s--conscious all the while of wondrous and
visionary evocations, wherein they take their place.

The poetical temper, on the other hand, lets itself go with a more
passive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding of
the vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place and
season. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining and
registering functions of the intellect does this take place.

Even in the vaguest obsessions of the poetical mind the intellect is
present, watching, noting, weighing, and, if you will, discriminating.

For, after all, poetry, though completely different in its methods, its
aims, and its effects from the other arts, is itself the greatest of all
the arts and must be profoundly aware, just as they are aware, of the
actual sense-impressions which produce its inspiration.

The difference, perhaps, is that, whereas the materials for the other
arts become most suggestive when isolated and disentangled from
the mass, the materials of poetry, though bringing with them, in this
case or in the other, their particular sense-accompaniment, must be
left free to flow organically together, and to produce their effect in
that primeval wanton carelessness, wherein the gods themselves
may be supposed to walk about the world.

One thing at least is clear. The more we acquire a genuine art of
discrimination amid the subtler processes of the mind the less we
come to deal in formulated or rationalistic theory.

The chief role of the intellect in criticism is to protect us from the
intellect; to protect us from those tiresome and unprofitable
"principles of art" which in everything that gives us thrilling
pleasure are found to be magnificently contradicted!

Criticism, whether of literature or art, is but a dead hand laid upon a
living thing, unless it is genuine response, to the object criticised, of
something reciprocal in us. Criticism in fact, to be of any value,
must be a stretching out of our whole organic nature, a sort of
sacramental partaking, with both senses and soul, of the bread and
wine of the "new ritual."

The actual written or spoken word in explanation of what we have
come to feel about the thing offered, is after all a mere subordinate
issue.

The essential matter is that what we experience in regard to the new
touch, the new style, should be a personal and absorbing plunge into
an element which we feel at once to have been, as it were, "waiting"
to receive