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In modern criticism the word poetry is used sometimes to denote any expression (artistic or other) of imaginative feeling, sometimes to designate a precise literary art, which ranks as one of the fine arts. As an expression of imaginative feeling, as the movement of an energy, as one of those great primal human forces which go to the development of the race, poetry in the wide sense has played as important a part as science. In some literatures (such as that of England) poetic energy and in others (such as that of Rome) poetic art is the dominant quality. It is the same with individual writers. In classical literature Pindar may perhaps be taken as a type of the poets of energy; Virgil of the poets of art. With all his wealth of poetic art Pindar's mastery over symmetrical methods never taught him to "sow with the hand," as Corinna declared, while his poetic energy always impelled him to "sow with the whole sack." In English poetical literature Elizabeth Barrett Browning typifies, perhaps, the poets of energy; while Keats (notwithstanding all his unquestionable inspiration) is mostly taken as a type of the poets of art. In French literature Hugo, notwithstanding all his mastery over poetic methods, represents the poets of energy.

In some writers, and these the very greatest -- including Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and perhaps Goethe -- poetic energy and poetic art are seen in something like equipoise. It is of poetry as an art, however, that we have mainly to speak here; and all we have to say upon poetry as an energy is that the critic who, like Aristotle, takes this wide view of poetry -- the critic who, like him, recognizes the importance of poetry in its relations to man's other expressions of spiritual force, claims a place in point of true critical sagacity above that of a critic who, like Plato, fails to recognize that importance. And assuredly no philosophy of history can be other than inadequate should it ignore the fact that poetry has had as much effect upon human destiny as that other great human energy by aid of which, from the discovery of the use of fire to that of the electric light, the useful arts have been developed.