"Thus, poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially
impressive, partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech
and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances
of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the
vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer
catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief
and despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies
suggesting higher phases of these feelings; so the poet develops from
the typical expressions in which men utter passion and sentiments
those choice forms of verbal combination in which concentrated passion
and sentiment may be fitly presented."
And the language which Spencer regards as the "most effective" is
tersely set forth by that poetic and spiritual preacher, Frederick
W. Robertson, in his idea of poetry: "The natural language of excited
feeling, and a work of imagination wrought into form by art."
Another point in connection with the language of poetry is that,
compelled by their limitations of rhythm, rhyme, and the compression
of much thought and feeling into brief space, the poets have become
the finest artists in the use of words. The examples of word-use in
the dictionaries are largely drawn from the poets.
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