The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters so much as its quality--whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is capable of expressing powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings.
The history of literature can show poetic dictions--special vocabularies and forms for poetry--that have these qualities; the diction, for instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed Chaucer, or of the troubadours.

That of the classic writers of an Augustan age was not of such a kind.

Words clothe thought; poetic diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself.

The Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it.
But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects.

Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it written--rapidity and antithesis.