"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is
the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare
has said of man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock
of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying
everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference
of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, _in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and
things violently destroyed_, the Poet binds together by passion
and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread
over the whole earth, and over all time."
It is Wordsworth who speaks--too rhetorically, perhaps. At any rate,
the prose will not compare with Sidney's. But it is good prose,
nevertheless; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb.
Their high claims for Poesy.
As might be expected, the poets in this volume agree in pride of their
calling. We have just listened to Wordsworth. Shelley quotes Tasso's
proud sentence--"Non c'è in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, se non
Iddio ed il Poeta": and himself says, "The jury which sits in judgment
upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of
his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the
wise of many generations." Sidney exalts the poet above the historian
and the philosopher; and Coleridge asserts that "no man was ever yet a
great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher." Ben
Jonson puts it characteristically: "Every beggarly corporation affords
the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but _Solus rex, aut poeta,
non quotannis nascitur_." The longer one lives, the more cause one
finds to rejoice that different men have different ways of saying the
same thing.
Inspiration not Improvisation.
The agreement of all these poets on some other matters is more
remarkable. Most of them claim _inspiration_ for the great
practitioners of their art; but wonderful is the unanimity with which
they dissociate this from _improvisation_. They are sticklers for the
rules of the game. The Poet does not pour his full heart
"In profuse strains of _unpremeditated_ art."
On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long
premeditation. The first and most conspicuous lesson of this volume
seems to be that Poetry is an _art_, and therefore has rules. Next
after this, one is struck with the carefulness with which these
practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle.