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.

There can be no proof that Blake’s lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order – poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

The musician – if he be a good one – finds his own perception prompted by the poet’s perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government – the realisation of the will of the people.

And not a girl goes walking Along the Cotswold lanes But knows men’s eyes in April Are quicker than their brains.

When you defile the pleasant streams, And the wild bird's abiding place, You massacre a million dreams, And cast your spittle in God's face

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.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

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.