He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the
trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin
wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--
"..
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