all, a poet; it is only as a poet that he can be finally
judged; and the greatness of a poet is to be measured by the extent to
which his writings are a revelation of what is beautiful.

I undertake a different and a humbler task, conscious of its
limitations, and aware that I can hardly avoid doing some violence to
the artist. What I shall seek in the poet's writings is not beauty, but
truth; and although truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth, still the
poetic and philosophic interpretation of life are not to be confused.
Philosophy must separate the matter from the form. Its synthesis comes
through analysis, and analysis is destructive of beauty, as it is of all
life. Art, therefore, resists the violence of the critical methods of
philosophy, and the feud between them, of which Plato speaks, will last
through all time. The beauty of form and the music of speech which
criticism destroys, and to which philosophy is, at the best,
indifferent, are essential to poetry. When we leave them out of account
we miss the ultimate secret of poetry, for they cling to the meaning and
penetrate it with their charm. Thought and its expression are
inseparable in poetry, as they never are in philosophy; hence, in the
former, the loss of the expression is the loss of truth. The pure idea
that dwells in a poem is suffused in the poetic utterance, as sunshine
breaks into beauty in the mist, as life beats and blushes in the flesh,
or as an impassioned thought breathes in a thinker's face.

But, although art and philosophy are supreme, each in its own realm, and
neither can be subordinated to the uses of the other, they may help each
other. They are independent, but not rival powers of the world of mind.
Not only is the interchange of truth possible between them; but each may
show and give to the other all its treasures, and be none the poorer
itself. "It is in works of art that some nations have deposited the
profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts." Job and Isaiah,
AEschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, were first of all poets.
Mankind is indebted to them in the first place for revealing beauty; but
it also owes to them much insight into the facts and principles of the
moral world. It would be an unutterable loss to the ethical thinker and
the philosopher, if this region were closed against them, so that they
could no longer seek in the poets the inspiration and light that lead to
goodness and truth. In our own day, a