Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences
that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I
say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in
the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of
being refined into the higher aesthetic experience of which we have spoken,
my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.
That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All
aesthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment,
fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has
been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best
words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and
judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction
that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a
kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as
passing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems
dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of
poetry as defined by Coleridge.
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