As I understand it, among Chesterton scholars, Kenner's short book quoted above is deemed perhaps the most penetrating and incisive of critical takes on said ‘jolly journalist’. I have made use of this citation as an epigraph here, at the opening of these concluding remarks, not because the work of Fiona Sampson is somehow close in style or ethos to Chesterton’s, but because it seems to me, after all of the above, that Sampson is in her own, far more complex way, a contemplative.

Another caveat to make, though, regarding this, is that the movement between seeing and configuring alluded to above – which is in a manner of speaking a movement between seeing (understanding) and seeing (embodying that vision), or vice versa – is certainly not, or at least not necessarily, some chronologically discrete movement. It has been seen that at the heart of Sampson's most developed thinking on poetry and the poetic is a notion of organicity – if perhaps such a notion in a more complex form than the purest of romanticisms or romanticisations. So that, if I may be right in speaking of Sampson as a contemplative, the distinction or separation she enacts or embodies as a poet and writer between ‘seeing’ and seeing, is only a logical or conceptual one and not an empirical one. The collated, unified and unitive vision whose description has been one of the main aims of this book- length essay happens as it were in the kairos. Epiphanies redound in her work, a good later modernist, and the very notion of epiphany indicates that there is some progressive truth to be had, incrementally, as a result of the development of an aesthetic or poetic, or at a more local level, as a result of the deep process of sensitization that goes to form a sensibility.