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Untitled Article
fer that title . But ought it to do so ? yes , perhaps , in the table of contents of a collection of € British Poets . * But « poet' is the name also of a variety of man , not solely of the author of a particular variety of book : now , to have written whole volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all kinds of characters , and
implies no greater peculiarity of mental construction , than to be the author of a history , or a novel . Whom , then , shall we call poets ? Those who are so constituted , that emotions are the links of association by which their ideas , both sensuous and spiritual , are connected together . This constitution belongs ( within certain limits ) to all in whom poetry
is a pervading principle . In all others , poetry is something extraneous and superinduced : something out of themselves ,, foreign to the habitual course of their every-day lives and characters ; a quite other world , to which they may make occasional visits , but where they are sojourners , not dwellers , and which , when out of it , or even when in it , they think of , peradventure , but as a
phajatoaaworld , a place of ignes fatui and spectral illusions . Those only who have the peculiarity of association which we have mentioned , and which is one of the natural consequences of intense sensibility , instead of seeming not themselves when they are uttering poetry , scarcely seem themselves when uttering any thing to which poetry
is foreign . Whatever be the thing which they are contemplating , the aspect under which it first and most naturally paints itself to them , is its poetic aspect . The poet of culture sees his object in prose , and describes it in poetry ; the poet of nature actually sees it in poetry .
This point is perhaps worth some little illu-stration ; the rather , as metaphysicians ( the ultimate arbiters of all philosophical criticism ) while they have busied themselves for two thousand years ,, more or less , about the few universal laws of human nature , have strangely neglected the analysis of its diversities . Of these , none lie deeper or reach further than the varieties which difference of
nature and of education makes in what may be termed the habitual bond of association . In a mind entirely uncultivated , which is also without any strong feelings , objects whether of sense or of intellect arrange themselves in the mere casual order in which they have been seen , heard , or otherwise perceived . Persons of
this sort may be said to think chronologically . If they remember a fact , it is by reason of a fortuitous coincidence with some trifling incident or circumstance which took place at the very time . If they have a story to tell , or testimony to deliver in a witness-box , their narrative must follow the exact order in which the events
took place : dodye them , and the thread of association is broken ; they cannot go on . Their associations , to use the language of philosophers , are chiefly of the successive , not the synchronous kind , and whether successive or synchronous , are mostly casual . To the man of science , again , or of business , objects group
Untitled Article
716 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 716, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/56/
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