Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
