for a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short
ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood,
selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is
a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected
and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the
energy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there
will be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic
perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected
whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or
narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed
into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The
decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall
be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation
of the purely poetic energy, but of another.

The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms
used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic
experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into
poetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarily
implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a
detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:

I die, I faint, I fail!

it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional
act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that
intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been
speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the
co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most
instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a