IN my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.

But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.

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Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception of the typical poet:—

A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.

But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater than the sum of its parts: so that men of smaller scope and more concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.