Poetic temperament

“ And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. ”

“ Some stupendous, resplendent work of art might thus affect the senses. Only a keenly receptive temperament, the impressionable, plastic mood, might embrace its insistent meaning, its eloquent message, its redundant appeal to every vibrant, sensitive pulse. ”

“ She was devoted to her art, for one thing. She was at the age, of the temperament, in the mood when art and ambition are consuming passions and allow but little play to any more strictly human emotion. ”

“ To each back its own burden. So he carries the piteous tale whereby his heart is aching for sympathy, and Those Others give him stones for bread and a serpent for a fish. Then he looks up to heaven, and asks if there be indeed a God to suffer all this wrong; or if there be, How long, O Lord, how long! The artistic temperament is not merely artistic perception, with which it is so often confounded. ”

“ The sympathetic reader of poetry cannot but see the reflection of the spiritual in the sensual, and the sensual in the spiritual, even as does the poet, and one, as the other, must be by temperament an idealist. ”

“ Her work falls under two distinct heads,—poetry of the intellect and poetry of the heart,—and while her most emotional verse has a fine subtlety of thought, and her most intellectual a subtlety of emotion, making them not crassly one or the other, none the less is the distinction apparent, and it is easy to put one’s hand upon the work into which her own temperament has entered and which her creative moods have shaped. ”

“ A slightly different temperament achieves the same happiness reciting poetry, repeating every verse ever conned for love of thought or sound. This is singing of a kind. Songs heard are sweet, but the unheard may be sweeter. The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by song. And the inner meaning and sense of a poem becomes one’s own on the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the hidden yearnings of one’s own being. ”

“ In him we see the trained faculties of the close and accurate observer, joined to the temperament of the poet—the capacity to think, to see and to feel—and by the power of sustained and strong emotion to make us the sharers of his joy. ”

“ Old writers gave men four temperaments, and they gave the sanguineous temperament to men of active life, and it is precisely the sanguineous temperament that is fading out of poetry and most obviously out of what is most subtle and living in poetry—its pulse and breath, its rhythm. ”

“ He loves not only human beauty, but everything that is beautiful and exquisite in its own kind,—marvelling at it with a wonderful admiration."
Here we see defined the temperament of the heroic poet, that inner nobility and exaltation without which mere technical skill can avail little in moving and holding the hearts of men. ”

“ A poet might, I think, so apprehend it: for it is one of the advantages of poetic representation, that it can take up even a slightly supported tradition, and following it can infer the depths of the heart, those abysmal depths in which the storms of passion rage, and those actions are begotten which laugh laws and morality to scorn, and yet are deeply rooted in the souls of men. ”

“ We cannot therefore frame our education with a view to giving every one the temperament of a poet. But some characteristics are universally desirable, and it is these alone that I shall consider at this stage. ”

“ We are therefore forced irresistibly to the conclusion that temperament resides in the emotional, in other words, in the sub-conscious nature of man. When the temperamental energy gives out, and the artist loses his grip, the strong probability is that he has, without knowing it, overworked the subconscious servant ”

“ Moreover, the poet’s style is itself in general the product of the same personality which determines his image of life, and must therefore be, like his image of life, delicately striated with the markings of his play of thought and feeling and fancy. ”

“ That strange reminiscence of what we never have really seen, in what we at present behold, appertains to a certain temperament only,—that temperament in which the ideal notion is so definite that all the realities the least approximating thereunto strike as its semblances, and all that it finds beautiful it compares so as to combine with the beautiful itself. ”

“ Since a man's temperament is what ultimately determines the peculiar combination [51] of qualities making up his artistic individuality—his characteristic powers and shortcomings—the first questions we have to ask ourselves regarding any artist we propose to study will always be: "What is his temperament?" "To which of the two great types does it belong, the active or the contemplative?" "Does its power lie primarily in observation or in introspection?" "Does it impel him towards objective characterization or toward the utterance of subjective feeling?" ”

“ But the romantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style which that, and other similar uses of the word romantic really indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely working influence. ”

“ What a store of good fortune, what a goodly contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament; especially, in the case of a poet—a great poet—who will, of course, have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet. ”

“ But if one elects the office of poet, then to perfect oneself, as far as possible, in poetic artistry for the sake of beautifully or compellingly embodying in verse whatsoever is lovely in Nature or noble in ideas, is to attain to high moral dignity in one’s own soul as a poet and to impress on the world the high spiritual function of poetry. ”

“ The strong artist temperament, the power of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance. ”

“ Why does the poet, the man of genius and fancy, or the philosopher of mind and nature, seat himself at their base, and with strange and undefined emotions, pause and ponder, amid the loneliness that slumbers around? ”

“ Is the artistic temperament a blessing or a curse? We should first decide what the artistic temperament means. Artistic is a large word. It includes painting, acting, poetry, music, literature, preaching. Whether the temperament is a blessing or a curse largely depends upon the health of the artist. If De Quincey was an artist, the artistic temperament was a curse. ”

“ Men, calm and sedate, in whom none suspected a poetic soul, are capable of rising and improvising verses, and we are full of admiration at their skill, and at the harmonious grace of rhythm, metaphor, and rhyme.
Each one feels something like inspiration within him, as though warmed by the quickening pulse of life. ”

“ He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophic calm. ”

“ Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic—a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us. ”

“ They say to you, oh Poet, ‘Perfect those gifts of your higher nature—yet be not of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.’ Look upon every beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression. ”

“ With a broader and deeper background of experience and environment, which by some divine special privilege belongs to the poetic imagination, it is easier to set apart and contrast these opposing words and sympathies in a poet ”

“ And what air does a poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age? ”

“ And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. ”

“ Differing frequently in character and in intellectual power, a basic similarity of temperament gives the various writers discussed a remarkable spiritual affinity. For in each one the wandering instinct is strong. Sometimes it may take a physical, sometimes an intellectual expression—sometimes both. But always it shows itself, and always it is opposed to the routine and conventions of ordinary life.
These papers are primarily studies in temperament; and the literary aspects have been subordinated to the personal element. ”

“ If by temperament, intelligence and emotional richness of nature are meant, I do not believe that anyone who is not to some extent possessed of these faculties can stir the feelings of his hearers to any considerable degree. ”

“ To begin with, the innumerable and infinite output of personal lyrics, good, bad and indifferent, is certain to continue, so long as human beings are subject to passions and sentimentalities, and can enjoy the varying moods of nature, and the pleasures of poetic pastiche. ”

“ And I thought with some sadness that all these revolts and indignations, all these protests, revulsions of feeling, pangs of suffering and of rage, expressed but the uneasiness of sensual beings trying for their share in the joys of form, colour, sensations—the only riches of our world of senses. A poet may be a simple being but he is bound to be various and full of wiles, ingenious and irritable. ”

“ He knows his good unbending temper which will not endure to hear ill spoken of the upright. But he thinks, what is the use? why speak so sweetly, why sing, when virtue and beauty are so lightly held, and every one does evil, fearing nought? The verse which carries these reflections is tossing in the squally haven of Society; soon the poet will encounter the wild sea without. ”

“ He is the poet and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees through the flowing vest the firm nature, and can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. ”

“ Consequently this same poet who ventures to allow himself to associate us with feelings so basely human, ought to know, on the other hand, how to raise us to all that is grand, beautiful, and sublime in our nature. ”

“ The temperament which really feels that pure form can adequately express the emotional experience of mankind is rare at any time. It is far less likely to develop among men who prefer positive, concrete mental images than among those who seek the definite, abstract conceptions which the French mind creates. ”

“ Whether because he reveals us to ourselves, or because he touches the soul with the fervor of divine aspiration, whether because in a world of sordid and restless anxiety he fills us with serene joy, or puts into rythmic and permanent form the best thoughts and hopes of man—who shall say? But none the less is the heart’s instinctive loyalty to the poet the proof of its consciousness that he does all these things, that he is the harmonizer, strengthener, and consoler. ”

“ And the rarer and more unfamiliar the situation of life in which the poet places his imagined character, the more in that character itself we must recognise relations akin to our own flesh and blood, in order to feel interest in its fate. ”

“ It is a consequence of the occasional and informal character of his poetry, that it brings us nearer to himself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to support a literary reputation could possibly do. ”

“ By temperament is to be understood the receptive faculty, the power to feel, the capacity for sensations, emotions, and "such intellectual apprehensions as, in strength and directness and their immediately realized values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like sensations." The function of temperament is to receive and to transmit, to interpret, to create in the sense that it reveals. In the result it is felt to be present only as the medium through which the forces behind it come to expression. ”

“ In no one of his dramas, to my sense, does the Poet appear to have been in a healthier or happier frame of mind, more free from the fascination of the darker problems of humanity, more at peace with himself and all the world, or with Nature playing more kindly and genially at his heart, and from thence diffusing her benedictions through his whole establishment. ”

“ One sees in these passages that there not only is a difference of force and passion, but an added quality of some kind in the mind of a poet, a combination of fine perception and emotion, which instantaneously and instinctively translates itself into words. ”

“ If a Poet is not admir’d, tho’ the Man may live, the Spirit of the Poet dies, but a People to admire those generous Sentiments which abound in Poetry, must at least have something in them that answers to them: If they once grow wholly immerst and sunk in Pleasures of sense, those elevated Notions appear as so many Libels upon them, and their sickly Souls either turn away from them, or very feebly answer to them. ”