“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.”
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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.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
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.
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.
