od or bad, moral,
immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or
weighty--such distinctions do not signify. In poetry we are not met by
questions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made
it. Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find melody
quite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a Venetian picture
meaningless) is a contradiction in terms. In poetry, life, or a
portion of life, lives again, resuscitated and presented to our mental
faculty through art. The best poetry is that which reproduces the most
of life, or its intensest moments. Therefore the extensive species of
the drama and the epic, the intensive species of the lyric, have been
ever held in highest esteem. Only a half-crazy critic flaunts the
paradox that poetry is excellent in so far as it assimilates the
vagueness of music, or estimates a poet by his power of translating
sense upon the borderland of nonsense into melodious words. Where
poetry falls short in the comparison with other arts, is in the
quality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous concreteness.
Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye and to the
intellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses by indirect
suggestion. Therefore dramatic poetry, the most complicated kind of
poetry, relies upon the actor; and lyrical poetry, the intensest kind
of poetry, seeks the aid of music. But these comparative deficiencies
are overbalanced, for all the highest purposes of art, by the
width and depth, the intelligibility and power, the flexibility and
multitudinous associations, of language. The other arts are limited in
what they utter. There is nothing which has entered into the life of
man which poetry cannot express. Poetry says everything in man's own
language to the mind. The other arts appeal imperatively, each in its
own region, to man's senses; and the mind receives art's message
by the help of symbols from the world of sense. Poetry lacks this
immediate appeal to sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind,
its quintessence extracted from all things of sense, reacts through
intellectual perception upon all the faculties that make men what they
are.

VII

I used a metaphor in one of the foregoing paragraphs to indicate the
presence of the vital spirit, the essential element of thought or
feeling, in the work of art. I said it radiated through the form, as
lamplight through an alabaster vase. Now the skill of the artist