It makes the poet, not the critic,
master of the situation. It implies that the critic is no longer to
give the law to the poet; but that, in some sense more or less complete,
he must begin, if not by putting himself in the place of the individual
writer as he was when at work on the individual poem, at least by
taking upon himself--by making his own, as far as may be--what he may
conceive to be the essential temperament of the poet.
This, indeed, is one of the first things to strike us in passing from
the old criticism to the new. The _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ plunge
straight into the business of the moment. From the first instant--with
"This will never do"--the Reviewer poses as the critic, or rather as
the accuser. Not so Coleridge and Hazlitt. Like the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, they undertake to discourse on individual poets. Unlike
them, each opens his enquiry with the previous question-a question
that seems to have found no lodgment in the mind of the Reviewers--What
is poetry? Further than this. Hazlitt, in a passage of incomparably
greater force than any recorded utterance of Coleridge, makes it his
task to trace poetry to the deepest and most universal springs of human
nature; asserts boldly that it is poetry which, in the strictest sense,
is "the life of all of us"; and calls on each one of us to assert his
birthright by enjoying it.
Pages:
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123