Biographia Literaria | Page 7

Gradus, halves and quarters of
lines, in which to embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man

from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
finery of,
------thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory
bring,--
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets of
great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth, Nature,
Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my former
passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the
component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative
dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which
the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the
merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and
meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to
comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the
poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the
greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of
essential poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into
other words of the same language, without diminution of their
significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are
so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded
from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty
in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in
the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I have

fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness. Our
genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in
their most important works at least,) without making the poet say
something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most
fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine
mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the
most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the
passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and
to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual,
yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious
something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning.
The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head
to point and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in
improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best
of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more