Great Regulars: A Poem is the very image of life

expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Defence of Poetry --Percy Bysshe Shelley

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