to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered
by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and
spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the
spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense;
yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is
clearly either physical or spiritual; therefore they do not stand poised
between the two worlds with the perfect balance of interests which marks
the poet. The philosopher and the man of religion recognize their goal
as a spiritual and ascetic one. If they concern themselves more than is
needful with the temporal and sensual, they feel that they are false to
their ideal. The scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand,
are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss
consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of
course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius
of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But
if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph
just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the
invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is
not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us
conscious of the two worlds of sense and spirit, reflecting one another.

Supposing that all this is true, what is gained by discovering, from a
consensus of poets' views, that the distinctive characteristic of the
poet is harmony of sense and spirit? Is not this so obvious as to be a
truism? It is perhaps so obvious that like all the truest things in the
world it is likely to be ignored unless insisted upon occasionally.
Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English
criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written
criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually
ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own
goal.

It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of
English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of
the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's _School of
Abuse_, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who
had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry
were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan
criti