Biographia Literaria | Page 3

to
omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower.
From that period to the date of the present work I have published
nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come

before the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four poems,
printed with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were censured at
all, were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am
persuaded not with equal justice),--with an excess of ornament, in
addition to strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add,
that, even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted
the superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not
less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than
were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language,
though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the
desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths,
in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part
likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative
talent.--During several years of my youth and early manhood, I
reverenced those who had re- introduced the manly simplicity of the
Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the
hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style.
Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest
poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied,
perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.
At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a
very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference
of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and
again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in
such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems
of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and
brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds
of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the
former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At
the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us
read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too,
which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his
censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and,
seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as
that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex,

and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great
poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every
word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that,
availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made
us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have
answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness
of the word in the original text.
In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our
school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have
been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute,
harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and
Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear
him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean!
Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring?
Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain introductions,
similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction.
Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit,
as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in which however it
yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus,
which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it
ambition? Alexander and Clytus!-Flattery? Alexander and
Clytus!--anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late
repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of
agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that,
had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his
friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend
was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have sometimes
ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of
certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both