The
decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall
be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation
of the purely poetic energy, but of another.
The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms
used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic
experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into
poetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarily
implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a
detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:
I die, I faint, I fail!
it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional
act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that
intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been
speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the
co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most
instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a
partial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic
energy was not notably associated with other energies.
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