Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/54

 But the function of a poet is not to separate and crystallise into compactness the common thought; it is rather to link it to infinities of association, to send it out trailing clouds of glory; to show the "primrose by the river brim" or the "flower in the crannied wall "as a single expression of forces making for beauty that sweep through the cosmos. Shakespeare abounds in sententious utterance; for instance:

But here, apart from the large harmony of sound, apart from the intrinsic beauty of the words, is their dramatic fitness in Prospero's mouth, when his fairy masque fades suddenly, and he evokes the solemn images of all that we take to be least dreamlike, ending with "the great globe itself, yea all that it inherit." We cannot separate his aphorism and feel that we can see all around it, as we can with any characteristic utterance of Pope's, such as:

If one can assert anything positively in criticism, it is that Pope's ideal of poetry is unpoetic. But it does not follow that Pope was not a poet. That he was a great writer no one will deny. The disservice which Pope did to English literature—and it has been much exaggerated—is that he used his authority to formulate as possessing universal validity the rules which it suited his own genius to observe. His first