As the title [of The Anatomy of Nonsense] is somewhat too cumbrous for convenience, perhaps we should use a short form of it, in the manner of the newspaper Variety. Two possibilities present themselves, and depend on the part of the book we are describing. Anatomy first of all defines a poem: a statement about an experience, real or imagined, in which the poet tries to understand the feelings that the experience gives rise to. Writing a poem is thus an act of moral judgment upon the feelings in question…. To make possible the judgment, the poet first organizes the experience so as to exclude all but the relevant feeling. Here the meter helps. Bearing in mind that "the emotional content of words is generated by our experience with the conceptual content," the critic tries to decide whether or not the poet has motivated the feeling—that is...