To have written one perfect song
is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the
media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one
supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one
moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human
conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect
experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no
matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is,
more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with
whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
most heroic altruism.]
WHAT IS LYRIC?
And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
something under two hundred in the history of our own.
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