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Untitled Article
but if the human emotion be not painted with the most scrupulous truth , the poetry is bad poetry , i . e . is not poetry at ail , but a failure . Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the essentials of poetry has brought us very close to the last two attempts at a definition of poetry which we happen to have seen in print , both
of them by poets and men of genius . The one is by JSbenezer Elliott , the author of * Corn-Law Rhymes / and other poems of still greater merit . * Poetry , ' says he , is impassioned truth . ' The other is by a writer in Blackwood ' s Magazine , and comes , we think , still nearer the mark . We forget his exact words , but in substance he defined poetry * man ' s thoughts tinged by his feelings . There is in either definition a near approximation to what we are in
search of . Every truth which man can announce , every thought , even every outward impression , which can enter into his conscious * ness ., may become poetry when shewn through any impassioned medium , when invested with the colouring of joy , or grief , or pity , or affection , or admiration , or reverence , or awe , or even hatred or terror : and , unless so coloured , nothing , be it as interesting as it may , is poetry . But both these definitions fail to discriminate between poetry and eloquence . Eloquence , as well as poetry ,
is impassioned truth ; eloquence , as well as poetry , is thoughts coloured by the feelings . Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism alike recognize a distinction between the two : there is much that every one would call eloquence , which no one would think of classing as poetry . A question will sometimes arise , whether some particular author is a poet ; and those who maintain the negative commonly allow , that though not a poet , he is a highly eloquent writer .
The distinction between poetry and eloquence appears to us to be equally fundamental with the distinction between poetry and narrative , or between poetry and description . It is still farther from having been satisfactorily cleared up than either of the others , unless , which is highly probable , the German artists and
critics have thrown some light upon it which has not yet reached us . Without a perfect knowledge of what they have written , it is something like presumption to write upon such subjects at all , and we shall be the foremost to urge that , whatever we may be about to submit , may be received , subject to correction from them .
Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or uttering forth of feeling . But if we may be excused the seeming affectation of the antithesis , we should say that eloquence is heard , poetry is overheard . Eloquence supposes an audience ; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet ' s utter unconsciousness of a listener . Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself , in moments of solitude , and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet ' s mind . Eloquence is feeling
Untitled Article
64 IVhut is Poetry ?
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 64, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/64/
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