at is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The
general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it
loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact
that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are
legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it is
an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry.
It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of
five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the
impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia
of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or
literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you
have the evidence of that act, the sovereign aesthetic process, there you
have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or
both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which
those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not
suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be
content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each
single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the
comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not
sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr
Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr
Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of
intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a
hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly
comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be
prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its
kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been
created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.

That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one
which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of
criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and
appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive
comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where
there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real
poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true
criticism of poetic method, though it ma