Art of Poetry

The editor of this book, and the ideal teacher to whom he hopes to be useful, need not agree on everything, but they will share two assumptions:
(I) that such general notions as the student is going to acquire about poetry he should acquire from actual experience with poems, not from a pedagogical system; and consequently (2) that the poems he has experience with, even at the beginning, should be worth encountering for their own sake. Accordingly, the book leads the student in the usual way from simple to complex, but "simple" has been taken to mean
"unmixed rather than "diluted." In the poems on which demonstration hinges in Part One, some fundamental quality or principle is exhibited in action so markedly that it can be isolated for discussion without serious distortion.