To get at what kind of poet Chesterton was it is helpful, first, to be clear about what kind he was not. Ezra Pound's poetic imagination, for instance, is scaled to the concrete image, and G. M. Hopkins's to the abruptly stressed phrase; Christopher Marlowe is known for his mighty line, and Alexander Pope for the soigné couplet. Chesterton wrote galloping stanzas. This makes him different from each of these poets individually, but it also makes him different from them as a group. The reason he writes at the tempo and according to the prosodic proportions he does is that he is not actually a poet at all. Those who are the first to agree on this – those who think him too careless, too fey, or too political – are generally the last to recognize that he was not, either, trying to be one. They make the category error of presuming that if he is not a good poet he must be a failed poet. But what he aimed to be, and what he is, is something deliberately different.

Chesterton's poetical imagination expresses itself as it does because he is a balladeer. By dilating his meaning across several lines he is able to reduce the ‘intensity of interpretation upon the grammar’ that Empson describes as the inevitable result of writing in metre. For what is lost in expressive ‘ambiguity’ there is a corresponding gain in clarity. This is important because, for the ballad, what is required above all is that the narrative may be understood at first reading (or hearing). In Chesterton's case, what is required is that the narrative may be understood even at fast reading, because it is through an accelerated prosody – together with suspended syntax, anaphoric repetitions, abrupt alliteration and clinching end rhymes – that his verses generate their defining ‘atmosphere’, which is dramatic.

In other words, Chesterton did not write poetry, he wrote verse, the relative merit of which cannot be determined by criteria used to appraise poetry. It is truer to say that the criteria must be inverted.