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Nascitur poeta is a maxim of classical antiquity , which has passed to these latter days with less questioning than most of the doctrines of that earl y age . When it originated , the human , faculties were occupied ^ fortunately for posterity , less in examining how the works of genius are created , than in creating them :
and the adage , probably , had no higher source than the tendency , common among mankind , to consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice , all skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules , as the result of a peculiar gift . Yet this aphorism , born in the infancy of psychology , will perhaps be
found , now when that science is in its adolescence , to be as true as an epigram ever is , that is , to contain some truth : truth , however , which has been so compressed and bent out of shape , in order to tie it up into so small a knot of only two words , that it reauires an almost infinite amount of unrolling and laying straight , frefore it will resume its just proportions .
We are not now intending to remark upon the grosser misapplications of this ancient maxim , which have engendered so many r&ces of poetasters . The days $ re gone by , when every raw youth whose borrowed phantasies have set themselves to a
borrowed tune , mistaking as Coleridge says an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic genius , while unable to disguise from himself that he ft ^ ul taken no means whereby he might become a poet , could fancy himself a born ope . Those who would reap without sowing , a « d gain the victory without fighting the battle , are ambitious now of another sort of distinction , and are bora
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sure V—* You shall have a grain , two grains , &ir , to put you in mind of Wheedle-hall occasionally . ' Here you become the most social of friends , the happiest eonvivialists that ever hob-and * nobbed together . So you go on smiling at each other , delighted with each other ' s agreeable companionship , aad he blesses you by
putting into your hands the objects of your desires—the last and holiest pledge of his respect for you , viz : six bristles of that pig , an inch of hoof-paring of that ox , and two grains of that sand : and you bid good night . ' He is alone—look at him , as he now sticks his thumbs into his breeches beckets , now uniting them in repose behind : look at him , I say , as he stumps up and down the on his
room ; he moves as no other m ^ n earth moves ; head , neck , shoulders , arms , chest , trunk , are labourers to his legs ; the upper part of him is employed in carrying the lower from place to place : they are not at all reciprocants . Well , there he is , repeating to himself , * What a —r— generous , gentlemanly , hospitable , and wealthy man that fellow must think me !* P ^ Exceptions do not m ake rules . . V .
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714 The Two Kinds of Poetry .
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THE TWO KINDS OF POETRY .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 714, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/54/
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