[Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 215. Macmillan,
1900.]

"The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on
some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of
his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in
him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many
images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance
with laws of association that may at least in part be described,
these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into
significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling
mimicry of the actual world of the senses--all the time delicately
controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so growing
intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is
to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the
moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional
expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of
his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his
most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words
finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written
characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of
personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer
to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy
and strength."

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although some
critics would question the phrase, "all the time delicately controlled by
the poet's conscious purpose."
[Footnote: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according
to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose