vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or
pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not
become one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call the
result lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramatic
poetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying is
that in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I am
producing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic quality
is the same in either case. Cleopatra's speech is notable for two things:
its dramatic significance, which is admittedly contrived by Shakespeare,
and its poetry which springs from an intensity of experience which is
clearly, unless we juggle with words, Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's.
The fact that the material upon which the poet's mood has worked has not
been confined to some event that has happened to himself but has included
the condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significance
of his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. The
poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the
character of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking
of the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process
of any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see
that we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being
constant in its essential properties in whatever association we may
henceforth find it.

If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I think
it rightly may be, that the purely poetic energy is not a variable quality,
that of any given expression of a man's mental activity it can definitely
be said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to be
answered,--Can one poem be better than another, if both are truly poems?
Or can one poet, by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by
reason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every