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LECTURES ON

THE ENGLISH POETS

LECTURE I.-INTRODUCTORY

ON POETRY IN GENERAL

THE best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.

In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound.

Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for any thing else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment, (as some persons have been led to imagine) the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours-it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that poetry is something< to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun,—there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and

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are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous
and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of
the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different
states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feel-
ing that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be
eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with
delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a branch of
authorship it is the stuff of which our life is made.' The rest is
'mere oblivion,' a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering in
life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is
poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration,
wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that
fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole
being without it 'man's life is poor as beast's. Man is a poetical
animal; and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry,
act upon them all our lives, like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who
had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child is a poet
in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of
Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first
crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman, when
he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes
after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold;
the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who
paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the
tyrant, who fancies himself a god ;—the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king,
the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of
their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all
the others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly
and madness at second hand. "There is warrant for it.' Poets
alone have not such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that
apprehend more than cooler reason'
n' can.

'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold ;

The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination.'

1

If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro: but was not Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.

Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind which ecstacy is very cunning in.' Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances. Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason, has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things,

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as reason and history do.' It is strictly the language of the imagina-
tion; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects,
not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other
thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combina-
tions of power.
This language is not the less true to nature, because
it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if
it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of
passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be pre-
sented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear—and the imagination
will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of
whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. Our eyes are made
the fools' of our other faculties. This is the universal law of the
imagination,

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'That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is each bush suppos'd a bear!'

When Iachimo says of Imogen,

-The flame o' th' taper

Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see the enclosed lights'—

this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord
with the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally
with the poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of
shining gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from
novelty and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the
imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic
stature to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but because
the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or
the usual size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a
greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than another
object of ten times the same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling
makes up for the disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to
the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an
equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. When Lear
calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, for they are old like
him,' there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identifica-
tion of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could
do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair!

Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with

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