"The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets."
WALT WHITMAN

We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radical
distinction between "the poet"--as we have called him for
convenience--and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that this
distinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets after
a certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, at
some moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, the
other day, spoke of a telegraph wire as "that message-vine." Her father
and mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was a
child's instinctive "poetizing" imagination, but the father and mother,
while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, were
conscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, for
the instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart's
desire. That is to say, they could still feel "poetically," though their
wonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon as
the gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood.

All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, and
that if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And all
readers agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker of
poetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But the
moment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin.


_1. Feeling and Imagination_

What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? The
psychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors of