The Study of Poetry • Paragraph 126
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The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem of ‘The Princess’. It is prominent in ‘In Memoriam’ and in ‘The Idylls of the King’. In ‘The Princess’, the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:--