The best poetry has a far background; it comes out of deeps within the poet, unfathomed by himself, unfathomable.  He feels more than he can express.  Hence the imaginative poet always suggests, revealing enough to inspirit the reader’s higher faculties to strive for more; not because, with artistic design, he leaves much untold, which he often does, but because through imaginative susceptibility he at times grasps at and partly apprehends much that cannot be embodied.  He feels his subject more largely and deeply than he can see or represent it.  To you his work is suggestive because to him the subject suggested more than he could give utterance to.  Every subject, especially every subject of poetic capability, having infinite relations, he who most apprehends this boundlessness—­and indeed because he does apprehend it—­can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree of his genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or expose it.  The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, is at once exhausted.

The poetic imagination shows itself in the epithets the poet has at his command, creative insight drawing an epithet out of the heart of an object; whence, there is beneath such an epithet a depth that keeps feeding it with significance, bringing out its aptness the longer we look.  Sometimes epithets are brighter than their object; the unimaginative thus futilely striving to impart power instead of deriving it.  To be lasting, the light of the epithet must be struck by the imagination out of its object.  The inspired poet finds a word so sympathetic with the thought that it caresses and hugs it.

Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poetic imagination.  The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect, needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet’s individual resources can this be drawn.  To make a high artist, you must have very much of a man.  Behind “Paradise Lost” and “Samson Agonistes” is a big Miltonic man.  The poet has to put a great deal of himself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry, there must be a great deal of high self to put in.  He must coin his soul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made out of materials gathered by memory and fancy.  His stream of thought must flow from springs, not from reservoirs.  Hence the universal biographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a rich personality.

The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal prism.  Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination.  But this displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach, cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend.