poet's reading.

While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated and
discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal qualities of its
own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic sense and not needing
for their aesthetic effect any lofty intellectual vision, any deep
criticism of life or even any passionate human emotion at all, the spirit
and the method of the poet's working--what people call his
inspiration--have not escaped the controlling influence of the artistic
spirit. Not that the imagination has lost its wings, but we have
accustomed ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate
their limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.

To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production, and
the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any
artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism
of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the
Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci.
Schiller tried to adjust the balance between form and feeling, and Goethe
to estimate the position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's
definition of poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken
as an analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work
has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose without this
fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to substitute for
poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,' we may discern the
most important moment in the evolution of that artistic life. The
question made an early and strange appearance in your literature too; and
I need not remind you how deeply the young poets of the French romantic
movement were excited and stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the
workings of his own imagination in the creating of that supreme
imaginative work which we know by the name of The Raven.

In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had
intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to poetry, it
was against the claims of the understanding that an artist like Goethe
had to protest. 'The more incomprehensible to the understanding a poem
is the better for it,' he said once, asserting the complete supremacy of
the imagination in poetry as of reason in prose. But in this century it
is rather against the claims of the emotional faculties, the