Where you
have the evidence of that act, the sovereign aesthetic process, there you
have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or
both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which
those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not
suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be
content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each
single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the
comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not
sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr
Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr
Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of
intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a
hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly
comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be
prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its
kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been
created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.
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