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Untitled Article
ternal excitements which act upon that organization / and make the well-strung harp give forth its music . Wherever there is man and nature , there may be poetry . But as this universal essence is rendered perceptible , it necessarily is subjected to various modifications . The life and soul of poetry are always the same ; but to make them visible and tangible , they must become incarnate
in various forms , which forms bear the peculiar features of age , class , or country . Nor is it more certain that the poetry of a rude and that of a civilized period , or of an oriental and a northern region , must exhibit appropriate diversities , than that ; in the same country and the same generation , such diversities must also be found between the poetry of the rich and that of the poor , though both may possess the qualities which compel us to admit and to feel that they are poetry .
Poetry is a train of thoughts rich in pictorial and affecting asso ^ ciations . A thought or an expression is poetical , exactly in proportion to its power of calling up such associations . This power must evidently be varied by the peculiar mental habits of those who read or hear . There is much and noble poetry in our language , which only exists for scholars . The finest specimens of this kind are in Gray ' s * Odes , ' and in Milton ' s ' Paradise Lost /
He only feels the full force of the one who is thoroughly familiar with the history of his country ; or of the other , who feels a classical allusion , as if it were a vernacular idiom . The power of a poet who is a scholar , over readers who are scholars also , is indefinitely multiplied . It includes the power of all the other poets whom he thus makes for the time the satellites of his own genius ; presenting to the mind not only the picture which his own
fancy has sketched , but including in it , and calling up by it , the productions of all those , his allusion to whom , though it be but in the turn of a phrase , is understood and felt . And so the historical Odes of Gray—besides those bold and rapid sketches which occupy the foreground of the painting—exhibit , by allusion to the narrative , in long and shadowy perspective , the poetical characters and facts of history . The effect of allusion in poetry is like that
of a combination of mechanical powers . It invests one man with the strength of many . When poetry , that is to say , when man shall arrive at perfection , its wealth in allusion will be most ample and boundless . It does not , however , follow that the poetry which is now most endowed with this quality is the best poetry . As all machinery , however powerful , requires living strength to set it in motion , so allusion will accomplish little , unless it be worked by the living strength of originality .
The highest order of poetical associations must , after all , lbe sought in natural objects and human emotions . He will never work upon the soul by his allusions , who fails to affect it by his original conceptions . Yet those who can appreciate classical and historical allusions will be disposed to accept them to some extent
Untitled Article
190 The Poor and their Poetry *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 190, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/46/
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