Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry ; Shelley's Defence of Poetry ; Browning's Essay on ShelleyBlackwell, 1921 - 112 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
age of brass Ages of Poetry Bavius beauty Bodleian Bodleian Library called Celtic nations character civil contains contemporaries creations cultivated Dante Defence Bod Defence of Poetry delight divine drama effect epic essay eternal existence expression Forman Four Ages fragment genius harmony Herodotus highest holograph draft Homer human imagination imitation influence inspired intellectual iron age Koszul language less letters light lived Livy Lord Byron manners Mary Shelley's transcript Memoirs of Shelley Milton mind Miscellany modern moral Muses nature Nonnus objects Ollier opinion original Orlando Furioso Paradise Lost passage passion Peacock Peacock's Memoirs PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY perfection Petrarch philosophers Plato pleasure poem poet poet's poetical faculty portion possessed present edition principle printed produced reason relation religion Richard Garnett sense sentence Shelley's prose Sidney society songs soul sympathy things THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK thought Thucydides tion truth universal verse whole words writers wrote
Popular passages
Page 31 - The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Page 28 - 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.
Page 88 - ... cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
Page xix - Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Page 41 - Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night', Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy bloody and invisible hand, Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond Which keeps me pale ! — Light thickens ; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood : Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
Page 31 - A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Page 25 - 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.
Page 29 - A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
Page 51 - The greatest poet even cannot say it ; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness ; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
Page 50 - We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice ; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies.