but of literary history; and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in so convenient and lucid a form.  The arrangement is under subjects, and chronological.  There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation, beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold.  These are followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and the last F.W.H.  Myers.  The hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind, some of which have a tendency to overlap.  Thus, in addition to the section on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, another on external nature, and another on imitation.  Imitation, in the last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the ancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the point of introducing the chorus.

Mr. Cowl’s book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in which it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from the romanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold.  There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the critic’s formulae and aphorisms.  How excellently Sir Philip Sidney expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates a world, in his observation that Nature’s world “is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden!” This, however, is a fine saying rather than an interpretation.  It has no importance as a contribution to the theory of poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads: 

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally.  But what a flood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself!  How rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden’s comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry: 

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after.