How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_Ineins-bildung_! Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding paragraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing about it? Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--that it is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the question whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously, the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what he sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his soul, or it may me, all together. There arise schools every now and then--classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe in imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in the imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of life. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's. Nor is Zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as Victor Hugo's. Poetry, or prose either, without romance, without liberation, can never rise above the second order. The poet must be faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the "reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement of a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in the arts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bed which mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been a rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge ... of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another." Dennis might cry: "Poetry is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism.... The great design of the arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by restoring order." But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringing order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing Aristotle into chaos.