Lectures on the English Poets | Page 2

are
all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies,
refines, raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's."
Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the
principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without
knowing it. The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at
hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the
shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a
garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stops to look at the
rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor's

show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds his
hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the
slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a
god;--the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and
the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young
and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does
no more than describe what all the others think and act. If his art is
folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second hand. "There is
warrant for it." Poets alone have not "such seething brains, such
shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler reason" can.
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
The madman. While
the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The
poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heav'n to earth,
from earth to heav'n; And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of
things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy
nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong
imagination."
If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a
fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are,
because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. Ariosto
has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro: but was not Medoro,
who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much
enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of
Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the
poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural
man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without
passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel
sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a
chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor;
and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the
passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our
wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical

language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which
ecstacy is very cunning in." Neither a mere description of natural
objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or
forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the
heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a direct
but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a
sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions,
communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of
lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole
being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms;
feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of
life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed.
It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the
understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the
actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical
impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or
power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all
limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other
image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in
the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure
by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by the most striking
examples of the same quality in other instances. Poetry, according to
Lord Bacon, for this reason, "has something divine in it, because it
raises the mind