SONG AND EMOTION 19 The Romantic as the lyrical view. Poetry expression of Emotion. but, so far as we know, she never bore children."1 Goethe's pupil, the young Matthew Arnold, accepted without reserve the antique notion of poetry. "Actions, human actions," he cried, "are the eternal objects of the muse." In after years, as we shall see, he formed a more sympathetic conception. Other poets have thrown different and priceless alloys into the crucible from which is to flow the metal of our seeking, adding fire and sweetness to its tone. The chiefs of the romantic movement, so lieved Passion to be the one was its fervent exemplar. In certain Byron. moods, it is true, he affected to think that he and his compeers were upon a wrong system, and he extolled the genius and style of Pope. But this was after all had got the seed of his own flower. It was plainly an affectation of revolt from his own affectation, with haply some prophetic sense of naturalism as a basis for genuine emotion. His summing up is given in "Don Juan": near our own time, bething needful. Byron "Thus to their extreme verge the passions brought Dash into poetry, which is but passion, Or at least was so, ere it grew a fashion." Moore, light-weight as he was, aptly stated the Byronic creed: "Poetry ought only to be employed as an interpreter of feeling." This is certainly true, as far as it goes, and agrees with Mill's 1 But see Ovid, Met. x. 297: "Illa Paphon genuit, de quo tenet insula nomen." Mill and later but still limited canon, that poetry is emotion expressed in lyrical language.1 But a complete definition distinguishes the thing defined from everything else; it denotes, as you know, "the species, the whole species, and nothing but the species." Bascom and Ruskin follow Mill, but Ruskin adds other elements, saying that poetry is the suggestion, by the "imagination," of noble "thoughts" for noble emotions. This does not exclude painting and other emotional and imaginative arts. In truth, he is simply defining art, and takes poetry, as Plato might, as a synonym for art in all its forms of expression. An elevated view, on the whole, is gained by Imagination. those who recognize more sensibly the force of Imagination. Here the twin contemplative seers, Wordsworth and Coleridge, lift their torches, dispersing many mists. They saw that poetry is not opposed to prose, of which verse is the true antithesis, but that in spirit and action it is the reverse of science or matter of fact. Imagination is its polestar, its utterance the echo of man and nature. The poet has no restriction beyond the duty of giving pleasure. Nothing else stands between him and the very image of nature, from which a hundred barriers shut off the biographer and historian. Words The Lake worth admits the need of emotion, but renounces taste. Coleridge plainly has the instinct for beauty and the spell of measured words. 1 J. S. Mill's Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties, 1833. IMAGINATION-PLATONISM 21 The chief contributions of the Lake School to our definition are the recognition of the imagination and the antithesis of science to poetry. The pessimist Schopenhauer, who wrote like a musician on music, like a poet on poetry, yet with wholly impassive judgment, also avows that poetry is "the art of exciting by words the power of the imagination," and that it must "show by example what life and the world are." From the attributes of invention, passion, and imagination may perhaps be deduced what The Platonic seems to others the specific quality of conception. the poet, the very quintessence of his gift. What should I mean, save that which Aristotle's master considered the element productive of all others and a direct endowment from heaven, Inspiration. the Inspiration governing creative, impassioned, imaginative art? The poet's soul was, according to Plato, in harmonic relation with the soul of the universe. It is true that in the "Republic" he supplies Aristotle with a technical basis; Plato, in “The furthermore, as an idealist playing at government, he is more sternly utilitarian than even the man of affairs. The epic and dramatic makers of "imitative history" are falsifiers, dangerous for their divine power of exciting the passions and unsettling the minds of ordinary folk. He admires a poet, and would even crown him, but feels bound to escort Republic." 1 Coleridge's Introductory Matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage; Wordsworth's Prefaces and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads, etc. him to the side of the ship Republic and to drop him overboard, as the Quaker repulsed the boarder, with the remark, "Friend, thee has no business here!" But this is Plato defying his natal goddess in a passing ascetic mood; Plato, in whose self the poet and philosopher were one indeed, having ever since been trying, like the two parts of his archetypal man, to find again so perfect a union. In his more general mood he atones for such wantonness, reiterating again and again that the poet is a seer, possessed of all secrets and guided by an inspiring spirit; that without his second sight, his interpretation of the divine ideas symbolized by substance and action, his mission would be fruitless. From Plato to Those who take this higher view revere the name of Plato, though sometimes looking beyond him to the more eastern East, whence such occult wisdom is believed to flow, to such sayings as that ascribed to Zoroaster,1 "Poets are standing transporters; their employment consists in speaking to the Father and to Matter, in provoking apparent copies of unapparent natures, and thus inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabric of the world." Cicero. Cicero, deeply read in Plato, could not conceive of a poet's producing verse of grand import and perfect rhythm without some heavenly inbreathing of the mind. The soul's highest prerogative was to contemplate the order of celestial things 1 Cited by F. B. Sanborn in a paper on Emerson. THE POET AS A SEER and to reproduce it. 23 Transcendental thinkers Bacon. such as Lord Bacon in his finest vein-recognize this as its office. While Bacon's general view of poetry is that all "Feigned History" (as he terms it), prose or verse, may be so classed, he says the use of it "hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it"; and again, that it is thought to "have some participation of divineness because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind." Sidney's flawless Sidney. "Defense of Poesie "1 exalts the prophetic gift of the vates above all art and invention. In our day Carlyle clung to the supremacy of inspiration, in art no less than in action. But no one since Ploti nus has made it so veritably the golden dome of the temple as our seer of seers, Emerson, in whose be- v lief the artist does not create so much as report. The soul works through him. "Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing." And thus all the Concord group, notably The Concord Dr. W. T. Harris, in whose treatises of School. Dante and other poets the spiritual interpreting 1 Prof. Albert S. Cook, in his edition of Sidney's tractate, remarks concerning the title: "The Defense was not published till 1595, and then by two different printers, Olney and Ponsonby. The former gave it the title, An Apologie for Poetrie; the latter, The Defence of Poesie. It is doubtful which of these appeared the earlier. . . . Sidney himself refers to the treatise as 'a pitiful defense of poor poetry.'" ... |