Economy, Clarity, Force

I agree with Lucas, here, and would go further to say that style is what we need to express our own experience, our own imagery and ideas, with economy, clarity, and force. Modern styles might not allow us to be ourselves.

There are poets who can write vitally of, and in the style of, their own age; there remain others for whom it is equally essential to escape from it. Generations of critics have lost their heads and tempers squabbling which is right. Surely both. Surely it is understandable that a poet may wish to break away to some magic islet of his own, where he can feel himself monarch of all he surveys, because he shares it only with the dead. For they do not cramp our style as the living can. We can learn from them without fearing to become too imitatively like them; and the older the dead, the easier they are to elbow aside when we turn to write ourselves, as if their ghosts wore thinner and more shadowy with the years.

-- From Studies French and English, by F. L. Lucas.
Books For Libraries Press, New York, 1969 (Original publication, 1934).