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Page 31
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.
I have thought it most favourable 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 a 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 persons 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, the 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.
THE END
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A DEFENCE OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
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