"His innate, unquestioning pride in his poetical mission means that he gives to it all his gifts and all his efforts. The result is a poetry that by any standards deserves the name because it is based on a radiant vision of reality and fashioned with so subtle, so adventurous, and so dedicated an art that it is worthy to be an earthly counterpart of the songs which Apollo and the Muses sing on Olympus, and which Pindar regards as the archetype of music on those lofty occasions when all discords are resolved and all misgivings obliterated by the power of the life-giving word."