judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work
because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite
wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the
people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid
of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more
eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we
praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some
particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by
suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is
giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this
alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in
the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.

For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the
best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it
does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental
poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience;
what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way,
that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the