it is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare,
by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does under
similar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetry
and what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the
Clown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not
demand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that would
force him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this
kind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama
does not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it
poetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and
yet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the
poetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when
Cleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and
a continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the
suggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric
is the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly
emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also
unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of
his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who
is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind
from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry,
then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be
perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a
fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is
concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a
mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as
poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as