The concentration resulting fom a framework of theology and philosophy, [T.S. Eliot] says, is one of the reasons ‘why Dante is a classic and Blake only a poet of genius.’ The intellectual disorder of the nineteenth century gave the poet no such system, indeed it imposed upon him the necessity of being at once an artist and an original speculative thinker—an impossible combination. Thus the effort to construct for himself a workable plan out of the odds and ends of the wreckage of philosophical systems not infrequently resulted in grotesque and unsteady structures, the early collapse of which left him a prey to despair and frustration. — Calvert Alexander, SJ