Classic Poem

I

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental
action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be
considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought
to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon
those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing
from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within
itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the {word
in Greek}, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects
those forms which are common to universal nature and existence
itself; the other is the {word in Greek}, or 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 the imagination as the
instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow
to the substance.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression
of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.
Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing
wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to
ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human
being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise
than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony,
by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited
to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could
accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them,
in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can
accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play
by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and
every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation
to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which
awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away,
so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the
duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the
cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these
expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for
the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the
emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner;
and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation,
become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of
his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and
his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures
of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented
treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative
arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil
and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the
harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from
the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained
within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality,
diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles
alone capable of affording the motives according to which the
will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is
social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment,
beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of
kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain
order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects
and the impressions represented by them, all expression being
subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us
dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an
inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our
view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its
forms.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they
observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the
melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series
of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain
order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic
representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive
an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense
of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern
writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which
approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest
delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as
that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances
where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the
beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between
this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom
it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the
word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they
express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,
communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort or reduplication
from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that
is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and
perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent
them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts
instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets
should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus
disorganized, 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'; {Footnote: De Augment. Scient.,
cap. i, lib. iii.} 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; and to be a poet is to apprehend the
true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the
relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and
secondly between perception and expression. 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.

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.

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action,
are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called
poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a
synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses
those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language,
which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained
within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature
itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the
actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible
of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or
motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that
faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily
produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone;
but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have
relations among each other, which limit and interpose between
conception and expression The former is as a mirror which reflects,
the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are
mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters,
and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters
of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never
equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term, as
two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a
guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions,
so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of
poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question,
whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the
gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets,
any excess will remain.

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of
the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle
still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured
and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and
verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other
and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order
of those relations has always been found connected with a perception
of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of
poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence
of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely
less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the
words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence
the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a
crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour
and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the
creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed,
or it will bear no flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of
Babel.

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony
in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to
music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of
harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet
should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed
convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such
composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the
exact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction
between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction
between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was
essentially a poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the
melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible
to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and
lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts
divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular
plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the
varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
{Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death
particularly}. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom
of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind,
and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element
with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions
in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors,
nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things
by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their
periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves
the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are
those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm
on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable
of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
power.

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.

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition
as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be a considered as
a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions: a single word even may be a spark of inexting