Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/18

12 and foul, in its rigid conventions, in its contest for prizes that are so oddly apt to lose their value as soon as they are won, how like the school of life is to any other school; how strangely opinions differ regarding its rules, its aims, its method, its routine and its Headmaster.

And the poets? They, too, attend both schools. But what are the faculties and qualities of mind which produce poetry, or which incline men towards it? According to Byron, there are four elements that we are justified in demanding of a poet. He found them, not without satisfaction, more conspicuous in Pope than in his contemporaries. These elements are sense, learning (in moderation), passion and invention. Perhaps because he was less rich in it, he omitted a fifth element, by no means the least essential. I mean imagination, the imagination that not merely invents, but that creates, and pierces to the inmost spirit and being of life, humanity and nature. This poetical imagination also is of two distinct kinds or types. The one divines, the other discovers. The one is intuitive, inductive; the other logical, deductive. The one visionary, the other intellectual. The one knows that beauty is truth, the other proves that truth is beauty. And the poet inherits, as it seems to me, the one kind from the child in him, the other from the boy in