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... New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt
any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and
diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be
the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity". [Footnote: _Life
of Pope_. Johnson's Works, xi. pp 194, 195.] But Johnson failed to see
that his own view of poetry led inevitably to this lame and impotent
conclusion.
To adopt Johnson's method is, in truth, to misconceive the whole nature
of poetry and of poetic imagination. The ideas that have shaped the
work of one poet may act as guide and spur, but can never be a rule--far
less a law--to the imagination of another. The idea, as it comes to
an artist, is not a law imposing itself from without; it is a seed of
life and energy springing from within. This, however, was a truth
entirely hidden from the eyes of Johnson and the Augustan critics. To
assert it both by word and deed, both as critics and as poets, was the
task of Coleridge, and of those who joined hands with Coleridge, in
the succeeding generation.


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