Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. Cook, June 28, 1918.] Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity. The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as A many-sided mirror, Which could distort to many a shape of error This true, fair world of things. [Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.] It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described the poet's achievement: With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes. [Footnote: _Ode_.] "The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the artist's imitation of life, inquiring, What is art But life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres It pushes toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the infinite. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work: He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality. [Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.]