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I have refrained in these pages, and purposely, from technical talk and from defining the differences between Epic, Dramatic, Lyric Poetry:  between the Ode and the Sonnet, the Satire and the Epigram.  To use the formula of a famous Headmaster of Winchester, “details can be arranged,” when once we have a clear notion of what Poetry is, and of what by nature it aims to do.  My sole intent has been to clarify that notion, which (if the reader has been patient to follow me) reveals the Poet as a helper of man’s most insistent spiritual need and therefore as a member most honourable in any commonwealth:  since, as Ben Jonson says:  “Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur”—­these two only, a King and a Poet, are not born every year.  The Poet “makes”—­that is to say, creates—­which is a part of the divine function; and he makes—­using man’s highest instruments, thought and speech—­harmonious inventions that answer the harmony we humbly trace in the firmament fashioned, controlled, upheld, by divine wisdom. "Non c’e’ in mondo,” said Torquato Tasso proudly, "chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta"—­“Two beings only deserve the name of Creator:  God and the Poet.”

THE END