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.
From John Drinkwater
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.
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.
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