But poets, or those who imagine and express this
indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors
of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of
life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful
and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world
which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or
susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true.
Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they
appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or
prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. (Longman
922)
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits
on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with
its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their
auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine
and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved
for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect
in all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in modern times, no
living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; 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. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer
its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the
melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet
know not whence or why. (Longman 923)
But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It
awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a
thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed
in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once
contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which
extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great
secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification
of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not
our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and
pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good
is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the
cause. (Longman 924)
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the
centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all
science, and that to which all science must be referred . . . What were [would
be] virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful
universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the
grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to
bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of
calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be
exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will
compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation
is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious
portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
(Longman 926)
Poets are not only subject to these experiences as
spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they
combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and
reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the
cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best
and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which
haunt the interlunations of life . . . (Longman 927)
The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of
the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or
institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power
of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting
man and nature. The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as
regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with
that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny
and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the
throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most
celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric
life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound
the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and
they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets
are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express
what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what
they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world. (Longman 930)
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