Yes, he was the first to see: that if we are to understand heaven, whose intimations form our only sense of sequence and worth in this daisychain of misery that afflicts all living consciousness, it must be, will only be, through our senses. His doctrine of correspondences, where sight and hearing intermingle their horn and ivory gateways to the sullen soul, that was the first step: to test the equipment of our senses by overloading them, to see and find out what they really consist of at bottom. What is the exact quality of sin? What are the furry sensations of virtue? What is the color of hope? Perversions, condemnations, every experience seared to its uttermost, only then would the harp of the self be tuned to catch the vibrational beauties of the immanent or transcendent without being liable to deceptions! Revelation has not been vouchsafed to us.
This is the scientific method he was the first to establish in poetry. Absolutely.
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