The Study of Poetry • Paragraph 318
Stage 1 of 6

Read it through once

There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part of the whole number, “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest”; the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent, through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry, the language of which is characterized by a severe economy of expression--a closeness of texture, resulting from the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.