Parnassianism was whole-hearted; but any one who interpreted some of his sentences as implying a desire to restrict either the poet's field or his expression to a degree that might justifiably be termed narrow would be in error. In one respect, perhaps, his plea was a plea for widening; he did not wish to exclude the classical subject. And his declaration that poetry should not be written to carry a message but to embody a perception of beauty did not preclude a message in the poetry. His last poems, including "The Burial in England," may be restrained but are scarcely impersonal, may not be didactic but are none the less patriotic. He need not, in fact, be pinned to every word of his preface separately. The drift of the whole is evident. He himself, like other people, would not have been where he was but for the Romantic movement; but he thought that English verse was in danger of decomposition. He merely desired to emphasize the dangers both of prosing and of personal paroxysms; and, above all, to insist upon careful craftsmanship.
This careful craftsmanship had been his own aim from the beginning. "Libellum arida modo pumice expolitum" is a phrase in the first of the Catullus epigrams he translated at school; and, whilst the content of his poetry showed a steadily growing strength of passion and thought, its form was subjected to, though it never too obviously "betrayed," an increasingly assiduous application of pumice-stone and file. His poems were written and rewritten before they were printed; some were completely remodelled after their first publication; and he was continually returning to his old poems to make alterations
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