That only sounds to me as a jest at the best. I think there is a deeper truth in one’s saying how he hates poetry; and since I know that the true love comes forth from the true hatred, and the love and hatred are twin brothers or sisters, I regard the hater of poetry as my real friend. Therefore I say loudly: “Come to me those who hate poetry, I will tell them how I as a poet, hate the poetry; and let us, why, through the virtue of that hatred, make the poetry reveal its real worth.”
When Rossetti found the interpretation of love in Beauty, he failed to explain, from his vagueness of mind or baffling cleverness, what was that Beauty; and he, like John Keats before him of course, misled the small poets, indeed thousands of them, making them believe in Beauty (whatever it was) as their guiding star. I think that Ruskin was more sane in using it as the revealer of the defects of our commonplace life; what defects, I should like to know, we have in our life! What I am going to say is that it is that Beauty or, let me say, Poetry, to reveal the beauty or perfection of our material life and order; when I write
