h nowhere meet, or, if I may use incorrectly a
word which will be useful later, they are analogues. Hence we understand
one by help of the other, and even, in a sense, care for one because of
the other; but hence also, poetry neither is life, nor, strictly
speaking, a copy of it. They differ not only because one has more mass
and the other a more perfect shape; but they have different _kinds_ of
existence. The one touches us as beings occupying a given position in
space and time, and having feelings, desires, and purposes due to that
position: it appeals to imagination, but appeals to much besides. What
meets us in poetry has not a position in the same series of time and
space, or, if it has or had such a position, is taken apart from much
that belonged to it there; and therefore it makes no direct appeal to
those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to contemplative
imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or emotionless,
imagination saturated with the results of 'real' experience, but still
contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why poetry has poetic
value for us is that it presents to us in its own way something which we
meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the test of its poetic
value lies simply in the question whether it satisfies our imagination,
the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience, for example, judging it
only so far as they appear transmuted in our imagination. So also
Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight, Milton's greatness of
soul, Shelley's 'hate of hate' and 'love of love,' and that desire to
help men by his poetry which influenced this poet or that--not, surely,
in the process of composition but in hours of meditation--all these
have, as such, no poetical worth: they have that worth only when,
passing through the unity of the poet's being, they reappear as
qualities of imagination, and then are indeed mighty powers in the world
of poetry.

I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my main subject. This
formula, it is said, empties poetry of its meaning: it is really a
doctrine of form for form's sake.

[Sidenote: WHERE DOES IT LIE?]

'It matters not what a poet says, so long as he says the thing well. The
_what_ is poetically indifferent: it is the _how_ that counts. Matter,
subject, content, substance, determines nothing; there is no subject
with which poetry may not deal: the form, the treatment, is everything.
Nay, more: not only is the matter in