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Untitled Article
themselves according to the artificial classifications which the understanding has voluntarily made for the convenience of thought or of practice . But where any of the impressions are vivid and intense , the associations into which these enter are the ruling ones : it being a well-known law of association , that the stronger a feeling is , the more rapidly and strongly it associates itself with
any other object or feeling . Where , therefore , nature has given strong feelings , and education has not created factitious tendencies stronger than the natural ones , the prevailing associations will be those which connect objects and ideas with emotions , and with each other through the intervention of emotions . Thoughts and images will be linked together , according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them . A thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which is allied with it . At the centre
of each group of thoughts or images will be found a feeling ; and the thoughts or images are only there because the feeling was there . AH the combinations which the mind puts together , all the pictures which it paints , all the wholes which Imagination constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy ,, will be indebted to some dominant feeling , not as in other natures to a dominant thought , for their unity and consistency of character , for what distinguishes them from incoherences .
The difference , then , between the poetry of a poet , and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetical mind ,, is that in the latter , with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded and glorified , the thought itself is still the conspicuous object ; while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself , employing Thought only as the medium of its utterance . In the one feeling waits upon thought ; in the other , thought upon feeling .
The one writer has a distinct aim , common to him with any other didactic author ; he desires to convey the thought , and he conveys it clothed in the feeling s which it excites in himself , or which he deems most appropriate to it . The other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings ; and all the thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along the stream .
It may assist in rendering our rrjeaning intelligible , if we illustrate it by a parallel between the two English authors of our own day , who have produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring poetry , Wordsworth and Shelley . Apter instances could not be wished for ; the one might be cited as the type , the exemplar , of what the poetry of culture may accomplish , the other as perhaps
the most striking example ever known of the poetic temperament . How different , accordingly , is the poetry of these two great writers ! In Wordsworth , the poetry is almost always the mere setting of a thought . The thought may be more valuable than the setting , or it may be less valuable , but there can be no question as to which was first in his mind : what he is impressed with , and what he is anxious to impress , is some proposition , more or less
Untitled Article
The Two Kinds of Poetry . 717
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 717, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/57/
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