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. 1875 edition. Excerpt: ... II. 'WHAT IS POETRY? The better to meet the question, What is poetry? we begin by putting before it another, and ask, Where is poetry? Poetry is in the mind. Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no ...
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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. 1875 edition. Excerpt: ... II. 'WHAT IS POETRY? The better to meet the question, What is poetry? we begin by putting before it another, and ask, Where is poetry? Poetry is in the mind. Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in the best and deepest part of that life. The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or be started and modified by what is without them, all this--that is, all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can come within the scope of man--is the domain of poetry; only, to enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the very mystery of being. In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished that it gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner and the outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by the understanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things, conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into the mind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are not dandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Before proceeding a step further, --nay, in order that...
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