tances of the word would have to be
gathered, in each of which, of course, the word would appear with a new
and perhaps incompatible meaning.

[Sidenote: Expressions may be recast perversely, humorously, or
sublimely.]

Whenever a word appears in a radically new context it has a radically
new sense: the expression in which it so figures is a poetic figment, a
fresh literary creation. Such invention is sometimes perverse, sometimes
humorous, sometimes sublime; that is, it may either buffet old
associations without enlarging them, or give them a plausible but
impossible twist, or enlarge them to cover, with unexpected propriety, a
much wider or more momentous experience. The force of experience in any
moment--if we abstract from represented values--is emotional; so that
for sublime poetry what is required is to tap some reservoir of feeling.
If a phrase opens the flood-gates of emotion, it has made itself most
deeply significant. Its discursive range and clearness may not be
remarkable; its emotional power will quite suffice. For this reason
again primitive poetry may be sublime: in its inchoate phrases there is
affinity to raw passion and their very blindness may serve to bring that
passion back. Poetry has body; it represents the volume of experience as
well as its form, and to express volume a primitive poet will rely
rather on rhythm, sound, and condensed suggestion than on discursive
fulness or scope.

[Sidenote: The nature of prose.]

The descent from poetry to prose is in one sense a progress. When use
has worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it an
indifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has become
prosaic; it has also become, by the same process, transparent and purely
instrumental. In poetry feeling is transferred by contagion; in prose it
is communicated by bending the attention upon determinate objects; the
one stimulates and the other informs. Under the influence of poetry
various minds radiate from a somewhat similar core of sensation, from
the same vital mood, into the most diverse and incommunicable images.
Interlocutors speaking prose, on the contrary, pelt and besiege one
another with a peripheral attack; they come into contact at sundry
superficial points and thence push their agreement inwards, until
perhaps a practical coincidence is arrived at in their thought.
Agreement is produced by controlling each mind externally, through a
series of checks and little