As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far.  Ben Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply:  “It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth.”  So did Edgar Allan Poe, when he said:  “It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above.”  Coleridge, again, initiates us into the secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something which—­

combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, which is alone truly one.

On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl’s book: 

How excellently the German Einbildungskraft expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that forms the many into one—­Ineins-bildung!  Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric—­repeating simply, or by transposition—­and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.

The meaning is simple enough:  it is much the same as that of the preceding paragraph.  But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing about it?

Mr. Cowl’s book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point—­that it is an imitation.  The schools have differed less over the question whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on the nature of poetry, the word “imitation” must be qualified.  Obviously, the poet must imitate something—­either what he sees in nature, or what he sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his soul, or it may me, all together.  There arise schools every now and then—­classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth—­who believe in imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in the imaginative world.  In the result their work is no true imitation of life.  Pope’s poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare’s.  Nor is Zola’s, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as Victor Hugo’s.  Poetry, or prose either, without romance, without liberation, can never rise above the second order.  The poet must be faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul.  Poe defined art as the “reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul,” and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement of a personal and ideal vision.  That is why the reverence of rules in the arts is so dangerous.  It puts