"
* * * * *
The Poet then, having seized on the Idea and purged it of what is
trivial or accidental, reclothes it in a concrete dress and so
represents it to us. And you will generally remark in the very greatest
poets that not only are the images they represent to us extraordinarily
definite and concrete and therefore vivid--as Dante, for example, will
describe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity as
though he were writing a newspaper report; but this concreteness of
vision translates itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech. I
suppose there was never a more concrete writer than Shakespeare, and his
practice of translating all his idea into things which you can touch or
see grew steadily stronger throughout his career, so that any competent
critic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier by
its compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of the
various "parts of speech," its masterful _corvee_ of nouns substantive
to do the work of verbs, and so on. Even in very early work such as
_Venus and Adonis_ we cannot but note this gift of vision, how quick and
particular it is.
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