he resembles Keats most of all; and none but a real poet could ever
make us think of Keats. If he be condemned for not breaking new paths,
we may remember the words of a wise man--"It is easier to differ from
the great poets than it is to resemble them." He loved to employ the
standard five-foot measure that has done so much of the best work of
English poetry. In _The Woman with the Dead Soul_, he showed once
more the musical possibilities latent in the heroic couplet, which
Pope had used with such monotonous brilliance. In _Marpessa_, he
gave us blank verse of noble artistry. But he was far more than a mere
technician. He fairly meets the test set by John Davidson. "In the
poet the whole assembly of his being is harmonious; no organ is
master; a diapason extends throughout the entire scale; his whole
body, his whole soul is rapt into the making of his poetry.... Poetry
is the product of originality, of a first-hand experience and
observation of life, of a direct communion with men and women, with
the seasons of the year, with day and night. The critic will therefore
be well-advised, if he have the good fortune to find something that
seems to him poetry, to lay it out in the daylight and the moonlight,
to take it into the street and the fields, to set against it his own
experience and observation of life."

One of the most severe tests of poetry that I know of is to read it
aloud on the shore of an angry sea. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton gain in
splendour with this accompaniment.

With the words of John Davidson in mind, let us take two passages from
_Marpessa_, and measure one against the atmosphere of day and
night, and the other against homely human experience. Although Mr.
Davidson was not thinking of Phillips, I believe he would have
admitted the validity of this verse.