fts of Nature and all
the noblest works of man.

About _Lycidas_ criticism has less to say than to unsay. Johnson's
notorious attack upon it is only the extremest instance of the futility
of applying to poetry the tests of prose and of the general incapacity
of that generation to apply any other. Even {126} Warton, who really
loved these early poems of Milton and did so much to recall them to
public notice, could speak of him as appearing to have had "a very bad
ear"! At such a time it was inevitable that the artificial absurdity
of pastoral poetry which is a prose fact should blind all but the
finest judges to the poetic fact that living spirit can animate every
form it finds prepared for its indwelling. Johnson and the rest were
right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an
insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which
they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of
_Lycidas_, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity
which drowns its incongruities in a flood of poetic life. There is a
still more important truth which that generation could not see. Prose
aims at expressing facts directly, and sometimes succeeds. That is
what Johnson liked, and practised himself with masterly success. But
when he and his asked that poetry should do the same they were asking
that she should deny her nature. She knows that her truth can only be
expressed or suggested by its imaginative equivalents. It is with
poetry as with religion. Religious truth stated directly becomes
philosophy or science, {127} conveying other elements of truth,
perhaps, but failing to convey the element which is specifically
religious; and therefore religion employs parable, ceremony, sacrament,
mystery, to express what scientifically exact prose cannot express. So
poetry can neither deal directly with King's death or Milton's grief
nor be content with a subject which is a mere fact in time and space.
If it did, the effect produced would not be a poetic effect; the
experience of the reader would not be a poetic experience. The poet
must transform or transcend the facts which have set his powers to
work; he must escape from them or rather lift them up with him
new-created into the world of the imagination; he must impose upon them
a new form, invented or accepted by himself, and in any case so heated
by his own fire of poetry that it can fuse and reshape the matter
s