This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ...not accept that in full of all poetic demands, there is nothing to compel them to do so, and Wordsworth has no more to give them. 1 Shelley, writing of himself to Godwin (December 1817), said: " In this have I long believed that my power consists: in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ...not accept that in full of all poetic demands, there is nothing to compel them to do so, and Wordsworth has no more to give them. 1 Shelley, writing of himself to Godwin (December 1817), said: " In this have I long believed that my power consists: in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation." It is remarkable that nearly the same thing can truthfully--more truthfully perhaps--be said of Wordsworth, a poet so exceedingly different from Shelley in general tone. The greatest divergence is in that quality of " sympathy." Shelley felt and excited sympathy. Wordsworth felt it; but he often (as our text indicates) both felt and expressed it without exciting it from the majority of his readers, and some readers there are from whom he can scarcely ever excite it. I shall not dwell here on some express blemishes which are nevertheless very truly stated and very banefully operative--such as occasional triviality, more frequent bathos, and prosing lengthiness more frequent still. The upshot of these objections is that Wordsworth has bad defects, which are specially annoying inasmuch as they are specially anti-poetic. After all this has been allowed for and acknowledged, and after we have even excluded altogether in our minds the poems or passages open to such a censure, the residue remains, and constitutes Wordsworth a most true poet--indeed, a very exalted and a great one; with emotion to move us, purity and simplicity to charm, imagination to upraise, and beauties of art to delight; but wanting certain dramatic and impulsive qualities, without which the relation between a poet and his reader remains, however genuine, a not quite final and complete relation. The Prodigal Son said to his Father, " Make...
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