“When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.”
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Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
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Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year's prospect fairly chills his daunting breast.
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It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.
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Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.
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Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.
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