The Function of the Poet, and Other EssaysLowell, James Russell
History
The Function of the Poet, and Other Essays
Lowell, James Russell
Literature -- History and criticism
Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are
full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read,
whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir
you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray
makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.
There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in
verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical
proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake,
awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy
captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he
bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he
bowed, there he fell down dead."
Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence to
which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by
the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from
manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he
writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things
have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the
impression he shall make on others.
III. KALEVALA
But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive
quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives
from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter
reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by
conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the
conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with
expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call
art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a
vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was
conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not
communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come
down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of
its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the
understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become
the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which
is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the
property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here
a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases
and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions
remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy
combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and
natural relation with the world about him, however little or however
much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious
and incommunicable gift.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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