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Untitled Article
event excites in rude minds , which live wholly immersed in oatward things , and have never , either from choice or a force they could not resist , turned themselves to the contemplation of the world within . Passing now from childhood , and from the childhood of society , to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchildlike age—the minds and hearts of greatest
depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry ; the shallowest and emptiest , on the contrary , are , by universal remark , the most addicted to novel-reading . This accords , too , with all analogous experience of human nature . The sort of persons whom not merely in books but in their lives , we find perpetually engaged in hunting for excitement from without , are invariably those who do not possess , either in the vigour
of their intellectual powers or in the depth of their sensibilities , that which would enable them to find ample excitement nearer at home . The same persons whose time is divided between sightseeing , gossip , and fashionable dissipation , take a natural delight in fictitious narrative : the excitement it affords is of the kind which
comes from without . Such persona are rarely lovers of poetry , though they may fancy themselves so , because they relish novels in verse . But poetry , which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of the human heart , is interesting only to those to whom it recals what they have felt , or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel , or what they might have been able to feel , had their outward circumstances been
different , Poetry , when it is really such , is truth ; and fiction also , if it is good for anything , is truth : but they are different truths . The truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly : the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life . The two kinds of knowledge are different , and come by different ways , come mostly to different persons . Great poets are often proverbially ignorant of life .
What they know has come by observation of themselves ; they have found there one highly delicate , and sensitive , and refined specimen of human nature , on which the laws of human emotion are written in large characters , such as can be read off without much study : and other knowledge of mankind , such as comes to
men of the world by outward experience , is not indispensable to them as poets : but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all ; he has to describe outward things , not the inward man ; actions and events , not feelings ; and it will not do for him to be numbered among thoBe who , as Madame Roland said of Brissot , know man but not men .
All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements , poetry and narrative or incident , in the same work , and calling it either a novel or a poem ; but so may red and white combine on the same human features , or on the same canvass ; and so may oil and vinegar , though opposite natures , blend together in the same
Untitled Article
62 What is Pdetry ?
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 62, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/62/
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