e that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itself
with the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to remember
Wordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' for
nothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which direct
emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent on
the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not
at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the
really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to
ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he
drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from
men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking
heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us
the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry
will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them
into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours
as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the
poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme
poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the
imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art
will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own
inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more
than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry
speak straight. Well, poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne
wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it.

He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty has
revenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines in
which he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadow
upon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious of
shining.

For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit,
Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it,

he writes, in the _Valediction to his Book_, thus giving formal
expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of
our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which
had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to
distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so
that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more