The great poems receive us on any good ground of interest which we choose to tread. Would you have a romantic novel? Shakespeare provides that in “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night.” Or a military adventure? There is “Henry Fifth.” Or a love tragedy? There is “Romeo and Juliet.” These satisfy our primitive liking for a good story. And so in some measure do all great poems, for the great poems are epics and dramas, that is, stories in verse. Literature finds its best structural material in action and event, and language is best suited to the expression of actions, perhaps because it has been made by a world of workers and doers. The most effective means of conveying abstract ideas is through story. The most moving sections of the Bible are narrative, the greatest lessons are taught in parables and instances. “Paradise Lost” is a narrative of great vigor, for all the dull debates and arguments; and if it was not Milton’s primary intention to tell a great story for its own sake, nevertheless he did tell a great story and we can enjoy it for its own sake long before we have begun, and long after we have ceased, to be interested in his theology and philosophy. To say that great poets, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, are romancers as truly as are the writers of prose novels is not to belittle poetry. The highest thoughts can be conveyed in a story. When a great poetic story-teller ceases for too many lines to be master of narrative, it will often be found that some other poetic qualities have for the moment died out of him too. And when he attempts to convey great ideas with little regard to their place in a moving sequence of events, he pays the penalty of not being read, he loses hold of the reader’s interest. The most titanic case of the failure of high poetic thoughts to win their way to the common heart of man, because of the disregard of narrative form, is Browning’s “The Ring and the Book.” There the story, a terrible and touching story, is told over a dozen times, and not once told well. Imbedded in its strange shapelessness are wonderful ideas and passages of intense beauty. As a heap of poetry it is the only production of the Victorian age that has the magnitude of Shakespeare and the classic epics. Other poems of Browning’s, “Clive” and “Ivan Ivanovitch,” show that he had narrative gifts. Some scenes in his dramas are in emotional energy and narrative progression unrivaled by any poet since Shakespeare. But in “The Ring and the Book,” into which he put his whole heart, he would not or could not tell his story as the experience of all ages has shown that stories must be told: his poem does not move forward in a continuously high and noble style. And so most of the world of readers are deprived of the richness with which he freighted from his prodigal mind and great soul his mighty rudderless ship that goes down in midocean.