Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones. Anima Poetae, p. 5. The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's Bard and Collins' Odes. The Bard once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight. Anima Poetae, p. 5. Great harm is done by bad poets in trivializing beautiful expressions and images, and associating disgust and indifference with the technical forms of poetry. Anima Poetae, p. 59. A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket; let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine Nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory. Modern Poetry T. T. Sept. 22, 1830. Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think. T. T. Sept. 22, 1830. Prose and Poetry I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose-words in their best order;-poetry, the best words in the best order. T. T. July 12, 1827. A Caution to Posterity There are actions which left undone mark the greater man; but to have done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without condemning Dryden. By the by, we are all too apt to forget that contemporaries have not the same wholeness, and fixedness in their notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can hope and fear and believe and disbelieve. We make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes. Anima Poetae, p. 159. Limitation of Love of Poetry A man may be, perhaps, exclusively a poet, a poet most exquisite in his kind, though the kind must needs be of inferior worth; I say, may be; for I cannot recollect any one instance in which I have a right to suppose it. But, surely, to have an exclusive pleasure in poetry, not being yourself a poet;-to turn away from all effort, and to dwell wholly on the images of another's vision-is an unworthy and effeminate thing. A jeweller may devote his whole time to jewels unblamed; but the mere amateur, who grounds his taste on no chemical or geological idea, cannot claim the same exemption from despect. How shall he fully enjoy Wordsworth, who has never meditated on the truths which Wordsworth has wedded to immortal verse? Poetical Filter Omniana. I once thought of making a collection-to be called 'The Poetical Filter-upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. You would be surprised at the number of exquisite wholes which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them;-just as whole volumes of Wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if I may so call them, of that great man —whilst at the same time five-sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of Byron or Moore or Campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. But he has won the battle now, aye! and will wear the crown, whilst English is English. Elegy and Ode T. T. Oct. 23, 1833. Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice. The true lyric ode is subjective too: but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself. Dialogue in Verse T. T. Oct. 23, 1833. I cannot Can dialogues in verse be defended? but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth. Style T. T. July 21, 1832. The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakespeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your fore-finger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages. A good lecture upon style might be composed, by taking, on the one hand, the slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps even of Roger North, which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and, on the other, the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not, of course, adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there, in the regular Roger North way-much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this, his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it. The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal. The definition of good prose is-proper words in their proper places ;-of good verse-the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication ;-it is as if he had been speaking |