Our _first_ point is this, that although poetic expression is throughout exclusively embodied in articulate words, and apparently as such is simply related to human speech, yet in so far as the words themselves are merely abstract signs representative of _ideas,_ the true source of poetic speech is not to be discovered in the selection of particular words, and in the manner they are associated in sentences and elaborated phrases, nor in harmonious rhythm, rhyme and so forth, but in the type of _conception_ employed. We have, in short, to look for our point of departure for the constructive use of expression in the choice of the idea or image, find our first and foremost question will be what kind of conception will give us an expression suitable to poetry. _Secondly_, however, it remains the fact that the imaginative idea essentially pertinent to poetry is exclusively made objective in _language._ We have consequently to investigate the expression of speech according to its purely verbal aspect, in the light of which poetic words are distinguishable from those of prose, poetic phrases from those of our ordinary life and prosaic thought, abstracting in the first instance the mere sound of them to our sense of hearing. _Finally_, we have to recognize the fact that poetry is a mode of articulate speech, the sounding word, which in its temporal duration no less than its actual sound, must receive a definite configuration, one that implies the presence of time-measure, rhythm, melodious sound and rhyme. I. THE POETIC CONCEPT OR IDEA What in the plastic arts the sensuous visible _form_ expressed by means of stone and colour is, or what in the realm of music animating strains of harmony and melody are, this--we must repeatedly insist on the fact--can only be, in respect to poetic expression--the idea or image itself. The force of the poet's creation centres consequently, in the fact that the art moulds a content in an ideal medium, and without bringing before us the actual forms of external Nature and the progressions of musical sound; by doing so, therefore, it translates the objective presence accepted by the other arts into an ideal form, which Spirit or intelligence expresses for the imagination under the mode which is and must remain that of our conscious life. A distinction of this very character was already insisted on when we had occasion previously to establish a distinction between the earliest type, of poetry and its later modes of reconstruction from the data of prose.