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

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

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

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.

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.