Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
74. "our tendency [is] to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. in these aspects of parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. we dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors...we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously"; "no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. his significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. you cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead....what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it"
77. "i have tried to poin tout the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written"; "the poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."
78. "my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways."