the overlaying crust of the common, by a warming, expanding, inward
motion, which is sped by a vitality so urgent and irresistible that,
to make passage for the new thought, lightly is lifted a load which,
but for this spiritual efficacy, could not be stirred, just as heavy
stones are raised by delicate growing plants. To exert this power the
poet is always moved at the instance of feeling. Poetry having its
birth in feeling, no man can enjoy or value it but through feeling.
But what moves him to embody and shape his feeling is that ravishing
sentiment which will have the best there is in the feeling, the
sentiment which seeks satisfaction through contemplation or
entertainment of the most divine and most perfect, and ever rises to
the top of the refined joy which such contemplation educes.
The poetic imagination is the Ariel of the poet,--his spiritual
messenger and Mercury. A clear look into the above passages would show
that the source of their power is in the farther scope or exquisite
range the imagination opens to us, often by a word. For further
illustration I will take a few other examples, scrutinizing them more
minutely. Had Lorenzo opened the famous passage in "The
Merchant of Venice" thus,--
"How _calm_ the moonlight _lies_ upon this bank,"
and continued to the end of the dozen lines in the same key, saying,--
"There's not the _tiniest star_ that _can be seen_
But in its _revolution_ it doth _hum_,
Aye _chanting_ to the _heavenly_ cherubins,"
his words would not have become celebrated and quotable. But Lorenzo
has the privilege of being one of the mouth-pieces of Shakespeare, and
so he begins,--
"How _sweet_ the moonlight _sleeps_ upon this bank."
Two words, _sweet_ and _sleep_, put in the place of _calm_ and _lies_,
lift the line out of prose into poetry. A log _lies_ on a bank; so
does a dead dog, and the more dead a thing is the more it lies; but
only what is alive _sleeps_, and thus the word, besides an image of
extreme stillness, brings with it what strengthens the image, the idea
of change from liveliness to quiet; for that which was awake now
sleeps; and the more full the picture of stillness, the more awake is
the mind of the reader, awakened by the fitness and felicity of the
image. The substitution of _sweet_ for _calm_ is, in a less degree,
similarly enlivening; for, used in such conjunction, _sweet_ is more
individual and subtle, and imports more life, and thus helps the
distinctness and vividness of the picture. How does the poetic Lorenzo
word the other three lines?
"There's not the _smallest orb_ which _thou behold'st_,
But in _his motion like an angel sings_,
Still _quiring_ to the _young-eyed_ cherubins."
The words or phrases italicized carry a larger, or a deeper or a finer
meaning than the corresponding ones in the substituted lines. To
_behold_ is more than to _see_: it is to see contemplatively. The
figure _prosopopoeia_ is often but an impotent straining to impart
poetic life; but the personification in _in his motion_ is apt and
effective. _Quiring_ is an amplification of the immediately preceding
_sings_, and, signifying to sing in company with others, enlarges,
while making more specific, the thought. And what an image of the
freshness of heaven and of youthful immortality is conveyed by the
epithet _young-eyed_! At every step the thought is expanded and
beautiful, reaching at the end of the third line a climax on which the
poetically excited mind is left poised in delight.
But the passage transformed, and, as we might say, degraded, is still
poetical. There is so much poetry in the thought that the flattening
of the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remaining
poetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and less
figurative words. And the thought is poetical because it is the result
of a flight of intellect made by aid of imagination's wings, these
being moved by the soaring demands of the beautiful, and beating an
atmosphere exhaled from sensibility. As Joubert says,--herein uttering
a cardinal æsthetic principle,--"It is, above all, in the spirituality
of ideas that poetry consists." Thought that is poetic will glisten
through the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic or
trite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it the
poetic sheen. Perdita wishes for
"Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."
Note the poetic potency in the simple word _dares_; how much it
carries: the cold which the swallow has not the courage to confront; a
mental action, I might almost call it, in the swallow, who, after
making a recognizance of the season, determines that it would be rash
to venture so far north: all this is in the single word. For _dares_
write _does_, and the effect would be like that of cutting a
gash in a rising balloon: you would let the line suddenly down,
because you take the life out of the thought.
"And take
The winds of March with beauty."
Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person or
thing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be taken
with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those
winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This is
poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility
which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the
promptings and the exactions of the beautiful.
In the opening of "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the shapes that in
sprightly moods possess the fancy,
"As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that _people_ the sunbeams."
Put _shine in_ the sunbeams, for _people_, and, notwithstanding the
luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the
line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic
dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies.
The poetical is the flush on the face of things in the
unconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheld
at the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood,
buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy. The most and the
highest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is most
capable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light is
engendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before were
dim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary in
twilight or moonlight, standing vague and unvalued until a torch is
waved over it.
When we begin to speak of poetry, the higher qualities of the mind
come up for judgment. No genuine poet is without one or more of these,
and a great poet must have most of them. Thence the thought of the
poet is pitched on a high key, and even in poets of power the poetry
of a page is sometimes shown merely by the sustained tone of the
sentiment, giving out no jets of fire, having no passages salient with
golden embossings. Through sympathy and sense of beauty, the poet gets
nearer to the absolute nature of things; and thence, with little of
imagery, or coloring, or passion, through this holy influence
he becomes poetic, depicting by re-creating the object or feeling or
condition, and rising naturally into rhythmic lines and sentences, the
best substance asking for, and readily obtaining, the most suitable
form of words. Yet a poet of inward resources can seldom write a page
without there being heard a note or bar or passage of the finer
melody.
But men wanting this inward wealth, that is, wanting depth and breadth
of emotional capacity, have not, whatever their other gifts, the soil
needed for highly imaginative poetry. With broad emphasis this
æsthetic law is exemplified in the verse of Voltaire, especially in
his dramas, and in the verse of one who was deeper and higher than he
as thinker and critic, of Lessing. Skillful versifiers, by help of
fancy and a certain plastic aptitude and laborious culture, are
enabled to give to smooth verse a flavor of poetry and to achieve a
temporary reputation. But of such uninspired workmanship the gilding
after a while wears off, the externally imparted perfume surely
evaporates.
Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonest
parts of speech, and the fewest of them. The more intense and deep
the feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplest
utterance. When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath,--like the
sudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirling
canopy of storm,--Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, the
words are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tenderness
and what sweep of power in three lines!
"O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause; send down and take my part!"
The thirty-third canto of the "Inferno" supremely exemplifies the
sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light
it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty,
one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation.
In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of men
that come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisite
stroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little words
what depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning! On the fourth day
one of Ugolino's dying sons throws himself at his father's feet,
crying,--
"Father, why dost not help me?"
Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, through
poetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony,
as in this case and the tragic drama, that the sensibilities are
"purged," according to the famous saying of Aristotle; but it is
because such scenes are witnessed by the light of the beautiful. The
beautiful always purifies and exalts.
In either of these two passages any piling up of words, any hyperbole
of phrase, or boldness or even grandeur of figurative speech, would
have proved a hindrance instead of a conductor to the feeling,
smothering and not facilitating expression. But when, turned out of
doors in "a wild night," by those "unnatural hags," his daughters,
Lear, baring his brow to the storm, invokes the thunder to
"Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,"
there is no tenderness, no folding of the sore heart upon itself;
there is the expansion of defiance, outburst of the mighty wrath of an
outraged father and wronged and crownless king: and so we have a gush
of the grandest diction, of the most tempestuous rhythm, the storm in
Lear's mind marrying itself with a ghastly joy to the storm of the
elements, the sublime tumult above echoed in the crashing splendor of
the verse:--
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving-thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germins spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!"
I know of no other single passage that exhibits so clearly the
colossal dimensions of Shakespeare. Here is attained, with almost
unique effect, what according to Schiller is the aim of poetry, "no
other than to give to humanity its fullest possible expression, its
most complete utterance."
The best poetry, like the best music, soars towards the upper light.
The genuinely poetical always lifts up the thought on the swell of
emotion. The thought moves free and strong because there is a deep,
bubbling head of feeling behind it. Feeling, at its best, has an
ascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where,
through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play in
freedom in the sunshine of the beautiful. The surest test of the
presence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from the
union, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful. However
weighty it may be with thought, the poetical passage floats,
thus giving certain sign of life, of a soul irrepressible.
But as in the forest there cannot be height of stem without strength
and breadth of root, the highest poetry is the most solid, the firmest
set in reality, in truth. The higher a poet is, the closer hold he has
of the roots of his subject. He looks at it with a peering, deeply
sympathetic insight. The roots, in fact, are in himself; they are in
the depths of his soul. Hence a cardinal question about a poem is, How
much of it does the poet draw out of himself? Is it his by projection
from his inward resources, by injection with his own juices; or is it
his only by adoption and adaptation, by dress and adjustment?
Flight of poetic imagination there cannot be unless the wings have
been feathered in the heart. Loftiness or grandeur of imagination
there cannot be, except there be first innate richness and breadth of
feeling. Imagination being simply the tensest action of intellect, is
ever, like intellect in all its phases, an instrument of feeling, a
mere tool. Height implies inward depth. The gift to touch the vitals
of a subject is the test-gift of literary faculty; it is the
soul-gift, the gift of fuller, livelier sympathy. Compare Wordsworth
with Southey to learn the difference between inward and outward gifts.
Poetry being in the mind, the man who has little poetry within him
will find little in nature or in the world or in Shakespeare. The man
who has no music in his soul will hear none at the Conservatoire in
Paris. Wordsworth sees with the inward eye, Southey too exclusively
with the outward. The true poet projects visions and rhythms out from
his brain, and gazes at and hearkens to them. The degree of the
truthfulness to nature and the vividness of these projections is the
measure of his poetic genius and capacity. Only through this intense
inwardness can he attain to great visions and rhythmic raptures, and
make you see and hear them. What illimitable inward sight must Keats
have dwelt in ere, to depict the effect on him of looking into
Chapman's Homer, he could write,--
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
Here is a brilliant example of poetic imagination, the
intellect urged to its finest action to satisfy the feeling which
delights in the grand, the select, the beautiful.
"Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
What an outlook! What a solemn, mysterious, elevating inward moment it
creates in us! To ascend to that peak, to carry the reader thither
with him, that is the flight of a great poet, of one who has been--as
in that choice poem, "The Prelude," Wordsworth, with an electric
stroke of poetic imagination, says of Newton--
"Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."
This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whom
he ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Some
poets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel while
reading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: their
verse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strung
for those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible not
to make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poetic
fancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials;
poetic imagination is an intense flash born unexpectedly of
internal collisions. Fancy is superficial and comparatively
short-sighted; imagination is penetrative and far-sighted, bringing
together things widely sundered, apparently diverse and opposite.
Fancy divides, individualizes; imagination compounds, builds, globes.
Fancy is not so broad or so keen or so warm or so bounding as
imagination; is comparatively tame and cold and quiet. Imagination is
synthetical. Large exhibitions of poetic imagination are rare even in
the greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature of
things, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe. Spenser
shows great resources of fancy, but little imagination. The arc of
imagination is in him too near its center. Hence there is no reach in
his thoughts. He has no exhaustless depths within. He is not,
as Coleridge says Shakespeare is, an example of "endless
self-reproduction." Cowley, says the same great critic, "is a fanciful
writer, Milton an imaginative poet."
As I have already said, the power of imagining, of forming in the mind
images, conceptions, is a purely intellectual power, and imagination
becomes poetical only when this intellectual power is an agent
obeying that emotional power which ardently seeks, intensely longs
for, the better, the more perfect, the purer, in one word, the
beautiful in each province of multiform life. The willing agent,
intellect, is sent out on excursions of discovery, and unexpectedly
falls in with and captures all kinds of sparkling booty.
Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beaming
thoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new stars
which, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart suddenly upon
the vision of the heaven-watcher. Such writers deal with the known,
with the best commonplace, not the common merely; and under the glance
of genius the common grows strange and profound.
Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for
secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals
of poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not
thoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itself
necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; and
their readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification more
than thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse,
chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smooth
sensuousness of diction, its gloss. Take a poet so celebrated, in some
respects so admirable, as Tennyson. Tennyson's verse is apt to be too
richly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than the
thoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with
some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has
little left for you. From a similar cause this is the case too with
Byron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow is
imparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tints
from a keen sense of the beautiful. But this is not the case with
Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course therefore
not with Milton or Shakespeare. All these keep fresh, at every contact
giving you strength and losing none. As freely and freshly as the
sun's beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellect
and feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley's "Sky-Lark." Not so
through Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women." After a time these
mellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper: they have not
enough flame-like motion. The nicest word-choosing will not
supply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by fresh
feeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will the
most gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation. There can
be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the
sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.
Tennyson's poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches,
and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots.
There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to
keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth's poetry has for
the most part roots deeply hidden.
Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a
body. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and
deserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but
healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is
chargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy do
the work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of the
memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inward
impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with
coldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the
intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts
springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and
thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and
upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject
that has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and
not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing
over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of
association. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of
which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep,
penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, it
is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface
streams from without.
Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough
to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to
the substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate
stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to
cooperate as members of an organic whole. There is not heat enough in
the originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity. There is
too much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "The
difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less
than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
alike."
Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough
sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the
floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of
verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they
have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather
than poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the
scoured garments of an ambitious fancy. The remark being made to
Goethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poets
had given an example of good prose, he rejoined, "That is very
natural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but he
who has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word gives
the other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing,
yet looks as though it were something." There is much good-looking
verse which does not fulfill any one of Milton's primary conditions
for poetry, being artificial instead of "simple," and having
neither soul enough to be "passionate," nor body enough to be
"sensuous." By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling.