A Defence of PoetryBobbs-Merrill, 1904 - 90 pages |
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action ancient Athenian awakened beauty become Bobbs-Merrill Company Boccaccio Celtic nations chaos character colour composition conceptions connected contain contem corruption created creation creative faculty Dante Defence of Poetry delight divested divine drama elements enlarged epic epoch error eternal truth evil express extinc fame happiest harmony Harvard College Hence Homer human nature ideal imagination imita imitation imputed inspiration institutions intense invisible King Lear language less Livy Lord Bacon lyre mankind manner melody Milton mind mirror modern Europe moral motions never objects observe Orlando Furioso Paradise Paradise Lost passion pathies PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY perfection periods Petrarch philosophers Plato pleasure poem poetical faculty poetry exist poets portions principle produced relation religion repre restricted sense rhythm selectest sensibility sentation SHELLEY social society spirit splendour superstition sympathy Tasso things thoughts tion true umph universal veil verse Virgil virtue Voltaire whilst words writers
Popular passages
Page 34 - 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. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Page 74 - The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
Page 78 - Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results ; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Page 82 - Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes...
Page 77 - I will compose poetry." 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...
Page 35 - A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.
Page 82 - ... strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
Page 73 - Angelo 1 had never been born ; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated ; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place ; if no monuments of...
Page 71 - It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.
Page 74 - There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or, at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let " I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage".