"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,"

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

"A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than
that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would
really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound.
The one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of
writing,

"A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:

"A creature
Of feature
More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
Darkly wise as a formless fate.
And if he be great,
If he be great, then rudely great,
Rudely great as a plough that plies,