Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire
be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the
universality of its appeal is a matter of course. We often hear people say,
sincerely enough, that they feel no response to poetry. This nearly always
means that their natural feeling for poetry has been vitiated in some
way, generally by contact, often forced upon them, with work that only
masquerades as poetry, or by such misgovernment of their lives as dulls all
their finer instincts. Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, the
delight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with a
little use it will quicken only to what is worthy. And lyric being pure
poetry, and most commonly found in isolation in the short poems which are
called lyrics, these will make the widest appeal of all the forms in which
poetry is found. For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almost
universal, sympathy with most other great energies is relatively rare.
The reason, for example, why twenty people will enjoy Wordsworth's
_Reaper_ for one who will enjoy _Paradise Lost_, is not because
_Paradise Lost_ is longer, but because it demands for its full
appreciation not only, in common with _The Reaper_, a sympathy with
the poetic energy, which it would obtain readily enough, but also a
sympathy with that other energy of intellectual control which has been
discussed. This energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far less
so than the poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and many
readers of _Paradise Lost_ will find in it not only poetry, which they
desire but faintly, while in _The Reaper_ they will find poetry as
nearly isolated from all other energies as it can be.