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" Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course. "

John Drinkwater

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" But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry. "

John Drinkwater

" It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse. "

John Drinkwater

" There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so. "

John Drinkwater

" The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely. "

John Drinkwater

" For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. "

John Drinkwater

" Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. "

John Drinkwater

" To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people. "

John Drinkwater

" So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse. "

John Drinkwater

" Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. "

John Drinkwater

" Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. "

John Drinkwater

" Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way. "

John Drinkwater

" To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential. "

John Drinkwater

" The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music. "

John Drinkwater

" When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life. "

John Drinkwater

" The written word is everything. "

John Drinkwater

" If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. "

John Drinkwater

" We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible. "

John Drinkwater

" It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. "

John Drinkwater