|
Part I
Part I
Introductory Note
The "Defence of Poetry" is by far the most important of Shelley`s prose
writings, and is of great value in supplementing and correcting the picture of
his mind which is given by his lyrical poetry; for we can perceive from this
brilliant piece of philosophical discussion that Shelley had intellect as well
as imagination.
The immediate occasion of the essay was the publication of Thomas Love
Peacock`s "Four Ages of Poetry," to which Shelley`s work was originally a
reply. In this, as in other notable respects, the treatise is parallel with
Sidney`s. In its present form Shelley has eliminated much of the controversial
matter; and it stands as one of the most eloquent and inspiring assertions of
the "ideal nature and essential value of poetry."
A Defence Of Poetry: An Essay
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind
contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced,
and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with
its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each
containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the ro
noielv, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms
which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the ro
xoyiselv, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of
things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity,
but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general
results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is
the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a
whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of
things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body
to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the
imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an
instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are
driven, like the alternations of an ever - changing wind over an Aeolian lyre,
which move it by their motion to ever - changing melody. But there is a
principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings,
which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but
harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to
the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its
chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion
of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the
lyre. A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and
motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which
awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the
lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by
prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong
also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a
child these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for
the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions
produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and
gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the
combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in
society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of
the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an
augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative
arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the
picture, the chisel and the statute, the chord and the harmony. The social
sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results,
begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the
future is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed; and
equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles
alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social
being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning,
and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of
society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from
that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression
being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss
those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the
principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the
imagination is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or
order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same
order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the
combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural
objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these
classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator
receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an
approximation to this order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man
in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less
closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is
not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in
those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the
beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this
highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in
excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure
resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or
nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort
of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical;
that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates
their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through
time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of
integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the
associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all
the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are
finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon
the various subjects of the world"^1 and he considers the faculty which
perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the
infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself
is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a
word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between
existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.
Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic
poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the
works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the
creations of poetry.
[Footnote 1: "De Augment. Scient.," cap. I, lib. iii.]
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws,
and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and
the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the
true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is
called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible
of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets,
according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared,
were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a
poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only
beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to
which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the
present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest
time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word,
or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of
events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an
attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to
his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms
which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the
distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry
without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of
Job, and Dante`s "Paradise" would afford, more than any other writings,
examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation.
The creations of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more
decisive.
Language, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all
the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that
figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But
poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language,
and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty,
whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs
from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of
the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more
various and delicate combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more
plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the
creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has
relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and
conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose
between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror which reflects,
the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of
communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although
the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree
to that of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their
thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the
term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a
guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long
as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the
restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the
celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually
conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher
character of poets, any excess will remain.
Measured And Unmeasured Language
We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that art
which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty
itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still narrower, and to
determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the
popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those
relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of
the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a
certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not
poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its
influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar
order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into
a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor,
as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.
The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower - and
this is the burden of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the
language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced
metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet
it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to
this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed.
The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially
in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact
structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and
prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and
poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet - the truth and
splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense
that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic,
dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts
divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of
rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his
style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little
success. Lord Bacon was a poet.^2 His language has a sweet and majestic
rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom
of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and
then bursts the circumference of the reader`s mind, and pours itself forth
together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual
sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily
poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent
analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as
their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the
elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme
poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form
and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the
truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante,
and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the
very loftiest power.
[Footnote 2: See the "Filum Labyrinthi," and the "Essay on Death"
particularly. - S.]
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is
this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of
detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance,
cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the
unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator,
which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies
only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which
can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the
germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the
story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them,
augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications
of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the
moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular
facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be
beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a
whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it
may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word
even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. And thus all the great
historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and although the plan of
these writers, especially that of Livy, restrained them from developing this
faculty in its highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for their
subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living
images.
Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls
open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In
the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are
fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and
unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for
future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in
all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in modern times, no living
poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment
upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers:
it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many
generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer
its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the
melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet
know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the
delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which
is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer
embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt
that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like
to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship,
patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths
in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been
refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations,
until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected that
these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they can by no
means be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation. Every epoch,
under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is
the naked idol of the worship of a semi - barbarous age: and Self - deceit is
the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie
prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the
temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover
without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or
dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the
ancient armor or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to
conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature
cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of
its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape
it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful
motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless
costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of
their conceptions in its naked truth and splendor; and it is doubtful whether
the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary
music for mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has
created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic
life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise,
and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in
another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by
rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of
thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it
represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand
thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as
memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all
thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is
love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with
the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,
to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of
his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with
thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and
assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new
intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry
strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the
same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to
embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his
place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By
this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which
perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a
glory in a participation in the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or
any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to
have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the
poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso,
Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry
is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
advert to this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with
all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty;
architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may
add, the forms of civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was
deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and
Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet
never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue been
developed; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and
rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded
the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we
records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in
man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language, which has
rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the store - house of
examples to everlasting time. For written poetry existed at that epoch
simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which
gave and which received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have
scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of
cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found
to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection
of man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguish between
the cause and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its birth; and
however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few great
specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to us, it is
indisputable that the art itself never was understood or practised according
to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For the Athenians employed
language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to
produce a common effect in the representation of the highest idealism of
passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind of
artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful
proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of
the elements capable of expressing the image of the poet`s conception are
employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music and
dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the fit
accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious institution
has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the
actor`s face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated to his
dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging
expression, is favorable only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit
for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some
great master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with
tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an
extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in "King Lear,"
universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this
principle which determines the balance in favor of "King Lear" against the
"Cedipus Tyrannus" or the "Agamemnon," or, if you will, the trilogies with
which they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry,
especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the
equilibrium. "King Lear," if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to
be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in
spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the
ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe.
Calderon, in his religious autos, has attempted to fulfil some of the high
conditions of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the
establishing a relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating
them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still
more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the
rigidly defined and ever - repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for
the living impersonations of the truth of human passion.
But I digress. The connection of scenic exhibitions with the improvement
or corruption of the manners of men has been universally recognized; in other
words, the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect and universal
form has been found to be connected with good and evil in conduct or habit.
The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when
the poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of
manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the
other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral
cause and effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness of the
age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator
beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but
that ideal perfection and energy which everyone feels to be the internal type
of all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged
by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their
conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good
affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an
exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all
its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the
unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men
can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of the
highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather
self - knowledge and self - respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see
itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as
it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many - sided mirror,
which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces
them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with
majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with
the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the
kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to
teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which
are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness,
with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hence what
has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison`s "Cato" is a
specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the
other! To such purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword
of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain
it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are
unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which,
divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. The period
in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of
Charles II, when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed
became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton
stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the
calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and
poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
wit succeeds to humor; we laugh from self - complacency and triumph, instead
of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic
merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy
against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it
assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the
corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in
secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the
connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in
whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of
human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and
that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has
once flourished is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the
energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of
political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this is true
with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language, institution,
and form require not only to be produced but to be sustained: the office and
character of a poet participate in the divine nature as regards providence, no
less than as regards creation.
|