in this respect poets differ enormously among one another--as in the
increasingly verbal form of these images as they are reshaped by his
imagination, and in the strongly rhythmical or metrical character of the
final expression.

Let carbon represent the first of the stages, the excited feeling
resulting from sensory stimulus. That is the raw material of poetic
emotion. Let the diamond represent the second stage, the chemical change,
as it were, produced in the mental images under the heat and pressure of
the imagination. The final stage would be represented by the cutting,
polishing and setting of the diamond, by the arrangement of the
transformed and now purely verbal images into effective rhythmical or
metrical designs.

Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed

"The vision and the faculty divine,
Though wanting the accomplishment of verse."

Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process already
described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of
every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner
world and the other world." The "faculty divine," into which vision blends
insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions--
as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passion
recollected in tranquillity,"--into words possessing a peculiar life and
power. The "accomplishment of verse" is easier to understand. It is the
expression, by means of these words now pulsating with rhythm--the natural
language of excitement--of whatever the poet has seen and felt, modified
by his imagination. The result is a poem: "embodied feeling."