artist's imitation of life, inquiring,

What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the infinite.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator,
then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their
objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely
superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things
than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work:

He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
[Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.]

Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of
imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees
walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the
essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of
essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth";