Tragic poet

“ Genuine human passion and a vital conception of life's tragedy found expression in verse, sometimes inspired, sometimes absurd, but always spontaneous and unfaltering. Blank verse, borrowed from Italy and adopted in English Senecan plays, now became a new instrument, and its preëminent adaptability for tragic poetry henceforth long remained unquestioned. ”

“ Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos by all the force of comparison or contrast, loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it,171 exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it, and lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations of human life. ”

“ The Author of this Piece was willing to try to do something in this way, that never before had been done. The Tragic Poets have seldom made their Heroes true Objects of Pity; and very seldom have made them in their Deaths look forward to a better Hope. And thus, when they die, they seem totally to perish. Death in such Instances must be terrible. It must be considered as the greatest Evil. But why is Death set in such shocking Lights, when it is the common Lot? ”

“ For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. ”

“ No longer I of hope shall sing, Of fame or joy, of love or art, Alas, not even of suffering, My lips are locked—I lean and cling, To hear the whisper of my heart. MUSE. What! am I like the autumn breeze for you, Which feeds on tears even to the very grave, For whom all grief is but a drop of dew? O poet, but one kiss—'t was I who gave. The weed I fain would root from out this sod Is thine own sloth—thy grief belongs to God. Whatever sorrow thy young heart have found, Open it well, this ever-sacred wound Dealt by dark angels—give thy soul relief. Naught makes us nobler than a noble grief. ”

“ So with the art of poetry: how imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother. ”

“ Even then philosophers complained of the injuriousness of tragedies. of peril such as the one which we are inaugurating, in which valour and manliness are rising in value, may perhaps gradually harden the souls to such a degree that they will again be in need of tragic poets ”

“ With Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. ‘What a piece of work is man,’ we cry; ‘so much more beautiful and so much more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?’ We seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. ”

“ Tragedy, the knowledge of death, raises us to that height. In fancy and for a moment it brings our mortal wills into harmony with our destiny, with the wages of existence, and with the silence beyond. These discoveries of reason have fixed the expression of the tragic mask, half horror and half sublimity. Such is the countenance of man when turned towards death and eternity and looking beyond all his endeavours at the Gorgon face of the truth. ”

“ To build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the true use of it. The tragedy 389is there—irrevocable. Let it sink deep in us till we see Rhodes shining over the sea. So great, so terrible, so piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their hearers. It will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness and littleness of life. ”

“ They naturally sought also in Tragedy, by overleaping all intervening gradations, to reach at once the extreme, whether in the stoicism of heroic fortitude, or in the monstrous fury of criminal desire. Of all their ancient greatness nothing remained to them but the contempt of pain and death whenever an extravagant enjoyment of life must finally be exchanged for them. This seal, therefore, of their former grandeur they accordingly impressed on their tragic heroes with a self-satisfied and ostentatious profusion. ”

“ The tragic music of its measure, the swift yet solemn harmonies of dialogue and burden, hold in extract the very heart of a tragedy, the burning essence distilled from "Hate born of Love, and blind as he." ”

“ A cry and a struggle and a sigh, a flash of light and a streak of dawn and darkness, and then we stand by the grave and weep for the dead that the living may see our tears. Ah, the helplessness and hopelessness of it all; the desolation and despondency, the thoughts that paralyze the mind and stifle the soul; all things out of joint, out of proportion, and Fate cries out to you in the slang phrase 'you don't fit!' Ah, the humor of the entire procession and the deep tragic background behind it. Seek and you will find, and when you find you shall not want it. ”

“ No one, I am sure, ever laid down a great tragedy—take the most terrible of all, take 'Lear'—without an overwhelming sense of the value of life; life as it is, life at its most pitiless and cruel, with all its iniquities, suffering, perplexity; without feeling he would far rather have lived and had all that than not have lived at all. But tragedy is an extreme case. In every simpler and more common case the poet does the same thing for us. ”

“ Because Tragedy is the experience which most invites these subterfuges, it is the greatest and the rarest thing in literature, for the vast majority of works which pass by that name are of a different order. Tragedy is only possible to a mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean. The least touch of any theology which has a compensating Heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal. That is why Romeo and Juliet is not a Tragedy in the sense in which King Lear is. ”

“ Tragedy, on this view, is the exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters themselves. ”

“ From then on, we were both under the empire of this thought of death, this picture of death; we both were subjected to a kind of tragic exaltation which made us forget the moment of doubt in which it was born, and lose consciousness of the real. All at once she burst into sobs, and her tears provoked my tears. We mingled our tears, such hot tears, alas! which yet were powerless to change our destiny. ”

“ We are stirred by the painful emotions of our fellows as readily as by their pleasurable ones. The tragic plays a large part in many forms of literature and in sculpture, music, and painting. And tragedy, dedicated to painful actions, also interests, fascinates, absorbs us. ”

“ No, the tragic (in its first sense, in the sense derived from the dramatic form from which it is named) is in the collision itself; it is the profound and, to our vision, the irreconcilable antagonism of different elements in life. And in life we accept it because we must; we transcend it because, as moral beings, we may. The sublime in actual tragic experience is the reaction of the unconquerable Soul. ”

“ Verona of brawls, dinners, nurses, and deaths, and, forever ascendant over our fancies, like Romeo's blessed moon, "tips everything with silver."
It is in part this poetic style which distinguishes the play from the later tragedies, but the difference is everywhere manifest to our impressions. The evil and gloom and pessimism that help to make up the tragic fact in "Lear" and "Macbeth" are here scarcely felt. To joy comes sorrow, because of evil and through accident,—this is the tragic theme. ”

“ In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him. The evil he has desperately embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart. ”

“ And over and above all sounds of the grief that is passed and of the triumph that is to follow is heard the voice of fate pronouncing the death-doom of the hero, on whose ἁμαρτία the tragic movement has depended. ”

“ She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.
—The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. ”

“ No fear to spoil a corpse by flattery,—the heavily sealed-up eyes can never more unclose to lighten with glad hope or fond ambition; the quiet heart cannot leap with gratitude or joy at that "word spoken in due season" which aids its noblest aspirations to become realized! The DEAD poet?—Press the cold clods of earth over him, and then rant above his grave,—tell him how great he was, what infinite possibilities were displayed in his work, what excellence, what merit, what subtlety of thought, what grace of style! ”

“ Tragedy has not only to represent by imitation the feelings and the affections of tragic persons, but also the events that have produced these feelings, and the occasion on which these affections are manifested. ”

“ It is the most commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been wounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded man—among so many other bleeding folk—who perversely augments his agony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. ”

“ What secret misery was thine, Which set a bar 'twixt thee and me? Alas, I suffer from it still; What was this grief, this unknown ill, Which I have wept so bitterly? POET. 'T was but a common grief, well known of men. But, look you, when our heavy heart is sore, Fond wretches that we are! we fancy then That sorrow never has been felt before. MUSE. There cannot be a common grief, Save that of common souls; my friend, Speak out, and give thy heart relief, Of this grim secret make an end. Confide in me, and have no fear. The God of silence, pale, austere, Is younger brother unto death. ”

“ Tragedy is here viewed as the representation of the whole of life in a typical example, and the tragic artist as one who can sum up the lessons of human vicissitude through the delineation of a particular crisis. And this, although hardly involved in the primary motive of tragedy, has certainly proved inseparable from the art in its most perfect realisations. The greatest tragic artists have been those "who saw life steadily and saw it whole," and the finest tragedies are those in which the interest is most comprehensive and universal. ”

“ Tragedy and elegy (and the term elegy was used by the Romans not only to bemoan the dead, but to deplore sad love affairs) are predominant in all literature, prose and verse.
We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read by us because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the substance of poetry and in the public mind there has always been an association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said—"our sweetest songs are those that told the saddest thought." ”

“ Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. ”

“ XIII. (Plot continued.) What constitutes Tragic Action. The change of fortune and the character of the hero as requisite to an ideal Tragedy. The unhappy ending more truly tragic than the 'poetic justice' which is in favour with a popular audience, and belongs rather to Comedy.
XIV. (Plot continued.) The tragic emotions of pity and fear should spring out of the Plot itself. To produce them by the Scenery or Stage Spectacle is entirely against the spirit of Tragedy. Examples of Tragic Incidents designed to heighten the emotional effect. ”

“ The beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. ”

“ Except to pour his sorrow into little cups of song,
And the world finds in them the magic wine that his broken heart let fall.
“And these are only a couple of names from a list of a thousand score
Who have put their glory on the world in poverty and pain.
And the title of poet’s a noble thing, worth living and dying for,
Though all the devils on earth and in Hell spit at me their disdain. ”