mpathy, for sympathy is
that which compels the transmission of the poet's sentiments to his
readers. What is dimly present here is a theory of the poetic occasion,
an occasion brought about by the poet's participation in a common
cultural condition which inspires the communication of sentiments, both
common and important, from one person to another. Corollary to this
proposition is the notion that the poetic achievement is measured by the
uniqueness of the poet's invention. Thus, it is not merely the poet's
choice of a sublime subject that is important, but also the excellence
with which he treats an unpromising subject. Ogilvie's criteria demand
not merely a celerity of imagining, or a facility for the sublime, but a
degree of innovativeness which wins the highest regard.

To follow the argument is to realize that his conception of the
imagination includes judgment, celerity, and innovation. All three
functions are basic to the imaginative act. It is the last, however,
which he most emphasizes; and it is apparent, I think, that one
intention of his argument is to refute the assumption that the sublime
is the principal object of the poetic imagination. It is clear also that
Ogilvie is attentive to the excesses of imagism, even as he makes the
variety of a poet's images (along with the boldness of his transitions
and the picturesque vivacity of his descriptions) one of the major terms
of critical assessment. Especially, he is attentive to that which
detracts from the principal object, and thus a kind of concentration of
purpose emerges as a tacit poetic value, a concentration to which he
refers as a "succession of sentiments which resemble ... the subject of
his Poem" (lii). Here again Ogilvie has not so much a unity of structure
in view as a unity of the passions, and it is this particular theme
which generally guides his discourse; it is the general premise upon
which his inquiry depends and on which his major justification of lyric
poetry is based. In more modern terms we might here speak of the
principle of the correlative, which Ogilvie rehearses in his treatment
of the correspondence of subject and metaphor, and even indeed of
metaphor as a mode of vision. Poetic discourse, for Ogilvie, does not
depend upon metaphor, but without metaphor such discourse would be
impossible.

What is important, then, is the principle of propriety, a neat accord
between the figure and the subject, a kind of apercu. Thus, metaphors
p