Lives of the Poets

“ For all these reasons the Lives of the Poets will always be eagerly read by those who wish to understand a great man and a great period of English literature. But they will be read still more for their pleasantness, humanity and wisdom. ”

“ I am now to examine Paradise Lost, a poem, which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second, among the productions of the human mind.
By the general consent of criticks, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. ”

“ We have sought to narrate the events of the poet's career in that spirit of respect and veneration which a life so full of virtue, love, and gentleness must ever command. It now remains that we should speak, with no timid reticence, our opinions on his mental characteristics, the merits of his writings, his position in literature, and his influence on the age. ”

“ Of this he said, in his “Essay on Lyric Poetry,” prefixed to the poem—“For the more harmony likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which laid me under great difficulties. But difficulties overcome give grace and pleasure. Nor can I account for the pleasure of rhyme in general (of which the moderns are too fond) but from this truth.” Yet the moderns surely deserve not much censure for their fondness of what, by their own confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in harmony. ”

“ He who reads these lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognizes a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty. ”

“ Let no pious ear be offended if I advance, in opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot often please. The doctrines of religion may, indeed, be defended in a didactick poem; and he who has the happy power of arguing in verse, will not lose it because his subject is sacred. A poet may describe the beauty and the grandeur of nature, the flowers of the spring, and the harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide, and the revolutions of the sky, and praise the maker for his works, in lines which no reader shall lay aside. ”

“ If, then, the encouragement of virtue and discouragement of vice be the proper ends of poetry in tragedy, pity and terror, though good means, are not the only. For all the passions, in their turns, are to be set in a ferment; as joy, anger, love, fear, are to be used as the poet's common-places; and a general concernment for the principal actors is to be raised, by making them appear such in the characters, their words, and actions, as will interest the audience in their fortunes. ”

“ Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that pious verse can do is to help the memory and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful ”

“ The political pamphlets, and the Journey to the Hebrides, have a certain historical interest; but are otherwise readable only in particular passages. Much of his criticism is pretty nearly obsolete; but the child of his old age—the Lives of the Poets—a book in which criticism and biography are combined, is an admirable performance in spite of serious defects. It is the work that best reflects his mind, and intelligent readers who have once made its acquaintance, will be apt to turn it into a familiar companion. ”

“ It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so diligently to lyrick poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp, his former powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. ”

“ I am of opinion, that if a modern tragick poet can preserve the unity of place, without destroying the probability of the incidents, 'tis always best for him to do it; because, by the preservation of that unity, as we have taken notice above, he adds grace, and clearness, and comeliness, to the representation. ”

“ Oh, incomparable land, in which a sonnet or a satire is repaid with archbishoprics and dukedoms! Well may the Abbé exclaim: "It is not surprising, we have had many poets amongst us, who have exulted in the title of Poet to the King; whilst we have had no one who has taken that of Poet-Laureate!" ”

“ When a poet writes a tragedy who knows he has judgment, and who feels he has genius, that poet presumes upon his own merit, and scorns to make a cabal. That people come coolly to the representation of such a tragedy, without any violent expectation, or delusive imagination, or invincible prepossession; that such an audience is liable to receive the impressions which the poem shall naturally make on them, and to judge by their own reason, and their own judgments ”

“ But of the prefacer, whoever he was, it may be reasonably suspected that he never read the poems; for he professes to value them for a very high species of excellence, and recommends them as the genuine effusions of the mind, which expresses a real passion in the language of nature. ”

“ To put these materials to poetical use, is required an imagination capable of painting nature, and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has attained the whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of phrase, and all the colours of words, and learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation. ”

“ His Miscellanies contain a collection of short compositions, written some as they were dictated by a mind at leisure, and some as they were called forth by different occasions; with great variety of style and sentiment, from burlesque levity to awful grandeur. Such an assemblage of diversified excellence no other poet has hitherto afforded. To choose the best, among many good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism. ”

“ The chief end of the poet is to please; for his immediate reputation depends on it.
"The great end of the poem is to instruct, which is performed by making pleasure the vehicle of that instruction; for poesy is an art, and all arts are made to profit. Rapin.
"The pity, which the poet is to labour for, is for the criminal, not for those or him whom he has murdered, or who have been the occasion of the tragedy. ”

“ In his descriptions both of life and nature, the poet and the philosopher happily co-operate; truth is recommended by elegance, and elegance sustained by truth. In the structure and order of the poem, not only the greater parts are properly consecutive, but the didactic and illustrative paragraphs are so happily mingled, that labour is relieved by pleasure, and the attention is led on through a long succession of varied excellence to the original position, the fundamental principle of wisdom and of virtue. ”

“ He considered the ancients and moderns not as parties or rivals for fame, but as architects upon one and the same plan, the Art of Poetry; according to which he judged, approved, and blamed, without flattery or detraction. ”

“ While his unfamiliarity with what was to other men familiar caused him to find food for poetic musing in what they passed by unheeded, it caused him to magnify trifles, to aim at dignifying the meanest objects, and to struggle, not merely to seek good, but to find poetry in everything. ”

“ The ode to the Sun is written upon a common plan, without uncommon sentiments; but its greatest fault is its length. No poem should be long of which the purpose is only to strike the fancy, without enlightening the understanding by precept, ratiocination, or narrative. A blaze first pleases, and then tires the sight. ”

“ Her father perceiving her fondness for this art, was at the expence of a master to instruct her in it; and she never failed to make it an amusement ’till her death. Every one acquainted with her writings, and capable of relishing the melifluent flow of her numbers, will naturally suppose, that she had a genius for music, particularly that of a grave and solemn kind, as it was best suited to the grandeur of her sentiments, and the sublimity of her devotion. But her most prevailing propension was to poetry. ”

“ Let that care be with those who deal in matters of fact and matters of faith; but whosoever aims at it in poetry, as he attempts what is not required, so shall he never perform what he attempts; for it is not his business alone to translate language into language, but poesie into poesie, and poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another it will all evaporate ”

“ It is probable, therefore, that in these three contradictory lines the poet complains more than the father-in-law, the friend, or the widower. Whatever names belong to these facts, or if the names be those generally supposed, whatever heightening a poet’s sorrow may have given the facts; to the sorrow Young felt from them religion and morality are indebted for the “Night Thoughts.” There is a pleasure sure in sadness which mourners only know! ”

“ His next work is the translation of the Art of Poetry; which has received, in my opinion, not less praise than it deserves. Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little operation on the ear or mind: it can hardly support itself without bold figures and striking images. A poem frigidly didactick, without rhyme, is so near to prose, that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse. ”

“ Epick poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner. History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a noble art, must animate by dramatick energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of vice and virtue; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined ”

“ The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copiousness; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.
His last poem was the “Resignation,” in which he made, as he was accustomed, an experiment of a new mode of writing, and succeeded better than in his “Ocean” or his “Merchant.” ”

“ The tissue of poetry, from which he seems to have hoped a lasting name, is totally neglected, and known only as it appended to his plays.
While comedy or while tragedy is regarded, his plays are likely to be read; but, expect what related to the stage, I know not that he has written a stanza that is sung, or a couplet that is quoted. The general character is his Miscellanies is, that they shew little wit, and little virtue. ”

“ Thus fallen from a heighth of greatness, our poet retired to bemoan the fickleness of fortune, and then wrote his Testament of Love, in which are many pathetic exclamations concerning the vicissitude of human things, which he then bitterly experienced. ”

“ In his poems, his diction is, wherever his subject requires it, so sublime and so truly poetical, that it's essence, like that of pure gold cannot be destroyed. Take his verses, and divest them of their rhimes, disjoint them of their numbers, transpose their expressions, make what arrangement or disposition you please in his words; yet shall there eternally be poetry, and something which will be found incapable of being reduced to absolute prose; what he has done in any one species, or distinct kind of writing, would have been sufficient to have acquired him a very great name. ”

“ The English poems, though they make no promises of “Paradise Lost,” have this evidence of genius—that they have a cast original and unborrowed. But their peculiarity is not excellence; if they differ from the verses of others, they differ for the worse; for they are too often distinguished by repulsive harshness; the combinations of words are new, but they are not pleasing; the rhymes and epithets seem to be laboriously sought, and violently applied. ”

“ Our author, however, does not appear to have been a mean poet; he had certainly from nature an exceeding fine genius, but after he came to town he became a votary to pleasure, and the applauses of his friends, which taught him to overvalue his talents, perhaps slackened his diligence, and by making him trust solely to nature, slight the assistance of art. ”

“ In his original poems, now and then, a happy line may perhaps be found, and now and then a short composition may give pleasure. But there is, in the whole, little either of the grace of wit, or the vigour of nature. ”

“ To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. ”

“ He plays, indeed, only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise. ”

“ In a poem written by him in his youth, and published in his Miscellanies, he declares his contempt of the contracted views and narrow prospects of the middle state of life, and declares his resolution either to tower like the cedar, or be trampled like the shrub; but in this poem, though addressed to a prince, he mentions this state of life as comprising those who ought most to attract reward, those who merit most the confidence of power and the familiarity of greatness ”