nd another on imitation. Imitation, in the
last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the
ancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the
seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the point
of introducing the chorus.

Mr. Cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections
and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in
which it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from the
romanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth
century, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold.
There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but
still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the
critic's formulae and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip Sidney
expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates
a world, in his observation that Nature's world "is brazen, the poets only
deliver a golden!" This, however, is a fine saying rather than an
interpretation. It has no importance as a contribution to the theory of
poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from
Wordsworth's preface to _Lyrical Ballads_:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in
tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. But what a
flood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself! How
rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden's
comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry:

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the
poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer,
which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field
of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after.

As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. Ben
Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "It
utters somewhat above a mortal mouth." So did