This, then, is the first value that we discover in Shakespeare’s use in that connection of the word “sessions”--an exact functioning of the poetic imagination. But over and above that there is yet another value, one that is not very easy to define in set terms, and one of which Shakespeare himself can hardly have been consciously aware. “Sessions,” as we now read the word, calls to our mind, as it did to his, a court of law with all its weighty circumstance; also, as we read it in the sonnet, we get precisely the effect of pure imaginative effort that Shakespeare got, or as much of it as is possible to our own faculty; but the word has also taken on a strange atmospheric significance, almost a shade of actual meaning that is beyond its original intention. In its strictly imaginative value alone, the word was one that might without offence have been more or less similarly used by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries or early successors, even after his brilliant discovery of it in that context. Shakespeare’s choice of the word was entirely admirable for his imaginative purpose, but it was not so astonishing as to make it explicitly his own beyond the use of any other poet who wished to escape the charge of mere theft. But as time went on, the word, fixed there in its sonnet, underwent a spiritual evolution, that for practical purposes was complete in any case by the time Tennyson arrived, until it was in some sense of a newly acquired nature, and no longer safe for any poet’s handling. The word could not now be used in anything approaching the same context without calling up in the reader’s mind the whole dark and passionate background of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It has, in short, acquired a specifically literary association which is to say--although some critics would seem to overlook the fact--that it is the living witness of one of the supreme moments of human experience, but also that it has become so essential a part of that particular moment that it is now almost impossible to use it in the service of any other. And when Tennyson began to write he found a language that was strewn with words that had put on this dangerous nature, beautiful and often as it would appear irreplaceable words, yet now with calamity in their touch for the poet. To reject them was by no means the same thing as rejecting the false “poetic” inflation that had been the mark of Wordsworth’s attack. It meant that by now a new discipline of a very arduous and vigilant kind had become necessary in the practice of poetry. On every hand were admirable and seductive instruments the use of which was forbidden. If you were Keats you might privateer among the old poetry with profit, but his success in this matter was the adventure of lucky genius, not an example to be followed. Shakespeare could write Not poppy nor mandragora Nor all the drowsy syrups of this world ... and Keats could find his Autumn sleeping Drowsed with the fume of poppies ...