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Untitled Article
Our judgments of authors who lay actual claim to the title of poets , follow the same principle . We believe that whenever , after a writer ' s meaning is fully understood , it is still matter of reasoning and discussion whether he is a poet or not , he will be found to be wanting in the characteristic peculiarity of association which we have so often adverted to . When ., on the contrary , after
reading or hearing one or two passages , the mind instinctively and "without hesitation cries out , This is a poet , the probability is , that the passages are strongly marked with this peculiar quality . And we may add that in such case , a critic who , not having
sufficient feeling to respond to the poetry , is also without sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not , will be apt to pronounce , not ' this is prose , ' but 6 this is exaggeration , ' * this is mysticism / or * this is nonsense / Although a philosopher cannot , by culture , make himself , in the peculiar sense in which we now use the term , a poet , unless
at least he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made poetry his earliest pursuit ; a poet may always , by culture , make himself a philosopher . The poetic laws of association are by no means incompatible with the more ordinary laws ; are by no means such as must have their course , even though a deliberate purpose require their suspension . If the peculiarities
of the poetic temperament were uncontrollable in any poet , they might be supposed so in Shelley ; yet how powerfully , in the Cenci , does he coerce and restrain all the characteristic qualities of his genius ! what severe simplicity , in place of his usual barbaric splendour ! how rigidly does he keep the feelings and the imagery in subordination to the thought !
The investigation of nature requires no habits or qualities of mind , but such as may always be acquired by industry and mental activity . Because in one state the mind may be so given up to a state of feeling , that the succession of its ideas is determined by the present enjoyment or suffering which pervades it , that is no reason but that in the calm retirement of study , when under no
peculiar excitement either of the outward or of the inward sense , it may form any combinations , or pursue any trains of ideas , which are most conducive to the purposes of philosophic inquiry ; and may , while in that state , form deliberate convictions , from which no excitement will afterwards make it swerve . Might we not go even further than this ? We shall not pause to ask whether it be not a misunderstanding of the nature of passionate feeling to imagine that it is inconsistent with calmness , and whether they who so deem of it , do not confound the state of desire which
unapart from conventional associations ; but on the other , whenever intellectual culture has afforded a choice between several modes of expreMiug the same emotion , the stronger the feeling is , the more naturally and certainly will it p refer that language which in most peculiarly appropriated to itself , and kept iacied from the contact of all more vulg&x and familial object * of contemplation .
Untitled Article
722 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 722, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/62/
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