The Poet's Perfect Expression Is The Token

Any Long Work In Which Poetry Is Persistent, Be It Epic Or Drama Or Narrative, Is Really A Succession Of Separate Poetic Experiences Governed Into A Related Whole By An Energy Distinct From That Which Evoked Them.

So It Is In Poetry. All We Ask Is That The Mood Recorded Shall Impress Us As Having Been Of The Kind That Exhausts The Imaginative Capacity; If It Fails To Do This The Failure Will Announce Itself Either In Prose Or In Insignificant Verse.

And Not A Girl Goes Walking Along The Cotswold Lanes But Knows Men's Eyes In April Are Quicker Than Their Brains.

A Lyric, It Is True, Is The Expression Of Personal Emotion, But Then So Is All Poetry, And To Suppose That There Are Several Kinds Of Poetry, Differing From Each Other In Essence, Is To Be Deceived By Wholly Artificial Divisions Which Have No Real Being.

It Is Commonly Asserted And Accepted That Paradise Lost Is Among The Two Or Three Greatest English Poems; It May Justly Be Taken As The Type Of Supreme Poetic Achievement In Our Literature.