the greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature of
things, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe. Spenser
shows great resources of fancy, but little imagination. The arc of
imagination is in him too near its center. Hence there is no reach in
his thoughts. He has no exhaustless depths within. He is not,
as Coleridge says Shakespeare is, an example of "endless
self-reproduction." Cowley, says the same great critic, "is a fanciful
writer, Milton an imaginative poet."

As I have already said, the power of imagining, of forming in the mind
images, conceptions, is a purely intellectual power, and imagination
becomes poetical only when this intellectual power is an agent
obeying that emotional power which ardently seeks, intensely longs
for, the better, the more perfect, the purer, in one word, the
beautiful in each province of multiform life. The willing agent,
intellect, is sent out on excursions of discovery, and unexpectedly
falls in with and captures all kinds of sparkling booty.

Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beaming
thoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new stars
which, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart suddenly upon
the vision of the heaven-watcher. Such writers deal with the known,
with the best commonplace, not the common merely; and under the glance
of genius the common grows strange and profound.

Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for
secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals
of poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not
thoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itself
necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; and