A Defence of PoetryBobbs-Merrill, 1904 - 90 pages |
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action ancient Athenian awakened beauty become best and happiest BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY Boccaccio Celtic nations character colour composition conceptions connected contain contem corruption created creation creative faculty Dante Defence of Poetry delight divested divine drama elements enlarged epic epoch error eternal truth evil express extinc fame Greece harmony Hence Homer human nature ical ideal imagination imita imitation imputed inspiration institutions intense invisible King Lear language less Livy Lord Bacon lyre mankind manner melody Milton mind mirror modern Europe moral motions never objects observe Orlando Furioso Paradise Paradise Lost passion pathies PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY perfection periods Petrarch philosophers Plato pleasure poem poetical faculty poetry exist poets portions principle produced relation religion repre restricted sense rhythm selectest sensibility sentation SHELLEY social society spirit superstition sympathy Tasso things thoughts tion true umph universal veil verse Virgil virtue Voltaire whilst words writers
Popular passages
Page 73 - Angelo 1 had never been born ; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated ; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place ; if no monuments of...
Page 77 - 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...
Page 74 - We have more moral, political and historical wisdom that 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.
Page 18 - ... 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"t — 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...
Page 64 - ... 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.
Page 44 - To such purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Page 12 - ... 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 quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, 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...
Page 27 - 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...
Page 19 - 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.
Page 74 - 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.