Poets' Corner

“ But if the Genius of Fiction has become absorbed with the problem of the city, that of Poetry has remained true to its first love among the fields and streams. It is a joy to know that the poets will always be found among the books chosen for the happy winter evening in the country home. There, if not in fiction and tale, countryside people find a reflection of their thoughts. ”

“ Some indeed have failed in poetically representing what passed under their eyes, because the eyes of the soul were wanting—the Poet's Second sight. Moreover, the genius of some true poets has proved more at home in those rarer, yet still to them living, regions of the Past. ”

“ We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song. ”

“ We have not forgotten an order of poets, peculiar, we believe, to our own enlightened land—a high order of poets sprung from the lower orders of the people—and not only sprung from them, but bred as well as born in "the huts where poor men lie," and glorifying their condition by the light of song. ”

“ Poets were not long in discovering that a draught of these sparkling waters fired their minds with divine inspiration, and the beauty in their souls grew like flowers into poems which stayed fresh and fair through all succeeding centuries. ”

“ With the great creative Poets, we can go outside of all these, and find ourselves in a region of pure Imagination, which may be as true to our higher instincts—perhaps more so—than the shows which surround us. ”

“ We may venture, however, on one observation, of a very plain and practical nature, which is forced upon us by the whole tenor of the extraordinary history before us.—Reason and imagination are both excellent things; but perhaps their provinces ought to be kept more distinct than they have lately been. ‘Poets have such seething brains,’ that they are disposed to meddle with everything, and mar all. ”

“ The two lines, or half lines, which make the glory of this extract resemble perfectly, for vigorous grace and that subtle strength of interpretation which transfigures the external nature it explains, the living leader of English poets. Even he has hardly ever given a study of landscape more large and delicate, an effect of verse more exquisite and sonorous. ”

“ Subtly connecting the arts, they were at once painters and poets, musicians and singers. And because they were philosophers and seekers after the beauty that underlies the form of things, they made the picture express its own significance, and every song find echo in the souls of those that heard. You will find no tedium of repetition in all their poetry, no thin vein of thought beaten out over endless pages. ”

“ The scene is not at all such a one as a poet would, for its own sake, delight to fancy; and yet, in the recollection of at least one very pleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, its brown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must have been surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enough to impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness and beauty. ”

“ Perhaps this question, which has so long puzzled the literary world, may be incapable of a categorical answer, but it seems to us essentially to consist of fine thoughts, deeply felt, and expressed in vivid and melodious language. Poets and poetesses see farther than other people, feel more deeply, and utter what they see and feel better. ”

“ They will go here and there speaking their verses and their little stories wherever they can find a score or two of poetical-minded people in a big room, or a couple of poetical-minded friends sitting by the hearth, and poets will write them poems and little stories to the confounding of print and paper. ”

“ They wander round with pencils and jot down thoughts that come here and there at what are called moments of inspiration. The poets dream over their subjects, catch fleeting thoughts that, vague at first, sing themselves into musical expression. ”

“ His interests and sentiments have perhaps a wider range than with most of these poets, and are almost all commendable and endearing, only it is expression makes the poet, and here the general effect is easy-going and commonplace. No doubt the facility with which he is amused by the first-coming features of his own work and of the world is a sign of youth, and makes his width of range the more promising. ”

“ IS THERE ROOM FOR THE POET? Is there room for the poet, fair Canada's sons.
To live his strange life, and to warble his songs,
To follow each current of thought as it runs,
And to sing of your victories, glories and wrongs?
Is there room for the poet, ye senators grave?
Ye orators, statesmen and law-makers, say;
May he of the calling so gentle e'er crave
Your patronage, and of your kindness a ray?
Ye toilers in cities, ye workers in fields,
Who handle the hammer, the pen or the plow,
Can the poet implicitly trust, as he yields
His heart, and his hopes, and his name to you now? ”

“ And, on the other hand, a poet reared in St Giles or the Goosedubs will develop his poetic vein. The true influences, we suspect, of scenery on genius are the following:—1st, Where poetry lies deep and latent in a deep but silent nature, scenery will act like the rod of Moses on the rock in bringing forth the struggling waters—it will prompt to imitation, and gradually supply language. ”

“ The dew-drops clustering with effulgence bright
On his carnation brow.—His heart beat high
As the exalted chieftain he was drawing nigh.
Now through a spacious dining-room they go,
Where one long table and four dozen chairs
Are seen, and twelve large globe lamps, hanging low.
And in each corner a zepoy, which bears
An Indian shade—while a long punkah stares
The Griffin in the face. Their journey's end. ”

“ The faculty of receiving such impressions strongly, and reproducing them vividly, is precisely what distinguishes the poet, whether in language or painting. He was great because the impressions which natural scenery made upon him were noble impressions. He not only saw nature in its truth and beauty, but he saw it in relation and subjection to the human soul. He paints the loveliness of nature, but he ever connects that loveliness with the soul and labor of men. Looking round this great room you cannot help note the spirit of the pictures. ”

“ Consequently if we take a survey of the various channels through which the genius of poetry has been accustomed to diffuse itself, it will be found, that, during this half century, every province had its cultivators; that poems epic and dramatic, historic and didactic, lyric and romantic, that satires, pastorals, and sonnets, songs, madrigals, and epigrams, together with a multitude of translations, brightened and embellished its progress. ”

“ Poets are not only subject to these experiences, as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all they combine with the evanescent lines of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or passion will touch the enchanted cord, and reanimate in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. ”

“ Such was the scene—and such the hour, when, in a corner of my prospect, I spied one of the fairest pieces of nature's workmanship that ever crowned a poetic landscape, or met a poet's eye: those visionary bards excepted who hold commerce with aerial things! Had calumny and villany taken my walk, they had at that moment sworn eternal peace with such an object. What an hour of inspiration for a poet! ”

“ In a series of "Notes," following the poems, line by line, he asserted that the poet won her success by the simplest means and plainest words, as true genius always does, and that her pages were full of emotional and imaginative meaning. Nature and Poetry uniting in an indissoluble whole ”

“ And again, "Though the arts are in some respects isolated, yet there is one which seems to profit by the resources of all, and that is Poetry. With words, Poetry can paint and sculpture; she can build edifices like an architect; she unites, to some extent, melody and music. She is, so to say, the center in which all arts unite." ”

“ By such experiences are we taught the pathos, the sacredness of life; and if we use them wisely, our eyes will ever after be anointed to see what poems, what romances, what sublime tragedies lie around us in the daily walk of life, ‘written not with ink, but in fleshly tables of the heart.’ The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the romancer is the second-hand recorder. ”

“ They express the place of poetry in the Universe. For, in this court that celebrates man's achievements in the East and West, and Nature's gifts to all, the poet on his winged horse appears to inspire the one and interpret the other. ”

“ Differentiating classic art from the romantic, and claiming for the poet of the Reconciliation the foremost place in the nobler school, inasmuch that his poem is like a pool whose depths [350] are so measureless that its surface is tranquil, and yet so clear that it becomes a mirror that faithfully reflects the features of all that gaze therein, it recounted how the poem treats the life of man in all its phases. ”

“ But little by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the source of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province of the poet's land has been shaped and built over and peopled. ”

“ In the present work it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. ”

“ Only when it takes wings does it become poetry. As the poet, touched by emotion, rises to enthusiasm and imaginative power or skill, his speech grows rhythmic, and thus puts on the attribute that distinguishes it from every other mode of artistic expression—the guild-mark which, rightly considered, establishes the nature of the thing itself.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ The golden cloud sailed into the West,
⁠Where the sun in blood sank down;
While the poet passed to his humble nest
⁠By the river-ways of town.
'Tis years since then, and, called from their rest,
The crowd would find that the poet knew best—
⁠He lives in his renown. ”

“ To give the body of the time the form and pressure of individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of one's race and epoch;—this, no less than the other, is the task and the opportunity of the lyric poet. ”

“ If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument? the minor poet?
The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing upon his face. ”

“ In short, every thing that is great in the whole Circle of Being, whether within the Verge of Nature, or out of it, has a proper Part assigned it in this noble Poem.
In Poetry, as in Architecture, not only the Whole, but the principal Members, and every Part of them, should be Great. ”

“ But the domain of feeling and emotion in which Lyrical Poetry has room to display its power and versatility is so extensive that lyrics are very various in their themes and in the treatment of them. Love, religion, patriotism, cosmopolitan benevolence, being, as I have shown in The Human Tragedy, the most elevated and most permanent sources of human sentiment and emotion, there will necessarily be in Lyrical Poetry, even considered by itself, and apart from all the other forms of poetry, a scale of relative elevation and importance. ”

“ The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense around us—with what we know, and see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. ”

“ From the moment that “He and She” meet unexpectedly on the first page of “A Poet’s Portfolio,” until they say good-night upon the last, they talk comprehensively and agreeably upon topics in which it is easy to feel a healthy human interest. They drop into poetry and climb back into prose with a good deal of facility and grace. They gossip about dogs and spoiled children; they say clever and true things about modern criticism; they converse seriously, but not solemnly, about life and love and literature. ”