Even Masefield is mastered by his sea, he does not master it. The New Englanders talk and talk wisely. T. S. Eliot and his imitators endeavor to show how their chastity and ennui remain intact through all their orgies of intellectual debauchery. But to all of these life is an unquestionable first premise of which all their wisdom is a deduction. But the function of the poet, of the poetic mind, is inductive rather than deductive.
Life needs proving in poetry as well as in science.
Philosophy is but a compromise between fact and fancy. The poet of a new spiritual activity admits neither. He, the human impulse, is the only premise. He is the potter. He is the maker of beauty, since all form originates in him, and of meaning, since he names the content.