higher realms where
poetry touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy encourages
men to taste poetry as they would a fine wine, which has indeed an
aesthetic value, but a small one. And then the natural man, finding an
empty form, hurls into it the matter of cheap pathos, rancid sentiment,
vulgar humour, bare lust, ravenous vanity--everything which, in
Schiller's phrase[3], the form should extirpate, but which no mere form
can extirpate. And the other heresy--which is indeed rather a practise
than a creed--encourages us in the habit so dear to us of putting our
own thoughts or fancies into the place of the poet's creation. What he
meant by _Hamlet_, or the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or _Abt Vogler_, we
say, is this or that which we knew already; and so we lose what he had
to tell us. But he meant what he said, and said what he meant.

Poetry in this matter is not, as good critics of painting and music
often affirm, different from the other arts; in all of them the content
is one thing with the form. What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or
Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the
picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but _what_ meaning can be
uttered in no language but their own: and we know this, though some
strange delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth, because we
cannot put it into words. Well, it is just the same with poetry. But
because poetry is words, we vainly fancy that some other words than its
own will express its meaning. And they will do so no more--or, if you
like to speak loosely, only a little more--than words will express the
meaning of the Dresden Madonna. Something a little like it they may
indeed express. And we may find analogues of the meaning of poetry
outside it, which may help us to appropriate it. The other arts, the
best ideas of philosophy or religion, much that nature and life offer us
or force upon us, are akin to it. But they are only akin. Nor is it the
expression of them. Poetry does not present to imagination our highest
knowledge or belief, and much less our dreams and opinions; but it,
content and form in unity, embodies in own irreplaceable way something
which embodies itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as
philosophy or religion. And just as each of these gives a satisfaction
which the other cannot possibly give, so we find in poetry, which cannot
satisfy the needs they meet, that which by their natures they cannot
a