Browning says to his imaginary poet:

"Your brains beat into rhythm--you tell
What we felt only."

There is much virtue, for us, in this rudely vigorous description of "the
poet." Certainly all of us feel, and thus far we are all potential poets.
But according to Browning there is, so to speak, a physiological
difference between the poet's brain and ours. His brain beats into rhythm;
that is the simple but enormous difference in function, and hence it is
that he can tell what we only feel. That is, he becomes a "singer" as well
as "maker," while we, conscious though we may be of the capacity for
intense feeling, cannot embody our feelings in the forms of verse. We may
indeed go so far as to reshape mental images in our heated brains--for all
men do this under excitement, but to sing what we have thus made is denied
to us.


_3. An Illustration from William James_

No one can be more conscious than the present writer of the impossibility
of describing in plain prose the admittedly complicated and mysterious
series of changes by which poetry comes into being. Those readers who find
that even the lines just quoted from Wordsworth and Browning throw little
new light upon the old difficulties, may nevertheless get a bit of help
here by turning back to William James's diagram of the working of the
brain. It will be remembered that in Chapter I we used the simplest
possible chart to represent the sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the
succeeding motor reaction, and we compared the "in-coming" and "out-going"