The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than
at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating
principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed
the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of
human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the center and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all
things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of
the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded
beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue,
love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful
universe which we inhabit--what were our consolations on this side of
the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar?
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the
determination of the will. A man can not say it: "I will compose
poetry." The greatest poet even can not say it; for the mind in
creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an
inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises
from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it
is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are
unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this
influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is
impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when
composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the
most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is
probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet. I
appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an
error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by
labor and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be
justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the
inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the space between
their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional expression: a
necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty
itself; for Milton conceived the "Paradise Lost" as a whole before he
executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the muse
having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song." And let this be an
answer to those who allege the fifty-six various readings of the first
line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry
what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the
poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial
arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as
a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the
hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the
origin, the gradations or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
even in the desire and the regret they leave, there can not but be
pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is
as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea which the
coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled
sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions;
and while they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they
combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the
enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced
these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.