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WHAT IS POETRY ?
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It has often been asked , What is Poetry ? And many and various are the answers which have been returned . The vulgarest of all—one with which no person possessed of the faculties to which Poetry addresses itself can ever have been satisfied—is
that which confounds poetry with metrical composition : yet to this wretched mockery of a definition , many have been led back , by the failure of all their attempts to find any other that would distinguish what they have been accustomed to call poetry , from much which they have known only under other names * €
That , however , the word poetry' does import something quite peculiar in its nature , something which may exist in what is called prose as well as in verse , something which does not even require the instrument of words , bat can speak through those other audible symbols called musical sounds , and even through the visible ones , which are the language of sculpture , painting , and
architecture ; all this , as we believe , is and must be felt , though perhaps indistinctly , by all upon whom poetry in any of its shapes produces any impression beyond that of tickling the ear . To the mind , poetry is either nothing , or it is the better part of all art whatever , and of real life too ; and the distinction between poetry and what is not poetry , whether explained or not , is felt to be fundamental .
Where every one feels a difference , a difference there must be . All other appearances may be fallacious , but the appearance of a difference is itself a real difference . Appearances too , like other things , must have a cause , and that which can cause anything , even an illusion , must be a reality . And hence , while a halfphilosophy disdains the classifications and distinctions indicated
by popular language , philosophy carried to its highest point may frame new ones , but never sets aside the old , content with correcting and regularizing them . It cuts fresh channels for thought , but it does not fill up such as it finds ready made , but traces , on the contrary , more deeply , broadly , and distinctly , those into which the current has spontaneously flowed .
Let us then attempt , in the way of modest inquiry , not to coerce and confine nature within the bounds of an arbitrary definition , but rather to find the boundaries which she herself has set , and erect a barrier round them ; not calling mankind to account for having misapplied the word f poetry , ' but attempting to clear up to them the conception which they already attach to it , and to bring before their minds as a distinct principle that which , as a vague feeling , has really guided them in their actual employnaeut of the term . The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions ; and therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Words-
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 60, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/60/
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