Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/19

Rh him. Not that any one poet's imagination is purely and solely of either type. The greatest poets—Shakespeare, Dante, Goëthe, for instance, are masters of both. Other poets, Wordsworth, Keats, Patmore, for instance, may manifest in varying measure the one impulse and the other. But the two streams, though their source and tributaries intermingle, are distinguishable; and such poets as Plato, the writer of the Book of Job, Vaughan, Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley, may be taken as representative of the one type; Lucretius, Donne, Dryden, Byron, Browning, Meredith, as representative of the other. Is not life both a dream and an awakening?

The visionaries, those whose eyes are fixed on the distance, on the beginning and end, rather than on the incident and excitement, of life's journey, have to learn to substantiate their imaginings, to base their fantastic palaces on terra firma, to weave their dreams into the fabric of actuality. But the source and origin of their poetry is in the world within. The intellectual imagination, on the other hand, flourishes on knowledge and experience. It must first explore before it can analyse, devour before it can digest, the world in which it finds itself. It feeds and feeds upon ideas, but because it is creative, it expresses them in the terms of