Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
John DrinkwaterBut in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
John DrinkwaterAny 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.
John DrinkwaterSo 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.
John Drinkwater