John Whitworth is not wrong about formal beauty being the first and last test of a poem (“Beauty in Poetry”, Quadrant, April 2011). However, it seems to me he’s not entirely right about how this effect is achieved. I say “seems”, and “not entirely”, because the subject is a very difficult, if not impossible, one to talk about, and I’m not sure I’ve fully understood what Whitworth wants to say. It’s possible we don’t really disagree. Nevertheless, so far as I do understand Whitworth’s claim, it goes something like this: Beauty in poetry, and indeed, in all art, comes from…