What
meets us in poetry has not a position in the same series of time and
space, or, if it has or had such a position, it is taken apart from much
that belonged to it there; and therefore it makes no direct appeal to
those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to contemplative
imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or emotionless,
imagination saturated with the results of "real" experience, but still
contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why poetry has poetic
value for us is that it presents to us in its own way something which we
meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the test of its poetic
value for us lies simply in the question whether it satisfies our
imagination; the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience, for example,
judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in our imagination. So
also Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight, Milton's greatness of
soul, Shelley's "hate of hate" and "love of love", and that desire to
help men or make them happier which may have influenced a poet in hours
of meditation--all these have, as such, no poetical worth: they have
that worth only when, passing through the unity of the poet's being,
they reappear as qualities of imagination, and then are indeed mighty
powers in the world of poetry.
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