The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2Poe, Edgar Allan
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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2
Poe, Edgar Allan
American fiction -- 19th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales, American; Short stories
Ellison became neither musician nor poet; although no man lived
more profoundly enamored of music and poetry. Under other
circumstances than those which invested him, it is not impossible
that he would have become a painter. Sculpture, although in its
nature rigorously poetical was too limited in its extent and
consequences, to have occupied, at any time, much of his
attention. And I have now mentioned all the provinces in which
the common understanding of the poetic sentiment has declared it
capable of expatiating. But Ellison maintained that the richest,
the truest, and most natural, if not altogether the most
extensive province, had been unaccountably neglected. No
definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet;
yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the
landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent
of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the
display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel
beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast
superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In
the multiform and multicolor of the flowers and the trees, he
recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at
physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of
this effort—or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes
which were to behold it on earth—he perceived that he should be
employing the best means—laboring to the greatest advantage—in
the fulfilment, not only of his own destiny as poet, but of the
august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic
sentiment in man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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