It illustrates it in a particularly
emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also
unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of
his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who
is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind
from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry,
then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be
perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a
fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is
concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a
mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as
poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as
vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or
pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not
become one whit less personal to me.
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