writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
evaporates unrecorded.]

Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing
in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour
is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson
defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain,
nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is
endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with
some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very
rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.
Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton
had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever
excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion,
and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in
his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief
thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but