neither is inspired. This is so also, I think, wherever
we can truly speak of merely decorative effect. We seem to perceive that
the poet had a truth or fact--philosophical, agricultural,
social--distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in
metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric
poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which
is really a mere 'conceit' is mere decoration. We often deceive
ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new
and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere
decoration, we judge the poetry to be not wholly poetic. And so when
Wordsworth inveighed against poetic diction, though he hurled his darts
rather wildly, what he was rightly aiming at was a phraseology, not the
living body of a new content, but the mere worn-out body of an old one.

In pure poetry it is otherwise. Pure poetry is not the decoration of a
preconceived and clearly defined matter: it springs from the creative
impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and
definition. If the poet already knew exactly what he meant to say, why
should he write the poem? The poem would in fact already be written. For
only its completion can reveal, even to him, exactly what he wanted.
When he began and while he was at work, he did not possess his meaning;
it possessed him. It was not a fully formed soul asking for a body: it
was an inchoate soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague
ideas and a few scattered phrases. The growing of this body into its
full stature and perfect shape was the same thing as the gradual
self-definition of the meaning. And this is the reason why such poems
strike us as creations, not manufactures, and have the magical effect
which mere decoration cannot produce. This is also the reason why, if we
insist on asking for the meaning of such a poem, we can only be answered
'It means itself.'

[Sidenote: THE TWO HERESIES]

And so at last I may explain why I have troubled myself and you with
what may seem an arid controversy about mere words. It is not so. These
heresies which would make poetry a compound of two factors--a matter
common to it with the merest prose, _plus_ a poetic form, as the one
heresy says: a poetical substance _plus_ a negligible form, as the other
says--are not only untrue, they are injurious to the dignity of poetry.
In an age already inclined to shrink from those