Category: Poetry
Poetry, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals, two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric—Man and Nature. Yet such a statement seems hardly adequate. For is there not in all high Poetry, whether it deals with Nature or with Man,...
Poetry, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals, two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric—Man and Nature. Yet such a statement se...
6. CHAPTER II.If the view taken in the former chapter of the genesis of Poetry be true, if any existence keenly realized may awaken it, must not that material framework which encompasses us f...
7. CHAPTER III.But same one may ask, Is not imagination generally at war with reason and truth? Is not the quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy as old as the days of Plato? Did not he feel th...
8. CHAPTER IV.Here an interesting question suggests itself: What if the discoveries of Newton and Faraday were to become no longer the exclusive possession of the learned, but were to pass in...
9. CHAPTER V.It may be worth while to dwell a little longer on the way in which Poetry and Science respectively deal with external Nature, noticing in what respects their methods agree, in w...
10. CHAPTER VI._4th._ The mystical feeling which the contemplation of Nature has awakened in poets of every age, but which our own day has so greatly expanded, while it is not directly suggest...
11. CHAPTER VII.The thought with which the last chapter closed opens up views which are boundless. Through the imaginative apprehension of outward Nature, and through the beauty inherent in it,...
12. CHAPTER VIII.Those who have not given attention to the subject are apt to imagine that the chief creators of mythological fables were the poets, and especially Homer. They suppose that the e...
13. CHAPTER IX.The method pursued in this book has been, beginning with some general views, from these to descend to special illustrations, in order to exemplify what has been said of Poetry i...
14. CHAPTER X.When from the representations of Nature in Homer, and indeed in all the Greek poets, we turn to the rural descriptions of the Roman poets, we feel that we have passed into a who...
15. CHAPTER XI.To pass from the Virgilian view of Nature to that of our earliest English poet, though it brings us nearer our own age in time, is really to recede from it in feeling to a remot...
16. CHAPTER XII.The divorce from Nature and country life which marked the Poetry of the closing seventeenth and opening eighteenth centuries, has often been subject of comment, and need not det...
17. CHAPTER XIII.About that ode of the gentle and pensive Collins (born 1721, died 1759) there is a sweet pathetic tone which the grander strains of later English poetry have never surpassed. In...
18. CHAPTER XIV.There are at least three distinct stages in men’s attitude towards the external world. First comes the unconscious love of children—of those at least whose home is in the countr...