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 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.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

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.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

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.