The poet is enamored of thoughts and laws. These know their way, and,
guided by them, he is ascending from an interest in visible things to an
interest in that which they signify, and from the part of a spectator to
the part of a maker. And as everything streams and advances, as every
faculty and every desire is procreant, and every perception is a
destiny, there is no limit to his hope. "Anything, child, that the mind
covets, from the milk of a cocoa to the throne of the three worlds, thou
mayest obtain, by keeping the law of thy members and the law of thy
mind." It suggests that there is higher poetry than we write or read.
Rightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know things by words and writing,
but only by taking a central position in the universe, and living in its
forms. We sink to rise.
"None any work can frame,
Unless himself become the same."
All the parts and forms of nature are the expression or production of
divine faculties, and the same are in us. And the fascination of genius
for us is this awful nearness to Nature's creations.
I have heard that the Germans think the creator of Trim and Uncle Toby,
though he never wrote a verse, a greater poet than Cowper, and that
Goldsmith's title to the name is not from his "Deserted Village," but
derived from the "Vicar of Wakefield." Better examples are Shakspeare's
Ariel, his Caliban, and his fairies in the "Midsummer Night's Dream."
Barthold Niebuhr said well, "There is little merit in inventing a happy
idea, or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author's voice
which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts,
as soon as it has received existence acts independently of the master's
impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates
what they do and say. Such creation is poetry, in the literal sense of
the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing
fulness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of
each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its
nature."[1]
This force of representation so plants his figures before him that he
treats them as real; talks to them as if they were bodily there; puts
words in their mouth such as they should have spoken, and is affected by
them as by persons. Vast is the difference between writing clean verses
for magazines, and creating these new persons and situations,--new
language with emphasis and reality. The humor of Falstaff, the terror of
Macbeth, have each their swarm of fit thoughts and images, as if
Shakspeare had known and reported the men, instead of inventing them at
his desk. This power appears not only in the outline or portrait of his
actors, but also in the bearing and behavior and style of each
individual. Ben Jonson told Drummond "that Sidney did not keep a decorum
in making every one speak as well as himself."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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