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Untitled Article
worth affirms to be its logical opposite , namely , not prose , but matter of fact or scrence . The one addresses itself to the belief , the other to the feelings . The one does its work by convincing or persuading , the other by moving . The one acts by presenting a proposition to the understanding , the other by offering interesting objects of contemplation to the sensibilities .
This , however , leaves us very far from a definition of poetry . We have distinguished it from one thing , but we are bound to distinguish it from everything . To present thoughts or images to the mind for the purpose of acting upon the emotions , does not belong to poetry alone . It is equally the province ( for example )
of the novelist : and yet the faculty of the poet and the faculty of the novelist are as distinct as any other two faculties ; as the faculty of the novelist and of the orator , or of the poet and the metaphysician . The two characters may be united , as characters the most disparate may ; but they have no natural connexion .
Many of the finest poems are in the form of novels , and in almost all good novels there is true poetry . But there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a novel as such , and the interest excited by poetry ; for the one is derived from incident , the other from the representation of feeling . In one , the source of the
emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility ; in the other , of a series of states of mere outward circumstances . Now , all minds are capable of being affected more or less by representations of the latter kind , and all , or almost all , by those of the former ; yet the two sources of interest correspond to two distinct and ( as respects their greatest development ) mutually exclusive characters of mind . Sol moth is the nature of poetry dissimilar to the nature of fictitious narrative , that to have a really strong passion for either of the two , seems to presuppose or to superinduce a comparative indifference to the other .
At what age is the passion for a story , for almost any kind of story , merely as a story , the most intense ?—in childhood . But that also is the age at which poetry , even of the simplest description , is least relished and least understood ; because the feelings with which it is especially conversant are yet undeveloped , and not having been even in the slightest degree experienced , cannot be sympathised with . In what stage of the progress of society , again , is story-telling most valued , and the story-teller in greatest request and honour ?—in a rude state ; like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day , and of almost all nations in the earliest ages . But in this state of society there is little poetry except ballads , which are mostly narrative , that is , essentially stories , and derive their principal interest from the incidents . Considered as poetry , they are of the lowest and most elementary kind : the feelings depicted , or rather indicated , are the simplest our nature has ; such joys and griefs as the immediate pressure of some outward
Untitled Article
What is Poetry ? 6 i
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 61, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/61/
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