and versification. There is no
such thing as mere form in poetry. All form is expression. Style may
have indeed a certain aesthetic worth in partial abstraction from the
particular matter it conveys, as in a well-built sentence you may take
pleasure in the build almost apart from the meaning. Even so style is
expressive--presents to sense, for example, the order, ease, and
rapidity with which ideas move in the writer's mind--but it is not
expressive of the meaning of that particular sentence. And it is
possible, interrupting poetic experience, to decompose it and abstract
for comparatively separate consideration this nearly formal element of
style. But the aesthetic value of style so taken is not considerable;
you could not read with pleasure for an hour a composition which had no
other merit. And in poetic experience you never apprehend this value by
itself; the style is here expressive also of a particular meaning, or
rather is one aspect of that unity whose other aspect is meaning. So
that what you apprehend may be called indifferently an expressed meaning
or a significant form. Perhaps on this point I may in Oxford appeal to
authority, that of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the latter at any
rate an authority whom the formalist will not despise. What is the gist
of Pater's teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one
virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence,
should express perfectly the writer's perception, feeling, image, or
thought; so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats's, we
exclaim, "That is the thing itself"; so that, to quote Arnold, the words
are "symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized," or, in our technical
language, a form identical with its content? Hence in true poetry it is,
in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in any but its own
words, or to change the words without changing the meaning. A
translation of such poetry is not really the old meaning in a fresh
dress; it is a new product, something like the poem, though, if one
chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in the
aspect of form.

No one who understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were
it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he
takes the word "meaning" in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to
poetry. People say, for instance, "steed" and "horse" have the same
meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not