Every poet is limited to his idiom, and though he may make broad differentiations, may change his structural form from sonnet to ode, from ode to dramatic scene, may adapt his style to a character to the extent of making clown and king unlike in their turn of phrase, yet when he is earnestly poetic he writes his own kind of poetry. Mr. Masefield vocalizes Masefield sentences with the breath of Romans. So Browning's characters all have the Browning abundance of telescoped metaphor. Shakespeare's English kings and Italian dukes trumpet Elizabethan blank verse. The identity of flavor and idiom and of metaphor between Shakespeare's English characters and Roman characters and Italian characters will never be perceived by the male and female Mrs. Jamesons, who write essays about Shakespeare's "characters," but cannot hear verse. To be sure, Shakespeare and all other great dramatists make the persons of the play adapt their substance to the situation; naturally Othello in a jealous fit does not talk about having lost his ducats and his daughter or order a cup of sack. But within the specific situation and the rather loose limits of character Shakespeare equips his person with a style of blank verse that is primarily Elizabethan, secondarily Shakespearean, and only in a tertiary and wholly subordinate sense Caesarean or Macbethean. D'Annunzio writes magnificent D'Annunzio, with a recognizable fondness for certain words and sonorities, no matter who is alleged to be talking. A poet is at his best when his singular power of phrase and his substance are most happily fused. Masefield's instrument plays best upon modern themes, upon the tragedy of obscure people in English fields or upon the seven seas. It is his distinction to have taken the lives of the humble and to have involved those lives in the revolution of the stars and the expanses of sea. He has lifted coarse words into literature (the Elizabethans did that, too); he has related the large elements to little elemental lives; he has elevated obvious simplicities to grand complexities.