s poetry has for
the most part roots deeply hidden.

Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a
body. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and
deserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but
healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is
chargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy do
the work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of the
memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inward
impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with
coldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the
intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts
springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and
thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and
upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject
that has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and
not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing
over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of
association. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of
which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep,
penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, it
is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface
streams from without.

Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough
to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to
the substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate
stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to
cooperate as members of an organic whole. There is not heat enough in
the originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity. There is
too much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "The
difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less
than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
alike."

Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough
sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the
floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of
verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they
have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather
than poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the
scoure