Introductory Note
The "Defence of Poetry" is by far the most important of Shelley's prose
writings, and is of great value in supplementing and correcting the picture of his mind
which is given by his lyrical poetry; for we can perceive from this brilliant piece of
philosophical discussion that Shelley had intellect as well as imagination.
The immediate occasion of the essay was the publication of Thomas Love Peacock's
"Four Ages of Poetry," to which Shelley's work was originally a reply. In this,
as in other notable respects, the treatise is parallel with Sidney's. In its present form
Shelley has eliminated much of the controversial matter; and it stands as one of the most
eloquent and inspiring assertions of the "ideal nature and essential value of
poetry."
A Defence of Poetry: An Essay
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called
reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations
borne by one thought to another, however produced, and the latter, as mind acting upon
those thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and composing from them, as from
elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own
integrity. The one is the ro noielv, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its
objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other
is the ro xoyiselv, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of
things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the
algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the
enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of
those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and
imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the
agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the
imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over
which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of
an ever - changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever -
changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all
sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but
harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the
impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the
motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the
musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself
will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every
gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable
impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as
the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by
prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a
consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child these
expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages
what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects
in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial
imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his
apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next
becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions
produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative
arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the
chisel and the statute, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws
from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the
moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the
plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become
the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a
social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in
sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the
intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in
their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented
by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let
us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the
principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination
is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in
these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe
a similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of
the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural
objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of
mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and
purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been
called taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which
approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the
diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in
those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful
(for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its
cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal
sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the
influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and
gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally
metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and
perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through
time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts;
and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been
thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.
These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same
footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"1 and
he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language
itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word,
the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception,
and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source
is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the
distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the
form of the creations of poetry.
[Footnote 1: "De Augment. Scient.," cap. I, lib. iii.]
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the
authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and
painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the
inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible
world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or
susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets,
according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called,
in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises
and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is,
and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he
beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the
word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events:
such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy,
rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the
infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are
not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons,
and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without
injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's
"Paradise" would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if
the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting,
and music are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the
instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech
which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted
sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which
are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible
nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct
representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of
more various and delicate combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic
and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is
arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other
materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit
and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror which reflects,
the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of
communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the
intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of
those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled
that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill will
produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of
religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the
restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity
which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together
with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will
remain.
Measured And Unmeasured Language
We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that art which is the
most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary,
however, to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between
measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which
they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found
connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language
of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without
which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of
its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence
the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might
discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one
language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed,
or it will bear no flower - and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of
poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system
of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet
should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is
its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be
preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet
must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of
his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar
error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was
essentially a poet - the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his
language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of
the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts
divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to
imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.2 His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the
almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth
together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the
authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors,
nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate
in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in
themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those
supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and
action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things,
than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.
[Footnote 2: See the "Filum Labyrinthi," and the "Essay on Death"
particularly. - S.]
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this
difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts,
which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other
is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one
is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of
events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the
germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of
human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular
facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and
forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains.
Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it.
A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should
be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a
poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst
of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of
inextinguishable thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of Livy, restrained
them from developing this faculty in its highest degree, they made copious and ample
amends for their subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living
images.
Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to estimate its
effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves
to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world,
neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry:
for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it
is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect
in all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever
arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging
as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from
the selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in
darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened,
yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of
infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which
all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in
human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an
ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of
friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths
in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and
enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they
imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their
admiration. Nor let it be objected that these characters are remote from moral perfection,
and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation.
Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge
is the naked idol of the worship of a semi - barbarous age: and Self - deceit is the
veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet
considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations
must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their
beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he
may the ancient armor or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive
a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far
concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate
itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it
is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most
barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the
beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendor; and it is doubtful whether
the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for
mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of
the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science
arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes
examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men
hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in
another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the
receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from
the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its
Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them,
as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought,
action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and
comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains
and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry
enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other
thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh
food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the
same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his
own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his
poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior
office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but
imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. There was little
danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood
themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the
poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have
frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact
proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the dramatic and
lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in
the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance,
sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the scheme
of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in
chivalry and Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern Europe;
yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue been developed; never
was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of
man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during
the century which preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our
species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in
man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language, which has rendered this
epoch memorable above all others, and the store - house of examples to everlasting time.
For written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an
idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all, as from a
common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more
of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist
with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal to
what has already been established to distinguish between the cause and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its birth; and however a
succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few great specimens of the Athenian
drama which have been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was
understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For the
Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious
institutions, to produce a common effect in the representation of the highest idealism of
passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind of artists of
the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity one
towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing
the image of the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedy without music and
dancing; and music and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has
indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the actor's face of a
mask, on which the many expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be
moulded into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favorable only to a partial and
inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be
directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy
with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an
extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in "King Lear,"
universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this principle which
determines the balance in favor of "King Lear" against the "Cedipus
Tyrannus" or the "Agamemnon," or, if you will, the trilogies with which
they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the
latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. "King Lear," if it
can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic
art existing in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was
subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern
Europe. Calderon, in his religious autos, has attempted to fulfil some of the high
conditions of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a
relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing;
but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than
gained by the substitution of the rigidly defined and ever - repeated idealisms of a
distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion.
But I digress. The connection of scenic exhibitions with the improvement or corruption
of the manners of men has been universally recognized; in other words, the presence or
absence of poetry in its most perfect and universal form has been found to be connected
with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been imputed to the drama
as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the
history of manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the
other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its perfection, ever
coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness of the age. The tragedies of the
Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin
disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but that ideal perfection and energy which
everyone feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.
The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they
distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good
affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm
is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar
life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being represented
as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of
its wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama
of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self -
knowledge and self - respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless
reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express
poetry, is as a prismatic and many - sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of
human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary
forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and
endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay.
Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity,
divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form
misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as
moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or
weakness, with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hence what has
been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's "Cato" is a specimen of
the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes
poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which
consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic
writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and
passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. The
period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles
II, when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the
triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating an age
unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of
dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal
universality: wit succeeds to humor; we laugh from self - complacency and triumph, instead
of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly
laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life,
becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a
monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it
devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry
are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connection of poetry and social good
is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that
the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic
excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it
has once flourished is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the
energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of
bringing back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its
most extended sense: all language, institution, and form require not only to be produced
but to be sustained: the office and character of a poet participate in the divine nature
as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
Part II
The Creative Faculty In Greece
Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the Macedonian, and
then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the extinction or suspension of the
creative faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered
tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious reign.
Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odor of the tuberose, it overcomes and
sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as
a meadow - gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and
adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense with a power of
sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is
correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in
manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it
the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is
to be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses and the affections is
to be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their superiority over these
succeeding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which belong to the inner
faculties of our nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with the
external; their incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is
not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection
consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that
they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their
age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure,
passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last
triumph of evil would have been achieved. For the end of social corruption is to destroy
all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a
paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a
torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever
addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is
heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates
all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life;
the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. It
will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and
Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and
sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the
fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have
never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached
to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which
at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains
within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not
circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the
sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those
immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more
finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great
poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
since the beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient Rome; but the
actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly saturated with the
poetical element. The Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest
treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture, anything which might
bear a particular relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to
the universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge
perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost.
Lucretius is in the highest, and Vergil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen
delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist of light which conceal from us the
intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry.
Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Vergilian age,
saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of
Rome, were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the
substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of
political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for
whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the
faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of
Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls;
the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were
not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result
from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and
the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order,
created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the
reward ever - living fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro3.
They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. The
Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
harmony.
[Footnote 3: "Because they lack the sacred bard."]
At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its
revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that
there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners
and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which,
copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their
thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these
systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already established, that
no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a
great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved
to us by the biographers of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a certain period after
the prevalence of a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, the three
forms into which Plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of
apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to be
confessed that "Light seems to thicken," and
"The crow makes wing to the rocky wood, Good things of day begin to droop and
drowse, And night's black agents to their preys do rouse."
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce
chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of
Knowledge and of Hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time.
Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the
Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected
with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian
doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may
have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the
progress of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here
discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet
they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice,
cruelty, and fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of
creating in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society
are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and
those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most
expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words from thoughts,
that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the Christian
and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves. The principle of equality had been
discovered and applied by Plato in his "Republic" as the theoretical rule of the
mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power produced by the common skill and
labor of human beings ought to be distributed among them. The limitations of this rule
were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility to
result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a
moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present,
and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths
contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the
exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The
incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south impressed
upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. The result
was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be
assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without
incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading
restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events.
The Poetry of Dante and Milton
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political hope that it
can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom of women produced the poetry of
sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was
as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had
walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled with the inhabitants of
a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and
heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation
itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their
art: "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse."4 The Provencal
trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the
inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is impossible
to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were
superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these
sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of
the dull vapors of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things of love
even more than Petrarch. His "Vita Nuova" is an inexhaustible fountain of purity
of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those intervals
of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the
gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to
have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of
modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar, and
the order of the great acts of the "Divine Drama," in the measure of the
admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a
perpetual hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all
the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated
world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the
dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the
dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory
over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which
humankind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded
diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognised in
the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship
of which chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
[Footnote 4: "The book, and he who wrote it, was a Galeotto" [i. e., a
pander], from the episode of Paolo and Francesca in Dante's "Inferno," v. 137.]
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time,
which unites the modern and ancient world. The distorted notions of invisible things which
Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which
these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult
question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have
subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least
appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Rhipaeus, whom Vergil calls
justissimus unus,5 in Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his
distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself a
philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it
has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the
character of Satan as expressed in "Paradise Lost." It is a mistake to suppose
that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable
hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremist
anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be
forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued,
are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral
being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has
conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold
security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from
any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the
alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the
popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no
superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct
moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled
as it were the elements of human nature as colors upon a single pallet, and arranged them
in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is,
according to the laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external
universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of
succeeding generations of mankind. The "Divina Commedia" and "Paradise
Lost" have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and
time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and
decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the
religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped
with the eternity of genius.
[Footnote 5: "The one most just man."]
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the
series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and
sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it,
developing itself in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the
wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Vergil, with a modesty
that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created
anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock - birds, though their notes were
sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have
sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet.
For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the "Aeneid," still
less can it be conceded to the "Orlando Furioso," the "Gerusalemme
Liberata," the "Lusiad," or the "Faerie Queene."
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion of the civilized
world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms
survived in the unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other
followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony than in the
boldness of his censures of papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entranced
Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of
inharmonious barbarians. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over
the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth
century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the
benighted world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning
atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth,
and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is
infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil
may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is
a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person
and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable
them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the
source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was
characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Chaucer caught the
sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of English literature is based upon the
materials of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of poetry and its
influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out the effects of poets, in the large
and true sense of the word, upon their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and mechanists,
on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is most delightful,
but it is alleged that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of
this distinction what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a general sense, is
that which the consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which,
when found, it acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and
permanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the means of
producing the former or the latter. In the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies
the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a
narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express that which
banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with
security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstitions, and the
conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives
of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their appointed
office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their
creations into the book of common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions
are of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of
the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the superior ones. But whilst
the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French
writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labor, let them beware that
their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to
the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that hath,
more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken
away." The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel
of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are
the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a
number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the
constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the
pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself,
are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in
tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the
pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is
inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the
pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, "It is better to go to the house
of mourning than to the house of mirth." Not that this highest species of pleasure is
necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the
admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation of poetry,
is often wholly unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. Those
who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,6 and their
disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of
mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement
which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would
have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children
burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the
abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what
would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and
Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a
revival of the study of Greek literature had been never taken place; if no monuments of
ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the
ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never,
except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of
the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of
society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive
and creative faculty itself.
[Footnote 6: Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The
others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners. - S.]
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into
practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the
just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of
thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no
want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political
economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But
we let "I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage." We want
the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act
that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun
conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which
have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man,
having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the
mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which
is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for
abridging and combining labor, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From what
other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a
weight to the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is
the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of
knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to
reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the
beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at
periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of
the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to
the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwidely for that which
animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of
knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be
referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it
is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted,
denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the
succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and
bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the
elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of
anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship - what were the
scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this
side of the grave - and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to
bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl - winged faculty of
calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose
poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a
fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which
fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are
unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in
its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results;
but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious
poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the
original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day,
whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by
labor and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted
to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial
connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional
expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself;
for Milton conceived the "Paradise Lost" as a whole before he executed it in
portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having "dictated" to him
the "unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would allege
the fifty - six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso."
Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and
intuition of the poetical faculty are still more observable in the plastic and pictorial
arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in a
mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of
accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with
place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and
departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in
the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it
does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature
through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming
calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These
and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most
delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by
them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and
friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as
what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as
spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with
the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a
scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever
experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry
thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the
vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in
language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide - abide, because there is no portal of expression from
the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems
from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most
beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and
horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke
all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within
the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the
spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters
which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and
lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient.
"The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of
heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident
of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws
life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within
our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos.
It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges
from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our
being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It
creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of
impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso -
"Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta."7
[Footnote 7: "No one merits the name of creator except God and the Poet."]
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and
glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most
illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of
any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest,
the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the
greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence,
and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the
exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior
degree, will be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for
a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, let us
decide without trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives of those who are
"there sitting where we dare not soar," are reprehensible. Let us assume that
Homer was a drunkard, that Vergil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso
was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser
was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living
poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their
errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins
"were as scarlet, they are now white as snow"; they have been washed in the
blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the
imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies
against poetry and poets; consider how little is as it appears - or appears as it is; look
to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to
the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no
necessary connection with the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that
these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects are
experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of the
poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and
harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the
intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a
man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually
live. But as he is more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and
pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
one and pursue the other with an ardor proportioned to this difference. And he renders
himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which
these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another's
garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge,
avarice, and the passions purely evil have never formed any portion of the popular
imputations on the lives of poets.
Concluding Remarks
I have thought it most favorable to the cause of truth to set down these remarks
according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind, by a consideration of the
subject itself, instead of observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view
which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the arguers
against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the subject. I can
readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers
who quarrel with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be stunned
by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius undoubtedly are, as
they ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to
distinguish rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements and principles;
and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what
is called poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being
arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its object an application of these principles to the
present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the
modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the
imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development
of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national
will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the low - thoughted envy which
would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison
any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty.
The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to
work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an
accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned
conceptions respecting man and nature. The person in whom this power resides, may often,
as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with
that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure,
they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own
soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the
present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.
They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive
and all penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished
at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are
the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which
futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is
moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Source: reprinted in Harvard Classics series, 1909
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© Paul Halsall, August 1998
