Blake was endowed with a capacity for considerable understanding of human nature, with a remarkable and original sense of language and the music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had these been controlled by a respect for impersonal reason, for common sense, for the objectivity of science, it would have been better for him. What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of the poet. Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is what we find in such a work as _Also Sprach Zarathustra_; it is eminently not a Latin virtue. The concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius. The fault is perhaps not with Blake himself, but with the environment which failed to provide what such a poet needed; perhaps the circumstances compelled him to fabricate, perhaps the poet required the philosopher and mythologist; although the conscious Blake may have been quite unconscious of the motives. Dante M. Paul Valéry, a writer for whom I have considerable respect, has placed in his most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which seems to me of very doubtful validity. I have not seen the complete essay, and know the quotation only as it appears in a critical notice in the _Athenæum_, July 23, 1920: La philosophie, et même la morale tendirent à fuir les œuvres pour se placer dans les réflexions qui les précèdent.... Parler aujourd’hui de poésie philosophique (fût-ce en invoquant Alfred de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c’est naivement confondre des conditions et des applications de l’esprit incompatibles entre elles. N’est-ce pas oublier que le but de celui qui spécule est de fixer ou de créer une notion—c’est-à-dire un _pouvoir_ et un _instrument de pouvoir_, cependant que le poète moderne essaie de produire en nous un _état_ et de porter cet état exceptionnel au point d’une jouissance parfaite....