On this page
-
Text (2)
-
Untitled Article
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
who , in his prolegomena to Homer , maintains that the Iliad and Odyssey are compilations from a collection of ancient national songs , written at the distance of centuries from each other , to which by the compiler that sort of unity is given which we now find in them , just as an epic poem might be formed of Robin
Hood , if all the ballads collected by Ritson Were melted down into one mass . * First , the health of the man , who at last boldly delivering us from the name of Homer , invites us to the nobler course . For who would contend with gods ? Who with the single one ? But to be one of the Homeridse , though only as the
last , is beautiful . Therefore hearken to the latest poem / The poem thus announced is the epic tale in this volume . It is one of the most original and characteristic of our author ' s poems * One of the most universally approved by the few , as well as admired by the many . Yet after all it is one of those which it will be most difficult to render popular out of Germany . Bitaub ^ ,
the author of ' Joseph / translated it into French prose ; and Holcroft , a talented man , who failed in nothing so eminently as in his metrical writings , rendered it into execrable blank verse .
Neither in English nor French could it attract attention , nor will it for a season . Wordsworth has remarked , that in matters of taste our preconceptions are bitter enemies to our enjoyments .
And the very epic character claimed for it would be sufficient to rouse every adverse feeling against it , until the real import of such claim is understood . Our readers may perhaps have heard
that among the most remarkable of the corollaries that have arisen out of the modern German metaphysics , is an entirely new system of Poetics ? which indeed has become current where the philosophy from which it arose has not been received . It shall be our object briefly to state a few of the first elementary
principles . The two chief writers of the school are the Schlegels ; and two of their works have been translated . * According to this theory , all poetry is to be brought under the three great classes of the epic , the lyric , and the dramatic . The epic is marked by this character of style , —that the poet presents his object
immediately and directly , with a total disregard of his own personality . He is , as it were , an indifferent and unimpassioned narrator or chronicler ; he relates his tale in one uniform tone ; he never hurries and never stops ; dwells as long on the description of a
warrior ' s dress or of a meal , as in the statement of the most momentous incident . This , it must be owned , characterises equall y the style of Homer and many of our old English and Scotch ballads—Chevy Chase , for instance . This our philosophical critics consider to be the primitive and antique poetry ; and Herodotus was in like manner an epic historian . The
op-* A , W . Schlegel ' s * Lectures on the Drama / which contains the most admirable development that has erer appeared of the excellences of Shakespeare . F . Schlegel's 4 Lectures on the History of Literature , ' a work more highl y esteemed in Germany , but more metaphysical and lens popular than the book of his brother .
Untitled Article
Goethe * s Works . 281
Untitled Article
No . 7 C > . X
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 281, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/65/
-