II.
WHAT IS POETRY?
The better to meet the question, _What_ is poetry? we begin by putting
before it another, and ask, _Where_ is poetry? Poetry is in the mind.
Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the
stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no
appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining
intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught
but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal
life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in
the best and deepest part of that life.
The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of
his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or
be started and modified by what is without them, all this--that is,
all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can
come within the scope of man--is the domain of poetry; only, to
enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the
individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure
whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such
spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the
very mystery of being.
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