_2. The Special Field_

What then do we mean by the province of poetry? Simply that there is a
special field in which, for uncounted centuries, poets have produced a
certain kind of artistic effect. Strictly speaking, it is better to say
"poets" rather than "the poet," just as William James confesses that
strictly speaking there is no such thing as "the Imagination," there are
only imaginations. But "the poet" is a convenient expression to indicate a
man functioning _qua_ poet--i.e. a man poetizing; and we shall continue to
use it. When we say that "the poet" in Sir Walter Scott inspires this or
that utterance, while "the novelist" or "the historian" or "the critic" in
him has prompted this or that other utterance, we are within our rights.

The field of poetry, as commonly understood, is that portion of human
feeling which expresses itself through rhythmical and preferably metrical
language. In this field "the poet" labors. The human feeling which he
embodies in verse comes to him originally, as feeling comes to all men, in
connection with a series of mental images. These visual, auditory, motor
or tactile images crowd the stream of consciousness as it sweeps inward to
the brain. There the images are subjected to a process of selection,
modification, transformation.
[Footnote: "The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought
has suffered a transformation since it was an experience." Emerson,
_Shakespeare: The Poet_.]
At some point in the process the poet's images tend to become verbal,--as
the painter's or the musician's do not,--and these verbal images are then
discharged in rhythmical patterns. It is one type of the threefold process
roughly described at the close of Chapter I. What is peculiar to the poet
as compared with other men or other artists is to be traced not so much in
the peculiar nature of his visual, auditory, motor or tactile images--for