POETRY.
Poetry is the flower of literature, the most perfect utterance of the
human mind in no other of his works does man so nearly approach the
Divine, so that in every age the poet has been regarded as the inspired
mouthpiece of God. The prophet was the forth teller not merely the
foreteller and his message commanded attention and respect as coming
from a power above the speaker. Whatever may be said to the contrary
there still remains the fact that the greatest and noblest thoughts
which have ever occupied the mind of man have found their highest
and most permanent expression in poetry, the outward form of which
differing from the language of daily life is at once the accompaniment
and indication of the dignity of a great idea.
Wordsworth calls poetry the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.
To the question, “What is a poet?” he replies, “He is a man speaking
to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more
enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature,
and a more comprehensive Soul than are supposed to be common among
mankind. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected
more than other men by absent things as if they were present.”
Poetry is life crystalized into literature, its value is in its eternal
truth, in its universal adaptation to the higher needs of our nature.
It is because we find in poetry what we have observed but could not
formulate for ourselves that it impresses us so deeply. George Eliot
said of Wordsworth’s poems, “I never before met with so many of my own
feelings expressed just as I should like them.” “There is some awe
mixed with the joy of our surprise,” wrote Emerson, “when this poet,
who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says
that which lies close to my own Soul, that which I also had well-nigh
thought and said.”
Lowell thought that the highest office of a great poet is to show us
how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious
and the familiar. Great poets have concentrated in their works the
thought of an age. Gladstone says that the poems of Homer constitute
a world of their own. “The study of him is not a mere matter of
literary criticism, but is a full study of life in every one of its
departments.” Poetry has somewhat the same relation to prose that a
landscape painted by Corot bears to a photograph of the same scene. It
is truth idealized. The poets teach us to admire beauties in nature
that we have often looked at but never perceived. If it were not for
Scott few people would know of Loch Katrine.
There is just as beautiful scenery elsewhere, but we are waiting for
the poets to show it to us.
Sometimes the poets compress their observations of life and of the
working of the spirit of man into words which embody a great truth in a
little space. “Jewels five words long that on the stretch’d forefinger
of all Time sparkle forever.” Often the poets produce an impression
or make a picture by the use or a single appropriate word, as when
Tennyson says the cloud _smoulders_ on the cliff. He is master of the
art of calling up mental images by allusions to color, sound and smell,
and he carefully chooses from his enormous vocabulary the exact word to
produce the desired effect.
Lowell thought that the real literary genius stored up the apt or
pleasing word, and Ruskin said, “he is the best poet who can by the
fewest words touch the greatest number of secret chords of thought in
his reader’s own mind, and set them to work in their own way.”
The inspiration and delight derived from familiarity with the best
poetry is one of the most precious results of culture. More than any
other work of man poetry helps us to cherish the ideal and we look to
our ideals to counteract the hardness of our daily life, to strengthen
and uplift us. To read a great poet for a few minutes every day raises
one out of the commonplace. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the hardest
worked men of his time, used to read a hundred lines or more of
the _Odyssey_ before he went to bed. He said that “Good poetry does
undoubtedly tend to form the Soul and character; it tends to beget a
love of beauty and of truth in alliance together; it suggests however
indirectly high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the
emotions helpful in making principles operative,” and he added, “We
have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to
sustain us.”
It is one of the fortunate miracles of literature that so much of the
very best poetry is also within the comprehension of the humblest
understanding. Many of the poems which have been the delight and
consolation of men of the greatest mental capacities have also the
power to encourage and uplift those of far lower abilities. The _Psalms
of David_, for example, have heights and depths which have made them
the inspiration of men of all classes in all ages. Progress in the
understanding of the poets is the result of reading which, beginning
with those that are easiest to comprehend, goes on with increasing
power to those, who, like Wordsworth, are philosophical and deep
and those, who, like Browning, present particular difficulties the
overcoming of which is rewarded by a vast wealth of inspiring thought.
Matthew Arnold, who speaks with authority on these subjects says,
“Constantly in reading poetry a sense of the best, the really
excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be
present in our minds, and should govern our estimate of what we read.”
and he remarks of the poet that, “if he is a real classic, if his work
belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right
meaning of the word, _classic_, _classical_), then the great thing
for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and
to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has
not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what
is formative, this is the great benefit to be got from the study of
poetry.”
It is not to be expected that at the first reading you can see all the
beauties that a word-painter like Tennyson spent years in elaborating.
A masterpiece cannot be read too carefully nor too often. To appreciate
a great picture like the Sistine Madonna, you must return to it again
and again and let its gracious sweetness sink into your soul. It is so
that you must study a great poem.
Hence it follows naturally that there is great culture value in storing
the memory with noble poems. While we should not go so far as to say
with Ruskin that no poetry is worth reading which is not worth learning
by heart, there is an inspiration in adorning our minds with as much as
we can learn accurately from the great poets; and this inspiration is
derived especially from the poetry we have known and loved in youth,
which has, from its very associations, a strength and sweetness that no
other can have.
“Many a noble poem,” says Henry Pancoast, “early acquired by a pure
effort of the memory and at first but dimly understood, has gradually
worked its way into the hidden depths of a child’s conscious life,
revealing its full power and beauty only by slow degrees, and
elevating, quickening, and enlarging his spirit in secrecy and in
silence.”
Poetry as the truest expression of the life and morals of an age is at
once a prophecy and a history. A prophecy as indicating that to which
the nation would aspire--a history as a record of the fact of past
aspiration. Concrete individual fact has little significance to poetry
except as the manifestation of an idea or of a universal truth.--The
poet is the embodiment of his age and his era and a full understanding
of his poetry gives us an insight into the very heart of them.