And he brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.

When Adam was invited by God to name all the animals, he was the first poet. Thus poetry is as old as mankind, and fundamental to man. Adam had a head, a heart and five senses: he was a perfect man and could sing. Adam the poet, when he named the animals, did not give them their scientific names, studied by genus and difference: no, he beheld the marvels of creation, he loved them, and he cried out the music of their names. And the sons of Adam also have intelligence, desire and sensation as their father had, they also have the experience and love of Creation, and— amantis est cantare—they will also always sing of it. For man, endowed with the power of speech and song, will not rest with experience. His experience will overflow, he will always be ready to speak of what he loves, he will make something drawn out of himself, that self which has somehow been transformed by the love-experience, and spontaneously will say the Thing that he has got to know and to love. From the day when the first man called out the names of the living things of the earth, the heart of man has continued to utter a good word—eructavit cor meum verbum bonum, as the poet hath it—echoing the refrain of that first divine poem: “And God saw that it was good.”