ABSTRACT
Mr Herbert Read insists that arrangement 'is mainly a question of rhetoric', yet makes a reservation. The recognition 'that a philosophical and psychological basis does exist for, and does explain' the phenomena of prose style is a very satisfactory feature of the book. Only Shakespeare's 'incarnadine' is poetry; and Shakespeare's 'incarnadine' is merely this word in its context of 'the multitudinous seas'. Plainly it is not the physical or even the psychological conditions of composition that decide whether a passage is poetry but the relation of the words to a state of mind and the qualities of that state of mind itself. Mr Read rewrites a flowery passage on the Oxford movement and in doing so gives us one of the few examples of imperfect sensibility to language that this book no slight test contains. The Anglican sands is certainly not equivalent to the looser elements of the Anglican Church.
