Who are the Poets?
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.
What is Poetry?
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 connexion 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 for ever
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.
Poetry and Utility
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
superstition, 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 labour, 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.
The Use of Poetry
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 odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the
elements which compose it, as the form and splendour 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 colour 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 labour 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
connexion 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, is 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 the 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 regret they leave, there
cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It
is as it were the interpenetration 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 colour 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.