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Untitled Article
essentially unlyncal . Lyric poetry , as it was the earliest kind , is also , if the view we are now taking of poetry be correct , more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other : it is tbe poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament , and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature . All Wordsworth's attempts in that strain , if we may venture to say so much of a man whom we so exceedingly admire , appear to us cold and spiritless .
Shelley is the very reverse of all this . Where Wordsworth is strong , he is weak ; where Wordsworth is weak , he is strong . Culture , that culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth , is precisely what was wanting to Shelley : or let us rather say , he had not , at the period of his deplorably early death , reached sufficiently far in that intellectual progression of which he was capable , and which , if it has done so much for far inferior natures , might have made of him the greatest of our poets . For him , intentional mental discipline had done little ; the vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all . He seldom follows up an idea ; it starts into life , summons from the fairy-land of his inexhaustible fancy some three or four bold images , then vanishes , and straight he is off on the wings of some casual association into quite another sphere . He had not yet
acquired the consecutiveness of thought necessary fora long poem ; his more ambitious compositions too often resemble the scattered fragments of a mirror ; colours brilliant as life , single images without end , but no picture . It is only when under the overruling influence of some one state of feeling , either actually experienced , or summoned up in almost the vividness of reality by a fervid imagination , that he writes as a great poet ; unity of feeling being
to him the harmonizing principle which a central idea is to minds of another class , and supplying the coherency and consistency which would else have been wanting . Thus it is in many of his smaller , and especially his lyrical poems . They are obviously written to exhale , perhaps to relieve , a state of feeling , or of conception of feeling , almost oppressive from its vividness . The thoughts and imagery are suggested by the feeling , and are such as it finds unsought . The state of feeling may be either of soul or of sense , or oftener ( might we not say invariably ?) of both ; for the poetic temperament is usually , perhaps always , accompanied by exquisite senses . The exciting cause may be either an object or an idea . But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling , must not be local , or consciously bodily ; it is a state of thawfaole frame , not of a part only ; like the state of sensation produced by a fine climate , or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or painful sensations in an impassioned nature , it pervades the entire nervous system . States of feeling , whether sensuous or spiritual , which thus possess the whole being , are the fountains of that poetry
Untitled Article
The Two Kinds of Poetry . 719
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 719, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/59/
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