These are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its whole.

The other half is that the "matter"-- that is, the deep substance of amalgamated Thought and Emotion--should be great, vital and fair.

But both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble or thoughtless matter.

There was, for example, a whole set of poets towards the end of the Elizabethan period who were close and weighty thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but whom the poetical world does not read at all.

And the reason is that their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in excellence their matter.