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Untitled Article
which we have called the poetry of poets ; and which is little else than the utterance of the thoughts and images that pass across the mind while some permanent state of feeling is occupying it . To the same original fineness of organization , Shelley was doubtless indebted for another of his rarest gifts , that exuberance of imagery , which when undepressed , as in many of his poems it is , amounts even to a vice . The susceptibility of his nervous system , which made his emotions intense , made also the impressions of his external senses deep and clear : and agreeably to the law of association by which , as already remarked , the strongest impressions are those which associate themselves the most easily and strongly , these vivid sensations were readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts which had coexisted with them , by all feelings
which in any degree resembled them . Never did a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as Shelley ' s . Wordsworth economizes an image , and detains it until he has distilled all the poetry out of it , and it will not yield a drop more : Shelley lavishes his with a profusion which is unconscious because it is inexhaustible . The one , like a thrifty housewife , uses all his . materials and wastes none : the other scatters them with a reckless prodigality of wealth of which there is perhaps no similar instance .
If , then , the maxim nasciturpoe ' tci , mean , either that the power of producing poetical compositions is a peculiar faculty which the poet brings into the world with him , which grows with his growth like any of his bodily powers , and is as independent of culture as his height , and his complexion ; or that any natural peculiarity whatever is implied in producing poetry , real poetry , and in any quantity—such poetry too , as , to the majority of educated and intelligent readers , shall appear quite as good as , or even better than , any other ; in either sense the doctrine is false . And nevertheless , there is poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical constitution , peculiar not in the kind but in the
degree or its susceptibility : a constitution which makes its possessor capable of greater happiness than mankind in general , and also of greater unhappiness ; and because greater , so also more various . And such poetry , to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature , is much more poetry , is poetry in a far higher sense , than any other ; since the common element of all poetry , that which constitutes poetry , human feeling , enters far more largely into this than into the poetry of culture . Not only because the natures which we have called poetical , really feel more , and consequently have more feeling to express ; but because , the capacity of feeling being so great , feeling , when excited and not voluntarily resisted , seizes the helm of their thoughts , and the succession of ideas and images becomes the mere utterance of an emotion ; not , as in other natures , the emotion a mere ornamental colouring of the thought . Ordinary education and the ordinary course of life are con-
Untitled Article
720 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 720, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/60/
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