So a critic (of a few centuries back, probably) would describe my (or anybody's) list of "seraphic" poets - the makers of transcendentally perfect poems - as those in whom the genius of Nature shows forth. (& this would agree with the idea of art as imitation of nature.) Beautiful poems have something inimitable & preternatural about them : the genius that makes artificial things which are almost as complex & amazing as the works of nature itself. & yet they are nature, too.

(Bacon, by the way, seems to have an interesting idea that the value of "historical poems" (epics, history plays, etc.) lies in the fact that they show events & people as better than they are in ordinary life - as more transparent or knowable, more worthy of imitation. In a sense this is the role played now by the movies.)

Examples of perfect, "seraphic" poets : Holderlin, Pushkin, Marvell, Keats, Donne, Rilke, Celan, Mandelstam, Whitman, Dickinson...

what makes them perfect? At their best, they make verse sing on all levels. Intellectual music. Going to the edge of the human (the upper limit).

Mystery of when & how nations & cultures evolve perfect poets. Dialect of the tribe; shared meanings & forms of play.

General basic structure of Forth of July:

Stubborn Grew : burial
The Grassblade Light : resurrection or (re)birth
July : flight (or flow)
Blackstone's Day-Book : light (summarizing or encompassing the 3 previous aspects)