The imagination,
by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief
to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will. We do not wish
the thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For
knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer in this case
the dupe, though it may be the victim, of vice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the
passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd
than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic
critics for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common
sense and reason; for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first
and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature", seen through the
medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means
of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as
well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod
upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait,
as the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which
things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common
conversation.
Pages:
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352