THE 
 
 LYRICAL POETS 
 
 PRELUDE TO POETRT 
 
First Edition, October 1894. 
 'Second Edition^ Anarch rSq?. 
 
ff 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 vii 
 i 
 
 Introduction . 
 
 CHAUCER, [1340-1400] ... 
 
 Invocation and Lines upon the Muse from 
 the third Book of " The Hous of Fame." 
 
 SPENSER, [1552-1599] .... 3 
 
 "The Perfecte Paterne of a Poete," from 
 " The Shepheards Calender," with Notes on 
 the First Invention of Poetry, and on Music. 
 
 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, [1554-1586] . . n 
 
 " An Apologie for Poetry." 
 
 CAMPION, [1567-1620] .... 84 
 
 Two Passages from " Observations in the 
 Art of English Poesie." 
 
 DANIEL, [1562-1619] .... 86 
 
 Two Stanzas from " Musophilus.'' 
 
 BEN JONSON, [1573-1637] ... 87 
 
 Two Passages upon Poetry trom the " Dis- 
 coveries upon Men and Matter." 
 
 MILTON, [1608-1674] .... 
 
 A Passage from u An Apology against a 
 Pamphlet called Smectymnuus, A Modest 
 Confutation," and a Passage from the Letter 
 to Hartlib, 
 
 i b v 
 
 99 
 
Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DRYDEN, [1631-1700] .... 105 
 
 Two Passages from his " Author's Apology, 
 for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence." 
 
 POPE, [1688-1744] 107 
 
 Passages from the Preface to Homer's Iliad, 
 and from a Letter to Walsh. 
 
 GRAY, [1716-1771] . . . xiv.-xvi. 
 Passages upon the Lyric Style, and the 
 " Language of Poetry," from his Letters to 
 Mason. 
 
 GOLDSMITH, [1728-1774] . . .108 
 
 Lines from " The Deserted Village." 
 
 BURNS, [1759-1796] . . . xii.-xvi. 
 
 Two Extracts from his Letters. 
 
 WORDSWORTH, [1770-1850] . . .109 
 
 Observations prefixed to the Second Edition 
 of " Lyrical Ballads" ; with an Appendix on 
 Poetic Diction. 
 
 COLERIDGE, [1772-1833] . . .153 
 
 A chapter from the " Biographia Literaria." 
 
 SHELLEY, [1792-1822] . 165 
 
 " A Defence of Poetry." 
 
 KEATS, [1795-1821] .... 215 
 
 Ode to the Poets. 
 
 LANDOR, [1775-1864] . . . .217 
 
 A Passage from " Imaginary Conversations." 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IT* ROM the English poets, from Sidney and 
 Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley, and their 
 great compeers, we have brought together 
 here some of the famous arguments which 
 they have stated on behalf of their infinite 
 art. It is the natural opening to their 
 poetry ; it is the one confession of their 
 faith, which may fairly claim to be in- 
 spired ; and if it does not give us the whole 
 philosophy of the subject, it affords as much 
 of theory as is likely to be listened to profit- 
 ably within hearing of the lyric muse herself. 
 
 Otherwise, it is clear, the account might easily 
 have been added to. We might have turned 
 from the poets to the philosophers, and fol- 
 lowed the whole history of the discussion, from 
 Aristotle onwards. Or, we might have added 
 some striking passages from the European 
 masters of the art, such as Goethe. But we 
 have matter enough for our limits as it is ; 
 while a certain unity is gained by keeping a 
 volume intended as introductory to the English 
 poets, chiefly to their own writings in what is 
 virtually their own defence. 
 
 In this defence and praise of their art, thus 
 for the first time brought together, there are 
 some items that are, so to speak, inevitable, 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 and that carry their justification on the 
 face of them. The Apologie of Sidney, the 
 Defence of Shelley, the passages from 
 Milton, Wordsworth's preface to his Lyrical 
 Ballads, and Coleridge's complementary chap- 
 ter : these, it is clear, must have a place. But 
 when we turn to Dryden and Pope, or to less 
 known poets, like Campion and Daniel, the 
 ground is not so clear. With a larger volume 
 at command, it would have been simple to 
 include, for instance, the whole, both of 
 Campion's striking indictment of the use of 
 Rhyme in his Observations in the Art of 
 English Poesie, and of Daniel's admirable and 
 convincing retort in his Defence of Rhyme. 
 Again, out of the wealth of Dryden's prefaces 
 and Pope's various writing on the art of 
 poetry, out of Goldsmith and Gray, or Words- 
 worth and Coleridge, there is an endless store 
 of good things to be had, which we have not 
 found room for. Many such tempting oppor- 
 tunities, indeed, we have had to forego, con- 
 tenting us on occasion with just so much, a 
 sentence, a stanza or two, as might serve as a 
 bare reminder of the part that the vigorous 
 disputants who wrote them played from time 
 to time in the perennial dialectic of their calling. 
 At another time, with a quarto's opportunity, 
 and our anthology might conceivably be ex- 
 panded with great effect,; as we should like. 
 It may fairly serve, as it is, its function of 
 pocket-guide to Parnassus. It discourses easily 
 and never laboriously, on the pleasant fields to 
 be found there ; and teaches the haunting 
 
Introduction. 
 
 nomenclature and the familiar associations of 
 the way thither. It takes a phrase from 
 Chaucer, an epigram from Ben Jonson, a lyric 
 word from Burns. It learns what the old 
 Welsh bards would call a Triad, a definition 
 in three terms, from Milton, and another from 
 Gray. It knits up the golden threads of these 
 poets, and shows their succession in fame and 
 time; especially, it shows whatever continuity 
 there is in what we may call the Lyric Line in 
 English Poetry, a line, really, as devious as 
 the divine accident of Burns and of Shelley 
 may suggest. 
 
 Accepting, then, its testimony in the most 
 liberal way, and reading a whole treatise on 
 occasion, into a single excerpt, there are 
 still some notable references which ought 
 not to be overlooked, whether in the other 
 writings of those who have already contributed 
 to its text, or elsewhere. Coleridge, as we 
 know, returned to the charge again and again 
 in his discursive eloquent way, and cast and 
 recast in particular his famous distinction 
 betwixt poetry and science. Wordsworth, 
 too, wrote other monumental prefaces than 
 that to the Lyrical Ballads; and Shelley's 
 Letters contain many a significant tribute in 
 be added to his formal confession of faith to 
 his Defence of Poetry. From these and other 
 sources, we wish to bring together what further 
 allusions we can, complementary to our main 
 text, with especial reference to the functions of 
 lyric poetry. 
 
 Fortunately, lyric poetry, notwithstanding 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 that some philosophers have tended to slight 
 it, is the most essential, as it is clearly the most 
 simple and obvious form of the art. It, at 
 least, is the exact antithesis to prose. Prose is 
 written speech ; lyric poetry is written song. 
 This is the beginning of the whole matter ; the 
 radical definition which we may elaborate, but 
 can hardly make more clear. With epic and 
 dramatic poetry the explanation is more diffi- 
 cult ; lyric poetry, happily, is so far simple. 
 
 We talk a great deal in these days about the 
 art and the technique of poetry, but less and 
 less about its inspiration. Partly for this very 
 reason, and partly because Plato is so often 
 referred to in the essays that follow, we should 
 like to quote the memorable passage in "Ion," 
 where Socrates declares that poetry is an in- 
 spiration, and not an art. He says it, let us 
 admit, half with the idea of showing once 
 again, that the poets are an irresponsible race, 
 only noble when, and in so far as, they are 
 inspired by the gods. But the passage is re- 
 markable, and good to be remembered now 
 when we have strayed so far from the origins 
 of lyric poetry that its primitive inspiration has 
 become for the most of us a mere convention. 
 
 "All good poets," says Socrates, "epic as 
 well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems 
 not by art, but because they are inspired and 
 possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers 
 when they dance are not in their right mind 3 
 so the lyric poets are not in their right mind 
 when they are composing their beautiful strains ; 
 but when falling under the power of music and 
 
Introduction. 
 
 metre they are inspired and possessed ; like 
 Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey 
 from the rivers when they are under the in- 
 fluence of Dionysus, but not when they are in 
 their right mind. And the soul of the lyric 
 poet does the same, as they themselves say ; 
 for they tell us that they bring songs from the 
 honeyed fountains, calling them out of the 
 gardens and dells of the Muses ; they, like the 
 bees, winging their way from flower to flower. 
 And this is true, for the poet is a light and 
 winged and holy thing, and there is no inven- 
 tion in him until he has been inspired and is 
 out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in 
 him." 
 
 Against this passage, set the historical pre- 
 face by Wordsworth, who best represents the 
 slow, deliberate, lyric method, which is become 
 a tradition of the English school. And in a 
 later preface than that in our text, the preface 
 to his volume of 1815, he speaks of these 
 things again, in a way worth recalling when we 
 attempt to decide the full measure of what we 
 may call the "lyric equivalent" in modern 
 poetry. 
 
 " All poets," says Wordsworth, " except the 
 dramatic, have been in the practice of feigning 
 that their works were composed to the music of 
 the harp or the lyre : with what degree of 
 affectation this has been done in modern times, 
 I leave to the judicious to determine. For my 
 own part, I have not been disposed to violate 
 probability so far, or to make such a large 
 demand upon the Reader's charity. Some of 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 these pieces are essentially lyrical ; and, there- 
 fore, cannot have their due force without a 
 supposed musical accompaniment ; but, in 
 much the greatest part, as a substitute for the 
 classic lyre or romantic harp, I require nothing 
 more than an animated or impassioned recita- 
 tion, adapted to the subject. . . ." 
 
 Since Wordsworth, clearly, we have moved 
 still a step in this respect, for much that claims 
 to be lyric poetry to-day, is pictorial, rather than 
 lyrical, in its conception ; written for the eye, 
 and not for the ear. No doubt, as in Words- 
 worth's own case, some of the best lyric poetry 
 which we possess, has been written by poets 
 who have had no ear for music itself. There 
 is a harmony purely of words, a melody too ; 
 which may be enough for lyrics essentially 
 literary. To quote Mr Edmund Clarence Sted- 
 man's interesting volume, The Nature and 
 Elements of Poetry, ' ' Lyrical Beauty does not 
 necessarily depend upon the obvious repetends 
 and singing-bars of a song or regular lyric ; . . . 
 the stanzaic effect, the use of open vowel 
 sounds, and other matters instinctive with song- 
 makers," are not indispensable. But the true 
 lyric is still primarily a song, and the further 
 away we get from music as the companion of 
 poetry, the further we shall be from the well- 
 spring of the lyric muse. This is why, perhaps, 
 the Elizabethans, and Burns, and a few Scotch 
 song-writers, wrote songs so much more heart- 
 felt and musical, so much more singable, than 
 our too literary poets of this century. " If I 
 could hit on some glorious old Scotch air ! " 
 xii 
 
Introduction. 
 
 says Burns in a letter to Margaret Chalmers, of 
 Oct. 26, 1787 ; and the names of old tunes at 
 the head of most of his songs show us how 
 musically impulsive his inspiration was at all 
 times. 
 
 But to return to Wordsworth, and the more 
 complex lyric forms. In the same preface of 
 1815, he attempts a classification of poetry, 
 in which the third of his six divisions is the 
 Lyrical. Under this head he includes "the 
 Hymn, the Ode, the Elegy, the Song, and the 
 Ballad," in all which, he adds, "for the pro- 
 duction of their full effect, an accompaniment 
 of music is indispensable." Even this shuts out 
 many kinds of poems which latterly we have 
 come to admit as lyrical to all intents and pur- 
 poses, but which Wordsworth ranks under his 
 next head of idyllic poetry ; such as the Sonnet, 
 and again poems like Milton's "L* Allegro" 
 and "II Penseroso." In the preface to the 
 Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, Pro- 
 fessor Palgrave serves us with a wider definition, 
 which may fairly be accepted as a good working 
 one, accurate enough for ordinary purposes. 
 "Lyrical," he says, "has been here held 
 essentially to imply that each Poem shall turn 
 on some single thought, feeling, or situation. 
 In accordance with this, narrative, descriptive, 
 and didactic poems, unless accompanied by 
 rapidity of movement, brevity, and the colour- 
 ing of human passion, have been excluded. . . . 
 Blank verse and the ten syllable couplet, with 
 all pieces markedly dramatic, have been re- 
 jected as alien from what is commonly under- 
 xiii 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 recalled by way of commentary on Words- 
 worth's plea for the sufficiency of the common 
 speech, the common idiom, for poetic diction: 
 "The language of the age," says Gray, "is 
 never the language of Poetry. . . . Our poetry 
 has a language peculiar to itself, to which 
 almost every one, that has written, has added 
 something, by criticising it with foreign idioms 
 and derivations, nay, often with new words and 
 invented terms of their own." 
 
 The direct opposite to Gray in his tempera- 
 ment and method is his immediate successor 
 in the lyric purple, Burns. We have quoted 
 Burns already as a pre-eminent instance of the 
 virtue that lies in the old musical tradition of 
 lyric poetry. Let us add here a few lines con- 
 tributory to our formulary of the lyric creed 
 and the lyric art, from one of his letters, where, 
 after speaking of the "wild enthusiasm of 
 passion" aroused in him by the "old Scottish 
 airs," to which his songs were almost always 
 composed, he goes on to say: "When one 
 would compose to them, ' to sowth the tune,' as 
 our Scotch phrase is, over and over, is the 
 readiest way to catch the inspiration and raise 
 the bard into that glorious enthusiasm so 
 strongly characteristic of our old Scotch 
 poetry." 
 
 Something of the same enthusiasm, it was, 
 that Shelley demanded of the poet in a memor- 
 able letter to Peacock, where he turns suo more 
 from the discussion of his friend's Nympholepsy 
 to the question of poetic inspiration : 
 
 ' ' What a wonderful passage there is in 
 
Introduction. 
 
 Phcedrus the beginning, I think, of one of 
 the speeches of Socrates in praise of poetic 
 madness, and in definition of what poetry is, 
 and how a man becomes a poet. Every man 
 who lives in this age and desires to write 
 poetry, ought, as a preservative against the 
 false and narrow systems of criticism which 
 every poetical empiric vents, to impress himself 
 with this sentence, if he would be numbered 
 among those to whom may apply this proud, 
 though sublime expression of Tasso ' Non 
 c'e in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, che 
 Dio ed il Poeta.' " 
 
 In a note to this letter of Shelley's, Pea- 
 cock adds the passage in question from the 
 "Phsedrus," which goes to corroborate our 
 previous passage from Plato: "There are 
 several kinds (says Socrates) of divine madness. 
 That which proceeds from the Muses taking 
 possession of a tender and unoccupied soul, 
 awakening, and bacchically inspiring it towards 
 songs and other poetry, adorning myriads of 
 ancient deeds, instructs succeeding generations. 
 But he who, without this madness from the 
 Muses, approaches the poetical gates, having 
 persuaded himself that by art alone he may 
 become sufficiently a poet, will find in the end 
 his own imperfection, and see the poetry of his 
 cold prudence vanish into nothingness before 
 the light of that which has sprung from divine 
 insanity." 
 
 Shelley, following Plato's idea, develops it 
 in his Defence of Poetry ; and Sidney in his 
 Apologie maintains the same faith in the 
 xvii 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 "divine right" and the supernal inspiration 
 of the poet, as where he tells us, that the poets 
 " are so beloved of the Gods, that whatsoever 
 they write proceeds of a divine fury." 
 
 A later poet, and an even less fortunate, than 
 Shelley ; of a different calibre, and a less 
 magnanimous temper, but a true lover of his 
 art Edgar Poe, gave another turn to this 
 idea in his lecture on "The Poetic Principle." 
 With Plato and Shelley, the poet has already, 
 as it were, been in heaven, and drunk of the 
 immortal springs there. With Edgar Poe, the 
 poet is rather in the state of an impassioned 
 desire for " divine beauty," the poet's paradise, 
 which is his, as yet, only by prevision. The 
 passage in which he expounds this view is the 
 more interesting, because it bears evidence, as 
 do his poems indeed, that he had read his 
 Shelley to some purpose : " It is the desire," 
 he says, "of the moth for the star. It is no 
 mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but 
 a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. In- 
 spired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories 
 beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform 
 combinations among the things and thoughts 
 of time to attain a portion of that Loveliness 
 whose very elements perhaps appertain to 
 eternity alone." Browning, another great 
 lover of Shelley, in the remarkable essay in 
 which he expresses his own poetic creed, on the 
 ground of Shelley's art, also works out this 
 idea with a difference in profound and moving 
 terms, but we forbear to quote, where indeed a 
 passing quotation would not suffice for our 
 
Introduction. 
 
 purpose. It is enough to refer any reader who 
 does not already know it, to what is the most 
 eloquent plea of the past mid century on behalf 
 of the exalted functions of the poet. 
 
 Having arrived at Browning, we have come 
 as far as, allowing for the proverbial diffi- 
 culty of dealing with contemporary poets 
 and critics, our subject may safely take 
 us. As it is, we have followed it to the 
 point, perhaps, where it may most safely be 
 left ; at the point of stimulus, and not of 
 exhaustion. If, indeed, it but provide the 
 stimulus to that finer sentiment and quicker 
 interest, upon which the last appreciation of 
 poetry depends, it is as much as we need 
 desire. And so, too, with the more formal 
 writings of the poets, which follow in our text. 
 We cannot expect, as we said, to find there the 
 comprehensive formulary, the whole philosophy, 
 of the subject, a subject which will never be 
 fully exploited until we have the impossible : a 
 perfect poet and a perfect philosopher rolled 
 into one. This, in spite of Coleridge, who has 
 said, "No man was ever yet a great poet, 
 without being at the same time a profound 
 philosopher." And in an un technical sense 
 this is true. But the outward and final 
 processes of the two are, and always must 
 be, different. The poet adopts the letter of 
 philosophy, as well as its spirit, it would 
 seem, witness Coleridge himself, with some 
 risk to his own proper art ; he cannot serve 
 two masters. 
 
 What we do find, then, in these contributions 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 by Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Milton, and 
 their successors, is a set of testimonies not at 
 all scientific, but such as they are, making a 
 much more delightful and eloquent companion 
 to the poetic anthology than any more formal 
 body of criticism could do. Taken in them- 
 selves, severally, they are full of wise and fine 
 things, said in a way not readily to be forgotten. 
 Taken historically, they touch in the most 
 interesting and telling fashion the periods in 
 English poetry, from Chaucer to Spenser, and 
 on through the Elizabethan golden age to the 
 beginning of this century, when Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge were still in their heat of youth, 
 and when Shelley and Keats were still potential. 
 To those who love these poets most, who 
 care most for their ideals, this little book ought 
 to be the one indispensable book of devotion, 
 the credo of the poetic faith. It revives, like 
 nothing else in criticism, the superb belief of 
 youth in poetry and the other world of the 
 imagination. It gives us back our early faith 
 in the destiny and divine right of ' ' our Poet 
 the Monarch," as Sidney calls him. And it 
 sets up, once and again, the eternal standards, 
 by which alone English poetry can hope to 
 sustain the great traditions of Spenser and 
 Milton, Keats and Wordsworth, and the other 
 masters of its House of Fame. 
 
 E. R. 
 
 September i8Q4, 
 
CHAUCER 
 
 (1340-1400) 
 
 Invocation and Lines 
 upon the Muse 
 from the Third Book of 
 "The Hous of Fame/ 1 1383-4. 
 
 O GOD of science and of light, 
 Apollo, through thy grete might, 
 This litel laste book thou gye ! 
 ^J| Nat that I wilne, for maistrye, 
 
 Here art poetical be shewed ; 
 But, for the rym is light and lewed, 
 Yit make hit sumwhat agreable. 
 Though som vers faile in a sillable ; 
 And that I do no diligence, 
 To shewe crafte, but o sentence. 
 And if divyne vertu, thou 
 Wilt helpe me to shewe now 
 That in myn hede y-marked is, 
 Lo, that is for to menen this, 
 The Hous of Fame to descry ve, 
 Thou shalt see me go, as blyve, 
 Unto the nexte laure I see, 
 And kisse hit, for hit is thy tree. 
 * * * * 
 
 But in this riche lusty place, 
 That Fames halle called was, 
 
 t A x 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Ful moche prees of folk ther nas, 
 Ne crouding, for to mochil prees. 
 But al on bye, above a dees, 
 Sitte in a see imperial, 
 That maad was of a rubee al, 
 Which that a carbuncle is y-called, 
 I saugh, perpetually y-stalled, 
 A feminyne creature ; 
 That never formed by nature 
 Nas swich another thing y-seye. 
 For altherfirst, soth for to seye, 
 Me thoughte that she was so lyte, 
 That the lengthe of a cubyte 
 Was lenger than she seemed be ; 
 But thus sone, in a whyle, she 
 Hir tho so wonderliche streighte, 
 That with hir feete she therthe reighte, 
 And with hir heed she touched hevene, 
 Ther as shynen sterres sevene. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 But, lord ! the perrie and the richesse 
 I saugh sitting on this goddesse ! 
 And, lord ! the hevenish melody e 
 Of songes, ful of armonye, 
 I herde aboute her trone y-songe, 
 That al the paleys-walles ronge ! 
 So song the mighty Muse, she 
 That cleped is Caliopee. 
 And hir eighte sustren eke, 
 That in hir face semen meke ; 
 And evermo, eternally, 
 They songe of Fame, as tho herde I : 
 " Heried be thou and thy name, 
 Goddesse of renoun and of fame I " 
 
SPENSER 
 
 (1552-1599) 
 
 This Poem forms the 
 October Eclogue of the 
 Calendar. The Prose 
 Argument and Notes 
 were part of the Com* 
 mentary supposed to 
 be written by E. K. 
 But E. K., there is no 
 doubt now, was simply 
 Spenser himself. 
 
 "The Perfecte 
 Paterne of a 
 Poete," from 
 'TheShepheards 
 Calender," 1579: 
 with Notes on 
 the First 
 Invention of 
 Poetry, and 
 on Music. 
 
 ARGUMENT. 
 
 In Cuddle is set out the perfecte pater ne of a Poete 
 ivhiche, finding no maintenaunce of his state and 
 studies, complayneth of the contempte of Poetrie, 
 and the causes tJiereof : Specially having bene in all 
 ages> and even amongst the most barbarous, alwayes 
 of singular accoumpt and honor > and being indede 
 so worthy and commendable an arte; or rather no 
 arte, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to 
 bee gotten by laboure and learning,but adorned with 
 both; and poured into the witte by a certain 
 'l&vOoVffiCLfffJibs and celestiall inspiration^ as the 
 A^tthor hereof els where at large discourseth in his 
 3 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 fookc called The English Poete, -which booke being 
 lately come to my hands, I mynde also by Gods grace, 
 upon further advisement to publish. 
 
 PIERS. 
 
 V-/UDDIE, for shame ! hold up thy heavye head, 
 And let us cast with what delight to chace, 
 And weary thys long lingring Phoebus race. 
 Whilome thou wont the shepheards laddes to 
 
 leade 
 
 In rymes, in ridles, and in bydding base ; 
 Now they in thee, and thou in sleepe art dead. 
 
 CUDDIE. 
 
 Piers, I have pyped erst so long with payne, 
 That all mine Oten reedes bene rent and wore, 
 And my poore Muse hath spent her spared store, 
 Yet little good hath got, and much lesse gayne. 
 Such pleasaunce makes the Grashopper so 
 
 poore, 
 And ligge so layd, when Winter doth her straine. 
 
 The dapper ditties, that I wont devise 
 To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry, 
 Delighten much ; what I the bett for-thy ? 
 They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise ; 
 I beate the bush, the byrds to th'^m doe flye : 
 What good thereof to Cuddie can arise ? 
 
 PIERS. 
 
 Cuddie, the prayse is better then the price, 
 The glory eke much greater then the gayne : 
 O ! what an honor is it, to restraine 
 The lust of lawlesse youth with good ad vice , 
 4 
 
Spenser. 
 
 Or pricke them forth with pleasaunce of thy 
 
 vaine, 
 Whereto thou list their trayned willes entice. 
 
 Soone as thou gynst to sette thy notes in frame, 
 O, how the rurall routes to thee doe cleave ! 
 Seemeth thou dost their soule of sence bereave ; 
 All as the shepheard that did fetch his dame 
 From Plutoes balefull bowre withouten leave, 
 His musicks might the hellish hound did tame. 
 
 CUDDIE. 
 
 So praysen babes the Peacoks spotted traine, 
 And wondren at bright Argus blazing eye ; 
 But who rewards him ere the more for-thy. 
 Or feedes him once the fuller by a graine ? 
 Sike prayse is smoke, that sheddeth in the sky e ; 
 Sike words bene wynd, and wasten soone in 
 vayne. 
 
 PIERS. 
 
 Abandon, then, the base and viler clowne ; 
 Lyft up thy selfe out of the lowly dust, 
 And sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of giusts ; 
 Turne thee to those that weld the awful crowne, 
 To doubted Knights, whose woundlesse armour 
 
 rusts, 
 And helmes unbruzed wexen dayly browne. 
 
 There may thy Muse display her fluttryng wing, 
 And stretch her selfe at large from East to West ; 
 Whither thou list in fayre Elisa rest, 
 Or, if thee please in bigger notes to sing, 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Advaunce the worthy whome shee loveth best, 
 That first the white beare to the stake did bring. 
 
 And, when the stubborne stroke of stronger 
 
 stounds 
 
 Has somewhat slackt the tenor of thy string, 
 Of love and lustihead tho mayst thou sing, 
 And carroll lowde,and leade the My Hers rownde, 
 All were Elisa one of thilke same ring ; 
 So mought our Cuddies name to heaven sownde. 
 
 CUDDIE. 
 
 Indeede the Romish Tityrus, I heare, 
 Through his Mecsenas left his Oaten reede, 
 Whereon he earst had taught his flocks to feede, 
 And laboured lands to yield the timely eare, 
 And eft did sing of warres and deadly drede, 
 So as the Heavens did quake his verse to here. 
 
 But ah ! Mecaenas is yclad in claye, 
 And great Augustus long ygoe is dead, 
 And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade, 
 That matter made for Poets on to play : 
 For ever, who in derring-doe were dreade, 
 The loftie verse of hem was loved aye. 
 
 But after vertue gan for age to stoope, 
 And mightie manhode brought a bedde of ease, 
 The vaunting Poets found nought worth a pease 
 To put in preace emong the learned troupe : 
 Tho gan the streames of flowing wittes to cease, 
 And sonne-bright honour pend in shamefull 
 coupe. 
 
 6 
 
Spenser. 
 
 And if that any buddes of Poesie, 
 Yet of the old stocke, gan to shoote agayne, 
 Or it mens follies mote be forst to fayne, 
 And rolle with rest in rymes of rybaudrye ; 
 Or, as it sprong, it wither must agayne : 
 Tom Piper makes us better melodic. 
 
 PIERS. 
 
 O pierlesse Poesye ! where is then thy place ? 
 If nor in Princes pallace thou doe sitt, 
 (And yet is Princes pallace the most fitt,) 
 Ne brest of baser birth doth thee embrace, 
 Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wit, 
 And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heaven 
 apace. 
 
 CUDDIE. 
 
 Ah, Percy ! it is all to weake and wanne, 
 So high to sore and make so large a flight ; 
 Her peeced pyneons bene not so in plight : 
 For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne ; 
 He, were he not with love so ill bedight, 
 Would mount as high, and sing as soote as 
 Swanne. 
 
 PIERS. 
 
 Ah, fon ! for love does teach him climbesohie, 
 And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre : 
 Such immortal mirrhor, as he doth admire, 
 Would rayse ones mynd above the starry skie, 
 And cause a caytive corage to aspire ; 
 For lofty love doth loath a lowly eye. 
 7 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 CUDDIE. 
 
 All otherwise the state of Poet stands ; 
 For lordly love is such a Tyranne fell, 
 That where he rules all power he doth expell ; 
 The vaunted verse a vacant head demaundes, 
 Ne wont with crabbed care the Muses dwell : 
 Unwisely weaves, that takes two webbes in hand. 
 
 Who ever casts to compasse weightye prise, 
 And thinkes to throwe out thondring words of 
 
 threate, 
 Let powre in lavish cups and thriftie bitts of 
 
 meate, 
 
 For Bacchus fruite is frend to Phoebus wise ; 
 And, when with Wine the braine begins to 
 
 sweate, 
 The nombers flowe as fast as spring doth ryse. 
 
 Thou kenst not, Percie, howe the ryme should 
 
 rage, 
 
 O ! if my temples were distaind with wine, 
 And girt in girlonds of wild Yvie twine, 
 How I could reare the Muse on stately stage, 
 And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine, 
 With queint Bellona in her equipage ! 
 
 But ah ! my corage cooles ere it be warme : 
 For-thy content us in thys humble shade, 
 Where no such troublous tydes han us assayde ; 
 Here we our slender pypes may safely charme, 
 
Spenser. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 ON THE ABOVE POEM. 
 
 This ^Eglogue is made in imitation of Theocritus 
 his xvi. Idilion, wherein he reproved the Tyranrie 
 Hiero of Syracuse for his nigardise towarde Poetes, 
 in whome is the power to make men immortal for 
 theyr good dedes, or shameful for their naughty lyfe. 
 And the lyke also is in Mantuane. The style hereof, 
 as also that in Theocritus, is more loftye then the 
 rest, and applyed to the heighte of Poeticall witte. 
 
 " THE FIRST INVENTION OF POETRY." 
 
 [See Stanza IV.\ 
 
 This place seemeth to conspyre with Plato, who in 
 his first booke de Legibus sayth, that the first inven- 
 tion of Poetry was of very vertuous intent. For at 
 what time an infinite number of youth usually came 
 to theyr great solemne feastes called Panegyrica, 
 which they used every five yeere to hold, some 
 learned man, being more hable then the rest for 
 speciall gyftes of wytte and Musicke, would take 
 upon him to sing fine verses to the people, in prayse 
 eyther of vertue or of victory, or of immortality, or 
 such like. At whose wonderfull gyft al men being 
 astonied, and as it were ravished with delight, 
 thinking (as it was indeed) that he was inspired from 
 above, called him vatem : which kinde of men after- 
 ward framing their verses to lighter musick (as of 
 musick be many kinds, some sadder, some lighter, 
 some martiall, some heroical, and so diversely eke 
 affect the mynds of men,) found out lighter matter of 
 Poesie also, some playing wyth love, some scorning 
 at mens fashions, some powred out in pleasures : and 
 so were called Poetes or makers. 
 
 " THE SECRETE WORKING OF MUSICK." 
 
 [See Stanza V,\ 
 
 What the secrete working of Musick is in the 
 myndes of men. as well appeareth hereby, that some 
 
 9 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 of the auncient Philosophers, and those the moste 
 wise, as Plato and Pythagoras, held for opinion, that 
 the mynd was made of a certaine harmonic and 
 musicall nombers, for the great compassion, and 
 likenes of affection in thone and in the other, as also 
 by that memorable history of Alexander : to whom 
 when as Timotheus the great Musitian playd the 
 Phrygian melody, it is said, that he was distraught 
 with such unwonted fury, that, streightway rysing 
 from the table in great rage, he caused himselfe to be 
 armed, as ready to goe to warre, (for that musick is 
 very warlike.) And immediatly when as the Musitian 
 chaunged his stroke into the Lydian and lonique 
 harmony, he was so furr from warring, that he sat as 
 styl, as if he had bene in matters of counsell. Such 
 might is in musick : wherefore Plato and Aristotle 
 forbid the Arcadian Melodic from children and 
 youth. For that being altogither on the fyft and vii 
 tone, it is of great force to molifie and quench the 
 kindly courage, which useth to burne in yong brests. 
 So that it is not incredible which the Poeie here 
 sayth, that Musick can bereave the soule of sence. 
 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 (1554-1586) 
 
 The " Apologie " was written 
 
 " An about 1581, the date is not 
 
 A i absolutely certain. The first 
 
 edition is the quarto of 1595, 
 for Poetfie." whose text we take, following 
 
 the reprint of Professor Arber. 
 
 WHEN the right vertuous Edward Wotton, 
 and I, were at the Emperors Court to- 
 gether, wee gave our selves to learne 
 horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano : 
 one that with great commendation had 
 the place of an Esquire in his stable. 
 Arid hee, according to the fertilnes of the 
 Italian wit, did not onely afoord us the 
 demonstration of his practise, but sought to 
 enrich our mindes with the contemplations 
 therein, which hee thought most precious. 
 But with none I remember mine eares were 
 at any time more loden, then when (either 
 angred with slowe paiment, or mooved with 
 our learner-like admiration,) he exercised his 
 speech in the prayse of his facultie. Hee sayd, 
 Souldiours were the noblest estate of mankinde, 
 *nd horsemen, the noblest of Souldiours. Hee 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 sayde, they were the Maisters of warre, and 
 ornaments of peace : speedy goers, and strong 
 abiders, triumphers both in Camps and Courts. 
 Nay, to so unbeleeved a poynt hee proceeded, 
 as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to 
 a Prince, as to be a good horseman. Skill of 
 government, was but a Pedanteria in com- 
 parison : then would hee adde certaine prayses, 
 by telling what a peerlesse beast a horse was, 
 The onely serviceable Courtier without flattery, 
 the beast of most beutie, faithfulnes, courage, 
 and such more, that if I had not beene a peece 
 of a Logician before I came to him, I think he 
 would have perswaded mee to have wished my 
 selfe a horse. But thus much at least with his 
 no fewe words hee drave into me, that selfe- 
 love is better then any guilding to make that 
 seeme gorgious, wherein our selves are parties. 
 Wherein, if Pugliano his strong affection and 
 weake arguments will not satisfie you, I wil 
 give you a neerer example of my selfe, who (I 
 knowe not by what mischance) in these my not 
 old yeres and idelest times, having slipt into 
 the title of a Poet, am provoked to say som- 
 thing unto you in the defence of that my 
 unelected vocation, which if I handle with 
 more good will then good reasons, beare with 
 me, sith the scholler is to be pardoned that 
 foloweth the steppes of his Maister. And yet 
 I must say, that as I have just cause to make 
 a pittiful defence of poore Poetry, which from 
 almost the highest estimation of learning, is 
 fallen to be the laughingstocke of children. 
 So have I need to bring some more availeable 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 proofes : sith the former is by no man barred 
 of his deserved credite, the silly latter hath 
 had even the names of Philosophers used to 
 the defacing of it, with great danger of civill 
 war among the Muses. And first, truly to al 
 them that professing learning inveigh against 
 Poetry, may justly be objected, that they goe 
 very neer to ungratfulnes, to seek to deface 
 that, which in the noblest nations and lan- 
 guages that are knowne, hath been the first 
 light-giver to ignorance, and first Nurse, whose 
 milk by little and little enabled them to feed 
 afterwards of tougher knowledges: and will 
 they now play the Hedghog, that being re- 
 ceived into the den, drave out his host? or 
 rather the Vipers, that with theyr birth kill 
 their Parents? Let learned Greece in any of 
 her manifold Sciences, be able to shew me 
 one booke, before Musceus, Homer, and 
 Hesiodus, all three nothing els but Poets. 
 Nay, let any historic be brought, that can 
 say any Writers were there before them, if 
 they were not men of the same skil, as Orpheus, 
 Linus, and some other are named : who having 
 beene the first of that Country, that made pens 
 deliverers of their knowledge to their posterity, 
 may justly challenge to bee called their Fathers 
 in learning : for not only in time they had this 
 priority (although in it self antiquity be vener- 
 able) but went before them, as causes to drawe 
 with their charming sweetnes, the wild un- 
 tamed wits to an admiration of knowledge. 
 So as Amphion was sayde to move stones with 
 his Poetrie, to build Thebes. And Orpheus to 
 13 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 be listened to by beastes, indeed, stony and 
 beastly people. So among the Romans were 
 Livius, Andronicus, and Ennius. So in the 
 Italian language, the first that made it aspire 
 to be a Treasure-house of Science, where the 
 Poets Dante, Boccace, and Petrarch. So in 
 our English were Gower and Chawcer. 
 
 After whom, encouraged and delighted with 
 theyr excellent fore-going, others have followed, 
 to beautifie our mother tongue, as wel in the 
 same kinde as in other Arts. This did so 
 notably shewe it selfe, that the Phylosophers 
 of Greece, durst not a long time appeare to the 
 worlde but under the masks of Poets. So 
 Thales, Empedocles, and Parmenides, sange 
 their naturall Phylosophie in verses : so did 
 Pythagoras and Phocilides their morral coun- 
 sells : so did Tirteus in war matters, and Solon 
 in matters of policie: or rather, they beeing 
 Poets, dyd exercise their delightful vaine in 
 those points of highest knowledge, which be- 
 fore them lay hid to the world. For that 
 wise Solon was directly a Poet, it is manifest, 
 having written in verse, the notable fable of 
 the Atlantick Hand, which was continued by 
 Plato. 
 
 And truely, even Plato> whosoever well con- 
 sidereth, shall find, that in the body of his 
 work, though the inside and strength were 
 Philosophy, the skinne as it were and beautie, 
 depended most of Poetrie: for all standeth 
 upon Dialogues, wherein he faineth many 
 honest Burgesses of Athens to speake of such 
 matters, that if they had been sette on the 
 14 
 
Sir Philip Sidney, 
 
 racke, they would never have confessed them. 
 Besides, his poetical describing the circum- 
 stances of their meetings, as the well ordering 
 of a banquet, the delicacie of a walke, with 
 enterlacing meere tales, as Giges Ring, and 
 others, which who knoweth not to be flowers 
 of Poetrie, did never walke into Appolos 
 Garden. 
 
 And even Historiographers, (although theyr 
 lippes sounde of things doone, and veritie be 
 written in theyr fore-heads,) have been glad to 
 borrow both fashion, and perchance weight of 
 Poets. So Herodotus entituled his Historic, by 
 the name of the nine Muses : and both he and 
 all the rest that followed him, either stole or 
 usurped of Poetrie, their passionate describing 
 of passions, the many particularities of battailes, 
 which no man could affirme : or if that be 
 denied me, long Orations put in the mouthes 
 of great Kings and Captaines, which it is 
 certaine they never pronounced. So that 
 truely, neyther Phylosopher nor Historio- 
 grapher, coulde at the first have entred into 
 the gates of populer judgements, if they had 
 not taken a great pasport of Poetry, which in 
 all Nations at this day wher learning florisheth 
 not, is plaine to be scene : in all which they 
 have some feeling of Poetry. In Turky, be- 
 sides their lawe-giving Divines, they have no 
 other Writers but Poets. In our neighbour 
 Countrey Ireland, where truelie learning goeth 
 very bare, yet are theyr Poets held in a devoute 
 reverence. Even among the most barbarous 
 and simple Indians where no writing is, yet 
 is 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 have they their Poets, who make and sing songs 
 which they call Areytos, both of theyr Aunces- 
 tors deedes, and praises of theyr Gods. A 
 sufficient probabilitie, that if ever learning come 
 among them, it must be by having theyr hard 
 dull wits softened and sharpened with the 
 sweete delights of Poetrie. For untill they find 
 a pleasure in the exercises of the minde, great 
 promises of much knowledge, will little perswade 
 them, that knowe not the fruites of knowledge. 
 In Wales, the true remnant of the auncient 
 Brittons, as there are good authorities to shewe 
 the long time they had Poets, which they called 
 Bardes: so thorough all the conquests of 
 Romaines, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, 
 some of whom did seeke to ruine all memory 
 of learning from among them, yet doo their 
 Poets even to this day, last ; so as it is not more 
 notable in soone beginning then in long con- 
 tinuing. But since the Authors of most of our 
 Sciences were the Romans, and before them 
 the Greekes, let us a little stand uppon their 
 authorities, but even so farre as to see, what 
 names they have given unto this now scorned 
 skill. 
 
 Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates, 
 which is as much as a Diviner, Fore-seer, or 
 Prophet, as by his conjoyned wordes Vaticinium 
 and Valicinari) is manifest : so heavenly a title 
 did that excellent people bestow upon his hart- 
 ravishing knowledge. And so farre were they 
 carried into the admiration thereof, that they 
 thought in the chaunceable hitting uppon any 
 such verses great fore-tokens of their following 
 16 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 fortunes were placed. Whereupon grew the 
 worde of Sortes Virgiliance, when by suddaine 
 opening Virgils booke, they lighted upon any 
 verse of hys making, whereof the histories of the 
 Emperors lives are full, as of Albinus the 
 Governour of our Hand, who in his childehoode 
 mette with this verse 
 
 Arma amens capio nee sat rationis in armis. 
 
 And in his age performed it, which although it 
 were a very vaine, and goclles superstition, as 
 also it was to think that spirits were com- 
 maunded by such verses, whereupon this word 
 charmes, derived of Carmina commeth, so yet 
 serveth it to shew the great reverence those wits 
 were helde in. And altogether not without 
 ground, since both the Oracles of Delphos and 
 Sibillas prophecies, where wholy delivered in 
 verses. For that same exquisite observing of 
 number and measure in words, and that high 
 flying liberty of conceit proper to the Poet, did 
 seeme to have some dyvine force in it. 
 
 And may not I presume a little further, to 
 shew the reasonablenes of this worde Vates? 
 And say that the holy Davids Psalmes are a 
 divine Poem ? If I doo, I shall not do it with- 
 out the testimonie of great learned men, both 
 auncient and moderne : but even the name 
 Psalmes will speake for mee, which being 
 interpreted, is nothing but songes Then that it 
 is fully written in meeter, as all learned Hebri- 
 cians agree, although the rules be not yet fully 
 found. Lastly and principally, his handeling his 
 prophecy, which is meerely poetical. For what 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 els is the awaking his musicall instruments? 
 The often and free changing of persons ? His 
 notable Prosopopeias, when he maketh you as 
 it were, see God comming in his Majestic. His 
 telling of the Beastes joyfulnes and hills leap- 
 ing, but a heavenlie poesie : wherein almost 
 hee sheweth himselfe a passionate lover, of 
 that unspeakable and everlasting beautie to be 
 scene by the eyes of the minde, onely cleered 
 by fayth. But truely nowe having named him, 
 I feare mee I seeme to prophane that holy name, 
 applying it to Poetrie, which is among us 
 throwne downe to so ridiculous an estimation : 
 but they that with quiet judgements will looke 
 a little deeper into it, shall finde the end and 
 working of it such, as beeing rightly applyed, 
 deserveth not to bee scourged out of the Church 
 of God. 
 
 But now, let us see how the Greekes named 
 it, and howe they deemed of it. The Greekes 
 called him a Poet, which name, hath as the 
 most excellent, gone thorough other Languages. 
 It commeth of this word Poiein, which is, to 
 make : wherein I know not whether by lucke or 
 wisedome, wee Englishmen have mette with 
 the Greekes, in calling him a maker : which 
 name, how high and incomparable a title it is, I 
 had rather were knowne by marking the scope of 
 other Sciences, then by my partiall allegation. 
 
 There is no Arte delivered to mankinde, that 
 hath not the workes of Nature for his principall 
 object, without which they could not consist, 
 and on which they so depend, as they become 
 Actors and Players as it were, of what Nature 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 will have set foorth. So doth the Astronomer 
 looke upon the starres, and by that he seeth, 
 setteth downe what order Nature hath taken 
 therein. So doe the Geometrician, and Arith- 
 metician, in their diverse sorts of quantities. 
 So doth the Musitian in times, tel you which by 
 nature agree, which not. The naturall Philo- 
 sopher thereon hath his name, and the Morrall 
 Philosopher standeth upon the naturall vertues, 
 vices, and passions of man ; and follows 
 Nature (saith hee) therein, and thou shalt not 
 erre. The Lawyer sayth what men have 
 determined. The Historian what men have 
 done. The Grammarian speaketh onely of the 
 rules of speech, and the Rethorician, and 
 Logitian, considering what in Nature will 
 soonest prove and perswade, thereon give 
 artificial rules, which still are compassed 
 within the circle of a question, according to 
 the proposed matter. The Phisition waigheth 
 the nature of a mans bodie, and the nature of 
 things helpeful, or hurtefull unto it. And the 
 Metaphisick, though it be in the seconde and 
 abstract notions, and therefore be counted 
 supernaturall : yet doth hee indeede builde 
 upon the depth of Nature : onely the Poet, 
 disdayning to be tied to any such subjection, 
 lifted up with the vigor of his owne invention, 
 dooth growe in effect, another nature, in mak- 
 ing things either better then Nature bringeth 
 forth, or quite a newe formes such as never 
 were in Nature, as the Heroes^ Demigods^ 
 Cyclops, Chimeras^ Furies ^ and such like : so 
 as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 inclosed within the narrow warrant of her 
 guifts, but freely ranging onely within the 
 Zodiack of his owne wit. 
 
 Nature never set forth the earth in so rich 
 tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither 
 with plesant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smell- 
 ing flowers : nor whatsoever els may make the 
 too much loved earth more lovely. Her world 
 is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden : but 
 let those things alone and goe to man, for whom 
 as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her 
 uttermost cunning is imployed, and knowe 
 whether shee have brought foorth so true a 
 lover as Theagines t so constant a friende as 
 Pilades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right 
 a Prince as Xenophons Cyrus: so excellent a 
 man every way, as Virgils Aeneas: neither let 
 this be jestingly conceived, because the works 
 of the one be essentiall : the other, in imitation 
 or fiction, for any understanding knoweth the 
 skil of the Artificer : standeth in that Idea or 
 fore-conceite of the work, and not in the work 
 it selfe. And that the Poet hath that Idea, is 
 manifest, by delivering them forth in such 
 excellencie as hee hath imagined them. Which 
 delivering forth also, is not wholie imaginative, 
 as we are wont to say by them that build 
 Castles in the ayre : but so farre substantially it 
 worketh, not onely to make a Cyrus, which 
 had been but a particuler excellencie, as 
 Nature might have done, but to bestow a 
 Cyrus upon the worlde, to make many Cyrus's^ 
 if they wil learne aright why, and how that 
 Maker made him. 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 Neyther let it be deemed too sawcie a com- 
 parison to ballance the highest poynt of mans 
 wit with the efficacie of Nature : but rather give 
 right honor to the heavenly Maker of that 
 maker : who having made man to his owne 
 likenes, set him beyond and over all the workes 
 of that second nature, which in nothing hee 
 sheweth so much as in Poetrie : when with the 
 force of a divine breath, he bringeth things 
 forth far surpassing her dooings, with no small 
 argument to the incredulous of that first 
 accursed fall of Adam : sith our erected wit, 
 maketh us know what perfection is, and yet 
 our infected will, keepeth us from reaching 
 unto it. But these arguments wil by fewe be 
 understood, and by fewer granted. Thus much 
 (I hope) will be given me, that the Greekes 
 with some probabilitie of reason, gave him the 
 name above all names of learning. Now let 
 us goe to a more ordinary opening of him, that 
 the trueth may be more palpable : and so I 
 hope, though we get not so unmatched a praise 
 as the Etimologie of his names wil grant, yet 
 his very description, which no man will denie, 
 shall not justly be barred from a principall 
 commendation. 
 
 Poesie therefore is an arte of imitation, for so 
 Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is 
 to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figur- 
 ing foorth : to speake metaphorically, a speak- 
 ing picture : with this end, to teach and 
 delight ; of this have beene three severall 
 kindes. The chiefe both in antiquitie and 
 excellencie, were they that did imitate the in- 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 conceivable excellencies of GOD. Such were, 
 David in his Psalmes, Salomon in his song of 
 Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs : Moses 
 and Debora in theyr Hymnes, and the writer of 
 Job ; which beside other, the learned Emanuell 
 Tremilius and Franciscus Junius, doe entitle 
 the poeticall part of the Scripture. Against 
 these none will speake that hath the holie 
 Ghost in due holy reverence. 
 
 In this kinde, though in a full wrong 
 divinitie, were Orpheus, Amphion, Homer in 
 his hymes, and many other, both Greekes and 
 Romaines : and this Poesie must be used, by 
 whosoever will follow S. James his counsell, in 
 singing Psalmes when they are merry : and I 
 knowe is used with the fruite of comfort by 
 some, when in sorrowfull pangs of their death- 
 bringing sinnes, they find the consolation of the 
 never-leaving goodnesse. 
 
 The second kinde, is of them that deale with 
 matters Philosophicall ; eyther morrall, as 
 Tirteus, Phocilides and Cato, or naturall, as 
 Lucretius and Virgils Georgicks : or Astronom- 
 icall, as Manilius, and Pontanus : or historical, 
 as Lucan : which who mislike, the faulte is in 
 their judgements quite out of taste, and not in 
 the sweet foode of sweetly uttered knowledge. 
 But because thys second sorte is wrapped 
 within the folde of the proposed subject, and 
 takes not the course of his owne invention, 
 whether they properly be Poets or no, let 
 Gramarians dispute : and goe to the thyrd, 
 indeed right Poets, of whom chiefly this 
 question ariseth ; betwixt whom, and these 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 second is such a kinde of difference, as betwixt 
 the meaner sort of Painters, (who counterfet 
 onely such faces as are sette before them) and 
 the more excellent : who having no law but 
 wit, bestow that in cullours upon you which is 
 fittest for the eye to see : as the constant, 
 though lamenting looke of Lucrecia, when she 
 punished in her selfe an others fault. 
 
 Wherein he painteth not Lucrecia whom he 
 never sawe, but painteth the outwarde beauty 
 of such a vertue : for these third be they which 
 most properly do imitate to teach and delight, 
 and to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath 
 been, or shall be : but range onely rayned with 
 learned discretion, into the divine consideration 
 of what may be, and should be. These bee 
 they, that as the first and most noble sorte, may 
 justly bee termed Vates, so these are waited on 
 in the excellen[te]st languages and best under- 
 standings, with the fore described name of 
 Poets : for these indeede doo meerely make to 
 imitate : and imitate both to delight and teach : 
 and delight to move men to take that goodnes 
 in hande, which without delight they would 
 flye as from a stranger. And teach, to make 
 them know that goodnes whereunto they are 
 mooved, which being the noblest scope to 
 which ever any learning was directed, yet want 
 there not idle tongues to barke at them. 
 These be subdivided into sundry more speciall 
 denominations. The most notable bee the 
 Heroick, Lirick, Tragick, Comick, Satirick, 
 lambick, Elegiack, Pastorall, and certaine 
 others. Some of these being termed according 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 to the matter they deale with, some by the 
 sorts of verses they liked best to write in, for 
 indeede the greatest part of Poets have 
 apparelled their poeticall inventions in that 
 numbrous kinde of writing which is called 
 verse : indeed but apparelled, verse being but 
 an ornament and no cause to Poetry : sith there 
 have beene many most excellent Poets, that 
 never versified, and now swarme many versi- 
 fiers that neede never aunswere to the name 
 of Poets. For Xenophon, who did imitate so 
 excellently, as to give us ejfigiem justi imperij, 
 the portraiture of a just Empire under the name 
 of Cyrus, (as Cicero sayth of him) made therein 
 an absolute heroicall Poem. 
 
 So did Heliodorus in his sugred invention of 
 that picture of love in Theagines and Cariclea, 
 and yet both these writ in Prose : which I\ 
 speak to shew, that it is not riming and versing 
 that maketh a Poet, no more then a long gowne;; 
 maketh an Advocate : who though he pleaded 
 in armor should be an Advocate and no 
 Souldier. But it is that fayning notable images j 
 of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delight- 
 full teaching which must be the right describing 
 note to know a Poet by : although indeed the 
 Senate of Poets hath chosen verse as their 
 fittest rayment, meaning, as in matter they 
 passed all in all, so in maner to goe beyond 
 them : not speaking (table talke fashion or like 
 men in a dreame, ) words as they chanceably 
 fall from the mouth, but peyzing each sillable of 
 each worde by just proportion according to the 
 dignitie of the subject. 
 
 24 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 Nowe therefore it shall not bee amisse first 
 to waigh this latter sort of Poetrie by his works, 
 and then by his partes ; and if in neyther of 
 these Anatomies hee be condemnable, I hope 
 wee shall obtaine a more favourable sentence. 
 This purifing of wit, this enritching of memory, 
 enabling of judgment, and enlarging of con- 
 ceyt, which commonly we call learning, under 
 what name soever it com forth, or to what 
 immediat end soever it be directed, the final end 
 is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, 
 as our degenerate soules made worse by theyr 
 clayey lodgings, can be capable of. This 
 according to the inclination of the man, bred 
 many formed impressions, for some that 
 thought this felicity principally to be gotten by 
 knowledge, and no knowledge to be so high 
 and heavenly, as acquaintance with the starres, 
 gave themselves to Astronomie ; others, per- 
 swading themselves to be Demigods if they 
 knewe the causes of things, became naturall 
 and supernaturall Philosophers, some an 
 admirable delight drew to Musicke : and some, 
 the certainty of demonstration, to the Mathe- 
 matickes. But all, one, and other, having this 
 scope to knowe, and by knowledge to lift up 
 the mind from the dungeon of the body, to the 
 enjoying his owne divine essence. But when 
 by the ballance of experience it was found, that 
 the Astronomer looking to the starres might 
 fall into a ditch, that the enquiring Philosopher 
 might be blinde in himselfe, and the Mathe- 
 matician might draw foorth a straight line with 
 a crooked hart : then loe, did proofe the over 
 25 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 ruler of opinions, make manifest, that all these 
 are but serving Sciences, which as they have 
 each a private end in themselves, so yet are 
 they all directed to the highest end of the 
 mistres Knowledge, by the Greekes called 
 Arkitecktonike, which stands, (as I thinke) in 
 the knowledge of a mans selfe, in the Ethicke 
 and politick consideration, with the end of well 
 dooing and not of well knowing onely ; even as 
 the Sadlers next end is to make a good saddle : 
 but his farther end, to serve a nobler facultie, 
 which is horsemanship, so the horsemans to 
 souldiery, and the Souldier not onely to have 
 the skill, but to performe the practise of a 
 Souldier : so that the ending end of all earthly 
 learning, being vertuous action, those skilles 
 that most serve to bring forth that, have a most 
 just title to bee Princes over all the rest : 
 wherein if wee can shewe the Poets noblenes, 
 by setting him before his other Competitors, 
 among whom as principall challengers step 
 forth the morrall Philosophers, whom me 
 thinketh, I see comming towards me with a 
 sullen gravity, as though they could not abide 
 vice by day light, rudely clothed for to witnes 
 outwardly their contempt of outward things, 
 with bookes in their hands agaynst glory, 
 whereto they sette theyr names, sophistically 
 speaking against subtility, and angry with any 
 man in whom they see the foule fault of anger : 
 these men casting larges as they goe, of 
 Definitions, Divisions, and Distinctions, with 
 a scornefull interogative, doe soberly aske, 
 whether it bee possible to finde any path, so 
 26 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 ready to leade a man to vertue, as that which 
 teacheth what vertue is? and teacheth it not 
 onely by delivering forth his very being, his 
 causes, and effects : but also, by making known 
 his enemie vice, which must be destroyed, and 
 his combersome servant Passion, which mus 
 be maistered, by shewing the generalities that 
 contayneth it, and the specialities that are 
 derived from it. Lastly, by playne setting 
 downe, how it extendeth it selfe out of the 
 limits of a mans own little world, to the 
 government of families, and maintayning of 
 publique societies. 
 
 The Historian, scarcely giveth ley sure to the 
 Moralist, to say so much, but that he loden 
 with old Mouse-eaten records, authorising him- 
 selfe (for the most part) upon other histories, 
 whose greatest authorities, are built upon the 
 notable foundation of Heare-say, having much 
 a-doe to accord differing Writers, and to pick 
 trueth out of partiality, better acquainted with 
 a thousande yeeres a goe, then with the present 
 age : and yet better knowing how this world 
 goeth, then how his owne wit runneth : curious 
 for antiquities, and inquisitive of novelties, a 
 wonder to young folkes, and a tyrant in table 
 talke, denieth in a great chafe, that any man 
 for teaching of vertue, and vertuous actions, is 
 comparable to him. I am Lux vita, Temporum 
 Magistra, Vita memories, Nuncia vetustatis. &c. 
 
 The Phylosopher (sayth hee) teacheth a dis- 
 putative vertue, but I doe an active : his vertue 
 is excellent in the dangerlesse Academic of 
 Plato t but mine sheweth foorth her honorable 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 face, in the battailes of Marathon, Pharsalia, 
 Poitiers, and Agincourt. Hee teacheth vertue 
 by certaine abstract considerations, but I onely 
 bid you follow the footing of them that have 
 gone before you. Olde-aged experience, goeth 
 beyond the fine-witted Phylosopher, but I give 
 the experience of many ages. Lastly, if he 
 make the Song-booke, I put the learners hande 
 to the Lute : and if hee be the guide, I am the 
 light. 
 
 Then woulde hee alledge you innumerable 
 examples, conferring storie by storie, how much 
 the wisest Senatours and Princes, have beene 
 directed by the credite of history, as Brutus, 
 AlphonsusotAragon, and who not, if need bee ? 
 At length, the long lyne of theyr disputation 
 maketh a poynt in thys, that the one giveth 
 the precept, and the other the example. 
 
 Nowe, whom shall wee finde (sith the 
 question standeth for the highest forme in the 
 Schoole of learning) to bee Moderator ? Trulie, 
 as me seemeth, the Poet ; and if not a Mod- 
 erator, even the man that ought to carrie the 
 title from them both, and much more from all 
 other serving Sciences. Therefore compare we 
 the Poet with the Historian, and with the 
 Morrall Phylosopher, and, if hee goe beyond 
 them both, no other humaine skill can match 
 him. For as for the Divine, with all reverence 
 it is ever to be excepted, not only for having 
 his scope as far beyonde any of these, as 
 eternitie exceedeth a moment, but even for 
 passing each of these in themselves. 
 
 And for the Lawyer, though Jus bee the 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 Daughter of Justice, and Justice the chiefe of 
 Vertues, yet because hee seeketh to make men 
 good, rather Formidine pance, then Virtutis 
 amore, or to say righter, dooth not indevour 
 to make men good, but that their evill hurt 
 not others : having no care so hee be a good , 
 Cittizen; how bad a man he be. Therefore, 
 as our wickedness maketh him necessarie, and 
 necessitie maketh him honorable, so is hee 
 not in the deepest trueth to stande in rancke 
 with these ; who all indevour to take naughtines 
 away, and plant goodnesse even in the secret- 
 est cabinet of our soules. And these foure are 
 all, that any way deale in that consideration of 
 mens manners, which being the supreme know- 
 ledge, they that best breed it, deserve the best 
 commendation. \ 
 
 The Philosopher therfore and the Historian, 
 are they which would win the gole : the one by 
 precept, the other by example. But both not 
 having both, doe both halte. For the Philo- 
 sopher, setting downe with thorny argument the 
 bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so mistie 
 to bee conceived, that one that hath no other 
 guide but him, shall wade in him till hee be 
 olde, before he shall finde sufficient cause to 
 bee honest : for his knowledge standeth so 
 upon the abstract and generall, that happie is 
 that man- who may understande him, and more 
 happie, that can applye what hee dooth 
 understand. 
 
 On the other side, the Historian wanting the 
 precept, is so tyed, not to what shoulde bee, 
 but to what is, to the particuler truth of things, 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 and not to the general reason of things, that 
 hys example draweth no necessary consequence 
 and therefore a lesse fruitfull doctrine. 
 
 Nowe dooth the peerelesse Poet performe 
 both : for whatsoever the Philosopher sayth 
 shoulde be doone, hee giveth a perfect picture 
 of it in some one, by whom hee presupposeth 
 it was done. So as hee coupleth the generall 
 notion with the particuler example. A perfect 
 picture I say, for hee yeeldeth to the powers of 
 the minde, an image of that whereof the Philo- 
 sopher bestoweth but a woordish description : 
 which dooth neyther strike, pierce, nor possesse 
 the sight of the soule, so much as that other 
 dooth. 
 
 For as in outward things, to a man that had 
 never scene an Elephant or a Rinoceros, who 
 should tell him most exquisitely all theyr shapes, 
 cullour, bignesse, and perticular markes : or of 
 a gorgeous Pallace, the Architecture, with de- 
 claring the full beauties, might well make the 
 hearer able to repeate as it were by rote, all 
 hee had heard, yet should never satisfie his in- 
 ward conceits, with being witnes to it selfe of a 
 true lively knowledge : but the same man, as 
 soone as hee might see those beasts well painted, 
 or the house wel in moddel, should straight- 
 waies grow without need of any description, to a 
 judicial comprehending of them, so no doubt 
 the Philosopher with his learned definition, bee 
 it of vertue, vices, matters of publick policie, 
 or privat government, replenisheth the memory 
 with many infallible grounds of wisdom : which 
 notwithstanding, lye darke before the imagina- 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 tive and judging powre, if they bee not 
 illuminated or figured foorth by the speaking 
 picture of Poesie. 
 
 Tullie taketh much paynes and many times 
 not without poeticall helpes, to make us knowe 
 the force love of our Countrey hath in us. Let 
 us but heare old Anchises speaking in the 
 middest of Troyes flames, or see Ulisses in 
 the fulnes of all Calipstfs delights, bewayle his 
 absence from barraine and beggerly Ithaca. 
 Anger the Stoicks say, was a short maddnes, 
 let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, 
 killing and whipping Sheepe and Oxen, think- 
 ing them the Army of Greeks, with theyr 
 Chiefetaines Agamemnon and Menelaus, and 
 tell mee if you have not a more familiar insight 
 into anger, then finding in the Schoolemen 
 his Genus and difference. See whether wisdome 
 and temperance in Ulisses and Diomedes, valure 
 in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Eurialus, 
 even to an ignoraunt man, carry not an ap- 
 parent shyning : and contrarily, the remorse of 
 conscience in Oedipus, the soone repenting 
 pride of Agamemnon, the selfe-devouring 
 crueltie in his Father Atreus, the violence of 
 ambition in the two Theban brothers, the 
 sowre-sweetnes of revenge in Medaa, and to fall 
 lower, the Terentian Gnato, and our Chaucers 
 Pandar, so exprest, that we nowe use their 
 names to signifie their trades. And finally, all 
 vertues, vices, and passions, so in their own 
 naturall seates layd to the vie we, that wee seeme 
 not to heare of them, but cleerely to see through 
 them. But even in the most excellent deter- 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 mination of goodnes, what Philosophers 
 counsell can so redily direct a Prince, as the 
 fayned Cyrus in Xenophon f or a vertuous man 
 in all fortunes, as Aeneas in Virgin? or a 
 whole Common- wealth, as the way of Sir 
 Thomas Moores Eutopia ? I say the way, 
 because where Sir Thomas Moore erred, it 
 was the fault of the man and not of the Poet, 
 for that way of patterning a Common-wealth 
 was most absolute, though hee perchaunce hath 
 not so absolutely perfourmed it : for the ques- 
 tion is, whether the fayned image of Poesie, or 
 the regular instruction of Philosophy, hath the 
 more force in teaching : wherein if the Philo- 
 sophers have more rightly shewed themselves 
 Philosophers, then the Poets have obtained to 
 the high top of their profession, as in truth, 
 
 -Mediocribus esse poetis, 
 
 Non Dij, non homines, non concessere Columnae : 
 
 It is I say againe, not the fault of the Art, 
 but that by fewe men that Arte can bee 
 accomplished. 
 
 Certainly, even our Saviour Christ could as 
 well have given, the morrall common places of 
 uncharitablenes and humblenes, as the divine 
 narration of Dives and Lazarus : or of dis- 
 obedience and mercy, as that heavenly discourse 
 of the lost Child and the gratious Father ; but 
 that hys through-searching wisdom, knewe 
 the estate of Dives burning in hell, and of 
 Lazarus being in Abrahams bosome, would 
 more constantly (as it were) inhabit both the 
 memory and judgment. Truly, for my selfe, 
 32 
 
Sir Philip Sidney, 
 
 mee seemes I see before my eyes the lost 
 Childes disdainefull prodigality, turned to 
 envie a Swines dinner: which by the learned 
 Divines, are thought not historicall acts, but 
 instructing Parables. For conclusion, I say 
 the Philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth 
 obscurely, so as the learned onely can under- 
 stande him : that is to say, he teacheth them 
 that are already taught, but the Poet is the 
 foode for the tenderest stomacks, the Poet is 
 indeed the right Popular Philosopher, whereof 
 Esops tales give good proofe : whose pretty 
 Allegories, stealing under the formal! tales of 
 Beastes, make many, more beastly then Beasts, 
 begin to heare the sound of vertue from these 
 dumbe speakers. 
 
 But now may it be alledged, that if this 
 imagining of matters be so fitte for the imagin- 
 ation, then must the Historian needs surpasse, 
 who bringeth you images of true matters, such 
 as indeede were doone, and not such as fantas- 
 tically or falsely may be suggested to have been 
 doone. Truely Aristotle himselfe in his dis- 
 course of Poesie, plainely determineth this ques- 
 tion, saying, that Poetry is Philosophoteron and 
 Spoudaioteron, that is to say, it is more Philo- 
 sophicall, and more studiously serious, then 
 history. His reason is, because Poesie dealeth 
 with Katholon, that is to say, with the universall 
 consideration ; and the history ^\^Kathekaston t 
 the perticuler ; nowe sayth he, the universall 
 wayes what is fit to bee sayd or done, eyther in 
 likelihood or necessity, (which the Poesie con- 
 sidereth in his imposed names,) and the per- 
 i c 33 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 ticuler, onely mark's, whether Alcibiades did, 
 or suffered, this or that. Thus fane Aristotle : 
 which reason of his, (as all his) is most full of 
 reason. For indeed, if the question were 
 whether it were better to have a perticuler acte 
 truly or falsly set down : there is no doubt 
 which is to be chosen, no more then whether 
 you had rather have Vespasians picture right as 
 hee was, or at the Painters pleasure nothing 
 resembling. But if the question be for your 
 owne use and learning, whether it be better to 
 have it set downe as it should be, or as it was : 
 then certainely is more doctrinable the fained 
 Cirus of Xenophon then the true Cyrus in 
 Justine : and the fayned Aeneas in Virgil, then 
 the right Aeneas in Dares Phrigius. 
 
 As to a Lady that desired to fashion her 
 countenance to the best grace, a Painter should 
 more benefite her to portraite a most sweet 
 face, wry ting Canidia upon it, then to paynt 
 Canidia as she was, who Horace sweareth, was 
 foule and ill favoured. 
 
 If the Poet doe his part a-right, he will shew 
 you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing 
 that is not to be shunned. In Cyrus, Aeneas, 
 Ulisses, each thing to be followed ; where the 
 Historian, bound to tell things as things were, 
 cannot be liberall (without hee will be poeticall) 
 of a perfect patterne : but as in Alexander or 
 &z^*0 himselfe, shewdooings, some to be liked, 
 some to be misliked. And then how will you 
 discerne what to followe but by your owne dis- 
 cretion, which you had without reading Quintus 
 Curtius f And whereas a man may say, though 
 34 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 in universall consideration of doctrine the Poet 
 prevaileth ; yet that the historic, in his saying 
 such a thing was doone, doth warrant a man 
 more in that hee shall follow. 
 
 The aunswere is manifest, that if hee stande 
 upon that was ; as if hee should argue, because 
 it rayned yesterday, therefore it shoulde rayne 
 to day, then indeede it hath some advantage to 
 a grose conceite : but if he know an example 
 onlie, informes a conjectured likelihood, and so 
 goe by reason, the Poet dooth so farre exceede 
 him, as hee is to frame his example to that which 
 is most reasonable : be it in warlike, politick, 
 or private matters ; where the Historian in his 
 bare Was, hath many times that which wee 
 call fortune, to over-rule the best wisdome. 
 Manie times, he must tell events, whereof he 
 can yeelde no cause : or if hee doe, it must be 
 poeticall ; for that a fayned example, hath \ 
 asmuch force to teach, as a true example : (for 
 as for to moove, it is cleere, sith the fayned 
 may bee tuned to the highest key of passion) 
 let us take one example, wherein a Poet and a 
 Historian doe concur. 
 
 Herodotus and Justine do both testifie, that 
 Zopirus, King Darius faithful servaunt, seeing 
 his Maister long resisted by the rebellious 
 Babilonians, fayned himselfe in extreame dis- 
 grace of his King : for verifying of which, he 
 caused his owne nose and eares to be cut off: 
 and so flying to the Babylonians, was received : 
 and for his knowne valour, so far credited, that 
 hee did finde meanes to deliver them over to 
 Darius, Much like matter doth Livie record 
 35 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 of Tarquinius and his sonne. Xenophon ex- 
 cellently faineth such another stratageme, per- 
 formed by Abradates in Cyrus behalfe. Now 
 would I fayne know, if occasion bee presented 
 unto you, to serve your Prince by such an honest 
 dissimulation, why you doe not as well learne 
 it of Xenophons fiction, as of the others verity : 
 and truely so much the better, as you shall save 
 your nose by the bargaine : for Abradates did 
 not counterfet so far. So then the best of the 
 Historian, is subject to the Poet ; for whatso- 
 ever action, or faction, whatsoever counsell, 
 pollicy, or warre stratagem, the Historian is 
 bound to recite, that may the Poet (if he list) 
 with his imitation make his own ; beautifying it 
 both for further teaching, and more delighting, 
 as it pleaseth him : having all, from Dante his 
 heaven, to hys hell, under the authoritie of his 
 penne. Which if I be asked what Poets have 
 done so, as I might well name some, yet say I, 
 and say againe, I speak of the Arte, and not of 
 the Artificer. 
 
 No we, to that which commonly is attributed 
 to the prayse of histories, in respect of the 
 notable learning is gotten by marking the 
 successe, as though therein a man should see 
 vertue exalted, and vice punished. Truely that 
 commendation is peculiar to Poetrie, and farre 
 of from History. For indeede Poetrie ever 
 setteth vertue so out in her best cullours, mak- 
 ing Fortune her wel-wayting hand-mayd, that 
 one must needs be enamored of her. Well may 
 you see Ulisses in a storme, and in other hard 
 plights ; but they are but exercises of patience 
 36 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 and magnanimitie, to make them shine the 
 more in the neere-following prosperitie. And 
 of the contrarie part, if evill men come to the 
 stage, they ever goe out (as the Tragedie Write, 
 answered, to one that misliked the shew of such 
 persons) so manacled, as they little animate 
 folkes to folio we them. But the Historian, 
 beeing captived to the trueth of a foolish world, 
 is many times a terror from well dooing, and an 
 incouragement to unbrideled wickednes. 
 
 For, see wee not valiant Milciades rot in his 
 fetters? The just Pkocion, and the accomplished 
 Socrates, put to death like Traytors? The 
 cruell Severus live prosperously? The excel- 
 lent Severus miserably murthered ? Sylla and 
 Marius dying in theyr beddes? Pompey and 
 Cicero slaine then, when they would have 
 thought exile a happinesse? 
 
 See wee not vertuous Cato driven to kyll 
 himselfe ? and rebell Ccesar so advaunced, that 
 his name yet after 1600 yeares, lasteth in the 
 highest honor? And marke but even Casars own 
 words of the fore-named Sylla, (who in that onely 
 did honestly, to- put downe his dishonest tyran- 
 nic,) Literas nescivit, as if want of learning 
 caused him to doe well. Hee meant it not by 
 Poetrie, which not content with earthly plagues, 
 deviseth new punishments in hel for Tyrants: nor 
 yet by Philosophic, which teacheth Occidendos 
 esse, but no doubt by skill in Historic : for that 
 indeede can affoord your Cipselus, Periander, 
 Phalaris, Dionisius, and I know not how many 
 more of the same kennell, that speede well 
 enough in theyr abhominable unjustice or usurp- 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 ation. I conclude therefore, that hee excelleth 
 Historic, not onely in furnishing the minde with 
 knowledge, but in setting it forward, to that 
 which deserveth to be called and accounted 
 good : which setting forward, and mooving to 
 well dooing, indeed setteth the Lawrell crowne 
 upon the Poet as victorious, not onely of the 
 Historian, but over the Phylosopher : howsoever 
 in teaching it may bee questionable. 
 
 For suppose it be granted, (that which I 
 suppose with great reason may be denied,) that 
 the Philosopher in respect of his methodical pro- 
 ceeding, doth teach more perfectly then the 
 Poet : yet do I thinke, that no man is so much 
 Philophilosopkos, as to compare the Philosopher 
 in mooving, with the Poet. 
 
 And that mooving is of a higher degree then 
 teaching, it may by this appeare : that it is wel 
 nigh the cause and the effect of teaching. For 
 who will be taught, if hee bee not mooved with 
 desire to be taught ? and what so much good 
 doth that teaching bring forth, (I speak still of 
 morrall doctrine) as that it mooveth one to doe 
 that which it dooth teach? for as Aristotle 
 sayth, it is not Gnosis, but Praxis must be the 
 fruit. And howe Praxis cannot be, without 
 being mooved to practise, it is no hard matter 
 to consider. 
 
 The Philosopher sheweth you the way, hee in- 
 formeth you of the particularities, as well of the 
 tediousnes of the way, as of the pleasant lodging 
 you shall have when your journey is ended, as 
 of the many byturnings that may divert you from 
 your way. But this is to no man but to him 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 that will read him, and read him with attentive 
 studious painfulnes. Which constant desire, 
 whosoever hath in him, hath already past halfe 
 the hardnes of the way, and therefore is behold- 
 ing to the Philosopher but for the other halfe. 
 Nay truely, learned men have learnedly thought, 
 that where once reason hath so much over- 
 mastred passion, as that the minde hath a free 
 desire to doe well, the inward light each minde 
 hath in it selfe, is as good as a Philosophers 
 booke ; seeing in nature we know it is wel, to 
 doe well, and what is well, and what is evill, al- 
 though not in the words of Arte, which Philos- 
 ophers bestowe upon us. For out of naturall con- 
 ceit, the Philosophers drew it. but to be moved 
 to doe that which we know, or to be mooved with 
 desire to knowe, Hoc opus : Hie labor est. 
 
 Nowe therein of all Sciences, (I speak still of \ / 
 humane, and according to the humane conceits) \ 
 is our Poet the Monarch. For he dooth not 
 only show the way, but giveth so sweete a pros- 
 pect into the way, as will intice any man to 
 enter into it. Nay, he dooth as if your journey 
 should lye through a fay re Vineyard, at the first 
 give you a cluster of Grapes : that full of that 
 taste, you may long to passe further. He be- 
 ginneth not with obscure definitions, which 
 must blur the margent with interpretations, and 
 load the memory with doubtfulnesse : but hee 
 commeth to you with words sent in delightfull 
 proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared 
 for the well inchaunting skill of Musicke ; and 
 with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you : with 
 a tale which holdeth children from play, and old 
 39 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 men from the chimney corner, And pretending 
 no more, doth intende the winning of the mind 
 from wickednesse to vertue : even as the childe 
 is often brought to take most wholsom things, 
 by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant 
 last : which if one should beginne to tell them, 
 the nature of Aloes, or R-ubarb they shoulde 
 receive, woulde sooner take their Phisicke at 
 their eares, then at their mouth. So is it in 
 men (most of which are childish in the best 
 things, till they bee cradled in their graves,) 
 glad they will be to heare the tales of Hercules, 
 Achilles, Cyrus, and Aeneas: and hearing them, 
 must needs heare the right description of wis- 
 dom, valure, and justice ; which, if they had 
 been barely, that is to say, Philosophically set 
 out, they would sweare they bee brought to 
 schoole againe. 
 
 That imitation whereof Poetry is, hath the 
 most conveniency to Nature of all other, in 
 somuch, that as Aristotle sayth, those things 
 which in themselves are horrible, as cruell 
 battailes, unnaturall Monsters, are made in 
 poeticall imitation delightfull. Truely I have 
 knowen men, that even with reading Amadis 
 de Gaule, (which God knoweth wanteth much 
 of a perfect Poesie) have found their harts 
 mooved to the exercise of courtesie, liberalise, 
 and especially courage. 
 
 Whoreadeth Aeneas carry ing oldeAncfoseson 
 his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to per- 
 fourme so excellent an acte ? Whom doe not the 
 words of Turnus moove ? (the tale of Turnus, 
 having planted his image in the imagination,) 
 40 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 Fugientem haec terra videbit, 
 
 Usque adeone mori miserum est? 
 
 Where the Philosophers, as they scorne to 
 delight, so must they bee content little to 
 moove : saving wrangling, whether Vertue bee 
 the chiefe, or the onely good : whether the con- 
 templative, or the active life doe excell : which 
 Plato and Boethius well knew, and therefore 
 made Mistres Philosophy, very often borrow 
 the masking rayment of Poesie. For even 
 those harde harted evill men, who thinke vertue 
 a schoole name, and knowe no other good, but 
 indulgeregenio, and therefore despise the austere 
 admonitions of the Philosopher, and feeie not 
 the inward reason they stand upon ; yet will be 
 content to be delighted : which is al, the good 
 felow Poet seemeth to promise : and so steale 
 to see the forme of goodnes (which seene they 
 cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if 
 they tooke a medicine of Cherries. Infinite 
 proofes of the strange effects of this poeticall 
 invention might be alledged, onely two shall 
 serve, which are so often remembred, as I thinke 
 all men knowe them. 
 
 The one of Menenius Agrippa, who when the 
 whole people of Rome had resolutely devided 
 themselves from the Senate, with apparant shew 
 of utter ruine : though hee were (for that time) 
 an excellent Oratour, came not among them, 
 upon trust of figurative speeches, or cunning 
 insinuations : and much lesse, with farre set 
 Maximes of Phylosophie, which (especially if 
 they were Platonick,} they must have learned 
 41 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Geometrie before they could well have con- 
 ceived : but forsooth he behaves himselfe, like 
 a homely, and familiar Poet. Hee telleth them 
 a tale, that there was a time, when all the parts 
 of the body made a mutinous conspiracie against 
 the belly, which they thought devoured the fruits 
 of each others labour : they concluded they 
 would let so unprofitable a spender starve. In 
 the end, to be short, (for the tale is notorious, 
 and as notorious that it was a tale,) with pun- 
 ishing the belly, they plagued themselves. This 
 applied by him, wrought such effect in the people, 
 as I never read, that ever words brought forth 
 but then, so suddaine and so good an alteration ; 
 for upon reasonable conditions, a perfect recon- 
 cilement ensued. The other is of Nathan the 
 Prophet, who when the holie David had so far 
 forsaken God, as to confirme adulterie with 
 murther: when hee was to doe the tenderest 
 office of a friende, in laying his owne shame be- 
 fore his eyes, sent by God to call againe so 
 chosen a servant : how doth he it ? but by tell- 
 ing of a man, whose beloved Lambe was un- 
 gratefullie taken from his bosome : the apply- 
 cation most divinely true, but the discourse it- 
 selfe, fayned : which made David, (I speake of 
 the second and instrumentall cause) as in a 
 glasse, to see his own filthines, as that heavenly 
 Psalme of mercie wel testifieth. 
 
 By these therefore examples and reasons, I 
 think it may be manifest, that the Poet with that 
 same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more 
 effectually, then any other Arte dooth, and so a 
 conclusion not unfitlie ensueth : that as vertue 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 is the most excellent resting place for all worldlie 
 learning to make his end of : so Poetrie, beeing 
 the most familiar to teach it, and most princelie 
 to move towards it, in the most excellent work, 
 is the most excellent workman. But I am 
 content, not onely to decipher him by his 
 workes, (although works in commendation or 
 disprayse, must ever holde an high authority,) 
 but more narrowly will examine his parts : so 
 that (as in a man) though altogether may carry 
 a presence ful of majestic and beautie, per- 
 chance in some one defectious peece, we may 
 find a blemish : now in his parts, kindes, or 
 Species, (as you list to terme them) it is to be 
 noted that some Poesies have coupled together 
 two or three kindes, as Tragicall and Comicall, 
 wher-upon is risen, the Tragi-comicall. Some 
 in the like manner have mingled Prose and 
 Verse, as Sanazzar and Boetius. Some have 
 mingled matters Heroicall and Pastorall. But 
 that commeth all to one in this question, for if 
 severed they be good, the conjunction cannot 
 be hurtfull. Therefore perchaunce forgetting 
 some, and leaving some as needlesse to be 
 remembred, it shall not be amisse in a worde 
 to cite the speciall kindes, to see what faults 
 may be found in the right use of them. 
 
 Is it then the Pastorall Poem which is mis- 
 liked? (for perchance, where the hedge is 
 lowest, they will soonest leape over.) Is the 
 poore pype disdained, which sometime out of 
 Melibeus mouth, can she we the miserie of 
 people, under hard Lords, or ravening Soul- 
 diours ? And again, by Titirus, what blessed- 
 43 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 nes is derived to them that lye lowest from the 
 goodnesse of them that sit highest? Some- 
 times, under the prettie tales of Wolves and 
 Sheepe, can include the whole considerations 
 of wrong dooing and patience. Sometimes 
 shew, that contention for trifles, can get but a 
 trifling victorie. Where perchaunce a man 
 may see, that even Alexander and Darius, 
 when they strave who should be Cocke of this 
 worlds dunghill, the benefit they got, was, 
 that the after-livers may say, 
 
 Haec memini et victum frustra contendere Thirsin : 
 Ex illo Coridon, Coridon est tempore nobis. 
 
 Or is it the lamenting Elegiack, which in a 
 kinde hart would moove rather pitty then 
 blame, who bewailes with the great Philosopher 
 Heraclitus, the weakenes of man-kind, and 
 the wretchednes of the world: who surely is 
 to be praysed, either for compassionate accom- 
 panying just causes of lamentation, or for 
 rightly paynting out how weake be the passions 
 of wofulnesse. Is it the bitter, but wholsome 
 lambick, which rubs the galled minde, in 
 making shame the trumpet of villanie, with 
 bolde and open crying out against naughtines ; 
 Or the Satirick, who 
 
 Omne vafer vitium, ridenti tangit amico? 
 
 Who sportingly never leaveth, until hee make 
 
 a man laugh at folly, and at length ashamed, 
 
 to laugh at himselfe : which he cannot avoyd, 
 
 without avoyding the follie. Who while 
 
 Circum praecordia ludit, 
 
 44 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 giveth us to feele, how many head-aches a 
 passionate life bringeth us to. How when all 
 is done, 
 
 Est ulubris animus si nos non deficit asquus ? 
 
 No perchance it is the Comick, whom naughtie 
 Play-makers and Stage-keepers, have justly 
 made odious. To the argument of abuse; I 
 will answer after. Onely thus much now is to 
 be said, that the Comedy is an imitation of 
 the common errors of our life, which he re- 
 presenteth, in the most ridiculous and scorne- 
 full sort that may be. So as it is impossible, 
 that any beholder can be content to be such 
 a one. 
 
 Now, as in Geometry, the oblique must be 
 knowne as wel as the right : and in Arith- 
 metick, the odde aswell as the even, so in 
 the actions of our life, who seeth not the 
 filthines of evil, wanteth a great foile to per- 
 ceive the beauty of vertue. This doth the 
 Comedy handle so in our private and domes- 
 tical matters, as with hearing it, we get as it 
 were an experience, what is to be looked for 
 of a nigardly Demea : of a crafty Danus : of 
 a flattering Gnato : of a vaine glorious Thraso : 
 and not onely to know what effects are to be 
 expected, but to know who be such, by the 
 signifying badge given them by the Comedian. 
 And little reason hath any man to say, that 
 men learne evill by seeing it so set out: sith 
 as I sayd before, there is no man living, but 
 by the force trueth hath in nature, no sooner 
 seeth these men play their parts, but wisheth 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 them in Pistrinum: although perchance the 
 sack of his owne faults, lye so behinde his back, 
 that he seeth not himselfe daunce the same 
 measure : whereto, yet nothing can more open 
 his eyes, then to finde his own actions con- 
 temptibly set forth. So that the right use of 
 Comedy will (I thinke) by no body be blamed, 
 and much lesse of the high and excellent 
 Tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, 
 and sheweth forth the Vicers, that are covered 
 with Tissue : that maketh Kinges feare to be 
 Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tirannicall 
 humors : that with slurring the affects of 
 admiration and commiseration, teacheth, the 
 uncertainety of this world, and upon how 
 weake foundations guilden roofes are builded. 
 That maketh us knowe, 
 
 Qui sceptra soevus, duro imperio regit, 
 Timet timentes, metus in authorem redit. 
 
 But how much it can moove, Plutarch 
 yeeldeth a notable testimonie, of the abhomin- 
 able Tyrant, Alexander Pheraus ; from whose 
 eyes, a Tragedy wel made, and represented, 
 drewe aboundance of teares : who without all 
 pitty, had murthered infinite nombers, and 
 ' some of his owne blood. So as he, that was 
 not ashamed to make matters for Tragedies, 
 yet coulde not resist the sweet violence of a 
 Tragedie. 
 
 And if it wrought no further good in him, 
 
 it was, that he in despight of himselfe, with- 
 
 drewe himselfe from harkening to that, which 
 
 might mollifie his hardened heart. But it is 
 
 4 6 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 not the Tragedy they doe mislike : For it were 
 too absurd to cast out so excellent a representa- 
 tion of whatsoever is most worthy to be learned. 
 Is it the Liricke that most displeaseth, who 
 with his tuned Lyre, and wel accorded voyce, 
 giveth praise, the reward of vertue, to vertuous 
 acts ? who gives morrall precepts, and naturall 
 Problemes, who sometimes rayseth up his 
 voice to the height of the heavens, in singing 
 the laudes of the immortall God. Certainly 
 I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I never 
 heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas^ that 
 I found not my heart mooved more then with 
 a Trumpet : and yet is it sung but by some 
 blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce, then 
 rude stile : which being so evill apparrelled in 
 the dust and cobwebbes of that uncivill age, 
 what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous 
 eloquence of Pindar? In Hungary I have 
 seene it the manner at all Feasts, and other such 
 meetings, to have songes of their Auncestours 
 valour; which that right Souldier-like Nation 
 thinck the chiefest kindlers of brave courage. 
 The incomparable Lacedemonians, did not 
 only carry that kinde of Musicke ever with 
 them to the field, but even at home, as such 
 songs were made, so were they all content to 
 bee the singers of them, when the lusty men 
 were to tell what they dyd, the olde men, what 
 they had done, and the young men what they 
 wold doe. And where a man may say, that 
 Pindar many times prayseth highly victories 
 of small moment, matters rather of sport then 
 vertue : as it may be aunswered, it was the 
 47 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 fault of the Poet, and not of the Poetry; so 
 indeede, the chiefe fault was in the tyme and 
 custome of the Greekes, who set those toyes 
 at so high a price, that Phillip of Macedon 
 reckoned a horse-race wonne at Olimpus^ 
 among hys three fearefull felicities. But as 
 the unimitable Pindar often did, so is that 
 kinde most capable and most fit, to awake 
 the thoughts from the sleep of idlenes, to 
 imbrace honorable enterprises. 
 
 There rests the Heroicall, whose very name 
 (I thinke) should daunt all back-biters ; for by 
 what conceit can a tongue be directed to speak 
 evill of that, which draweth with it, no lesse 
 Champions then Achilles, Cyrus t Aeneas, 
 Turnus, Tideus, and Rinaldo ? who doth not 
 onely teach and move to a truth, but teacheth 
 and mooveth to the most high and excellent 
 truth. Who maketh magnanimity and justice 
 shine, throughout all misty fearefulnes and 
 foggy desires. Who, if the saying of Plato 
 and Tullie bee true, that who could see 
 Vertue, would be wonderfully ravished with 
 the love of her beauty : this man sets her out 
 to make her more lovely in her holy day ap- 
 parell, to the eye of any that will daine, not 
 to disdaine, untill they understand. But if any 
 thing be already sayd in the defence of sweete 
 Poetry, all concurreth to the maintaining the 
 Heroicall, which is not onely a kinde, but the 
 best, and most accomplished kinde of Poetry. 
 For as the image of each action styrreth and 
 instructeth the mind, so the loftie image of such 
 Worthies, most inflameth the mind with desire 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 to be worthy, and informes with counsel how 
 to be worthy. Only let Aeneas be worne in the 
 tablet of your memory, how he governeth him- 
 selfe in the mine of his Country, in the preserv- 
 ing his old Father, and carrying away his re- 
 ligious ceremonies : in obeying the Gods com- 
 mandement to leave Dido, though not onely all 
 passionate kindenes, but even the humane con- 
 sideration of vertuous gratefulnes, would have 
 craved other of him. How in storms, howe in 
 sports, howe in warre, howe in peace, how a 
 fugitive, how victorious, how besiedged, how 
 besiedging, howe to strangers, howe to allyes, 
 how to enemies, howe to his owne : lastly, hov/ 
 in his inward selfe, and how in his outward 
 government. And I thinke, in a minde not pre- 
 judiced with a prejudicating humor, hee will be 
 found in excellencie fruitefull: yea, even as 
 Horace sayth 
 
 Melius Chrisippo et Crantore. 
 
 But truely I imagine, it falleth out with these 
 Poet- why ppers, as with some good women, 
 who often are sicke, but in fayth they cannot 
 tel where. So the name of Poetrie is odious 
 to them, but neither his cause, nor effects, 
 neither the sum that containes him, nor the 
 particularities descending from him, give any 
 fast handle to their carping disprayse. 
 r Sith then Poetrie is of all humane learning 
 the most auncient, and of most fatherly anti- 
 quitie, as from whence other learnings have 
 taken theyr beginnings : sith it is so uni- 
 versall, that no learned Nation dooth despise 
 i D 49 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 it, nor no barbarous Nation is without it : sith 
 both Roman and Greek gave divine names 
 unto it : the one of prophecying, the other of 
 making. And that indeede, that name of 
 making is fit for him ; considering, that 
 where as other Arts retaine themselves within 
 their subject, and receive as it were, their 
 beeing from it : the Poet onely, bringeth his 
 owne stuffe, and dooth not learne a conceite 
 out of a matter, but maketh matter for a 
 conceite : Sith neither his description, nor 
 his ende, contayneth any evill, the thing de- 
 scribed cannot be evill : Sith his effects be so 
 good as to teach goodnes and to delight the 
 learners: Sith therein, (namely in morrall 
 doctrine, the chiefs of all knowledges,) hee 
 dooth not onely farre passe the Historian, but 
 for instructing, is well nigh comparable to the 
 Philosopher : and for moving, leaves him be- 
 hind him : Sith the holy scripture (wherein 
 there is no uncleannes) hath whole parts in it 
 poeticall. And that even our Saviour Christ, 
 vouchsafed to use the flowers of it : Sith all his 
 kindes are not onlie in their united formes, but 
 in their severed dissections fully commendable, 
 I think, (and think I thinke rightly) the Lawrell 
 crowne appointed for tryumphing Captaines, 
 doth worthilie (of al other learnings) honor the 
 Poets tryumph. But because wee have eares 
 aswell as tongues, and that the lightest reasons 
 that may be, will seeme to weigh greatly, if no- 
 thing be put in the counter-balance : let us 
 heare, and aswell as wee can ponder, what 
 objections may bee made against this Arte, 
 so 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 which may be worthy, eyther of yeelding, or 
 answering. 
 
 First truely I note, not onely in these My so- 
 mousoi Poet-haters, but in all that kinde of 
 people, who seek a prayse by dispraysing 
 others, that they doe prodigally spend a 
 great many wandering wordes, in quips, and 
 scoffes; carping and taunting at each thing, 
 which by styrring the Spleene, may stay the 
 braine from a through beholding the worthines 
 of the subject. 
 
 Those kinde of objections, as they are full of 
 very idle easines, sith there is nothing of so 
 sacred a majestic, but that an itching tongue 
 may rubbe it selfe upon it : so deserve they no 
 other answer, but in steed of laughing at the 
 jest, to laugh at the jester. Wee know a play- 
 ing wit, can prayse the discretion of an Asse ; 
 the comfortablenes of being in debt, and the 
 jolly commoditie of beeing sick of the plague. 
 So of the contrary side, if we will turne Ovids 
 verse, 
 
 Ut lateat virtus, proximitate mali, 
 
 that good lye hid in neerenesse of the evill: 
 Agrippa will be as merry in showing the vanitie 
 of Science, as Erasmus was in commending of 
 follie. Neyther shall any man or matter escape 
 some touch of these smyling raylers. But for 
 Erasmus and Agrippa, they had another founda- 
 tion then the superficiall part would promise. 
 Mary, these other pleasant Fault-finders, who 
 wil correct the Verbe, before they understande 
 the Noune, and confute others knowledge 
 51 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 before they confirme theyr owne : I would 
 have them onely remember, that scoffing com- 
 meth not of wisedom. So as the best title in 
 true English they gette with their merriments, 
 is to be called good fooles : for so have our 
 grave Fore-fathers ever termed that humorous 
 kinde of jesters : but that which gyveth greatest 
 scope to their scorning humors, is ryming and 
 versing. It is already sayde (and as I think, 
 trulie sayde) it is not ryming and versing, that 
 maketh Poesie. One may bee a Poet without 
 versing, and a versifier without Poetry. But 
 yet, presuppose it were inseparable (as indeede 
 it seemeth Scaliger judgeth) truelie it were an 
 inseparable commendation. For if Oratio, next 
 to RatiO) Speech next to Reason, bee the great- 
 est gyft bestowed upon mortalitie : that can not 
 be praiselesse, which dooth most pollish that 
 blessing of speech, which considers each word, 
 not only (as a man may say) by his forcible 
 qualitie, but by his best measured quantitie, 
 carrying even in themselves, a Harmonic: 
 (without (perchaunce) Number, Measure, 
 Order, Proportion, be in our time growne 
 odious.) But lay a side the just prayse it 
 hath, by beeing the onely fit speech for 
 Musick, (Musick I say, the most divine 
 striker of the fences :) thus much is undoubt- 
 edly true, that if reading bee foolish, without 
 remembring, memorie being the onely treasurer 
 of knowled[g]e, those words which are fittest 
 for memory, are likewise most convenient for 
 knowledge. 
 
 Now, that Verse farre exceedeth Prose in the 
 52 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 knitting up of the memory, the reason is mani- 
 fest. The words, (besides theyr delight which 
 hath a great affinitie to memory, ) beeing so set, 
 as one word cannot be lost, but the whole worke 
 failes : which accuseth it selfe, calleth the re- 
 membrance backe to it selfe, and so most 
 strongly confirmeth it ; besides, one word so 
 as it were begetting another, as be it in ryme 
 or measured verse, by the former a man shall 
 have a neere gesse to the follower : lastly, even 
 they that have taught the Art of memory, have 
 shewed nothing so apt for it, as a certaine roome 
 devided into many places well and throughly 
 knowne. Now, that hath the verse in effect 
 perfectly : every word having his naturall 
 seate, which seate, must needes make the 
 words remembred. But what needeth more 
 in a thing so knowne to all men ? who is it that 
 ever was a scholler, that doth not carry away 
 some verses of Virgill, Horace, or Cato, which 
 n his youth he learned, and even to his old age 
 serve him for howrely lessons? but the fitnes 
 it hath for memory, is notably proved by all de- 
 livery of Arts : wherein for the most part, from 
 Grammer, to Logick, Mathematick, Phisick, 
 and the rest, the rules chiefely necessary to 
 bee borne away, are compiled in verses. So 
 that, verse being in it selfe sweete and orderly, 
 and beeing best for memory, the onely handle 
 of knowledge, it must be in jest that any man 
 can speake against it, Nowe then goe wee to 
 the most important imputations laid to the 
 poore Poets, for ought I can yet learne, they 
 are these, first, that there beeing many other 
 53 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 more fruitefull knowledges, a man might better 
 spend his tyme in them, then in this. 
 Secondly, that it is the mother of lyes. 
 Thirdly, that it is the Nurse of abuse, infect- 
 ing us with many pestilent desires: with a 
 Syrens sweetnes, drawing the mind to the 
 Serpents tayle of sinfull fancy. And heerein 
 especially, Comedies give the largest field to 
 erre, as Chaucer sayth : howe both in other 
 Nations and in ours, before Poets did soften 
 us, we were full of courage, given to 
 martiall exercises ; the pillers of manlyke 
 liberty, and not lulled a sleepe in shady idle- 
 nes with Poets pastimes. And lastly, and 
 chiefely, they cry out with an open mouth, as 
 if they out shot Robin Hood, that Plato 
 banished them out of hys Common - wealth. 
 Truely, this is much, if there be much truth 
 in it. First to the first : that a man might 
 better spend his time, is a reason indeede : but 
 it doth (as they say) but Petere principium : 
 for if it be as I affirme, that rio learning is so 
 good, as that which teacheth and mooveth to 
 vertue; and that none can both teach and 
 move thereto so much as Poetry : then is the 
 conclusion manifest, that Incke and Paper 
 cannot be to a more profitable purpose em- 
 ployed. And certainly, though a man should 
 graunt their first assumption, it should followe 
 (me thinkes) very unwillingly, that good is not 
 good, because better is better. But I still and 
 utterly denye, that there is sprong out of 
 earth a more fruitefull knowledge. To the 
 second therefore, that they should be the 
 54 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 principall lyars ; I aunswere paradoxically, but 
 truely, I thinke truely ; that of all Writers under 
 the sunne, the Poet is the least lier ; and 
 though he would, as a Poet can scarcely be 
 a Iyer, the Astronomer, with his cosen the 
 Geometrician, can hardly escape, when they 
 take upon them to measure the height of the 
 starres. 
 
 How often, thinke you, doe the Phisitians lye, 
 when they aver things, good for sicknesses, 
 which afterwards send Charon a great nomber 
 of soules drown[e]d in a potion before they 
 come to his Ferry. And no lesse of the rest, 
 which take upon them to affirme. Now, for 
 the Poet, he nothing affirmes, and therefore 
 never lyeth. For, as I take it, to lye, is to 
 affirme that to be true which is false. So as 
 the other Artists, and especially the Historian, 
 affirming many things, can in the cloudy know- 
 ledge of mankinde, hardly escape from many 
 lyes. But the Poet (as I sayd before) never 
 affirmeth. The Poet never maketh any circles 
 about your imagination, to conjure you to 
 beleeve for true what he writes. Hee citeth 
 not authorities of other Histories, but even for 
 hys entry, calleth the sweete Muses to inspire 
 into him a good invention : in troth, not 
 labouring to tell you what is, or is not, but 
 what should or should not be : and therefore, 
 though he recount things not true, yet because 
 hee telleth them not for true, he lyeth not, 
 without we will say, that Nathan, lyed in his 
 speech, before alledged to David, Which as 
 a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I 
 55 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 none so simple would say, that Esope lyed in 
 the tales of his beasts : for who thinks that 
 Esope writ it for actually true, were well worthy 
 to have his name c[h]ronicled among the beastes 
 hee writeth of. 
 
 What childe is there, that comming to a 
 Play, and seeing Thebes written in great Letters 
 upon an olde doore, doth beleeve that it is Thebes? 
 If then, a man can arive, at that childs age, to 
 know that the Poets persons and dooings, are 
 but pictures what should be, and not stories 
 what have beene, they will never give the lye, 
 to things not affirmatively, but allegorically, 
 and figurativelie written. And therefore, as in 
 Historic, looking for trueth, they goe away full 
 fraught with falsehood : so in Poesie, looking 
 for fiction, they shal use the narration, but as 
 an imaginative groundplot of a profitable 
 invention. 
 
 But heereto is replyed, that the Poets gyve 
 names to men they write of, which argueth a 
 conceite of an actuall truth, and so, not being 
 true, prooves a falsehood. And doth the 
 Lawyer lye then, when under the names of 
 John a stile and John a noakes, hee puts his 
 case? But that is easily answered. Theyr 
 naming of men, is but to make theyr picture 
 the more lively, and not to builde any historic : 
 paynting men, they cannot leave men name- 
 lesse. We see we cannot play at Chesse, but 
 that wee must give names to our Chesse-men ; 
 and yet mee thinks, hee were a very partiall 
 Champion of truth, that would say we lyed, for 
 giving a peece of wood, the reverend title of a 
 56 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 Bishop. The Poet nameth Cyrus or Aeneas, 
 no other way, then to shewe, what men of 
 theyr fames, fortunes, and estates, should 
 doe. 
 
 Their third is, how much it abusethmenswit, 
 trayning it to wanton sinfulnes, and lustfull 
 love : for indeed that is the principall, if not 
 the onely abuse I can heare alledged. They 
 say, the Comedies rather teach, then reprehend, 
 amorous conceits. They say, the Lirick, is 
 larded with passionate Sonnets. The Elegiack, 
 weepes the want of his mistresse. And that 
 even to the Heroical, Cupid hath ambitiously 
 climed. Alas Love, I would, thou couldest as 
 well defende thy selfe, as thou canst offende 
 others. I would those, on whom thou doost 
 attend, could eyther put thee away, or yeelde 
 good reason, why they keepe thee. But grant 
 love of beautie, to be a beastlie fault, (although 
 it be very hard, sith onely man, and no beast, 
 hath thatgyft, to discerne beauty.) Grant, that 
 lovely name of Love, to deserve all hatefull 
 reproches : (although even some of my 
 Maisters the Phylosophers, spent a good 
 deale of theyr Lamp-oyle, in setting foorth 
 the excellencie of it.) Grant, I say, what so- 
 ever they wil have granted ; that not onely 
 love, but lust, but vanitie, but, (if they list) 
 scurrilitie, possesseth many leaves of the Poets 
 bookes : yet thinke I, when this is granted, they 
 will finde, theyr sentence may with good man- 
 ners, put the last words^foremost : and not say, 
 that Poetrie abuseth mans wit, but that, mans 
 wit abuseth Poetrie. 
 
 57 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 For I will not denie, but that mans wit 
 may make Poesie, (which should be Eikastike, 
 which some learned have defined, figuring 
 foorth good things, ) to be Phantastike : which 
 doth contrariwise, infect the fancie with un- 
 worthy objects. As the Painter, that shoulde 
 give to the eye, eyther some excellent per- 
 spective, or some fine picture, fit for building 
 or fortification : or contayning in it some 
 notable example, as Abraham, sacrificing his 
 Sonne Isaack, Judith killing Holof ernes, David 
 fighting with Goliah, may leave those, and please 
 an ill-pleased eye, with wanton shewes of better 
 hidden matters. But what, shall the abuse of 
 a thing, make the right use odious? Nay 
 truely, though I yeeld, that Poesie may not 
 onely be abused, but that beeing abused, by 
 the reason of his sweete charming force, it can 
 doe more hurt than any other Armie of words : 
 yet shall it be so far from concluding, that the 
 abuse, should give reproch to the abused, that 
 contrariwise it is a good reason, that what- 
 soever being abused, dooth most harme, 
 beeing rightly used : (and upon the right use 
 each thing conceiveth his title) doth most 
 good. 
 
 Doe wee not see the skill of Phisick, (the best 
 rampire to our often-assaulted bodies) beeing 
 abused, teach poyson the most violent 
 destroyer? Dooth not knowledge of Law, 
 whose end is, to even and right all things 
 being abused, grow the crooked fosterer of 
 horrible injuries? Doth not (to goe to the 
 highest) Gods word abused, breed heresie? 
 53 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 and his Name abused, become blasphemie? 
 Truely, a needle cannot doe much hurt, and as 
 truely, (with leave of Ladies be it spoken) it 
 cannot doe much good. With a sword, thou 
 maist kill thy Father, and with a sword thou 
 maist defende thy Prince and Country. So 
 that, as in their calling Poets the Fathers of 
 lyes, they say nothing : so in this theyr 
 argument of abuse, they proove the com- 
 mendation. 
 
 They alledge heere-with, that before Poets 
 beganne to be in price, our Nation, hath set 
 their harts delight upon action, and not upon 
 imagination : rather doing things worthy to 
 bee written, then writing things fitte to be 
 done. What that before tyme was, I thinke 
 scarcely Sphinx can tell : Sith no memory is so 
 auncient, that hath the precedence of Poetrie. 
 And certaine it is, that in our plainest home- 
 lines, yet never was the Albion Nation without 
 Poetrie. Mary, thys argument, though it bee 
 leaveld against Poetrie, yet is it indeed, a 
 chaine-shot against all learning, or bookishnes, 
 as they commonly tearme it. Of such minde 
 were certaine Goethes, of whom it is written, 
 that having in the spoile of a famous Citie, 
 taken a fayre librarie : one hangman (bee like 
 fitte to execute the fruites of their wits) who 
 had murthered a great number of bodies, 
 would have set fire on it : no sayde another, 
 very gravely, take heede what you doe, for 
 whyle they are busie about these toyes, wee shall 
 with more leysure conquer their Countries. 
 
 This indeede is the ordinary doctrine of 
 59 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 ignorance, and many wordes sometymes I have 
 heard spent in it : but because this reason is 
 generally against all learning, aswell as Poetrie ; 
 or rather, all learning but Poetry : because it 
 were too large a digression, to handle, or at 
 least, to superfluous : (sith it is manifest, that 
 all government of action, is to be gotten by 
 knowledg, and knowledge best, by gathering 
 many knowledges, which is, reading,) I onely 
 with Horace, to him that is of that opinion, 
 
 lubeo stultum esse libenter : 
 
 for as for Poetrie it selfe, it is the freest from 
 thys objection. For Poetrie is the companion 
 of the Campes. 
 
 I dare undertake, Orlando Furioso, or honest 
 King Arthur, will never displease a Souldier : 
 but the quiddity of Ens, and Prima materia, 
 will hardely agree with a Corslet : and therefore, 
 as I said in the beginning, even Turks and 
 Tartares are delighted with Poets. Homer a 
 Greek, florished, before Greece florished. And 
 if to a slight conjecture, a conjecture may be 
 opposed : truly it may seeme, that as by him, 
 their learned men, tooke almost their first light 
 of knowledge, so their active men, received 
 their first notions of courage. Onlie Alexanders 
 example may serve, who by Plutarch is ac- 
 counted of such vertue, that Fortune was not 
 his guide, but his foote-stoole : whose acts 
 speake for him, though Plutarch did not : 
 indeede, the Phoenix of warlike Princes. This 
 Alexander, left his Schoolemaister, living 
 Aristotle, behindehim, but tooke deade Homer 
 60 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 with him : he put the Philosopher Calisthenes 
 to death, for his seeming philosophical!, indeed 
 mutinous stubburnnes. But the chiefe thing 
 he ever was heard to wish for, was, that Homer 
 had been alive. He well found he received 
 more braverie of minde, bye the patterne of 
 Achilles, then by hearing the definition of 
 Fortitude : and therefore, if Cato misliked 
 Fulvius, for carying Ennius with him to the 
 fielde, it may be aunswered, that if Cato mis- 
 liked it, the noble Fulvius liked it, or els he 
 had not doone it : for it was not the excellent 
 Cato UticensiS) (whose authority I would much 
 more have reverenced,) but it was the former : 
 in truth, a bitter punisher of faults, but else, a 
 man that had never wel sacrificed to the Graces. 
 Hee misliked and cryed out upon all Greeke 
 learning, and yet being 80. yeeres olde, began 
 to learne it. Be-like, fearing that Pluto under- 
 stood not Latine. Indeede, the Romaine 
 lawes allowed, no person to be carried to the 
 warres, but hee that was in the Souldiers role : 
 and therefore, though Cato misliked his un- 
 mustered person, hee misliked not his worke. 
 And if hee had, Scifio Nasica judged by 
 common consent, the best Romaine, loved him. 
 Both the other Scipio Brothers, who had by 
 their vertues no lesse surnames, then of Asia, 
 and A Prick, so loved him, that they caused his 
 body to be buried in their Sepulcher. So as 
 Cato, his authoritie being but against his person, 
 and that aunswered, with so farre greater then 
 himselfe, is heerein of no validitie. But now 
 indeede my burthen is great; now Plato his 
 6x 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 name is layde upon mee, whom I must confesse, 
 of all Philosophers, I have ever esteemed most 
 worthy of reverence, and with great reason : 
 Sith of all Philosophers, he is the most poeticall. 
 Yet if he will defile the Fountaine, out of which 
 his flowing streames have proceeded, let us 
 boldly examine with what reasons hee did it. 
 First truly, a man might maliciously object, 
 that Plato being a Philosopher was a naturall 
 enemie of Poets : for indeede, after the Philo- 
 sophers, had picked out of the sweete misteries 
 of Poetrie, the right discerning true points of 
 knowledge, they forthwith putting it in method, 
 and making a Schoole-arte of that which the 
 Poets did onely teach, by a divine delight- 
 fulnes, beginning to spurne at their guides, 
 like ungratefull Prentises, were not content to 
 set up shops for themselves, but fought by all 
 meanes to discredit their Maisters. Which by 
 the force of delight being barred them, the 
 lesse they could overthrow them, the more 
 they hated them. For indeede, they found 
 for Homer, seaven Cities strove, who should 
 have him for their Citizen : where many Citties 
 banished Philosophers, as not fitte members to 
 live among them. For onely repeating certaine 
 of Euripides verses, many Athenians had their 
 lyves saved of the Siracusians : when the 
 Athenians themselves, thought many Philo- 
 sophers, unwoorthie to live. 
 
 Certaine Poets, as Simonides, and Pindams 
 
 had so prevailed with Hiero the first, that of a 
 
 Tirant they made him a just King, where Plato 
 
 could do so little with Dionisius, that he him- 
 
 63 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 selfe, of a Philosopher, was made a slave. But 
 who should doe thus, I confesse, should requite 
 the objections made against Poets, with like 
 cavillation against Philosophers, as likewise one 
 should doe, that should bid one read Phcedrus, 
 or Symposium in Plato, or the discourse of love 
 in Plutarch^ and see whether any Poet doe 
 authorize abhominable filthines, as they doe. 
 Againe, a man might aske out of what Common- 
 wealth Plato did banish them ? insooth, thence 
 where he himselfe alloweth communitie of 
 women: So as belike, this banishment grewe 
 not for effeminate wantonnes, sith little should 
 poeticall Sonnets be hurtfull, when a man 
 might have what woman he listed. But I 
 honor philosophicall instructions, and blesse 
 the wits which bred them : so as they be not 
 abused, which is likewise stretched to Poetrie. 
 
 S. Paule himselfe, (who yet for the credite of 
 Poets) alledgeth twise two Poets, and one of 
 them by the name of a Prophet, setteth a 
 watch- word upon Philosophy, indeede upon the 
 abuse. So dooth Plato, upon the abuse, not 
 upon Poetrie. Plato found fault, that the 
 Poets of his time, filled the worlde, with wrong 
 opinions of the Gods, making light tales of 
 that unspotted essence : and therefore, would 
 not have the youth depraved with such opinions. 
 Heerin may much be said, let this suffice : the 
 Poets did not induce such opinions, but dyd 
 imitate those opinions already induced. For 
 all the Greek stories can well testifie, that the 
 very religion of that time, stoode upon many, 
 and many-fashioned Gods, not taught so by 
 63 
 
The Prelude to Poetry, 
 
 the Poets, but followed, according to their 
 nature of imitation. Who list, may reade in 
 Plutarch, the discourses of his and Osiris, of 
 the cause why Oracles ceased, of the divine 
 providence : and see, whether the Theologie 
 of that nation, stood not upon such dreames, 
 which the Poets indeed supersticiously ob- 
 served, and truly, (sith they had not the light 
 of Christ,) did much better in it then the 
 Philosophers, who shaking off superstition, 
 brought in Atheisme. Plato therefore, (whose 
 authoritie I had much rather justly conster, 
 then unjustly resist, ) meant not in general of 
 Poets, in those words of which Julius Scaliger 
 saith Qua authoritate, barbari quidam, atque 
 hispidi, abuti velint, ad Poetas 6 refublica 
 exigendos : but only meant, to drive out those 
 wrong opinions of the Deitie (whereof now, 
 without further law, Christianity hath taken 
 away all the hurtful beliefe.) perchance (as he 
 thought) norished by the then esteemed Poets. 
 And a man need goe no further then to Plato 
 himselfe, to know his meaning : who in his 
 Dialogue called lon^ giveth high, and rightly 
 divine commendation to Poetrie. So as Plato, 
 banishing the abuse, not the thing, not banish- 
 ing it, but giving due honor unto it, shall be 
 our Patron, and not our adversarie. For in- 
 deed I had much rather, (sith truly I may doe 
 it) shew theyr mistaking of Plato, (under whose 
 Lyons skin they would make an Asse-like 
 braying against Poesie,) then goe about to 
 over-throw his authority, whom the wiser a man 
 is, the more just cause he shall find to have in 
 64 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 admiration : especially, sith he attributeth unto 
 Poesie, more then my selfe doe ; namely, to be 
 a very inspiring of a divine force, farre above 
 mans wit ; as in the aforenamed Dialogue is 
 apparent. 
 
 Of the other side, who wold shew the honors, 
 have been by the best sort of judgements 
 granted them, a whole Sea of examples woulde 
 present themselves. Alexanders, Casars, 
 Scipios, al favorers of Poets. Ldius> called 
 the Romane Socrates, himselfe a Poet: so, as 
 part of Heautontimorumenon in Terence, was 
 supposed to be made by him. And even the 
 Greek Socrates, whom Apollo confirmed to be the 
 onely wise man, is sayde to have spent part of 
 his old tyme, in putting Esops fables into verses. 
 And therefore, full evill should it become his 
 scholler Plato, to put such words in his Maisters 
 mouth, against Poets. But what need more? 
 Aristotle writes the Arte of Poesie : and why if it 
 should not be written ? Plutarch teacheth the 
 use to be gathered of them, and how if they 
 should not be read ? And who reades Plutarchs 
 eyther historic or philosophy, shall finde, hee 
 trymmeth both theyr garments, with gards of 
 Poesie. But I list not to defend Poesie, with 
 the helpe of her underling, Historiography. 
 Let it suffise, that it is a fit soyle for prayse to 
 dwell upon : and what dispraise may set upon 
 it, is eyther easily over-come, or transformed 
 into just commendation. ' So that, sith the 
 excellencies of it, may be so easily, and so 
 justly confirmed, and the low-creeping objec- 
 tions, so soone troden downe ; it not being an 
 
 E 65 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Art of lyes, but of true doctrine : not of effem- 
 inatenes, but of notable stirring of courage : 
 not of abusing mans witte, but of strengthning 
 mans wit: not banished, but honored by Plato : 
 let us rather plant more Laurels, for to engar- 
 land our Poets heads, (which honor of beeing 
 laureat, as besides them, onely tryumphant 
 Captaines weare, is a sufficient authority, to 
 shewe the price they ought to be had in, ) then 
 suffer the ill-favouring breath of such wrong- 
 speakers, once to blowe upon the cleere springs 
 of Poesie. 
 
 But sith I have runne so long a careere in 
 this matter, me thinks, before I give my penne 
 afullestop, it shal be but a little more lost time, 
 to inquire, why England, (the Mother of ex- 
 cellent mindes,) shoulde bee growne so hard a 
 step-mother to Poets, who certainly in wit ought 
 to passe all other : sith all onely proceedeth from 
 their wit, being indeede makers of themselves, 
 not takers of others. How can I but exclaime, 
 
 Musa mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso. 
 
 Sweete Poesie, that hath aunciently had Kings, 
 Emperors, Senators, great Captaines, such, as 
 besides a thousand others, David, Adrian, 
 Sophocles^ Germanicus t not onely to favour 
 Poets, but to be Poets. And of our neerer 
 times, can present for her Patrons, a Robert., 
 king of Sicil, the great king Francis of France, 
 King James of Scotland. Such Cardinals as 
 Bembus, and Bibiena. Such famous Preachers 
 and Teachers, as Beza and Melancthon. So 
 learned Philosophers, as Fracastorius and 
 66 
 
Sir Philip Sidney, 
 
 Scaliger. So great Orators, as Pontanus and 
 Muretus. So piercing wits, as George Buch- 
 anan. So grave Counsellors, as besides many, 
 but before all, that Hospitall of Fraunce : then 
 whom, (I thinke) that Realme never brought 
 forth a more accomplished judgement : more 
 firmely builded upon vertue. I say these, with 
 numbers of others, not onely to read others 
 Poesies, but to poetise for others reading, that 
 Poesie thus embraced in all other places, should 
 onely finde in our time, a had welcome in 
 England, I thinke the very earth lamenteth it, 
 and therefore decketh our Soyle with fewer 
 Laurels then it was accustomed. For heerto- 
 fore, Poets have in England also florished. 
 And which is to be noted, even in those times, 
 when the trumpet of Mars did sounde loudest. 
 And now, that an overfaint quietnes should 
 seeme to strew the house for Poets, they are 
 almost in as good reputation, as the Mounti- 
 bancks at Venice. Truly even that, as of the 
 one side, it giveth great praise to Poesie, which 
 like Venus, (but to better purpose) hath rather 
 be troubled in the net with Mars, then enjoy 
 the homelie quiet of Vulcan: so serves it for a 
 peece of reason, why they are lesse gratefull to 
 idle England, which no we can scarce endure the 
 payne of a pen. Upon this, necessarily follow- 
 eth, that base men, with servile wits undertake 
 it : who think it inough, if they can be rewarded 
 of the Printer. And so as Epaminondas is sayd, 
 with the honor of his vertue, to have made an 
 office, by his exercising it, which before was 
 contemptible, to become highly respected : so 
 67 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 these, no more but setting their names to 
 it, by their owne disgracefulnes, disgrace the 
 most gracefull Poesie. For now, as if all the 
 Muses were gotte with childe, to bring foorth 
 bastard Poets, without any commission, they 
 doe poste over the banckes of Helicon, tyll they 
 make the readers more weary then Post-horses: 
 while in the mean tyme, they 
 
 Queis meliore Into sinxit praecordia Titan, 
 
 are better content, to suppresse the out-flowing 
 of their wit, then by publishing them, to bee 
 accounted Knights of the same order. But I, 
 that before ever I durst aspire unto the dignitie, 
 am admitted into the company of the Paper- 
 blurers, doe finde the very true cause of our 
 wanting estimation, is want of desert : taking 
 upon us to be Poets, in despight of Pallas. 
 No we, wherein we want desert, were a thanks- 
 worthy labour to expresse: but if I knew, I 
 should have mended my selfe. But I, as I 
 never desired the title, so have I neglected the 
 meanes to come by it. Onely over-mastred by 
 some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto 
 them. Mary, they that delight in Poesie it selfe, 
 should seeke to knowe what they doe, and how 
 they doe ; and especially, looke themselves in 
 an unflattering Glasse of reason, if they bee 
 inclinable unto it. For Poesie, must not be 
 drawne by the eares, it must bee gently led, or 
 rather, it must lead. Which was partly the 
 cause, that made the auncient -learned affirme, 
 it was a divine gift, and no humaine skill : sith 
 all other knowledges, lie ready for any that hath 
 68 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 strength of witte : A Poet, no Industrie can 
 make, if his owne Genius bee not carried unto 
 it : and therefore is it an old Proverbe, Orator 
 fit; Poeta nascitur. Yet confesse I alwayes, that 
 as the firtilest ground must bee manured, so 
 must the highest flying wit, have a Dedalus to 
 guide him. That Dedalus, they say, both in 
 this, and in other, hath three wings, to beare 
 it selfe up into the ayre of due commendation : 
 that is, Arte, Imitation, and Exercise. But 
 these, neyther artificiall rules, nor imitative 
 patternes, we much cumber our selves withall. 
 Exercise indeede wee doe, but that, very fore- 
 backwardly : for where we should exercise to 
 know, wee exercise as having knowne : and so 
 is oure braine delivered of much matter, which 
 never was begotten by knowledge. For, there 
 being two principal parts, matter to be expressed 
 by \vordes, and words to expresse the matter, in 
 neyther, wee use Arte, or Imitation, rightly. 
 Our matter is Quodlibit indeed, though wrongly 
 perfourming Ovids verse. 
 
 Quicquid conabar dicere versus erit :) 
 
 never marshalling it into an assured rancke, 
 that almost the readers cannot tell where to 
 finde themselves. 
 
 Chaucer ', undoubtedly did excellently in hys 
 Troylus and Cresseid; of whom, truly I know 
 not, whether to mervaile more, either that he in 
 that mistie time, could see so clearely, or that 
 wee in this cleare age, walke so stumblingly 
 after him. Yet had he great wants, fitte to be 
 forgiven, in so reverent antiquity. I account 
 69 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 the Mirrour of Magistrates, meetely furnished 
 of beautiful parts ; and in the Earle of Surries 
 Liricks, many things tasting of a noble birth, 
 and worthy of a noble minde. The Sheapheards 
 /Calender, hath much Poetrie in his Eglogues : 
 indeede worthy the reading if I be not deceived. 
 That same framing of his stile, to an old 
 nistick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther 
 Theocritus in Greeke, Virgin in Latine, nor 
 Sanazar in Italian, did affect it. Besides these, 
 doe I not remember to have seene but fewe, 
 (to speake boldely) printed, that have poeticall 
 sinnewes in them : for proofe whereof, let but 
 most of the verses bee put in Prose, and then 
 aske the meaning ; and it will be found, that 
 one verse did but beget another, without 
 ordering at the first, what should be at the 
 last : which becomes a confused masse of 
 words, with a tingling sound of ryme, barely 
 accompanied with reason. 
 
 Our Tragedies, and Comedies, (not with- 
 out cause cried out against,) observing rules, 
 neyther of honest civilitie, nor of skilfull Poetrie, 
 excepting Gorboduck, (againe, I say, of those 
 that I have seen,) which notwithstanding, as 
 it is full of stately speeches, and well founding 
 Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his 
 stile, and as full of notable moralitie, which it 
 doth most delightfully teach ; and so obtayne 
 the very end of Poesie: yet in troth it is 
 very defectious in the circumstaunces ; which 
 greeveth mee, because it might not remaine 
 as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it 
 is faulty both in place, and time, the two 
 70 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 necessary companions of all corporall actions. 
 For where the stage should alwaies represent 
 but one place, and the uttermost time pre- 
 supposed in it, should be, both by Aristotles 
 precept, and common reason, but one day: 
 there is both many dayes, and many places, 
 inartificially imagined. But if it be so in 
 Gorboduck, how much more in al the rest? 
 where you shal have Asia of the one side, 
 and Affrick of the other, and so many other 
 under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he 
 commeth in, must ever begin with telling 
 where he is: or els, the tale wil not be con- 
 ceived. Now ye shal have three Ladies, walke 
 to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve 
 the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we 
 heare newes.of shipwracke in the same place, 
 and then wee are to blame, if we accept it not 
 for a Rock. 
 
 Upon the backe of that, comes out a hidious 
 Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the 
 miserable beholders, are bounde to take it for 
 a Cave. While in the mean-time, two Armies 
 flye in, represented with foure swords and 
 bucklers, and then what harde heart will not 
 receive it for a pitched fielde? Now, of time 
 they are much more liberall, for ordinary it 
 is that two young Princes fall in love. After 
 many traverces, she is got with childe, delivered 
 of a faire boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falls 
 in love, and is ready to get another child, 
 and all this in two hours space : which how 
 absurd it is in sence, even sence may imagine, 
 and Arte hath taught, and all auncient ex- 
 7* 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 amples justified : and at this day, the ordinary 
 Players in Italic, vvil not erre in. Yet wil 
 some bring in an example of JSunucAus in 
 Terence, that containeth matter of two dayes, 
 yet far short of twenty yeeres. True it is, and 
 so was it to be playd in two daies, and so 
 fitted to the time it set forth. And though 
 Plautus hath in one place done amisse, let us 
 hit with him, and not misse with him. But 
 they wil say, how then shal we set forth a 
 story, which containeth both many places, and 
 many times? And doe they not knowe, that 
 a Tragedie is tied to the lawes of Poesie, and 
 not of Historic ? not bound to follow the storie, 
 but having liberty, either to faine a quite newe 
 matter, or to frame the history, to the most 
 tragicall conveniencie. Againe, many things 
 may be told, which cannot be shewed, if they 
 knowe the difference betwixt reporting and 
 representing. As for example, I may speake, 
 (though I am heere) of Peru, and in speech, 
 digresse from that, to the description of 
 Calicut: but in action, I cannot represent 
 it without Pacolets horse : and so was the 
 manner the Auncients tooke, by some Nuncius, 
 to recount thinges done in former time, or 
 other place. Lastly, if they wil represent an 
 history, they must not (as Horace saith) beginne 
 Abovo: but they must come to the principall 
 poynt of that one action, which they wil re- 
 present. By example this wil be best expressed. 
 I have a story of young Polidorus, delivered 
 for safeties sake, with great riches, by his 
 Father Priamus to Polimnestor king of Thrace, 
 73 
 
Sir Philip Sidney, 
 
 In the Troyan war time : Hee after some 
 yeeres, hearing the over-throwe of Priamus, 
 for to make the treasure his owne, murthereth 
 the child : the body of the child is taken up [by] 
 Hecuba: shee the same day, findeth a slight 
 to bee revenged most cruelly of the Tyrant : 
 where nowe would one of our Tragedy writers 
 begin, but with the delivery of the childe? 
 Then should he sayle over into Thrace, and 
 so spend I know not how many yeeres, and 
 travaile numbers of places. But where dooth 
 Euripides'? Even with the finding of the 
 body, leaving the rest to be tolde by the spirit 
 of Polidorus. This need no further to be 
 inlarged, the dullest wit may conceive it. But 
 besides these grosse absurdities, how all theyr 
 Playes be neither right Tragedies, nor right 
 Comedies : mingling Kings and Clownes, not 
 because the matter so carrieth it: but thrust 
 in Clownes by head and shoulders, to play 
 a part in majesticall matters, with neither 
 decencie, nor discretion. So as neither the 
 admiration and commiseration, nor the right 
 sportfulnes, is by their mungrell Tragy-comedie 
 obtained. I know Apuleius did some- what 
 so, but that is a thing recounted with space 
 of time, not represented in one moment : and 
 I knowe, the Auncients have one or two 
 examples of Tragy-comedies, as Plautus hath 
 Amphitrio : But if we marke them well, we 
 shall find, that they never, or very daintily, 
 match Horn-pypes and Funeralls. So falleth 
 it out, that having indeed no right Comedy, in 
 that comicall part of our Tragedy, we have 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 nothing but scurrility, unwoorthy of any chast 
 eares : or some extreame shew of doltishnes, 
 indeed fit to lift up a loude laughter, and 
 nothing els : where the whole tract of a 
 Comedy, shoulde be full of delight, as the 
 Tragedy shoulde be still maintained, in a 
 well raised admiration. But our Comedians, 
 thinke there is no delight without laughter, 
 which is very wrong, for though laughter may 
 come with delight, yet commeth it not of 
 delight : as though delight should be the 
 cause of laughter, but well may one thing 
 breed both together : nay, rather in themselves, 
 they have as it were, a kind of contrarietie : 
 for delight we scarcely doe, but in things that 
 have a conveniencie to our selves, or to the 
 general nature : laughter, almost ever commeth, 
 of things most disproportioned to our selves, 
 and nature. Delight hath a joy in it, either 
 permanent, or present. Laughter, hath onely 
 n. scornful tickling. 
 
 For example, we are ravished with delight 
 to see a faire woman, and yet are far from 
 being moved to laughter. We laugh at de- 
 formed creatures, wherein certainely we cannot 
 delight. We delight in good chaunces, we 
 laugh at mischaunces ; we delight to heare 
 the happines of our friends, or Country ; at 
 which he were worthy to be laughed at, that 
 would laugh ; wee shall contrarily laugh some- 
 times, to finde a matter quite mistaken, and 
 goe downe the hill agaynst the byas, in the 
 mouth of some such men, as for the respect 
 of them, one shal be hartely sorry, yet he 
 74 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 cannot chuse but laugh ; and so is rather 
 pained, then delighted with laughter. Yet 
 deny I not, but that they may goe well to- 
 gether, for as in Alexanders picture well set 
 out, wee delight without laughter, and in 
 twenty mad Anticks we laugh without delight : 
 so in Hercules, painted with his great beard, 
 and furious countenance, in womans attire, 
 spinning at Omphales commaundement, it 
 breedeth both delight and laughter. For the 
 representing of so strange a power in love, 
 procureth delight : and the scornefulnes of 
 the action, stirreth laughter. But I speake 
 to this purpose, that all the end of the comicall 
 part, bee not upon such scornefull matters, as 
 stirreth laughter onely : but mixt with it, that 
 delightful teaching which is the end of Poesie. 
 And the great fault even in that point of laughter, 
 and forbidden plainely by Aristotle, is, that 
 they styrre laughter in sinfull things ; which are 
 rather execrable then ridiculous: or in miser-' 
 able, which are rather to be pittied than scorned. 
 For what is it to make folkes gape at a wretched 
 Begger, or a beggerly Clowne ? or against lawe 
 of hospitality, to jest at straungers, because 
 they speake not English so well as wee doe? 
 what do we learne, sith it is certaine 
 
 (Nil habet infcelix paupertas durius in se,) 
 Quam quod ridicules homines facit. 
 
 But rather a busy loving Courtier, a hartles 
 threatening Thraso. A selfe- wise -seeming 
 schoolemaster. A awry-transformed Traveller. 
 These, if we sawe walke in stage names, which 
 
 75 
 
The Prelude to Poetry, 
 
 wee play naturally, therein were delightfull 
 laughter, and teaching delightfulnes : as in the 
 other, the Tragedies of Buchanan^ doe justly 
 bring forth a divine admiration. But I have 
 lavished out too many wordes of this play 
 matter. I doe it because as they are excelling 
 parts of Poesie, so is there none so much used 
 in England, and none can be more pittifully 
 abused. Which like an unmannerly Daughter, 
 shewing a bad education, causeth her mother 
 Poesies honesty, to bee called in question. 
 Other sorts of Poetry almost have we none, 
 but that Lyricall kind of Songs and Sonnets : 
 which, Lord, if he gave us so good mindes, 
 how well it might be imployed, and with howe 
 heavenly fruite, both private and publique, in 
 singing the prayses of the immortall beauty : 
 the immortall goodnes of that God, who gyveth 
 us hands to write, and wits to conceive, of 
 which we might well want words, but never 
 matter, of which, we could turne our eies to 
 nothing, but we should ever have new budding 
 occasions. But truely many of such writings, 
 as come under the banner of unresistable love, 
 if I were a Mistres, would never perswade mee 
 they were in love : so coldely they apply fiery 
 speeches, as men that had rather red Lovers 
 writings ; and so caught up certaine swelling 
 phrases, which hang together, like a man which 
 once tolde mee, the winde was at North, West, 
 and by South, because he would be sure to 
 name windes enowe : then that in truth they 
 feele those passions, which easily (as I think) 
 may be bewrayed, by that same forciblenes, or 
 76 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 Energia, (as the Greekes cal it) of the writer. 
 But let this bee a sufficient, though short note, 
 that wee misse the right use of the materiall 
 point of Poesie. 
 
 Now, for the out-side of it, which is words, 
 or (as I may tearme it) Diction, it is even well 
 worse. So is that honny-flowing Matron 
 Eloquence, apparelled, or rather disguised, in 
 a Curtizan-like painted affectation : one time 
 with so farre sette words, they may seeme 
 Monsters: but must seeme straungers to any 
 poore English man. Another tyme, with cours- 
 ing of a Letter, as if they were bound to followe 
 the method of a Dictionary : an other tyme, 
 with figures and flowers, extreamelie winter- 
 starved. But I would this fault were only 
 peculier to Versifiers, and had not as large 
 possession among Prose-printers; and, (which 
 is to be mervailed) among many Schollers , 
 and, (which is to be pittied) among some 
 Preachers. Truly I could wish, if at least I 
 might be so bold, to wish in a thing beyond 
 the reach of my capacity, the diligent imitators 
 of Tullie, and Demosthenes, (most worthy to be 
 imitated) did not so much keep, Nizolian 
 Paper-bookes of their figures and phrases, as 
 by attentive translation (as it were) devoure 
 them whole, and make them wholly theirs i 
 For nowe they cast Sugar and Spice, upon 
 every dish that is served to the table ; Like 
 those Indians, not content to weare eare-rings 
 at the fit and naturall place of the eares, but 
 they will thrust Jewels through their nose, and 
 Uppes bee use they will be sure to be fine. 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Tullie> when he was to drive out Cateline, 
 as it were with a Thunder-bolt of eloquence, 
 often used that figure of repitition, Vivit vivit ? 
 imo Senatum venit &c. Indeed, inflamed with 
 a well-grounded rage, hee would have his words 
 (as it were) double out of his mouth : and so 
 doe that artificially, which we see men doe in 
 choller naturally. And wee, having noted the 
 grace of those words, hale them in sometime 
 to a familier Epistle, when it were to too much 
 choller to be chollerick. Now for similitudes, 
 in certaine printed discourses, I thinke all 
 Herbarists, all stories of Beasts, Foules, and 
 Fishes, are rifled up, that they come in multi- 
 tudes, to waite upon any of our conceits ; 
 which certainly is as absurd a surfet to the 
 eares, as is possible : for the force of a simili- 
 tude, not being to proove anything to a con- 
 trary Disputer, but onely to explane to a willing 
 hearer, when that is done, the rest is a most 
 tedious pratling : rather over - swaying the 
 memory from the purpose whereto they were 
 applyed, then any whit informing the judge- 
 ment, already eyther satisfied, or by similitudes 
 not to be satis-fied. For my part, I doe not 
 doubt, when Antonius and Crassus, the great 
 forefathers of Cicero in eloquence, the one (as 
 Cicero testifieth of them) pretended not to know 
 Arte, the other, not to set by it : because with 
 a playne sensiblenes, they might win credit of 
 popular eares ; which credit, is the neerest step 
 to perswasion : which perswasion, is the chiefe 
 marke of Oratory ; I doe not doubt (I say) but 
 that .they used these tracks very sparingly, 
 78 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 which who doth generally use, any man may 
 see doth daunce to his owne musick : and so be 
 noted by the audience, more careful to speake 
 curiously, then to speake truly. 
 
 Undoubtedly, (at least to my opinion un- 
 doubtedly,) I have found in divers smally 
 learned Courtiers, a more sounde stile, then 
 in some professors of learning : of which I can 
 gesse no other cause, but that the Courtier 
 following that which by practise hee findeth 
 fittest to nature, therein, (though he know it 
 not,) doth according to Art, though not by 
 Art : where the other, using Art to shew Art, 
 and not to hide Art, (as in these cases he 
 should doe) flyeth from nature, and indeede 
 abuseth Art. 
 
 But what? me thinkes I deserve to be 
 pounded, for straying from Poetrie to Oratorie: 
 but both have such an affinity in this wordish 
 consideration, that I thinke this digression, will 
 make my meaning receive the fuller under- 
 standing: which is not to take upon me to 
 teach Poets howe they should doe, but onely 
 finding my selfe sick among the rest, to shewe 
 some one or two spots of the common infection, 
 growne among the most part of Writers : that 
 acknowledging our selves somewhat awry, we 
 may bend to the right use both of matter and 
 manner ; whereto our language gy veth us great 
 occasion, beeing indeed capable of any excellent 
 exercising of it. I know, some will say it is a 
 mingled language. And why not so much the 
 better, taKing the best of both the other? 
 Another will say it wanteth Grammer. Nay 
 79 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 truly, it hath that prayse, that it wanteth not 
 Grammar : for Grammer it might have, but it 
 needes it not ; beeing so easie of it selfe, and so 
 voyd of those cumbersome differences of Cases, 
 Genders, Moodes, and Tenses, which I thinke 
 was a peece of the Tower of Babilons curse, 
 that a man should be put to schoole to learne 
 his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly, 
 and properly the conceits of the minde, which 
 is the end of speech, that hath it equally with 
 any other tongue in the world : and is partic- 
 ulerly happy, in compositions of two or three 
 words together, neere the Greeke, far beyond 
 the Latine: which is one of the greatest 
 beauties can be in a language. 
 
 Now, of versifying there are two sorts, the 
 one Auncient, the other Moderne : the Auncient 
 marked the quantitie of each silable, and ac- 
 cording to that, framed his verse: the Moderne, 
 observing onely number, (with some regarde of 
 the accent,) the chiefe life of it, standeth in 
 that lyke sounding of the words, which we call 
 Ryme. Whether of these be the most excel- 
 lent, would beare many speeches. The Auncient, 
 (no doubt) more fit for Musick, both words 
 and tune observing quantity, and more fit lively 
 to expresse divers passions, by the low and 
 lofty sounde of the well-weyed silable. The 
 latter likewise, with hys Ryme, striketh a 
 certaine musick to the eare : and in fine, sith 
 it dooth delight, though by another way, it 
 obtaines the same purpose : there beeing in 
 eyther sweetnes, and wanting in neither 
 majestic. Truely the English, before any 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 other vulgar language I know, is fit for both 
 sorts : for, for the Ancient, the Italian is so 
 full of Vowels, that it must ever be cumbred 
 with Elisions. The Dutch, so of the other 
 side with Consonants, that they cannot yeeld 
 the sweet slyding, fit for a Verse. The French, 
 in his whole language, hath not one word, that 
 hath his accent in the last silable, saving two, 
 called Antepenultima, and little more hath the 
 Spanish: and therefore, very gracelesly may 
 they use Dactiles. The English is subject to 
 none of these defects. 
 
 Nowe, for the ryme, though wee doe not 
 observe quantity, yet wee observe the accent 
 very precisely : which other languages, eyther 
 cannot doe, or will not doe so absolutely. 
 That C&sura, or breathing place in the middest 
 of the verse, neither Italian nor Spanish have, 
 the French, and we, never almost fayle of. 
 Lastly, even the very ryme it selfe, the Italian 
 cannot put in the last silable, by the French 
 named the Masculine ryme, but still in the 
 next to the last, which the French call the 
 Female ; or the next before that, which the 
 Italians terme Sdrucciola. The example of 
 the former, is Buono, Suono, of the Sdrucciola, 
 Femina, Semina. The French, of the other 
 side, hath both the Male, as Bon t Son, and the 
 Female, as Plaise, Taise. But the Sdrucciola, 
 hee hath not : where the English hath all 
 three, as Due, True, Father, Rather, Motion^ 
 Potion ; with much more which might be sayd, 
 but that I finde already, the triflingnes of this 
 discourse, is much too much enlarged. ' So 
 
 I F 81 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 that sith the ever-praise-worthy Pocsie, is full 
 of vertue-breeding delightfulnes, and voyde of 
 no gyfte, that ought to be in the noble name 
 of learning : sith the blames laid against it, 
 are either false, or feeble : sith the cause why 
 it is not esteemed in Englande, is the fault of 
 Poet-apes, not Poets : sith lastly, our tongue 
 is most fit to honor Poesie, and to bee honored 
 by Poesie, I conjure you all, that have had 
 the evill lucke to reade this incke-wasting toy 
 of mine, even in the name of the nyne Muses, 
 no more to scorne the sacred misteries of Poesie : 
 no more to laugh at the name of Poets, as 
 though they were next inheritours to Fooles : 
 no more to jest at the reverent title of a Rymer : 
 but to beleeve with Aristotle, that they were 
 the auncient Treasurers, of the Graecians 
 Divinity. To beleeve with Bembus, that they 
 were first bringers in of all civilitie. To beleeve 
 with Scaliger, that no Philosophers precepts 
 can sooner make you an honest man, then the 
 reading of Virgill. To beleeve with Clauserus, 
 the Translator of Cornutus, that it pleased the 
 heavenly Deitie, by Hesiod and Homer, under 
 the vayle of fables, to give us all knowledge, 
 Logick, Rethorick, Philosophy, naturall, and 
 morall ; and Quid non f To beleeve with me, 
 that there are many misteries contained in 
 Poetrie, which of purpose were written 
 darkely, least by prophane wits, it should 
 bee abused. To beleeve with Landin, that 
 they are so beloved of the Gods, that what- 
 soever they write, proceeds of a divine fury. 
 Lastly, to beleeve themselves, when they tell 
 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 you they will make you immortall, by their 
 verses. 
 
 Thus doing, your name shal florish in the 
 Printers shoppes ; thus doing, you shall bee 
 of kinne to many a poeticall Preface; thus 
 doing, you shall be most fayre, most ritch, 
 most wise, most all, you shall dwell upon 
 Superlatives. Thus dooing, though you be 
 Libertino patre natus t you shall suddenly grow 
 Hercules proles : 
 
 Si quid mea carmina possunt. 
 Thus doing, your soul shal be placed with 
 Dantes Beatrix, or Virgils Anchises. But if, 
 (fie of such a but) you be borne so neere the 
 dull making Cataphract of Nilus, that you can- 
 not heare the Plannet-like Musick of Poetrie, 
 if you have so earth-creeping a mind, that it 
 cannot lift it selfe up, to looke to the sky of 
 Poetry : or rather, by a certaine rusticall dis- 
 daine, will become such a Mome, as to be a 
 Momus of Poetry : then, though I will not 
 wish unto you, the Asses eares of Midas ; nor 
 to bee driven by a Poets verses, (as Bubonax 
 was) to hang himselfe, nor to be rimed to 
 death, as is sayd to be doone in Ireland : yet 
 thus much curse I must send you in the behalfe 
 of all Poets, that while you live, you live in 
 love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of 
 a Sonnet: and when you die, your memory 
 die from the earth, for want of an Epitaph. 
 
 83 
 
CAMPION 
 
 (1567-1620) 
 
 TWO Passages 
 
 ~ . , 
 
 from Campion S 
 
 " Obser vati on s 
 
 in the Art Of 
 
 Enp-lish Poesie" 
 ungnsn roesie. 
 
 These " Observations," 
 Published in 1602, form 
 perhaps the most notable 
 attack ever made by an 
 
 En e Ush P oet > and an exce1 ' 
 
 lent rhymer at that, upon 
 the use of rhyme in poetry. 
 
 The P am P hletcaused e reat 
 excitement among Cam- 
 
 pion's fellow craftsmen. 
 
 1 HE world is made by Simmetry and pro- 
 portion, and is in that respect compared to 
 Musick, and Musick to Poetry; for Terence 
 saith, speaking of Poets, artem qui tractant 
 musicam, confounding Musick and Poetry to- 
 gether. 
 
 VJoE numbers, boldly passe, stay not for ayde 
 Of shifting rime, that easie flatterer 
 Whose witchcraft can the ruder eares beguile ; 
 Let your smooth feete enur'd to purer arte 
 True measures tread ; what if your pace be slow 
 8 4 
 
Campion. 
 
 And hops not like the Grecian elegies ? 
 It is yet gracefull, and well fits the state 
 Of words ill-breathed, and not shap't to runne : 
 Goe then, but slowly till your steps be firme, 
 Tell them that pitty, or perversely skorne 
 Poore English Poesie as the slave to rime, 
 You are those loftie numbers that revive 
 Triumphs of Princes, and sterne tragedies : 
 And learne henceforth t' attend those happy 
 
 sprights 
 Whose bounding fury, height, and waight 
 
 affects. 
 
 Assist their labour, and sit close to them, 
 Never to part away till for desert 
 Their browes with great Apollos bayes are hid. 
 He first taught number, and true harmonye, 
 Nor is the lawrell his for rime bequeath'd. 
 
DANIEL 
 
 (1562-1619) 
 
 The " Musophilus," like 
 
 T\vO Daniel's prose " Defence of 
 
 Rhyme," was written in 
 
 Stanzas from reply to Campion's "Obser- 
 vations"; and was probably 
 p ub H s hed in the year fol- 
 lowing his book, 1603. 
 
 AND as for Poesie (mother of this force) 
 That breedes, brings forth, and nourishes this 
 
 might, 
 
 Teaching it in a loose, yet measured course, 
 With comely motions how to goe upright : 
 And fostring it with bountifull discourse, 
 Adornes it thus in fashions of delight, 
 
 What should I say ? since it is well approv'd 
 The speech of heaven, with whom they have 
 
 commerce ; 
 
 That onely seeme out of themselves remov'd, 
 And doe with more than humane skills converse : 
 Those numbers wherewith heav'n and earth 
 
 are rnov'd, 
 Shew, weakenesse speakes in Prose, but powre 
 
 in Verse. 
 
 86 
 
BEN JONSON 
 
 (1573-1637) 
 
 Two 
 Passages 
 upon Poetry 
 from the 
 " Discoveries 
 upon Men 
 and Matter." 
 
 The "Discoveries" were 
 first published after Jonson's 
 death, in 1641. They con- 
 tain many scattered refer- 
 ences to poetry; but the 
 two passages that follow 
 are fully sufficient for our 
 purpose : and well represent 
 Ben Jonson's sturdy feeling 
 for the art of poetry, and for 
 his fellow-poets. 
 
 IN OTHING in our Age, I have observed, is Centura fie 
 more preposterous, then the running Judge- Poehs - 
 ments upon Poetry, and Poets ; when wee shall 
 heare those things commended and cry'd up 
 for the best writings, which a man would scarce 
 vouchsafe, to wrap any wholsome drug in ; 
 hee would never light his Tobacco with them. 
 And those men almost nam'd for Miracles, 
 who yet are so vile, that if a man should goe 
 about to examine and correct them, he must 
 make all they have done, but one blot. Their 
 good is so intangled with their bad as forcibly 
 87 
 
The Prelude to Poetry 
 
 one must draw on the other's death with it. 
 A Sponge dipped in Inke will doe all : 
 
 Mart. I. 4 ~~~~ Comitetur punica librum 
 
 e Pig- I0 * Spongia. 
 
 Et pau!6 post, 
 
 Non possunt , . . mult, una litura potest 
 
 Yet their vices have not hurt them : Nay, a 
 great many they have profited, for they have 
 beene lov'd for nothing else. And this false 
 opinion growes strong against the best men, 
 Cestius. if once it take root with the Ignorant. Cestius, 
 Cicero. in his time, was preferr'd to Cicero, so farre 
 
 as the Ignorant durst. They learn'd him 
 without booke, and had him often in their 
 mouthes ; but a man cannot imagine that 
 thing so foolish or rude, but will find and enjoy 
 an Admirer ; at least, a Reader or Spectator. 
 The Puppets are scene now in despight of the 
 Heath. Players; Heaths Epigrams and the Skullers 
 Taylor. Poems have their applause. There are never 
 wanting, that dare preferre the worst Preachers, 
 the worst Pleaders, the worst Poets ; not that 
 the better have left to write or speake better, 
 but that they that heare them judge worse ; 
 Non illi pejus dicunt, sect hi corruptius judi- 
 cant. Nay, if it were put to the question of 
 Spcnctr. the Water-rimers works, against Spencer's, I 
 doubt not but they would find more Suffrages ; 
 because the most favour common vices, out 
 of a Prerogative the vulgar have to lose 
 their judgments, and like that which is 
 naught. 
 
Ben Jonson. 
 
 Poetry, in this latter Age, hath prov'd but a 
 meane Mistresse to such as have wholly addicted 
 themselves to her, or given their names up to 
 her family, They who have but saluted her 
 on the by, and now and then tendred their 
 visits, shee hath done much for, and advanced 
 in the way of their owne professions (both the 
 Law and the Gospel) beyond all they could 
 have hoped or done for themselves without her 
 favour. Wherein she doth emulate the judi- 
 cious, but preposterous bounty of the time's 
 Grandes, who accumulate all they can upon 
 the Parasite or Fresh-man in their friendship ; 
 but think an old Client or honest servant bound 
 by his place to write, and starve. 
 
 Indeed, the multitude commend Writers, as 
 they do Fencers or Wrastlers, who if they come 
 in robustiously and put for it with a deale of 
 violence, are received for the braver-fellowes ; 
 when many times their own rudenesse is a cause 
 of their disgrace, and a slight touch of their 
 Adversary gives all that boisterous force the 
 foyle. But in these things the unskilfull are 
 naturally deceiv'd, and judging wholly by the 
 bulke, think rude things greater then polish'd, 
 and scattered more numerous then compos'd ; 
 nor think this only to be true in the sordid 
 multitude, but the neater sort of our Gallants ; 
 for all are the multitude, only they differ in 
 cloaths, not in judgment or understanding. 
 
 I remember, the Players have often men- De Shake- 
 
 tioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in 
 
 his writing (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never 
 
 blotted out a line. My answer hath beene, 
 
 89 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 would he had blotted a thousand. Which 
 they thought a malevolent speech. I had not 
 told posterity this, but for their ignorance who 
 choose that circumstance to commend their 
 friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to 
 justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov'd the 
 man, and doe honour his memory, on this side 
 Idolatry, as much as any.) Hee was, indeed, 
 honest, and of an open and free nature ; had 
 an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and 
 gentle expressions, wherein hee flow'd with 
 that facility that sometimes it was necessary 
 he should be stop'd. Sufflaminandus erat, as 
 Augustus Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in 
 tn a ' his owne power ; would the rule of it had beene 
 so, too. Many times hee fell into those things, 
 could not escape laughter, as when hee said in 
 the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, 
 Caesar, thou dost me wrong. He replied, 
 " Caesar did never wrong but with just cause" ; 
 and such like, which were ridiculous. But hee 
 redeemed his vices with his vertues. There 
 was ever more in him to be praysed then to 
 be pardoned. 
 
 What is a Post ? 
 
 Pocia, ^ pOET is that which by the Greeks is 
 
 call'd /car' Qoxhv> irot^rijs, a Maker, or a 
 fainer : his Art, an Art of imitation or fain- 
 ing.; expressing the life of man in fit measure. 
 90 
 
Ben Jonson. 
 
 numbers, and harmonye, according to Aristotle; 
 from the word iroiecv, which signifies to make or 
 fayne. Hence hee is called a Poet, not hee 
 which writeth in measure only, but that fayneth 
 and formeth a fable, and writes things like the 
 truth. For the Fable and Fiction is, as it were, 
 the forme and Soule of any Poeticall work or 
 Poeme. 
 
 What meaneyou by a Poeme f 
 
 A Poeme is not alone any worke or com-Poema. 
 position of the Poets in many or few verses; 
 but even one alone verse sometimes makes 
 a perfect Poeme. As when ^Eneas hangs Virgilius 
 up and consecrates the arms of Abas with ***** hb ' 
 this inscription : 
 
 " ./Eneas haec de Danais victoribus arma." 
 And calls it a Poeme or Carmen. Such are 
 
 those in Martiall : Martiall, 
 
 lib. 8, epig. 
 *' Otnnia, Castor, emis : sic net, ut omnia vendas. I5 . 
 
 And 
 
 " Pauper videri Cinna vult, et est pauper." 
 
 So were Horace his odes call'd Carmina t his Horatius. 
 Lirik, Songs. And Lucretius designes a whole Lucretius. 
 book in his sixt : 
 
 14 Quod in primo quoque carmine claret." 
 
 And anciently all the Oracles were call'd Epicum. 
 Carmina ; or whatever sentence was express'd, ^" iatt ~ 
 were it much or little, it was called an Epick, Lirlcum. 
 Dramatick, Lirik, Elegiake, or Epigrammatike Ehg i ^ u ^ tt 
 Poeme. ,/J 
 
 9* 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 But how differs a Poeme from what wee call 
 Poesy ? 
 
 A Poeme, as I have told you, is the work of 
 the Poet ; the end and fruit of his labour and 
 
 Poesis studye. Poesy is his skill or Crafte of making ; 
 
 the very Fiction it selfe, the reason or forme 
 of the work. And these three voices differ, as 
 the thing done, the doing, and the doer ; the 
 thing fain'd, the faining, and the fainer; so 
 the Poeme, the Poesy, and the Poet. Now 
 
 Artium the Poesy is the habit or the Art ; nay, rather 
 
 Retina. the Q ueene o f Arts, which had her Original 
 from heaven, received thence from the 'Ebrewes, 
 and had in prime estimation with the Greeks 
 transmitted to the Latines and all nations 
 that profess'd Civility. The study of it (if wee 
 
 Aristotle, will trust Aristotle) offers to mankinde a certain 
 rule and Patterne of living well and happily, 
 
 M. T. Cicero, disposing us to all Civill offices of Society. 
 If wee will believe Tully, it nourisheth and 
 instructeth our youth, delights our Age, 
 adornes our prosperity, comforts our Adversity, 
 entertaines us at home, keepes us company 
 abroad, travailes with us, watches, devides the 
 times of our earnest and sports, shares in our 
 Country recesses and recreations ; insomuch as 
 the wisest and best learned have thought her 
 the absolute Mistresse of manners and neerest of 
 kin to Vertue. And wheras they entitle Phil- 
 osophy to bee a rigid and austere Poesie, they 
 have, on the contrary, stiled Poesy a dulcet 
 and gentle philosophy, which leades on and 
 guides us by the hand to action with a ravish- 
 
Ben Jonson. 
 
 ing delight and incredible Sweetnes. But be- 
 fore wee handle the kindes of Poems, with their 
 special differences, or make court to the Art 
 itselfe, as a mistresse, I would leade you to the 
 knowledge of our Poet by a perfect information Poet, differ- 
 
 what he is or should bee by nature, by exer- e ^ ti(gt 
 
 , . . A . , ,. J . . Grammatic. 
 
 cise, by imitation, by Studie, and so bring him Logic. 
 
 downe through the disciplines of Grammar, Rhetoric. 
 Logicke, Rhetoricke, and the Ethicks, adding ' ihica - 
 somewhat out of all, peculiar to himselfe, and 
 worthy of your admittance or reception. 
 
 First, wee require in our Poet or maker (for that i. Ingeniam. 
 Title our Language affordes him elegantly with 
 the Greeke) a goodnes of naturall wit. For where- 
 as all other arts consist of doctrine and precepts, 
 the Poet must be able by nature and instinct to 
 pour out the Treasure of his minde, and as 
 Seneca saith, Aliquando secundum Anacreon- Seneca, 
 tern insanirejucundumesse; by which hee under- 
 stands the Poeticall Rapture. And according to 
 that of Plato, Frustra Poeticas fores sui compos Plato, 
 pulsavit. And of Aristotle, Nullum magnum Aristotle, 
 ingenium sine mixturd dementia fuit. Nee 
 potest grande aliquid, et supra c&teros loqui, 
 nisi mota mens. Then it riseth higher, as by a 
 devine Instinct, when it contemnes common 
 and knowne conceptions. It utters somewhat 
 above a mortall mouth. Then it gets aloft and 
 flies away with his Ryder, whether, before, it 
 was doubtful to ascend. This the Poets under- 
 stood by their Helicon, Pegasus, or Parnassus : ,., .. 
 
 ' J-felicon, 
 
 and this made Ovid to boast, Pegasus, 
 
 " Est, Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo : 
 Sedibus aethereis spiritus ille venit." 
 93 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Petron. in 
 
 2. Exerci- 
 tatio. 
 
 And Lipsius to affirm, Scio, Poetam neminem 
 prastantem fuisse t sine parte quadam uberiore 
 divines auree. And hence it is that the comming 
 up of good Poets (for I mind not mediocres or 
 imos) is so thinne and rare among us. Every 
 beggerly corporation affoords the State a mayor 
 or two bailiffs yearly ; but Solus rex, aut poeta, 
 non quotannis nascitur. To this perfection of 
 nature in our Poet, wee require Exercise of those 
 parts, and frequent. If his wit will not arrive 
 soddainly at the dignitie of the Ancients, let 
 him not yet fall out with it, quarrell, or be 
 over hastily angry ; offer, to turne it away 
 from study in a humor, but come to it 
 againe upon better cogitation ; try another 
 time, with labour. If then it succeed not, cast 
 not away the Quills yet, nor scratch the Waine- 
 scott, beate not the poor Deske, but bring all to 
 the forge, and file againe ; tourne it anewe. There 
 is no statute Law of the Kingdome bidds you bee 
 a poet against your will ; or the first quarter. If it 
 come, in a yeare or two, it is well. The common 
 Rymers powre forth Verses, such as they are, ex 
 tempore ; but there never come from them one 
 Sense, worth the life of a Day. A Rymer, and a 
 Poet, are two things. It is said of the incom- 
 parable Virgil, that he brought forth his verses 
 like a Beare, and after form'd them with licking. 
 Scaliger, the father, writes it of him, that he 
 made a quantitie of verses in the morning, which 
 afore night hee reduced to a lesse number. But, 
 Valer. Max- that which Valerius Maximus hath left recorded 
 imus. o f Euripides, the tragicke Poet, his answer to Al- 
 
 cestis, another Poet, is as memorable, as modest ; 
 94 
 
 Virgin, 
 Scaliger. 
 
Ben Jonson. 
 
 who, when it was told to Alcestis that Euripides Euripides, 
 had in three daies brought forth, but three verses, 
 and those with some difficultie, and throwes, 
 Alcestis, glorying hee could with ease have sent 
 forth a hundred in the space, Euripides roundly 
 reply'd, " Like enough ; but here is the differ- 
 ence : thy verses will not last those three daies, 
 mine will to all time." Which was, as to 
 tell him ; he could not write a verse. I have 
 met many of these rattles, that made a noyse 
 and buz'de. They had their humme, and no 
 more. Indeed, things wrote with labour 
 deserve to be so read, and will last their Age. 
 
 The third requisite in our Poet, or Maker, is 
 Imitation, to bee able to convert the substance 3. hnitatio. 
 or Riches of another Poet to his owne use. To 
 make choice of one excellent man above the 
 rest, and so to follow him, till he grow very He, 
 or so like him, as the Copie may be mistaken for 
 the Principal. Not as a creature that swallowes 
 what it takes in crude, raw, or undigested, but 
 that feedes with an Appetite, and hath a 
 Stomache to concoct, devide, and turne all into 
 nourishment. Not to imitate servilely, as 
 Horace saith, and catch at vices for vertue ; Horathts. 
 but to draw forth out of the best and choicest 
 flowers, with the Bee, and turn all into honey, 
 worke it into one relish and savour ; make our 
 Imitation sweet ; observe how the best writers 
 have imitated, and follow them. How Virgil Virgil, 
 and Statius have imitated Homer ; how Horace, s ^^ 
 Archilochus; how, Alcseus, and the Other./?**/.] 
 Liricks ; and so of the rest. Archil., 
 
 But that which wee especially require in 
 95 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 4. Lectio, him is an exactnesse of Studie and multiplicity 
 of reading, which maketh a full man, not alone 
 enabling him to know the History or Argument 
 of a Poeme and to report it, but so to master the 
 matter and Stile, as to shew hee knowes how to 
 handle, place, or dispose of either with Elegancie 
 when need shall bee. And not thinke hee can 
 leape forth suddainely a poet by dreaming hee 
 
 Parnassus, hath been in Parnassus, or having washt his 
 
 Helicon. lips, as they say, in Helicon. There goes 
 more to his making, then so ; for to Nature, 
 
 Ars Coron. Exercise, Imitation, and Studie, Art must bee 
 added to make all these perfect. And though 
 these challenge to themselves much in the 
 making up of our Maker, it is Art only can 
 tead him to perfection, and leave him there 
 in possession, as planted by her hand. It 
 
 M. T. Cicero is the assertion of Tully, if to an excellent 
 nature there happen an accession or con- 
 firmation of Learning and Discipline, there 
 will then remaine somewhat noble and singular. 
 
 Shnyluj For, as Simylus saith in Stobaeus, 0#re Qfois 
 IKCLVT) ylverai rtyytis Arep, otfre Tray Ttx v 'Q M 
 iptffiv KeKTynfry, without Art, Nature can nere 
 bee perfect ; & without Nature, Art can clayme 
 no being. But, our Poet must beware, that his 
 Studie be not only to learn of himself ; for hee 
 that shall affect to doe that, confesseth his ever 
 having a Foole to his master. Hee must read 
 many, but ever the best and choisest ; those 
 that can teach him anything, hee must ever 
 account his masters, and reverence. Among 
 
 Horathis. whom Horace and (hee that taught him) 
 
 Aristoteles. Aristotle, deserv'd to be the first in estima- 
 
 96 
 
Ben Jonson. 
 
 tion. Aristotle was the first accurate Criticke 
 and truest Judge nay, the greatest Philo- 
 sopher the world ever had for hee noted the 
 vices of all knowledges in all creatures, and 
 out of many mens perfections in a Science, hee 
 formed still one Art. So hee taught us two 
 offices together, how we ought to judge 
 rightly of others, and what wee ought to 
 imitate specially in ourselves. But all this 
 in vaine, without a natural wit and a Poeticall 
 nature in chiefe. For no man, so soone as hee 
 knowes this or reades it, shall be able to write 
 the better ; but as he is adapted to it by Nature, 
 he shall grow the perfecter Writer. Hee must 
 have Civil prudence and Eloquence, and that 
 whole ; not taken up by snatches or peeces, in 
 Sentences or remnants, when he will handle 
 businesse or carry Counsells, as if he came then 
 out of the Declamors Gallerie, or Shadowe, 
 furnish'd but out of the body of the State, Virorum 
 which commonly is the Schoole of men. . . . schola JRe* 
 
 97 
 
MILTON 
 
 (1608-1674) 
 
 A Passage from 
 " An Apology 
 against a 
 Pamphlet call'd 
 Smectymnuus : 
 a Modest 
 Confutation.*' 
 
 The Treatise from which 
 this passage is taken was 
 published in 1642, in reply 
 to Bishop Hall and his 
 son's " Modest confutation 
 against a Scandalous and 
 Seditious Libel." With 
 the dispute we have of 
 course nothing to do, save 
 in so far as it is the 
 occasion of so noble a 
 tribute to Poetry. 
 
 ... 1 HAD my time Readers, as others have, 
 who have good learning bestow'd upon them, 
 to be sent to those places, where the opinion 
 was, it might be soonest attain'd ; and as 
 the manner is, was not unstudied in those 
 authors which are most commended ; where- 
 of some were grave Orators and Historians, 
 whose matter methought I lov'd indeed, but 
 as my age then was, so I understood them ; 
 others were the smooth Elegiack Poets, where- 
 of the Schooles are not scarce, whom both for 
 the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, 
 which in imitation I found most easie, and most 
 agreeable to natures part in me, and for their 
 
Milton. 
 
 matter, which what it is, there be few who know 
 not, I was so allur'd to read, that no recreation 
 came to me better welcome. For that it was 
 then those years with me which are excus'd, 
 though they be least severe, I may be sav'd the 
 labour to remember ye. Whence having de- 
 serv'd them to account it the chiefe glory of their 
 wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, 
 and by that could esteeme themselves worthiest 
 to love those high perfections, which under one 
 or other name they took to celebrate, I thought 
 with myselfe by every instinct and presage of 
 nature which is not wont to be false, that what 
 imbolden'd them to this task, might with such 
 diligence as they us'd imbolden me ; and that 
 what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share 
 would herein best appeare, and best value itselfe, 
 by how much more wisely, and with more love 
 of vertue I should choose (let rude eares be ab- 
 sent) the object of not unlike praises. For albeit 
 these thoughts to some will seeme vertuous and 
 commendable, to others only pardonable, to a 
 third sort perhaps idle ; yet the mentioning of 
 them now will end in serious. Nor blame it, 
 Readers, in those yeares to propose to themselves 
 such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above 
 other things in this life have sometimes preferr'd : 
 Whereof not to be sensible when good and 
 faire in one person meet, argues both a grossc 
 and shallow judgment, and withall an ungentle 
 and swainish brest : for by the firme setling of 
 these perswasions, I became, to my best memory, 
 so much a proficient, that if I found those 
 authors anywhere speaking unworthy things of 
 99 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 themselves, or unchaste of those names which 
 before they had extoll'd ; this effect it wrought 
 with me, from that time forward their Art I still 
 applauded, but the men I deplor'd ; and above 
 them all, preferr'd the two famous renowners 
 of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but 
 honour of them to whom they devote their 
 verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts 
 without transgression. And long it was not 
 after, when I was confirm'd in this opinion, 
 that he who would not be frustrate of his hope 
 to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought 
 himself to bee a true Poem ; that is, a composi- 
 tion and patterne of the best and honourablest 
 things ; not presuming to sing high praises of 
 heroick men or famous Cities, unlesse he have 
 in himself the experience and the practice of all 
 that which is praise worthy. These reasonings, 
 together with a certain nicenesse of nature, an 
 honest haughtinesse, and self-esteem either of 
 what I was, or what I might be, (which let 
 envie call pride, ) and lastly that modesty, where- 
 of though not in the Title-page, yet here I may 
 be excus'd to make some beseeming profes- 
 sion ; all these uniting the supply of their 
 naturall aid together, kept me still above those 
 low descents of minde, beneath which he must 
 deject and plunge himself, that can agree to 
 salable and unlawfull prostitutions. Next, 
 (for hear me out now, Readers,) that I may 
 tell ye whether my younger feet wander'd; 
 I betook me among those lofty Fables and 
 Romances, which recount in solemne canto's the 
 deeds of Knighthood founded by our victorious 
 
Miiton. ; _ s , . m . 
 
 Kings, and from hence had in renowne over all 
 Christendome. There I read it in the oath of 
 every Knight, that he should defend to the ex- 
 pence of his best blood, or of his life, if it so be- 
 fell him, the honour and chastity of Virgin or 
 Matron ; from whence even then I learnt what a 
 noble vertue chastity sure must be, to the defence 
 of which so many worthies, by such a deare 
 adventure of themselves, had sworne. And if I 
 found in the story afterward, any of them, by 
 word or deed, breaking that oath, I judg'd it 
 the same fault of the Poet, as that which is 
 attributed to Homer, to have written undecent 
 things of the gods. Only this my mind gave 
 me, that every free and gentle spirit, without 
 that oath, ought to be borne a knight, nor 
 needed to expect the guilt spurre, or the laying of 
 a sword upon his shoulder to stirre him up both 
 by his counsell and by his arme, to secure and 
 protect the weaknesse of any attempted chastity. 
 So that even those books, which to many others 
 have been the fuell of wantonnesse and loose 
 living, I cannot thinke how, unless by divine 
 indulgence, prov'd to me so many incitements, 
 as you have heard, to the love and stedfast 
 observation of that vertue which abhorres the 
 society of Bordello's. Thus from the Laureat 
 fraternity of Poets, riper yeares and the cease- 
 lesse round of study and reading led me to the 
 shady spaces of philosophy ; but chiefly to the 
 divine volumes of Plato, and his equall Xeno- 
 phon : where, if I should tell ye what I learnt 
 of chastity and love, I meane that which is 
 truly so, whose charming cup is only vertue, 
 
Prdude to- Poetry. 
 
 which she bears in her hand to those who are 
 worthy. The rest are cheated with a thick 
 intoxicating potion, which a certain Sorceresse, 
 the abuser of loves name, carries about ; and 
 how the chiefest office of love begins and ends 
 in the soule, producing those happy twins of her 
 divine generation, knowledge and vertue ; with 
 such abstracted sublimities as these, it might 
 be worth your listning, Readers, as I may 
 one day hope to have ye in a still time, when 
 there shall be no chiding ; not in these noises, 
 the adversary, as ye know, barking at the doore, 
 or searching for me at the Burdello s, where it 
 may be he has lost himselfe, and raps up with- 
 out pitty the sage and rheumatick old prelatesse, 
 with all her young Corinthian Laity, to inquire 
 for such a one. 
 
II. 
 
 V\ A Passage 
 
 The letter was published 
 in 1644, the same year 
 when the *' Areopagitica " 
 appeared. It outlines a 
 remarkable scheme of 
 education, to be carried 
 on in "a spacious house 
 and ground about it fit 
 for an academy, and big 
 enough to lodge a hundred 
 and fifty persons. " * * This 
 place," it is added, 
 "should be at once both 
 school and university " ; 
 and the students are to 
 be of ages ranging from 
 
 twelve to twenty-one. At the point referred to in the 
 following passage, they are supposed to be at an 
 advanced stage, well read in law, religion, literature, 
 and even in " Orpheus, Hesiod, Theocritus, . . . and 
 in Latin, Lucretius, Manilius, and the rural part of 
 Virgil." 
 
 from Milton's 
 
 Letter to 
 
 Master Samuel 
 
 Hartlib, 
 
 published 
 
 as a tractate, 
 
 " Of Education." 
 
 W HEN all these employments are well con- 
 quer'd, then will the choice Histories, Heroic 
 Poems, and Attic Tragedies of stateliest and 
 most regal argument, with all the famous Political 
 Orations, offer themselves ; which, if they were not 
 only read, but some of them got by memory, 
 and solemnly pronounc't with right accent 
 and grace, as might be taught, would endue 
 them even with the spirit and vigour of Demos- 
 thenes or Cicero, Euripides, or Sophocles. 
 103 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 And now, lastly, will be the time to read with 
 them those organic arts, which inable men to 
 discourse and write perspicuously, elegantly, 
 and according to the fitted stile of lofty, mean, 
 or lowly. Logic, therefore, so much as is use- 
 ful, is to be referr'd to this due place with all 
 her well-coucht Heads and Topics, untill it be 
 time to open her contracted palm into a grace- 
 ful and ornate Rhetoric taught out of the rule of 
 Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, 
 Longinus. To which Poetry would be made 
 subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as be- 
 ing less suttle and fine, but more simple, sen- 
 suous, and passionate. I mean not here the 
 prosody of a verse, which they could not but 
 have hit on before among the rudiments of 
 Grammar ; but that sublime Art which in Aris- 
 totles Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian Com- 
 mentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and 
 others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic 
 Poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what 
 Decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to 
 observe. This would make them soon perceive 
 what despicable creatures our common Rimers 
 and Play-writers be : and shew them what re- 
 ligious, what glorious and magnificent use might 
 be made of Poetry, both in divine and humane 
 things. From hence, and not till now, will be 
 the right season of forming them to be able 
 Writers and Composers in every excellent 
 matter, when they shall be thus fraught with 
 an universal insight into things. 
 
 104 
 
DRYDEN 
 
 (1631-1700) 
 
 Two Passages 
 from his 
 " Author's 
 Apology, for 
 Heroic Poetry 
 and Poetic 
 Licence." 
 
 The "Apology" served 
 as preface to Dryden's im- 
 possible opera (adapted 
 from Milton's "Paradise 
 Lost, ") " The State of In- 
 nocence and Fall of Man," 
 first published in 1674. 
 The work was dedicated 
 to the then Duchess of 
 York, Mary of Modena, 
 potential Queen of James 
 II. 
 
 I MAGING is, in itself, the very height and life 
 of poetry. It is, as Longinus describes it, a 
 discourse, which by a kind of enthusiasm, or 
 extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it 
 seem to us, that we behold those things which 
 the poet paints, so as to be pleased with them, 
 and to admire them. If poetry be imitation, 
 that part of it must needs be best, which de- 
 scribes most lively our actions and passions ; 
 our virtues and our vices ; our follies and our 
 humours : For neither is comedy without its 
 part of imaging ; and they who do it best are 
 certainly the most excellent in their kind. . . . 
 
 105 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 A PROMISED to say somewhat of Poetic Licence, 
 but have in part anticipated my discourse al- 
 ready. Poetic Licence, I take to be the liberty 
 which poets have assumed to themselves, in all 
 ages, of speaking things in verse, which are 
 beyond the severity of prose. It is that parti- 
 cular character, which distinguishes and sets 
 the bounds betwixt oratio soluta and poetry. 
 This, as to what regards the thought, or ima- 
 gination of a poet, consists in fiction: but 
 then those thoughts must be expressed ; and 
 here arise two other branches of it ; for if this 
 licence be included in a single word, it admits 
 of tropes ; if in a sentence or proposition, of 
 figures ; both which are of a much larger ex- 
 tent, and more forcibly to be used in verse than 
 prose. This is that birthright which is derived 
 to us from our great forefathers, even from 
 Homer down to Ben ; and they, who would 
 deny it to us, have, in plain terms, the fox's 
 quarrel to the grapesthey cannot reach it. 
 
POPE 
 
 (1688-1744) 
 Passage on From the Preface to 
 
 Homei". Homer's Iliad, 1715. 
 
 V V E acknowledge him the father of poetical 
 diction, the first who taught that language of 
 the Gods to men. His expression is like the 
 colouring of some great masters, which dis- 
 covers itself to be laid on boldly, and executed 
 with rapidity. It is indeed the strongest and 
 most glowing imaginable, and touched with 
 the greatest spirit. Aristotle had reason to 
 say, He was the only poet who had found out 
 living words ; there are in him more daring 
 figures and metaphors than in any good author 
 whatever. An arrow is impatient to be on the 
 wing, a weapon thirsts to drink the blood of an 
 enemy, and the like. Yet his expression is 
 never too big for the sense, but justly great in 
 proportion to it." 
 
 From a Letter to Walsh 
 Oct. 22, 1706. 
 
 A Style of 
 Sound. 
 
 " T 
 
 IT is not enough that nothing offends the 
 
 ear, but a good poet will adapt the very sounds, 
 as well as words, to the things he treats of. 
 So that there is (if one may express it so) a 
 style of sound." 
 
 107 
 
GOLDSMITH 
 
 (1728-1774) 
 
 Lines on 
 
 Poetry from " The 
 
 Deserted Village." 1770. 
 
 AND thou, sweet poetry, thou loveliest maid, 
 Still first to fly where sensual joys invade ! 
 Unfit in these degenerate times of shame, 
 To catch the heart or strike for honest fame : 
 Dear charming nymph, neglected and decried, 
 My shame in crowds, my solitary pride ; 
 . Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe, 
 , Thou found'st me poor at first and keep'stme so. 
 Thou guide by which the nobler arts excel, 
 Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well ! 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
 (1770-1850) 
 
 Observations 
 
 Prefixed 
 
 to the 
 
 Second Edition 
 
 of " Lyrical 
 
 Ballads." 
 
 This most famous of 
 poets' prefaces was first 
 published in 1800, in the 
 volume of poems of that 
 year. The Appendix on 
 " Poetic Diction M was 
 added two years later, 
 when the Third Edition 
 of the volume appeared. 
 
 IT is supposed, that by the act of writing in 
 verse an Author makes a formal engagement 
 that he will gratify certain known habits of 
 association; that he not only thus apprises 
 the Reader that certain classes of ideas and 
 expressions will be found in his book, but that 
 others will be carefully excluded. This ex- 
 ponent or symbol held forth by metrical 
 language must in different eras of literature 
 have excited very different expectations: for 
 example, in the age of Catullus, Terence, and 
 Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian ; 
 and in our own country, in the age of Shak- 
 speare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that 
 of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I 
 will not take upon me to determine the exact im- 
 109 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 port of the promise which by the act of writ- 
 ing in verse an Author, in the present day, makes 
 to his Reader ; but I am certain it will appear 
 to many persons that I have not fulfilled 
 the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily 
 contracted. They who have been accustomed 
 to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of 
 many modern writers, if they persist in reading 
 this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, 
 frequently have to struggle with feelings of 
 strangeness and awkwardness : they will look 
 round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire 
 by what species of courtesy these attempts can 
 be permitted to assume that title. I hope 
 therefore the Reader will not censure me, if I 
 attempt to state what I have proposed to myself 
 to perform ; and also (as far as the limits of 
 this notice will permit) to explain some of the 
 chief reasons which have determined me in the 
 choice of my purpose : that at least he may be 
 spared any unpleasant feeling of disappoint- 
 ment, and that I myself may be protected from 
 the most dishonourable accusation which can be 
 brought against an Author, namely, that of an 
 indolence which prevents him from endeavour- 
 ing to ascertain what is his duty, or, when his 
 duty is ascertained, prevents him from per- 
 forming it. 
 
 The principal object, then, which I proposed 
 to myself in these Poems was to chuse incidents 
 and situations from common life, and to relate 
 or describe them, throughout, as far as was 
 possible, in a selection of language really used 
 by men, and, at the same time, to throw over 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 them a certain colouring of imagination, where- 
 by ordinary things should be presented to the 
 mind in an unusual way ; and, further, and 
 above all, to make these incidents and situations 
 interesting by tracing in them, truly though not 
 ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature : 
 chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which 
 we associate ideas in a state of excitement. 
 Low and rustic life was generally chosen, be- 
 cause, in that condition, the essential passions 
 of the heart find a better soil in which they can 
 attain their maturity, are less under restraint, 
 and speak a plainer and more emphatic lan- 
 guage ; because in that condition of life our 
 elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater 
 simplicity, and, consequently, may be more 
 accurately contemplated, and more forcibly 
 communicated ; because the manners of rural 
 life germinate from those elementary feelings ; 
 and from the necessary character of rural 
 occupations, are more easily comprehended, 
 and are more durable ; and, lastly, because in 
 that condition the passions of men are incor- 
 porated with the beautiful and permanent forms 
 of nature. The language, too, of these men is 
 adopted (purified indeed from what appears to 
 be its real defects, from all lasting and rational 
 causes of dislike or disgust) because such men 
 hourly communicate with the best objects from 
 which the best part of language is originally 
 derived ; and because, from their rank in society 
 and the sameness and narrow circle of their 
 intercourse, being less under the influence of 
 social vanity, they convey their feelings and 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. 
 Accordingly, such a language, arising out of 
 repeated experience and regular feelings, is a 
 more permanent, and a far more philosophical 
 language, than that which is frequently sub- 
 stituted for it by Poets, who think that they are 
 conferring honour upon themselves and their 
 art, in proportion as they separate themselves 
 from the sympathies of men, and indulge in 
 arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, 
 in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and 
 fickle appetites, of their own creation. 1 
 
 I cannot, however, be insensible of the pre- 
 sent outcry against the triviality and meanness, 
 both of thought and language, which some of 
 my contemporaries have occasionally intro- 
 duced into their metrical compositions ; and I 
 acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is 
 more dishonourable to the Writer's own charac- 
 ter than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, 
 though I should contend at the same time, that 
 it is far less pernicious in the sum of its con- 
 sequences. From such verses the Poems in 
 these volumes will be found distinguished at 
 least by one mark of difference, that each of 
 them has a worthy purpose. Not that I mean 
 to say, I always began to write with a distinct 
 purpose formally conceived ; but my habits of 
 meditation have so formed my feelings, as that 
 my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite 
 
 1 It is worth while here to observe, that the affect- 
 ing parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed 
 in language pure and universally intelligible even 
 to this day. 
 
 112 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 those feelings, will be found to carry along 
 with them a purpose. If in this opinion I am 
 mistaken, I can have little right to the name of 
 a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous 
 overflow of powerful feelings : and though this 
 be true, Poems to which any value can be 
 attached were never produced on any variety 
 of subjects but by a man, who, being possessed 
 of more than usual organic sensibility, had also 
 thought long and deeply. For our continued 
 influxes of feeling are modified and directed by 
 our thoughts, which are indeed the represen- 
 tatives of all our past feelings : and, as by 
 contemplating the relation of these general 
 representatives to each other, we discover what 
 is really important to men, so, by the repetition 
 and continuance of this act, our feelings will be 
 connected with important subjects, till at length, 
 if we be originally possessed of much sensi- 
 bility, such habits of mind will be produced, 
 that, by observing blindly and mechanically 
 the impulses of those habits, we shall describe 
 objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, 
 and in such connexion with each other, that 
 the understanding of the being to whom we 
 address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state 
 of association, must necessarily be in some 
 degree enlightened, and his affections ameli- 
 orated. 
 
 I have said that each of these poems has a 
 purpose. I have also informed my Reader 
 what this purpose will be found principally to 
 be : namely, to illustrate the manner in which 
 our feelings and ideas are associated in a state 
 i H 113 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 of excitement. But, speaking in language 
 somewhat more appropriate, it is to follow the 
 fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated 
 by the great and simple affections of our 
 nature. This object I have endeavoured in 
 these short essays to attain by various means ; 
 by tracing the maternal passion through many 
 of its more subtile windings, as in the poems 
 of the Idiot Boy and the Mad Mother ; by 
 accompanying the last struggles of a human 
 being, at the approach of death, cleaving in 
 solitude to life and society, as in the Poem of 
 the Forsaken Indian; by showing, as in the 
 Stanzas entitled We are Seven, the perplexity 
 and obscurity which in childhood attend our 
 notion of death, or rather our utter inability 
 to admit that notion ; or by displaying the 
 strength of fraternal, or, to speak more philo- 
 sophically, of moral attachment when early 
 associated with the great and beautiful objects 
 of nature, as in The Brothers ; or, as in the 
 Incident of Simon Lee, by placing my Reader 
 in the way of receiving from ordinary moral 
 sensations another and more salutary impres- 
 sion than we are accustomed to receive from 
 them. It has also been part of my general 
 purpose to attempt to sketch characters under 
 the influence of less impassioned feelings, as 
 in The Two April Mornings, The Fountain, 
 The Old Man Travelling, The Two Thieves, 
 etc., characters of which the elements are 
 simple, belonging rather to nature than to 
 manners, such as exist now, and will probably 
 always exist, and which from their constitution 
 114 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 may be distinctly and profitably contemplated. 
 I will not abuse the indulgence of my Reader 
 by dwelling longer upon this subject ; but it 
 is proper that I should mention one other 
 circumstance which distinguishes these Poems 
 from the popular Poetry of the day ; it is this, 
 that the feeling therein developed gives im- 
 portance to the action and situation, and not 
 the action and situation to the feeling. My 
 meaning will be rendered perfectly intelligible 
 by referring my Reader to the Poems entitled 
 Poor Susan and the Childless Father, par- 
 ticularly to the last Stanza of the latter Poem. 
 
 I will not suffer a sense of false modesty to 
 prevent me from asserting, that I point my 
 Reader's attention to this mark of distinction, 
 far less for the sake of these particular Poems 
 than from the general importance of the 
 subject. The subject is indeed important! 
 For the human mind is capable of being 
 excited without the application of gross and 
 violent stimulants ; and he must have a very 
 faint perception of its beauty and dignity who 
 does not know this, and who does not further 
 know, that one being is elevated above another, 
 in proportion as he possesses this capability. 
 It has therefore appeared to me, that to en- 
 deavour to produce or enlarge this capability 
 is one of the best services in which, at any 
 period, a Writer can be engaged ; but this 
 service, excellent at all times, is especially so 
 at the present day. For a multitude of causes, 
 unknown to former times, are now acting with 
 a combined force to blunt the discriminating 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all 
 voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of 
 almost savage torpor. The most effective of 
 these causes are the great national events 
 which are daily taking place, and the in- 
 creasing accumulation of men in cities, where 
 the uniformity of their occupations produces 
 a craving for extraordinary incident, which the 
 rapid communication of intelligence hourly 
 gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners 
 the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the 
 country have conformed themselves. The 
 invaluable works of our elder writers, I had 
 almost said the works of Shakspeare and 
 Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic 
 novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, 
 and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in 
 verse. When I think upon this degrading 
 thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am 
 almost ashamed to have spoken of the 
 feeble effort with which I have endeavoured 
 to counteract it ; and, reflecting upon the 
 magnitude of the general evil, I should be 
 oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, 
 had I not a deep impression of certain inherent 
 and indestructible qualities of the human mind, 
 and likewise of certain powers in the great and 
 permanent objects that act upon it, which are 
 equally inherent and indestructible ; and did I 
 not further add to this impression a belief, that 
 the time is approaching when the evil will be 
 systematically opposed, by men of greater 
 powers, and with far more distinguished 
 success. 
 
 116 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and 
 aim of these Poems, I shall request the Reader's 
 permission to apprise him of a few circumstances 
 relating to their style, in order, among other 
 reasons, that I may not be censured for not 
 having performed what I never attempted. 
 The Reader will find that personifications of 
 abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; 
 and, I hope, are utterly rejected, as an ordinary 
 device to elevate the style, and raise it above 
 prose. I have proposed to myself to intimate, 
 and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very 
 language of men ; and assuredly such personi- 
 fications do not make any natural or regular 
 part of that language. They are, indeed, a 
 figure of speech occasionally prompted by pas- 
 sion, and I have made use of them as such ; 
 but I have endeavoured utterly to reject them 
 as a mechanical device of style, or as a family 
 language which Writers in metre seem to lay 
 claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep 
 my Reader in the company of flesh and blood, 
 persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him. 
 I am, however, well aware that others who pur- 
 sue a different track may interest him likewise ; 
 I do not interfere with their claim, I only wish 
 to prefer a different claim of my own. There 
 will also be found in these pieces little of what 
 is usually called poetic diction ; I have taken 
 as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily 
 take to produce it ; this I have done for the 
 reason already alleged, to bring my language 
 near to the language of men, and further, be- 
 cause the pleasure which I have proposed to 
 117 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 myself to impart, is of a kind very different from 
 that which is supposed by many persons to be 
 the proper object of poetry. I do not know how, 
 without being culpably particular, I can give 
 my Reader a more exact notion of the style in 
 which I wished these poems to be written, than, 
 by informing him that I have at all times endea- 
 voured to look steadily at my subject, con- 
 sequently, I hope that there is in these Poems 
 little falsehood of description, and that my ideas 
 are expressed in language fitted to their respec- 
 tive importance. Something I must have gained 
 by this practice, as it is friendly to one property 
 of all good poetry, namely, good sense ; but it 
 has necessarily cut me off from a large portion 
 of phrases and figures of speech which from 
 father to son have long been regarded as the 
 common inheritance of Poets. I have also 
 thought it expedient to restrict myself still 
 further, having abstained from the use of many 
 expressions, in themselves proper and beautiful, 
 but which have been foolishly repeated by bad 
 Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected 
 with them as it is scarcely possible by any art 
 of association to overpower. 
 
 If in a poem there should be found a series 
 of lines, or even a single line, in which the lan- 
 guage, though naturally arranged, and accord- 
 ing to the strict laws of metre, does not differ 
 from that of prose, there is a numerous class of 
 critics, who, when they stumble upon these 
 prosaisms, as they call them, imagine that they 
 have made a notable discovery, and exult over 
 the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 profession. Now these men would establish a 
 canon of criticism which the Reader will con- 
 clude he must utterly reject, if he wishes to be 
 pleased with these pieces. And it would be a 
 most easy task to prove to him, that not only 
 the language of a large portion of every good 
 poem, even of the most elevated character, 
 must necessarily, except with reference to the 
 metre, in no respect differ from that of good 
 prose, but likewise that some of the most in- 
 teresting parts of the best poems will be found 
 to be strictly the language of prose, when prose 
 is well written. The truth of this assertion 
 might be demonstrated by innumerable pass- 
 ages from almost all the poetical writings, even 
 of Milton himself. I have not space for much 
 quotation ; but, to illustrate the subject in a 
 general manner, I will here adduce a short 
 composition of Gray, who was at. the head of 
 those who, by their reasonings, have attempted 
 to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose 
 and Metrical composition, and was more than 
 any other man curiously elaborate in the 
 structure of his own poetic diction. 
 
 In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 
 And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire : 
 The birds in vaiii their amorous descant join, 
 Or cheerful fields resume their green attire. 
 These ears, alas ! far other notes repine ; 
 A different object do these eyes require ; 
 My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine ; 
 And in my breast the imperfect joys expire : 
 Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 
 And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ; 
 1*9 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 
 To warm their little loves the birds complain. 
 I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
 And weep the more because I iveep in vain, 
 
 It will easily be perceived, that the only part 
 of this Sonnet which is of any value is the lines 
 printed in Italics ; it is equally obvious, that, 
 except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single 
 word " fruitless " for fruitlessly, which is so far 
 a defect, the language of these lines does in no 
 respect differ from that of prose. 
 
 By the foregoing quotation I have shown 
 that the language of Prose may yet be well 
 adapted to Poetry ; and I have previously 
 asserted, that a large portion of the language 
 of every good poem can in no respect differ 
 from that of good Prose. I will go further. I 
 do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed, 
 that there neither is, nor can be, any essential 
 difference between the language of prose and 
 metrical composition. We are fond of tracing 
 the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, 
 and, accordingly, we call them Sisters : but 
 where shall we find bonds of connexion suffi- 
 ciently strict to typify the affinity betwixt 
 metrical and prose composition? They both 
 speak by and to the same organs ; the bodies 
 in which both of them are clothed may be said 
 to be of the same substance, their affections 
 are kindred, and almost identical, not neces- 
 sarily differing even in degree ; Poetry * sheds 
 
 1 I here use the word "Poetry" (though against 
 
 my own judgment) as opposed to the word Prose, and 
 
 synonymous with metrical composition. But much 
 
 120 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 no tears "such as Angels weep" but natural 
 and human tears ; she can boast of no celes- 
 tial Ichor that distinguishes her vital juices 
 from those of prose ; the same human blood 
 circulates through the veins of them both. 
 
 If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical 
 arrangement of themselves constitute a dis- 
 tinction which overturns what I have been 
 saying on the strict affinity of metrical 
 language with that of prose, and paves the 
 way for other artificial distinctions which the 
 mind voluntarily admits, I answer that the 
 language of such Poetry as I am recom- 
 mending is, as far as is possible, a selection 
 of the language really spoken by men ; that 
 this selection, wherever it is made with true 
 taste and feeling, will of itself form a dis- 
 tinction far greater than would at first be 
 imagined, and will entirely separate the com- 
 position from the vulgarity and meanness of 
 ordinary life; and, if metre be superadded 
 thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be 
 produced altogether sufficient for the gratifica- 
 tion of a rational mind. What other dis- 
 tinction would we have ? Whence is it to 
 come? And where is it to exist? Not, 
 
 confusion has been introduced into criticism by this 
 contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the 
 more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, 
 or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is 
 Metre : nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis ; be- 
 cause lines and passages of metre so naturally occur 
 in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to 
 avoid them, even were it desirable. 
 121 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 surely, where the Poet speaks through the 
 mouths of his characters : it cannot be neces- 
 sary here, either for elevation of style, or any 
 of its supposed ornaments : for, if the Poet's 
 subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, 
 and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions 
 the language of which, if selected truly and 
 judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and 
 variegated, and alive with metaphors and 
 figures. I forbear to speak of an incongruity 
 which would shock the intelligent Reader, should 
 the Poet interweave any foreign splendour of 
 his own with that which the passion naturally 
 suggests : it is sufficient to say that such 
 addition is unnecessary. And, surely, it is 
 more probable that those passages, which 
 with propriety abound with metaphors and 
 figures, will have their due effect, if, upon 
 other occasions where the passions are of 
 a milder character, the style also be subdued 
 and temperate. 
 
 But, as the pleasure which I hope to give 
 by the Poems I now present to the Reader 
 must depend entirely on just notions upon this 
 subject, and, as it is in itself of the highest 
 importance to our taste and moral feelings, I 
 cannot content myself with these detached 
 remarks. And if, in what I am about to say, 
 it shall appear to some that my labour is 
 unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting 
 a battle without enemies, I would remind such 
 persons, that, whatever may be the language 
 outwardly holden by men, a practical faith 
 in the opinions which I am wishing to establish 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 is almost unknown. If my conclusions are 
 admitted, and carried as far as they must be 
 carried if admitted at all, our judgments con- 
 cerning the works of the greatest Poets both 
 ancient and modern will be far different from 
 what they are at present, both when we praise, 
 and when we censure : and our moral feelings 
 influencing and influenced by these judgments 
 will, I believe, be corrected and purified. 
 
 Taking up the subject, then, upon general 
 grounds, I ask what is meant by the word 
 Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he 
 address himself? And what language is to be 
 expected from him ? He is a man speaking to 
 men : a man, it is true, endued with more 
 lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tender- 
 ness, who has a greater knowledge of human 
 nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than 
 are supposed to be common among mankind ; 
 a man pleased with his own passions and 
 volitions, and who rejoices more than other 
 men in the spirit of life that is in him ; 
 delighting to contemplate similar volitions 
 and passions as manifested in the goings-on 
 of the Universe, and habitually impelled to 
 create them where he does not find them. To 
 these qualities he has added, a disposition to 
 be affected more than other men by absent 
 things as if they were present ; an ability of 
 conjuring up in himself passions, which are 
 indeed far from being the same as those 
 produced by real events, yet (especially in 
 those parts of the general sympathy which 
 are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly 
 123 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 resemble the passions produced by real events, 
 than any thing which, from the motions of 
 their own minds merely, other men are 
 accustomed to feel in themselves ; whence, 
 and from practice, he has acquired a greater 
 readiness and power in expressing what he 
 thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts 
 and feelings which, by his own choice, or 
 from the structure of his own mind, arise 
 in him without immediate external excite- 
 ment. 
 
 But, whatever portion of this faculty we 
 may suppose even the greatest Poet to 
 possess, there cannot be a doubt but that 
 the language which it will suggest to him, 
 must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of 
 that which is uttered by men in real life, 
 under the actual pressure of those passions, 
 certain shadows of which the Poet thus pro- 
 duces, or feels to be produced, in himself. 
 
 However exalted a notion we would wish 
 to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is 
 obvious, that, while he describes and imitates 
 passions, his situation is altogether slavish 
 and mechanical, compared with the freedom 
 and power of real and substantial action and 
 suffering. So that it will be the wish of the 
 Poet to bring his feelings near to those of 
 the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, 
 for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let him- 
 self slip into an entire delusion, and even 
 confound and identify his own feelings with 
 theirs ; modifying only the language which is 
 thus suggested to him by a consideration that 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 he describes for a particular purpose, that of 
 giving pleasure. Here, then, he will apply 
 the principle on which I have so much insisted, 
 namely, that of selection ; on this he will de- 
 pend for removing what would otherwise be 
 painful or disgusting in the passion; he will 
 feel that there is no necessity to trick out or 
 to elevate nature : and, the more industriously 
 he applies this principle, the deeper will be his 
 faith that no words, which his fancy or imagina- 
 tion can suggest, will be to be compared with 
 those which are the emanations of reality and 
 truth. 
 
 But it may be said by those who do not 
 object to the general spirit of these remarks, 
 that, as it is impossible for the poet to produce 
 upon all occasions language as exquisitely 
 fitted for the passion as that which the real 
 passion itself suggests, it is proper that he 
 should consider himself as in the situation of 
 a translator, who deems himself justified when 
 he substitutes excellencies of another kind for 
 those which are unattainable by him ; and 
 endeavours occasionally to surpass his original, 
 in order to make some amends for the general 
 inferiority to which he feels that he must sub- 
 mit. But this would be to encourage idle- 
 ness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the 
 language of men who speak of what they 
 do not understand ; who talk of Poetry as 
 of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure ; 
 who will converse with us as gravely about 
 a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as 
 if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste 
 125 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry. 
 Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that 
 Poetry is the most philosophic of all writ- 
 ing : it is so : its object is truth, not individual 
 and local, but general, and operative ; not . 
 standing upon external testimony, but carried 
 alive into the heart by passion ; truth which is 
 its own testimony, which gives strength and 
 divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, 
 and receives them from the same tribunal. 
 Poetry is the image of man and nature. The 
 obstacles which stand in the way of the fidelity 
 of the Biographer and Historian, and of their 
 consequent utility, are incalculably greater than 
 those which are to be encountered by the Poet 
 who has an adequate notion of the dignity of 
 his art. The Poet writes under one restriction 
 only, namely, that of the necessity of giving 
 immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed 
 of that information which may be expected from 
 him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, 
 an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a 
 Man. Except this one restriction, there is no 
 object standing between the Poet and the image 
 of things ; between this, and the Biographer 
 and Historian there are a thousand. 
 
 Nor let this necessity of producing immediate 
 pleasure be considered as a degradation of the 
 Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an ac- 
 knowledgment of the beauty of the universe, 
 an acknowledgment the more sincere, because 
 it is not formal, but indirect ; it is a task light 
 and easy to him who looks at the world in the 
 spirit of love : further, it is an homage paid to 
 126 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 the native and naked dignity of man, to the 
 grand elementary principle of pleasure, by 
 which he knows, and feels, and lives, and 
 moves. We have no sympathy but what is 
 propagated by pleasure : I would not be mis- 
 understood ; but wherever we sympathise with 
 pain, it will be found that the sympathy is 
 produced and carried on by subtle combina- 
 tions with pleasure. We have no knowledge, 
 that is, no general principles drawn from the 
 contemplation of particular facts, but what 
 has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us 
 by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the 
 Chemist and Mathematician, whatever diffi- 
 culties and disgusts they may have had to 
 struggle with, know and feel this. However 
 painful may be the objects with which the 
 Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels 
 that his knowledge is pleasure ; and where he 
 has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What 
 then does the Poet? He considers man and 
 the objects that surround him as acting and 
 re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an 
 infinite complexity of pain and pleasure ; he 
 considers man in his own nature and in his 
 ordinary life as contemplating this with a 
 certain quantity of immediate knowledge, 
 with certain convictions, intuitions, and 
 deductions, which by habit become of the 
 nature of intuitions ; he considers him as 
 looking upon this complex scene of ideas and 
 sensations, and finding every where objects 
 that immediately excite in him sympathies 
 which, from the necessities of his nature, 
 127 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoy- 
 ment. 
 
 To this knowledge which all men carry about 
 with them, and to these sympathies in which, 
 without any other discipline than that of our 
 daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet 
 principally directs his attention. He considers 
 man and nature as essentially adapted to each 
 other, and the mind of man as naturally the 
 mirror of the fairest and most interesting 
 qualities of nature. And thus the Poet, 
 prompted by this feeling of pleasure which 
 accompanies him through the whole course 
 of his studies, converses with general nature 
 with affections akin to those, which, through 
 labour and length of time, the Man of Science 
 has raised up in himself, by conversing with 
 those particular parts of nature which are the 
 objects of his studies. The knowledge both of 
 the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure ; 
 but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a 
 necessary part of our existence, our natural and 
 unalienable inheritance ; the other is a personal 
 and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, 
 and by no habitual and direct sympathy con- 
 necting us with our fellow-beings. The Man 
 of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown 
 benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his 
 solitude : the Poet, singing a song in which all 
 human beings join with him, rejoices in the 
 presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly 
 companion. Poetry is the breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge ; it is the impassioned 
 expression which is in the countenance of 
 128 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 all Science. Emphatically may it be said of 
 the Poet, as Shakspeare hath said of man, 
 "that he looks before and after." He is the 
 rock of defence of human nature ; an upholder 
 and preserver, carrying every where with him 
 relationship and love. In spite of difference of 
 soil and climate, of language and manners, of 
 laws and customs, in spite of things silently 
 gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, 
 the Poet binds together by passion and know- 
 ledge the vast empire of human society, as it is 
 spread over the whole earth, and over all time. 
 The objects of the Poet's thoughts are every 
 where; though the eyes and senses of man are,it is 
 true,his favourite guides,yet he will follow where- 
 soever he can find an atmosphere of sensation 
 in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first 
 and last of all knowledge it is as immortal as 
 the heart of man. If the labours of Men of 
 Science should ever create any material revolu- 
 tion, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in 
 the impressions which we habitually receive, the 
 Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but 
 he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man 
 of Science, not only in those general indirect 
 effects, but he will be at his side, carrying 
 sensation into the midst of the objects of the 
 Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the 
 Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be 
 as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon 
 which it can be employed, if the time should 
 ever come when these things shall be familiar 
 to us, and the relations under which they are 
 contemplated by the followers of these respec- 
 il 129 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 tive Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably 
 material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. 
 If the time should ever come when what is now 
 called Science, thus familiarised to men, shall 
 be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh 
 and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit 
 to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the 
 Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine 
 inmate of the household of man. It is not, 
 then, to be supposed that any one, who holds 
 that sublime notion of Poetry which I have 
 attempted to convey, will break in upon the 
 sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory 
 and accidental ornaments, and endeavour to 
 excite admiration of himself by arts, the neces- 
 sity of which must manifestly depend upon the 
 assumed meanness of his subject. 
 
 What I have thus far said applies to Poetry 
 in general ; but especially to those parts of 
 composition where the Poet speaks through the 
 mouths of his characters ; and upon this point 
 it appears to have such weight, that I will con- 
 clude, there are few persons of good sense, who 
 would not allow that the dramatic parts of 
 composition are defective, in proportion as they 
 deviate from the real language of nature, and 
 are coloured by a diction of the Poet's own, 
 either peculiar to him as an individual Poet or 
 belonging simply to Poets in general, to a body 
 of men who, from the circumstance of their 
 compositions being in metre, it is expected will 
 employ a particular language. 
 
 It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of com- 
 position that we look for this distinction of 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 language ; but still it may be proper and 
 necessary where the Poet speaks to us in his 
 own person and character. To this I answer 
 by referring ray Reader to the description 
 which I have before given of a Poet. Among 
 the qualities which I have enumerated as 
 principally conducing to form a Poet, is 
 implied nothing differing in kind from other 
 men, but only in degree. The sum of what 
 I have there said is, that the Poet is chiefly 
 distinguished from other men by a greater 
 promptness to think and feel without imme- 
 diate external excitement, and a greater power 
 in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are 
 produced in him in that manner. But these 
 passions and thoughts and feelings are the 
 general passions and thoughts and feelings of 
 men. And with what are they connected? 
 Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and 
 animal sensations, and with the causes which 
 excite these; with the operations of the 
 elements, and the appearances of the visible 
 universe ; with storm and sunshine, with the 
 revolutions of the seasons, with cold and heat, 
 with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries 
 and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear 
 and sorrow. These, and the like, are the sen- 
 sations and objects which the Poet describes, as 
 they are the sensations of other men, and the 
 objects which interest them. The Poet thinks 
 and feels in the spirit of the passions of men. 
 How, then, can his language differ in any material 
 degree from that of all other men who feel vividly 
 and see clearly ? It might ^proved that it is im- 
 131 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 possible. But supposing that this were not the 
 case, the Poet might then be allowed to use a 
 peculiar language when expressing his feelings 
 for his own gratification, or that of men like 
 himself. But Poets do not write for Poets 
 alone, but for men. Unless therefore we are 
 advocates for that admiration which depends 
 upon ignorance, and that pleasure which arises 
 from hearing what we do not understand, the 
 Poet must descend from this supposed height, 
 and, in order to excite rational sympathy, he 
 must express himself as other men express 
 themselves. To this it may be added, that 
 'while he is only selecting from the real language 
 of men, or, which amounts to the same thing, 
 composing accurately in the spirit of such selec- 
 tion, he is treading upon safe ground, and we 
 know what we are to expect from him. Our 
 feelings' are the same with respect to metre; for, 
 as it may be proper to remind the Reader, the 
 distinction of metre is regular and uniform, and 
 not, like that which is produced by what is 
 usually called poetic diction, 1 arbitrary, and 
 subject to infinite caprices upon which no 
 calculation whatever can be made. In the one 
 case, the Reader is utterly at the mercy of the 
 Poet respecting what imagery or diction he 
 may chuse to connect with the passion, 
 whereas, in the other, the metre obeys 
 certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader 
 both willingly submit because they are 
 certain, and because no interference is made 
 by them with the passion but such as the 
 l See Appendix, page 149. 
 132 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 concurring testimony of ages has shown to 
 heighten and improve the pleasure which 
 co-exists with it. 
 
 It will now be proper to answer an obvious 
 question, namely, Why, professing these 
 opinions, have I written in verse? To this, 
 in addition to such answer as is included in 
 what I have already said, I reply, in the first 
 place, Because, however I may have restricted 
 myself, there is still left open to me what con- 
 fessedly constitutes the most valuable object of 
 all writing, whether in prose or verse, the great 
 and universal passions of men, the most general 
 and interesting of their occupations, and the 
 entire world of nature, from which I am at 
 liberty to supply myself with endless combina- 
 tions of forms and imagery. Now, supposing 
 for a moment that whatever is interesting in 
 these objects may be as vividly described in 
 prose, why am I to be condemned, if to such 
 description I have endeavoured to superadd 
 the charm which, by the consent of all nations, 
 is acknowledged to exist in metrical language? 
 To this, by such as are unconvinced by what 
 I have already said, it may be answered that a 
 very small part of the pleasure given by Poetry 
 depends upon the metre, and that it is injudi- 
 cious to write in metre, unless it be accompanied 
 with the other artificial distinctions of style 
 with which metre is usually accompanied, and 
 that, by such deviation, more will be lost from 
 the shock which will thereby be given to the 
 Reader's associations than will be counter- 
 balanced by any pleasure which he can derive 
 133 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 from the general power of numbers. In answer 
 to those who still contend for the necessity of 
 accompanying metre with certain appropriate 
 colours of style in order to the accomplishment 
 of its appropriate end, and who also, in my 
 opinion, greatly underrate the power of metre 
 in itself, it might, perhaps, as far as relates to 
 these Poems, have been almost sufficient to 
 observe, that Poems are extant, written upon 
 more humble subjects, and in a more naked 
 and simple style than I have aimed at, which 
 poems have continued to give pleasure from 
 generation to generation. Now, if nakedness 
 and simplicity be a defect, the fact here men- 
 tioned affords a strong presumption that poems 
 somewhat less naked and simple are capable of 
 affording pleasure at the present day; and, 
 what I wished chiefly to attempt, at present, 
 was to justify myself for having written under 
 the impression of this belief. 
 
 But I might point out various causes why, 
 when the style is manly, and the subject of 
 some importance, words metrically arranged 
 will long continue to impart such a pleasure to 
 mankind as he who is sensible of the extent of 
 that pleasure will be desirous to impart. The 
 end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co- 
 existence with an overbalance of pleasure. 
 Now, by the supposition, excitement is an 
 unusual and irregular state of the mind ; ideas 
 and feelings do not, in that state, succeed each 
 other in accustomed order. But, if the words 
 by which this excitement is produced are in 
 themselves powerful, or the images and feelings 
 134 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 have an undue proportion of pain connected 
 with them, there is some danger that the 
 excitement may be carried beyond its proper 
 bounds. Now the co-presence of something 
 regular, something to which the mind has been 
 accustomed in various moods and in a less ex- 
 cited state, cannot but have great efficacy in 
 tempering and restraining the passion by an 
 intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling 
 not strictly and necessarily connected with the 
 passion. This is unquestionably true, and 
 hence, though the opinion will at first appear 
 paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to 
 divest language, in a certain degree, of its 
 reality, and thus to throw a sort of half con- 
 sciousness of unsubstantial existence over the 
 whole composition, there can be little doubt, 
 but that more pathetic situations and senti- 
 ments, that is, those which have a greater 
 proportion of pain connected with them, may 
 be endured in metrical composition, especially 
 in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old 
 ballads is very artless ; yet they contain many 
 passages which would illustrate this opinion, 
 and, I hope, if the Poems referred to be at- 
 tentively perused, similar instances will be found 
 in them. This opinion may be further illus- 
 trated by appealing to the Reader's own ex- 
 perience of the reluctance with which he comes 
 to the re-perusal of the distressful parts of 
 Clarissa Harlowe, or the Gamester. While 
 Shakspeare's writings, in the most pathetic 
 scenes, never act upon us, as pathetic, beyond 
 the bounds of pleasure an effect which, in a 
 '35 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 much greater degree than might at first be 
 imagined, is to be ascribed to small, but con- 
 tinual and regular impulses of pleasurable 
 surprise from the metrical arrangement. On 
 the other hand, (what it must be allowed will 
 much more frequently happen,) if the Poet's 
 words should be incommensurate with the 
 passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader 
 to a height of desirable excitement, then, (un- 
 less the Poet's choice of his metre has been 
 grossly injudicious,) in the feelings of pleasure 
 which the Reader has been accustomed to con- 
 nect with metre in general, and in the feeling, 
 whether cheerful or melancholy, which he has 
 been accustomed to connect with that particu- 
 lar movement of metre, there will be found 
 something which will greatly contribute to im- 
 part passion to the words, and to effect the com- 
 plex end which the Poet proposes to himself. 
 
 If I had undertaken a systematic defence of 
 the theory upon which these poems are written, 
 it would have been my duty to develope the 
 various causes upon which the pleasure received 
 from metrical language depends. Among the 
 chief of these causes is to be reckoned a 
 principle which must be well known to those 
 who have made any of the Arts the object of 
 accurate reflection ; I mean the pleasure which 
 the mind derives from the perception of simili- 
 tude in dissimilitude. This principle is the 
 great spring of the activity of our minds, and 
 their chief feeder. From this principle the 
 direction of the sexual appetite, and all the 
 passions connected with it, take their origin : 
 136 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 it is the life of our ordinary conversation ; and 
 upon the accuracy with which similitude in 
 dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude 
 are perceived, depend our taste and our moral 
 feelings. It would not have been a useless 
 employment to have applied this principle to 
 the consideration of metre, and to have shown 
 that metre is hence enabled to afford much 
 pleasure, and to have pointed out in what 
 manner that pleasure is produced. But my 
 limits will not permit me to enter upon this 
 subject, and I must content myself with a 
 general summary. 
 
 I have said that poetry is the spontaneous 
 overflow of powerful feelings : it takes its origin 
 from emotion recollected in tranquility : the 
 emotion is contemplated till, by a species of 
 re-action, the tranquility gradually disappears, 
 and an emotion, kindred to that which was 
 before the subject of contemplation, is gradu- 
 ally produced, and does itself actually exist in 
 the mind. In this mood successful composition 
 generally begins, and in a mood similar to this 
 it is carried on ; but the emotion of whatever 
 kind, and in whatever degree, from various 
 causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that 
 in describing any passions whatsoever, which 
 are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon 
 the whole, be in a state of enjoyment. Now, 
 if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a 
 state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the 
 Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held 
 forth to him, and ought especially to take care, 
 that, whatever passions he communicates to 
 137 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 his Reader, those passions, if his Reader's 
 mind be sound and vigorous, should always be 
 accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. 
 Now the music of harmonious metrical lan- 
 guage, the sense of difficulty overcome, and 
 the blind association of pleasure which has 
 been previously received from the works of 
 rhyme or metre of the same or similar con- 
 struction, and indistinct perception perpetually 
 renewed of language closely resembling that of 
 real life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, 
 differing from it so widelyall these imper- 
 ceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, 
 which is of the most important use in tempering 
 the painful feeling which will always be found 
 intermingled with powerful descriptions of the 
 deeper passions. This effect is always produced 
 in pathetic and impassioned poetry ; while, in 
 lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness 
 with which the Poet manages his numbers are 
 themselves confessedly a principal source of 
 the gratification of the Reader. I might, per- 
 haps, include all which it is necessary to say 
 upon this subject, by affirming what few 
 persons will deny, that, of two descriptions 
 either of passions, manners, or characters, 
 each of them equally well executed, the one 
 in prose and the other in verse, the verse will 
 be read a hundred times where the prose is 
 read once. We see that Pope, by the power 
 of verse alone, has contrived to render the 
 plainest common sense interesting, and even 
 frequently to invest it with the appearance of 
 passion. In consequence of these convictions 
 138 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 I related in metre the Tale of Goody Blake and 
 Harry Gill t which is one of the rudest of this 
 collection. I wished to draw attention to the 
 truth, that the power of the human imagination 
 is sufficient to produce such changes even in 
 our physical nature as might almost appear 
 miraculous. The truth is an important one ; 
 the fact (for it is a fact) is a valuable illustration 
 of it : and I have the satisfaction of knowing that 
 it has been communicated to many hundreds 
 of people who would never have heard of it, 
 had it not been narrated as a Ballad, and in a 
 more impressive metre than is usual in Ballads. 
 Having thus explained a few of the reasons 
 why I have written in verse, and why I have 
 chosen subjects from common life, and en- 
 deavoured to bring my language near to the 
 real language of men, if I have been too minute 
 in pleading my own cause, I have at the same 
 time been treating a subject of general interest ; 
 and it is for this reason that I request the 
 Reader's permission to add a few words with 
 reference solely to these particular poems, and 
 to some defects which will probably be found 
 in them. I am sensible that my associations 
 must have sometimes been particular instead of 
 general, and that, consequently, giving to 
 things a false importance, sometimes from 
 diseased impulses, I may have written upon 
 unworthy subjects ; but I am less apprehensive 
 on this account, than that my language may 
 frequently have suffered from those arbitrary 
 connections of feelings and ideas with particular 
 words and phrases, from which no man can 
 139 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 altogether protect himself. Hence I have no 
 doubt, that, in some instances, feelings, even 
 of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers 
 by expressions which appeared to me tender 
 and pathetic. Such faulty expressions, were I 
 convinced they were faulty at present, and that 
 they must necessarily continue to be so, I woid 
 willingly take all reasonable pains to correct. 
 But it is dangerous to make these alterations 
 on the simple authority of a few individuals, or 
 even of certain classes of men ; for where the 
 understanding of an Author is not convinced, 
 or his feelings altered, this cannot be done 
 without great injury to himself: for his own 
 feelings are his stay and support ; and, if he 
 sets them aside in one instance, he may be 
 induced to repeat this act till his mind loses all 
 confidence in itself, and becomes utterly debili- 
 tated. To this it may be added, that the 
 Reader ought never to forget that he is himself 
 exposed to the same errors as the Poet, and, 
 perhaps, in a much greater degree : for there 
 can be no presumption in saying, that it is not 
 probable he will be so well acquainted with the 
 various stages of meaning through which words 
 have passed, or with the fickleness or stability 
 of the relations of particular ideas to each 
 other ; and, above all, since he is so much less 
 interested in the subject, he may decide lightly 
 and carelessly. 
 
 Long as I have detained my Reader, I hope 
 
 he will permit me to caution him against a 
 
 mode of false criticism which has been applied 
 
 to Poetry, in which the language closely re- 
 
 140 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 sembles that of life and nature. Such verses 
 have been triumphed over in parodies of which 
 Dr Johnson's stanza is a fair specimen. 
 
 I put my hat upon my head 
 
 And walked into the Strand, 
 
 And there I met another man 
 
 Whose hat was in his hand. 
 Immediately under these lines I will place 
 one of the most justly-admired stanzas of the 
 "Babes in the Wood." 
 
 These pretty babes with hand in hand 
 
 Went wandering up and down ; 
 
 But never more they saw the Man 
 
 Approaching from the Town. 
 
 In both these stanzas the words, and the 
 order of the words, in no respect differ from 
 the most unimpassioned. conversation. There 
 are words in both, for example, " the Strand," 
 and "the Town," connected with none but the 
 most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we 
 admit as admirable, and the . other as a fair 
 example of the superlatively contemptible. 
 Whence arises this difference ? Not from the 
 metre, not from the language, not from the 
 order of the words ; but the matter expressed 
 in Dr Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The 
 proper method of treating trivial and simple 
 verses, to which Dr Johnson's stanza would 
 be a fair parallelism, is not to say, This is a 
 bad kind of poetry, or, This is not poetry ; but 
 this wants sense; it is neither interesting in 
 itself, nor can lead to any thing interesting; 
 the images neither originate in that sane state 
 of feeling which arises out of thought, nor can 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This 
 is the only sensible manner of dealing with 
 such verses. Why trouble yourself about the 
 species till you have previously decided upon 
 the genus ? Why take pains to prove that an 
 ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident 
 that he is not a man ? 
 
 I have one request to make of my Reader, 
 which is, that in judging these Poems he would 
 decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not 
 by reflection upon what will probably be the 
 judgment of others. How common is it to 
 hear a person say, "I myself do not object to 
 this style of composition, or this or that ex- 
 pression, but, to such and such classes of 
 people, it will appear mean or ludicrous!" 
 This mode of criticism, so destructive of all 
 sound unadulterated judgment, is almost uni- 
 versal: I have therefore to request, that the 
 Reader would abide independently by his own 
 feelings, and that, if he finds himself affected, 
 he would not suffer such conjectures to inter- 
 fere with his pleasure. 
 
 If an Author, by any single composition, has 
 impressed us with respect for his talents, it is 
 useful to consider this as affording a pre- 
 sumption, that on other occasions where we 
 have been displeased, he, nevertheless, may 
 not have written ill or absurdly ; and, further, 
 to give him so much credit for this one com- 
 position as may induce us to review what has 
 displeased us, with more care than we should 
 otherwise have bestowed upon it. This is not 
 only an act of justice, but, in our decisions 
 142 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 upon poetry especially, may conduce, in a high 
 degree, to the improvement of our own taste : 
 for an accurate taste in poetry, and in all the 
 other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, 
 is an acquired talent, which can only be pro- 
 duced by thought and a long-continued inter- 
 course with the best models of composition. 
 This is mentioned, not with so ridiculous a 
 purpose as to prevent the most inexperienced 
 Reader from judging for himself (I have already 
 said that I wish him to judge for himself), but 
 merely to temper the rashness of decision, and 
 to suggest, that, if Poetry be a subject on which 
 much time has not been bestowed, the judg- 
 ment may be erroneous ; and that, in many 
 cases, it necessarily will be so. 
 
 I know that nothing would have so effectually 
 contributed to further the end which I have in 
 view, as to have shown of what kind the 
 pleasure is, and how that pleasure is produced, 
 which is confessedly produced by metrical com- 
 position essentially different from that which I 
 have here endeavoured to recommend : for the 
 Reader will say that he has been pleased by 
 such composition ; and what can I do more 
 for him ? The power of any art is limited ; 
 and he will suspect, that, if I propose to furnish 
 him with new friends, it is only upon condition 
 of his abandoning his old friends. Besides, 
 as I have said, the Reader is himself conscious 
 of the pleasure which he has received from 
 such composition, composition to which he has 
 peculiarly attached the endearing name of 
 Poetry ; and all men feel an habitual grati- 
 
 M3 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 tude, and something of an honourable bigotry 
 for the objects which have long continued to 
 please them ; we not only wish to be pleased, 
 but to be pleased in that particular way in 
 which we have been accustomed to be pleased. 
 There is a host of arguments in these feelings ; 
 and I should be the less able to combat them 
 successfully, as I am willing to allow, that, in 
 order entirely to enjoy the Poetry which I am 
 recommending, it would be necessary to give 
 up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed. But, 
 would my limits have permitted me to point 
 out how this pleasure is produced, I might 
 have removed many obstacles, and assisted 
 my Reader in perceiving that the powers of 
 language are not so limited as he may suppose ; 
 and that it is possible for poetry to give other 
 enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and more 
 exquisite nature. This part of my subject I 
 have not altogether neglected ; but it has been 
 less my present aim to prove, that the interest 
 excited by some other kinds of poetry is less 
 vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers 
 of the mind, than to offer reasons for pre- 
 suming, that, if the object which I have 
 proposed to myself were adequately attained, 
 a species of poetry would be produced, which 
 is genuine poetry ; in its nature well adapted 
 to interest mankind permanently, and likewise 
 important in the multiplicity and quality of 
 its moral relations. 
 
 From what has been said, and from a perusal 
 of the Poems, the Reader will be able clearly 
 to perceive the object which I have proposed 
 144 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 to myself: he will determine how far I have 
 attained this object ; and, what is a much more 
 important question, whether it be worth at- 
 taining; and upon the decision of these two 
 questions will rest my claim to the approbation 
 of the Public. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 ON POETIC DICTION. 
 
 As, perhaps, I have no right to expect from 
 a Reader of Observations on a volume of 
 Poems that attentive perusal without which it 
 is impossible, imperfectly as I have been com- 
 pelled to express my meaning, that what is 
 there said should, throughout, be fully under- 
 stood, I am the more anxious to give an exact 
 notion of the sense in which I use the phrase 
 poetic diction ; and for this purpose I will here 
 add a few words concerning the origin of the 
 phraseology which I have condemned under 
 that name. The earliest poets of all nations 
 generally wrote from passion excited by real 
 events ; they wrote naturally, and as men : 
 feeling powerfully as they did, their language 
 was daring, and figurative. In succeeding 
 times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame 
 of Poets, perceiving the influence of such 
 language, and desirous of producing the same 
 effect without having the same animating 
 i K 145 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 passion, set themselves to a mechanical adop- 
 tion of these figures of speech, and made use 
 of them, sometimes with propriety, but much 
 more frequently applied them to feelings and 
 ideas with which they had no natural connexion 
 whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly 
 produced, differing materially from the real 
 language of men in any situation. The Reader 
 or Hearer of this distorted language found 
 himself in a perturbed and unusual state of 
 mind ; when affected by the genuine language 
 of passion he had been in a perturbed and 
 unusual state of mind also : in both cases he 
 was willing that his common judgment and 
 understanding should be laid asleep, and he 
 had no instinctive and infallible perception of 
 the true to make him reject the false ; the one 
 served as a passport for the other. The 
 agitation and confusion of mind were in both 
 cases delightful, and no wonder if he con- 
 founded the one with the other, and believed 
 them both to be produced by the same, or 
 similar causes. Besides, the Poet spake to him 
 in the character of a man to be looked up to, 
 a man of genius and authority. Thus, and 
 from a variety of other causes, this distorted 
 language was received with admiration; and 
 Poets, it is probable, who had before contented 
 themselves for the most part with misapplying 
 only expressions which at first had been dic- 
 tated by real passion, carried the abuse still 
 further, and introduced phrases composed ap- 
 parently in the spirit of the original figurative 
 language of passion, yet altogether of their 
 
 Hi 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 own invention, and distinguished by various 
 degrees of wanton deviation from good sense 
 and nature. 
 
 It is indeed true that the language of the 
 earliest Poets was felt to differ materially from 
 ordinary language, because it was the language 
 of extraordinary occasions ; but it was really 
 spoken by men, language which the Poet him- 
 self had uttered when he had been affected by 
 the events which he described, or which he had 
 heard uttered by those around him. To this 
 language it is probable that metre of some sort 
 or other was early superadded. This separated 
 the genuine language of Poetry still further 
 from common life, so that whoever read or 
 heard the poems of these earliest Poets felt 
 himself moved in a way in which he had not 
 been accustomed to be moved in real life, and 
 by causes manifestly different from those which 
 acted upon him in real life. This was the 
 great temptation to all the corruptions which 
 have followed : under the protection of this 
 feeling succeeding Poets constructed a phrase- 
 ology which had one thing, it is true, in com- 
 mon with the genuine language of poetry, 
 namely, that it was not heard in ordinary 
 conversation; that it was unusual. But the 
 first Poets, as I have said, spake a language 
 which, though unusual, was still the language 
 of men. This circumstance, however, was dis- 
 regarded by their successors ; they found that 
 they could please by easier means : they became 
 proud of a language which they themselves had 
 invented, and which was uttered only by them- 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 selves ; and, with the spirit of fraternity, they 
 arrogated it to themselves as their own. In 
 process of time metre became a symbol or 
 promise of this unusual language, and whoever 
 took upon him to write in metre, according as 
 he possessed more or less of true poetic genius, 
 introduced less or more of this adulterated 
 phraseology into his compositions, and the true 
 and the false became so inseparably interwoven 
 that the taste of men was gradually perverted ; 
 and this language was received as a natural 
 language: and at length, by the influence of 
 books upon men, did to a certain degree 
 really become so. Abuses of this kind were 
 imported from one nation to another, and with 
 the progress of refinement this diction became 
 daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of 
 sight the plain humanities of nature by a 
 motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, 
 hieroglyphics, and enigmas. 
 
 It would be highly interesting to point out 
 the causes of the pleasure given by this ex- 
 travagant and absurd language: but this is 
 not the place ; it depends upon a great variety 
 of causes, but upon none perhaps more than 
 its influence in impressing a notion of the 
 peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet's char- 
 acter, and in flattering the Reader's self-love by 
 bringing him nearer to a sympathy with that 
 character ; an effect which is accomplished by 
 unsettling ordinary habits of thinking, and thus 
 assisting the Reader to approach to that per- 
 turbed and dizzy state of mind in which if he 
 does not find himself, he imagines that he is 
 148 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 balked of a peculiar enjoyment which poetry 
 can and ought to bestow. 
 
 The sonnet which I have quoted from Gray, 
 in the Preface, except the lines printed in 
 Italics, consists of little else but this diction, 
 though not of the worst kind ; and indeed, 
 if I may be permitted to say so, it is far too 
 common in the best writers, both ancient and 
 modern. Perhaps I can in no way, by positive 
 example, more easily give my Reader a notion 
 of what I mean by the phrase poetic diction, 
 than by referring him to a comparison between 
 the metrical paraphrase which we have of pas- 
 sages in the Old and New Testament, and 
 those passages as they exist in our common 
 Translation. See Pope's " Messiah" through- 
 out : Prior's ' ' Did sweeter sounds adorn my 
 flowing tongue," etc., etc. "Though I speak 
 with the tongues of men and of angels," etc., 
 etc. See ist Corinthians, chapter xiiith. By 
 way of immediate example, take the following 
 of Dr Johnson : 
 
 Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes, 
 Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise ; 
 No stern command, no monitory voice, 
 Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice ; 
 Yet, timely provident, she hastes away 
 To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day ; 
 When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain, 
 She crops the harvest and she stores the grain. 
 How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, 
 Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers? 
 While artful shades thy downy couch enclose, 
 And soft solicitation courts repose, 
 149 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, 
 Year chases year with unremitted flight, 
 Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow, 
 Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambushed foe. 
 
 From this hubbub of words pass to the 
 original. "Go to the Ant, thou Sluggard, 
 consider her ways, and be wise : which having 
 no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat 
 in the summer, and gathereth her food in the 
 harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O Slug- 
 gard? When wilt thou arise out of thy 
 sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a 
 little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall 
 thy poverty come as one that travaileth, and 
 thy ,*vant as an armed man." Proverbs, 
 chap. vi. 
 
 One more quotation, and I have done. It 
 is from Cowper's verses, supposed to be written 
 by Alexander Selkirk : 
 
 Religion ! what treasure untold 
 Resides in that heavenly word ? 
 More precious than silver and gold, 
 Or all that this earth can afford. 
 
 But the sound of the church-going bell 
 These valleys and rocks never heard, 
 Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell, 
 Or smiled when a sabbath appeared. 
 
 Ye winds, that have made me your sport, 
 Convey to this desolate shore 
 Some cordial endearing report 
 Of a land I must visit no more. 
 150 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 My Friends, do they now and then send 
 A wish or a thought after me? 
 O tell me I yet have a friend, 
 Though a friend I am never to see, 
 
 I have quoted this passage as an instance of 
 three different styles of composition. The 
 first four lines are poorly expressed ; some 
 Critics would call the language prosaic; the 
 fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that 
 it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet 
 "church-going" applied to a bell, and that 
 by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance 
 of the strange abuses which Poets have intro- 
 duced into their language till they and their 
 Readers take them as matters of course, if 
 they do not single them out expressly as 
 objects of admiration. The two lines, " Ne'er 
 sigh'd at the sound," etc., are, in my opinion, 
 an instance of the language of passion wrested 
 from its proper use, and, from the mere cir- 
 cumstance of the composition being in metre, 
 applied upon an occasion that does not justify 
 such violent expressions ; and I should con- 
 demn the passage, though perhaps few Readers 
 will agree with me, as vicious poetic diction. 
 The last stanza is throughout admirably ex- 
 pressed: it would be equally good whether 
 in prose or verse, except that the Reader has 
 an exquisite pleasure in seeing such natural 
 language so naturally connected with metre. 
 The beauty of this stanza tempts me to 
 conclude with a principle which ought never 
 to be lost sight of, namely, that in works of 
 15* 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 imagination and sentiment, in proportion as 
 ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the 
 composition be in prose or in verse, they 
 require and exact one and the same language. 
 Metre is but adventitious to composition, and 
 the phraseology for which that passport is 
 necessary, even where it is graceful at all, 
 will be little valued by the judicious. 
 
 153 
 
Certain 
 Passages 
 
 from the 
 " Biographia 
 Literaria." 
 
 COLERIDGE. 
 
 (1772-1833) 
 
 The ' ' Biographia Liter- 
 aria" was published in 1817. 
 The following passages com- 
 prise chapter xiv., which, 
 besides dealing generally 
 with poetic principles and 
 the poetic art, forms the 
 UDOn Poetry opening of Coleridge's reply 
 to Wordsworth's preceding 
 Essay. We need not add 
 that the " Biographia " 
 needs to be studied as a 
 whole, for Coleridge's theory 
 of poetry to be fully under- 
 stood. But so much may 
 fairly serve to represent him 
 here. 
 
 DURING the first year that Mr Wordsworth 
 and I were neighbours, our conversations 
 turned frequently on the two cardinal points 
 of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy 
 of the reader by a faithful adherence to the 
 truth of nature, and the power of giving the 
 interest of novelty by the modifying colours of 
 imagination. The sudden charm, which acci- 
 dents of light and shade, which moonlight or 
 sunset, diffused over a known and familiar 
 landscape, appeared to represent the practi- 
 
 *53 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 cability of combining both. These are the 
 poetry of nature. The thought suggested 
 itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a 
 series of poems might be composed of two 
 sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents 
 were to be, in part at least, supernatural ; and 
 the excellence aimed at was to consist in the 
 interesting of the affections by the dramatic 
 truth of such emotions, as would naturally 
 accompany such situations, supposing them 
 real. And real in this sense they have been to 
 every human being who, from whatever source 
 of delusion, has at any time believed himself 
 under supernatural agency. For the second 
 class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary 
 life ; the characters and incidents were to be 
 such as will be found in every village and its 
 vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling 
 mind to seek after them, or to notice them 
 when they present themselves. 
 
 In this idea originated the plan of the 
 "Lyrical Ballads"; in which it was agreed 
 that my endeavours should be directed to 
 persons and characters supernatural, or at least 
 romantic ; yet so as to transfer from our 
 inward nature a human interest and a sem- 
 blance of truth sufficient to procure for these 
 shadows of imagination that willing suspension 
 of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes 
 poetic faith. Mr Wordsworth, on the other 
 hand, was to propose to himself as his object, 
 to give the charm of novelty to things of every 
 day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the 
 supernatural, by awakening the mind's atten- 
 154 
 
Coleridge. 
 
 tion from the lethargy of custom, and directing 
 it to the loveliness and the wonders of the 
 world before us ; and inexhaustible treasure, 
 but for which, in consequence of the film of 
 familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, 
 yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that 
 neither feel nor understand. 
 
 With this view I wrote the "Ancient 
 Mariner," and was preparing, among other 
 poems, the " Dark Ladie," and the " Chris- 
 tabel," in which I should have more nearly 
 realized my ideal than I had done in my first 
 attempt. But Mr Wordsworth's industry had 
 proved so much more successful, and the 
 number of his poems so much greater, that my 
 compositions, instead of forming a balance, 
 appeared rather an interpolation of hetero- 
 geneous matter. Mr Wordsworth added two 
 or three poems written in his own character, in 
 the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction 
 which is characteristic of his genius. In this 
 form the " Lyrical Ballads " were published ; 
 and were presented by him, as an experiment, 
 whether subjects, which from their nature 
 rejected the usual ornaments and extra- 
 colloquial style of poems in general, might not 
 be so managed in the language of ordinary 
 life as to produce the pleasurable interest which 
 it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. 
 To the second edition he added a preface of 
 considerable length ; in which, notwithstanding 
 some passages of apparently a contrary import, 
 he was understood to contend for the extension 
 of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject 
 155 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 as vicious and indefensible all phrases and 
 forms of style that were not included in what 
 he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equi- 
 vocal expression) called the language of real 
 life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in 
 which it was impossible to deny the presence 
 of original genius, . however mistaken its 
 direction might be deemed, arose the whole 
 long-continued controversy. For from the 
 conjunction of perceived power with supposed 
 heresy I explain the inveteracy, and in some 
 instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious 
 passions, with which the controversy has been 
 conducted by the assailants. 
 
 Had Mr Wordsworth's poems been the silly, 
 the childish things which they were for a long 
 time described as being ; had they been really 
 distinguished from the compositions of other 
 poets merely by meanness of language and 
 inanity of thought ; had they indeed contained 
 nothing more than what is found in the 
 parodies and pretended imitations of them ; 
 they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, 
 into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged 
 the preface along with them. But year after 
 year increased the number of Mr Wordsworth's 
 admirers. They were found, too, not in the 
 lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly 
 among young men of strong sensibility and 
 meditative minds ; and their admiration (in- 
 flamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) 
 was distinguished by its intensity, I might 
 almost say, by its religious fervour. These 
 facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, 
 156 
 
Coleridge. 
 
 which was more or less consciously felt, 
 where it was outwardly and even boisterously 
 denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion 
 to his opinions, and of alarm at their con- 
 sequences, produced an eddy of criticism, 
 which would of itself have borne up the poems 
 by the violence with which it whirled them 
 round and round. With many parts of this 
 preface, in the sense attributed to them, and 
 which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, 
 I never concurred ; but, on the contrary, ob- 
 jected to them as erroneous in principle, and 
 as contradictory (in appearance at least) both 
 to other parts of the same preface and to the 
 author's own practice in the greater number of 
 the poems themselves. Mr Wordsworth, in 
 his recent collection, has, I find, degraded this 
 prefatory disquisition to the end of his second 
 volume, to be read or not at the reader's 
 choice. But he has not, as far as I can dis- 
 cover, announced any change in his poetic 
 creed. At all events, considering it as the 
 source of a controversy, in which I have been 
 honoured more than I deserve by the frequent 
 conjunction of my name with his, I think it 
 expedient to declare, once for all, in what 
 points I coincide with his opinions, and in 
 what points I altogether differ. But in order 
 to render myself intelligible, I must previously, 
 in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, 
 first, of a poem ; and secondly, of poetry itself, 
 in kind and in essence. 
 
 The office of philosophical disquisition con- 
 sists in just distinction ; while it is the privi- 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 lege of the philosopher to preserve himself 
 constantly aware that distinction is not division. 
 In order to obtain adequate notions of any 
 truth, we must intellectually separate its dis- 
 tinguishable parts ; and this is the technical 
 process of philosophy. But having so done, 
 we must then restore them in our conceptions 
 to the unity in which they actually co-exist; 
 and this is the result of philosophy. A poem 
 contains the same elements as a prose com- 
 position; the difference, therefore, must con- 
 sist in a different combination of them, in 
 consequence of a different object proposed. 
 According to the difference of the object will 
 be the difference of the combination. It is 
 possible that the object may be merely to 
 facilitate the recollection of any given facts or 
 observations by artificial arrangement ; and the 
 composition will be a poem, merely because it 
 is distinguished from prose by metre, or by 
 rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the 
 lowest sense, a man might attribute the name 
 of a poem to the well-known eaumeration of 
 the days in the several months : 
 
 ''Thirty days hath September, 
 April, June, and November," &c. 
 
 and others of the same class and purpose. 
 And as a particular pleasure is found in anti- 
 cipating the recurrence of sound and quantities, 
 all compositions that have this charm super- 
 added, whatever be their contents, may be 
 entitled poems. 
 
Coleridge. 
 
 So much for the superficial form. A dif- 
 ference of object and contents supplies an 
 additional ground of distinction. The im- 
 mediate purpose may be the communication 
 of truths ; either of truth absolute and demon- 
 strable, as in works of science; or of facts 
 experienced and recorded, as in history. 
 Pleasure, and that of the highest and most 
 permanent kind, may result from the attain- 
 ment of the end ; but it is not itself the im- 
 mediate end. In other works the communica- 
 tion of pleasure may be the immediate purpose ; 
 and though truth, either moral or intellectual, 
 ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will 
 distinguish the character of the author, not 
 the class to which the work belongs. Blest 
 indeed is that state of society, in which the 
 immediate purpose would be baffled by the 
 perversion of the proper ultimate end ; in 
 which no charm of diction or imagery could 
 exempt the Bathyllus even of an Anacreon, 
 or the Alexis of Virgil, from disgust and 
 aversion ! 
 
 But the communication of pleasure may be 
 the immediate object of a work not metrically 
 composed ; and that object may have been in 
 in a high degree attained, as in novels and 
 romances. Would then the mere superaddition 
 of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these 
 to the name of poems? The answer is, that 
 nothing can permanently please, which does 
 not contain in itself the reason why it is so, 
 and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, 
 all other parts must be made consonant with 
 159 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 it. They must be such as to justify the per- 
 petual and distinct attention to each part, 
 which an exact correspondent recurrence of 
 accent and sound are calculated to excite. The 
 final definition then, so deduced, may be thus 
 worded. A poem is that species of composi- 
 tion, which is opposed to works of science, by 
 proposing for its immediate object pleasure, 
 not truth ; and from all other species (having 
 this object in common with it) it is discrimi- 
 nated by proposing to itself such delight from 
 the whole, as is compatible with a distinct 
 gratification from each component part. 
 
 Controversy is not seldom excited in con- 
 sequence of the disputants attaching each a 
 different meaning to the same word; and in 
 few instances has this been more striking than 
 in disputes concerning the present subject. If 
 a man chooses to call every composition a 
 poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, 
 I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The 
 distinction is at least competent to characterize 
 the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, 
 that the whole is likewise entertaining or 
 affecting as a tale, or as a series of interesting 
 reflections, I of course admit this as another 
 fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional 
 merit. But if the definition sought for be that 
 of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be 
 one the parts of which mutually support and 
 explain each other; all in their proportion 
 harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose 
 and known influences of metrical arrangement. 
 The philosophic critics of all ages coincide 
 160 
 
Coleridge. 
 
 with the ultimate judgment of all countries, 
 in equally denying the praises of a just poem, 
 on the one hand to a series of striking lines or 
 distichs, each of which absorbing the whole 
 attention of the reader to itself, disjoins it from 
 its context, and makes it a separate whole, 
 instead of a harmonizing part ; and on the 
 other hand, to an unsustained composition, 
 from which the reader collects rapidly the 
 general result unattracted by the component 
 parts. The reader should be carried forward, 
 not merely or chiefly by the mechanical im- 
 pulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to 
 arrive at the final solution ; but by the pleasur- 
 able activity of mind excited by the attrac- 
 tions of the journey itself. Like the motion 
 of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the 
 emblem of intellectual power ; or like the path 
 of sound through the air, at every step he 
 pauses and half recedes, and from the retro- 
 gressive movement collects the force which 
 again carries him onward, Pracipitandus est 
 liber spiritus, says Petronius Arbiter most 
 happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the 
 preceding verb : and it is not easy to conceive 
 more meaning condensed in fewer words. 
 
 But if this should be admitted as a satis- 
 factory character of a poem, we have still to 
 seek for a definition of poetry. The writings 
 of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the Tkeoria 
 Sacra of Burnet, furnish undeniable proofs 
 that poetry of the highest kind may exist 
 without metre, and even without the contra- 
 distinguishing objects of a poem. The first 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 chapter of Isaiah (indeed a very large pro- 
 portion of the whole book) is poetry in the 
 most emphatic sense ; yet it would be not less 
 irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, 
 and not truth, was the immediate object of the 
 prophet. In short, whatever specific import 
 we attach to the word poetry, there will be 
 found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, 
 that a poem of any length neither can be, nor 
 ought to be, all poetry. Yet if a harmonious 
 whole is to be produced, the remaining parts 
 must be preserved in keeping with the poetry ; 
 and this can be no otherwise effected than by 
 such a studied selection and artificial arrange- 
 ment as will partake of one, though not a 
 peculiar, property of poetry. And this again 
 can be no other than the property of exciting 
 a more continuous and equal attention than 
 the language of prose aims at, whether col- 
 loquial or written. 
 
 My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, 
 in the strictest use of the word, have been in 
 part anticipated in the preceding disquisition 
 on the fancy and imagination. What is poetry? 
 is so nearly the same question with, what is a 
 poet ? that the answer to the one is involved in 
 the solution of the other. For it is a distinction 
 resulting from the poetic genius itself, which 
 sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, 
 and emotions of the poet's own mind. The 
 poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the 
 whole soul of man into activity, with the 
 subordination of its faculties to each other, 
 according to their relative worth and dignity. 
 
Coleridge. 
 
 He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that 
 blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, 
 by that synthetic and magical power, to which 
 we have exclusively appropriated the name of 
 imagination. This power, first put in action 
 by the will and understanding, and retained 
 under their irremissive, though gentle and 
 unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis) re- 
 veals itself in the balance of reconciliation of 
 opposite or discordant qualities : of sameness, 
 with difference ; of the general, with the con- 
 crete ; the idea, with the image ; the individual, 
 with the representative ; the sense of novelty 
 and freshness, with old and familiar objects ; 
 a more than usual state of emotion, with more 
 than usual order; judgment ever awake and 
 steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and 
 feeling profound or vehement ; and while it 
 blends and harmonizes the natural and the 
 artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the 
 manner to the matter ; and our admiration of 
 the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. 
 "Doubtless," as Sir John Davies observes of 
 the soul (and his words may with slight altera 
 tion be applied, and even more appropriately, 
 to the poetic imagination), 
 
 " Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns 
 Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, 
 As fire converts to fire, the things it burns, 
 As we our food into our nature change. 
 
 From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, 
 And draws a kind of quintessence from things ; 
 Which to her proper nature she transforms 
 To bear them light on her celestial wings. 
 163 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Thus does she, when from individual states 
 She doth abstract the universal kinds ; 
 Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates 
 Steal access through our senses to our minds." 
 
 Finally, good sense is the body of poetic 
 genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and 
 imagination the soul that is everywhere, and 
 in each ; and forms all into one graceful and 
 intelligent whole. 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 (1792-1822) 
 
 The " Defence" was written 
 at Pisa in 1821, in reply to an 
 article by Peacock in Ollier's 
 Literary Miscellany. It was 
 intended to extend to three 
 parts, only the first of which 
 Of Poetry." was completed. It was first 
 
 published by Lady Shelley 
 in the " Essays and Letters " 
 in 1824. 
 
 ACCORDING to one mode of regarding those 
 two classes of mental action, which are called 
 reason and imagination, the former may be con- 
 sidered 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 colour 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 rd Trotetv, 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 rb \oytfav, 
 or principle of analysis, and its action regards 
 the relations of things simply as relations ; 
 considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, 
 165 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 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 quantities, both separately and as a whole. 
 Reason respects the differences, and imagina- 
 tion 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 ^Eolian 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 correspond- 
 ing antitype in the pleasurable impressions 
 which awakened it ; it will be the reflected 
 166 
 
Shelley. 
 
 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 imita- 
 tion, 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 addi- 
 tional 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 statue, 
 the chord and the harmony. The social sym- 
 pathies, or those laws from which, as from its 
 elements, society results, begin to develop 
 themselves from the moment that two human 
 beings co-exist ; the future is contained within 
 the present, as the plant within the seed ; and 
 equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual de- 
 pendence, 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, 
 167 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 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 repre- 
 sented by them, all expression being subject 
 to the laws of that from which it proceeds. 
 But let us dismiss those more general considera- 
 tions 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 be- 
 longing 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 
 168 
 
Shelley, 
 
 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 in- 
 fluence 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 meta- 
 phorical; that is, it marks the before un- 
 apprehended relations of things and per- 
 petuates 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 dis- 
 organised, 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 " * 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 exist- 
 ence and perception, and secondly between 
 perception and expression. Every original 
 * De Augment. Scient., cap. i, lib. iii. 
 i6q 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 language near to its source is in itself the chaos 
 of a cyclic poem : the copiousness of lexico- 
 graphy and the distinctions of grammar are the 
 works of a later age, and are merely the cata- 
 logue and the form of the creations of poetry. 
 
 But poets, or those who imagine and ex- 
 press 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 appre- 
 hension 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 
 170 
 
Shelley. 
 
 make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather 
 than prophecy an attribute to poetry. A 
 poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, 
 and the one ; as far as relates to his con- 
 ceptions, 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 
 ^Eschylus, 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, colour, 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 con- 
 siders the effect as a synonyme 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 com- 
 binations, than colour, 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 imagina- 
 171 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 tion, 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 com- 
 munication. 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 per- 
 formers 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. 
 
 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 deter- 
 mine the distinction between measured and 
 unmeasured language ; for the popular division 
 into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate 
 philosophy. 
 
 172 
 
Shelley. 
 
 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 in- 
 fluence, 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 colour and odour, 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 burthen of the curse 
 of Babel. 
 
 An observation of the regular mode of the re- 
 currence of harmony in the language of poetical 
 minds, together with its relation to music, pro- 
 duced metre, or a certain system of traditional 
 forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by 
 no means essential that a poet should ac- 
 commodate his language to this traditional 
 form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, 
 be observed. The practice is indeed con- 
 venient and popular, and to be preferred, 
 especially in such composition as includes 
 much action : but every great poet must in- 
 evitably innovate upon the example of his pre- 
 decessors in the exact structure of his peculiar 
 J 73 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 versification. The distinction between poets 
 and prose writers is a vulgar error. The dis- 
 tinction between philosophers and poets has 
 been anticipated. Plato was essentially a 
 poet the truth and splendour of his imagery, 
 and the melody of his language, are the most 
 intense that it is possible to conceive. He re- 
 jected 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.* 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 circum- 
 ference 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 
 
 * See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on 
 Death particularly. 
 
 74 
 
Shelley. 
 
 supreme poets, who have employed traditional 
 forms of rhythm on account of the form and 
 action of their subjects, less capable of per- 
 ceiving and teaching the truth of things, than 
 those who have omitted that form. Shake- 
 speare, Dante, and Milton (to confine our- 
 selves to modern writers) are philosophers of 
 the very loftiest power. 
 
 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, circum- 
 stance, cause and effect ; the other is the 
 creation of actions according to the unchange- 
 able 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 for ever develops new and wonder- 
 ful 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 
 J75 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 which makes beautiful that which is dis 
 torted. 
 
 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 inex- 
 tinguishable 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, be- 
 yond and above consciousness ; and it is 
 reserved for future generations to contemplate 
 and measure the mighty cause and effect in 
 all the strength and splendour 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 
 176 
 
Shelley. 
 
 his peers : it must be impanneled by Time 
 from the selectest of the wise of many genera- 
 tions. 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 de- 
 light 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 de- 
 votion to an object, were unveiled to the depths 
 in these immortal creations : the sentiments of 
 the auditors must have been refined and en- 
 larged by a sympathy with such great and 
 lovely impersonations, until from admiring 
 they imitated, and from imitation they identi- 
 fied themselves with the objects of their ad- 
 miration. 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; Re- 
 venge is the naked idol of the worship of a 
 semi-barbarous age ; and Self-deceit is the 
 veiled image of unknown evil, before which 
 M 177 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 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 armour 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 splendour ; and it is doubt- 
 ful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., 
 be not necessary to temper this planetary 
 music for mortal ears. 
 
 The whole objection, however, of the im- 
 morality of poetry rests upon a misconception 
 of the manner in which poetry acts to pro- 
 duce the moral improvement of man. Ethical 
 science arranges the elements which poetry 
 has created, and propounds schemes and pro- 
 poses 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 
 178 
 
Shelley. 
 
 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 pleasures of his species must be- 
 come his own. The great instrument of mora 
 good is the imagination ; and poetry ad- 
 ministers 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 voia 
 for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens 
 the faculty which is the organ of the mora 
 nature of man, in the same manner as exercise 
 strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do 
 179 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 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 pro- 
 portion 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 contemporane- 
 ously with all that is most perfect in the kindred 
 expressions of the poetical faculty ; architecture, 
 painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philoso- 
 phy, 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 
 erasedfrom the habits and institutions of modern 
 Europe ; ye never at any other period has so 
 much energy, beauty, and virtue been devel- 
 oped ; never was blind strength and stubborn 
 form so disciplined and rendered subject to the 
 will of man, or^that will less repugnant to the dic- 
 tates of the beautiful and the true, as during the 
 180 
 
Shelley. 
 
 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 memor- 
 able above all others, and the storehouse of ex- 
 amples 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 co-exist with whatever other arts con- 
 tribute 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 suc- 
 ceeding writer may have equalled or surpassed 
 those few great specimens of the Athenian drama 
 which have been preserved to us, it is indisput- 
 able 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 ideal- 
 isms of passion and of power ; each division 
 in the art was made perfect in its kind by 
 artists of the most consummate skill, and was 
 disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 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 ap- 
 propriated to his dramatic character might be 
 moulded into one permanent and unchanging 
 expression, is favourable 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 favour of King 
 Lear against the CEdipus Tyrannus or the Aga- 
 memnon, 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 
 
Shelley. 
 
 the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama 
 which has prevailed in modern Europe. Cal- 
 deron, 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 observa- 
 tion 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 im- 
 personations of the truth of human passion. 
 
 But I digress. The connection of scenic ex- 
 hibitions with the improvement or corruption 
 of the manners of men, has been universally 
 recognised ; in other words, the presence or 
 absence of poetry in its most perfect and 
 universal form has been found to be con- 
 nected with good and evil in conduct or 
 habit. The corruption which has been im- 
 puted 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 ex- 
 actness equal to any example of moral cause 
 and effect. 
 
 The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it 
 may have approached to its perfection, ever co . 
 existed 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, 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy 
 which every one 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 affec- 
 tions are strengthened by pity, indignation, 
 terror and sorrow; and an exalted calm is 
 prolonged from the satiety of this high exer- 
 cise 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 wilful- 
 ness; 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 pro- 
 pagating its like wherever it may fall. 
 
 But in periods of the decay of social life, the 
 
 drama sympathises with that decay. Tragedy 
 
 becomes a cold imitation of the form of the 
 
 great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all 
 
 184 
 
Shelley. 
 
 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 truth ; 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 light- 
 ning, 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, di 
 vested 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 ex- 
 pressed 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 per- 
 vades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and 
 poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. 
 Comedy loses its ideal universality : wit suc- 
 ceeds to humour ; we laugh from self-com- 
 placency and triumph, instead of pleasure; 
 malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to 
 sympathetic merriment ; we hardly laugh, but 
 185 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 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 for ever 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 connexion 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 dra- 
 matic excellence ; and that the corruption or 
 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 
 dfama 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 participates in 
 the divine nature as regards providence, no 
 less than as regards creation. 
 
 Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal 
 predominance first of the Macedonian, and 
 then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols 
 of the extinction or suspension of the creative 
 faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, who 
 186 
 
Shelley 
 
 found patronage under the lettered tyrants of 
 Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representa- 
 tives of its most glorious reign. Their poetry 
 is intensely melodious ; like the odour of the 
 tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit 
 with excess of sweetness ; whilst the poetry of 
 the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of 
 June, which mingles the fragrance of all the 
 flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and 
 harmonising spirit of its own which endows 
 the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme 
 delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in 
 written poetry is correlative with that softness 
 in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and 
 even in manners and institutions, which dis- 
 tinguish the epoch to which I now refer. Nor 
 is it the poetic faculty itself, or any mis-appli- 
 cation of it, to which this want of harmony is 
 to be imputed, An equal sensibility to the 
 influence of the senses and the affections is 
 to be found in the writings of Homer and 
 Sophocles : the former, especially, has clothed 
 sensual and pathetic images with irresistible 
 attractions. Their superiority over these suc- 
 ceeding writers consists in the presence of those 
 thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of 
 our nature, not in the absence of those which 
 are connected with the external : their incom- 
 parable perfection consists in a harmony of 
 the union of all. It is not what the erotic 
 poets have, but what they have not, in which 
 their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch 
 as they were poets, but inasmuch as they were 
 not poets, that they can be considered with 
 187 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 any plausibility as connected with the corrup- 
 tion of their age. Had that corruption availed 
 so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to 
 pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which 
 is imputed to them as an imperfection, the 
 last triumph of evil would have been achieved. 
 For the end of social corruption is to destroy 
 all sensibility to pleasure ; and, therefore, it is 
 corruption. It begins at the imagination and 
 the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself 
 thence as a paralysing venom, through the 
 affections into the very appetites, until all be- 
 come a torpid mass in which hardly sense 
 survives. At the approach of such a period, 
 poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties 
 which are the last to be destroyed, and its 
 voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea 
 departing from the world. Poetry ever com- 
 municates all the pleasure which men are 
 capable of receiving : it is ever still the light 
 of life ; the source of whatever of beautiful or 
 generous or true can have place in an evil time. 
 It will readily be confessed that those among 
 the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alex- 
 andria, who were delighted with the poems of 
 Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual 
 than the remnant of their tribe. But corrup- 
 tion must utterly have destroyed the fabric of 
 human society before poetry can ever cease. 
 The sacred links of that chain have never been 
 entirely disjoined, which descending through 
 the minds of many men is attached to those 
 great minds, whence as from a magnet the in- 
 visible effluence is sent forth, which at once 
 
Shelley. 
 
 connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. 
 It is the faculty which contains within itself 
 the seeds at once of its own and of social 
 renovation. And let us not circumscribe the 
 effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within 
 the limits of the sensibility of those to whom 
 it was addressed. They may have perceived 
 the beauty of those immortal compositions, 
 simply as fragments and isolated portions: 
 those who are more finely organised, or, born 
 in a happier age, may recognise them as 
 episodes to that great poem, which all poets } 
 like the co-operating thoughts of one great 
 mind, have built up since the beginning of the 
 world. 
 
 The same revolutions within a narrower 
 sphere had place in ancient Rome; but the 
 actions and forms of its social life never seem 
 to have been perfectly saturated with the 
 poetical element. The Romans appear to 
 have considered the Greeks as the selectest 
 treasuries of the selectest forms of manners 
 and of nature, and to have abstained from 
 creating in measured language, sculpture, 
 music, or architecture, anything which might 
 bear a particular relation to their own condi- 
 tion, whilst it should bear a general one to 
 the universal constitution of the world. But 
 we judge from partial evidence, and we judge 
 perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, 
 and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. 
 Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in 
 a very high sense, a creator. The chosen 
 delicacy of expressions of the latter, are as 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 a mist of light which conceal from us the 
 intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions 
 of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet 
 Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the 
 other great writers of the Virgilian age, saw 
 man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The 
 institutions also, and the religion of Rome, 
 were less poetical that those of Greece, as 
 the shadow is less vivid than the substance. 
 Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather 
 than accompany, the perfection of political 
 and domestic society. The true poetry of 
 Rome lived in its institutions ; for whatever 
 of beautiful, true, and majestic, they contained, 
 could have sprung only from the faculty which 
 creates the order in which they consist. The 
 life of Camillus, the death of Regulus ; the 
 expectation of the senators, in their godlike 
 state, of the victorious Gauls ; the refusal of 
 the republic to make peace with Hannibal, 
 after the battle of Cannae, were not the con- 
 sequences of a refined calculation of the 
 probable personal advantage to result from 
 such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, 
 to those who were at once the poets and 
 the actors of these immortal dramas. The 
 imagination beholding the beauty of this order, 
 created it out of itself according to its own 
 idea ; the consequence was empire, and the 
 reward ever-living fame. These things are 
 not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro. 
 They are the episodes of that cyclic poem 
 written by Time upon the memories of men. 
 The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills 
 190 
 
Shelley. 
 
 the theatre of everlasting generations with 
 their harmony. 
 
 At length the ancient system of religion and 
 manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolu- 
 tions. And the world would have fallen into 
 utter anarchy and darkness, but that there 
 were found poets among the authors of the 
 Christian and chivalric systems of manners 
 and religion, who created forms of opinion 
 and action never before conceived ; which, 
 copied into the imaginations of men, became 
 as generals to the bewildered armies of their 
 thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose 
 to touch upon the evil produced by these 
 systems : except that we protest, on the ground 
 of the principles already established, that no 
 portion of it can be attributed to the poetry 
 they contain. 
 
 It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, 
 David, Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a 
 great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his 
 disciples. The scattered fragments preserved 
 to us by the biographers of this extraordinary 
 person, are all instinct with the most vivid 
 poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been 
 quickly distorted. At a certain period after 
 the prevalence of a system of opinions founded 
 upon those promulgated by him, the three 
 forms into which Plato had distributed the 
 faculties of mind underwent a sort of apothe- 
 osis, and became the object of the worship of 
 the civilised world. Here it is to be confessed 
 that " Light seems to thicken," and 
 
 191 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 u The crow makes wing to the rooky wood, 
 Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, 
 And night's black agents to their preys do rouse." 
 
 But mark how beautiful an order has sprung 
 from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos ! 
 how the world, as from a resurrection, 
 balancing itself on the golden wings of know- 
 ledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet 
 unwearied flight into the heaven of time. 
 Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, 
 which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, 
 nourishing its everlasting course with strength 
 and swiftness. 
 
 The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, 
 and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic 
 conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the 
 darkness and the convulsions connected with 
 their growth and victory, and blended them- 
 selves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. 
 It is an error to impute the ignorance of the 
 dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the 
 predominance of the Celtic nations. What- 
 ever of evil their agencies may have contained 
 sprang from the extinction of the poetical 
 principle, connected with the progress of 
 despotism and superstition. Men, from causes 
 too intricate to be here discussed, had become 
 insensible and selfish : their own will had 
 become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, 
 and thence the slaves of the will of others : 
 lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, charac- 
 terised a race amongst whom no one was to 
 be found capable of creating in form, language, 
 or institution. The moral anomalies of such 
 192 
 
Shelley. 
 
 a state of society are not justly to be charged 
 upon any class of events immediately con- 
 nected with them, and those events are most 
 entitled to our approbation which could dis- 
 solve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate 
 for those who cannot distinguish words from 
 thoughts, that many of these anamolies have 
 been incorporated into our popular religion. 
 
 It was not until the eleventh century that 
 the effects of the poetry of the Christian and 
 chivalric systems began to manifest themselves. 
 The principle of equality had been discovered 
 and applied by Plato in his Republic, as the 
 theoretical rule of the mode in which the 
 materials of pleasure and of power produced 
 by the common skill and labour of human 
 beings ought to be distributed among them. 
 The limitations of this rule were asserted by 
 him to be determined only by the sensibility 
 of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato, 
 following the doctrines of Timseus and Pytha- 
 goras, taught also a moral and intellectual 
 system of doctrine, comprehending at once 
 the past, the present, and the future condition 
 of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred 
 and eternal truths contained in these views to 
 mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract 
 purity, became the exoteric expression of the 
 esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom 
 of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic 
 nations with the exhausted population of the 
 south, impressed upon it the figure of the 
 poetry existing in their mythology and in- 
 stitutions. The result was a sum of the 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 action and reaction of all the causes included 
 in it ; for it may be assumed as a maxim that 
 no nation or religion can supersede any other 
 without incorporating into itself a portion of 
 that which it supersedes. The abolition of 
 personal and domestic slavery, and the eman- 
 cipation of women from a great part of the 
 degrading restraints of antiquity, were among 
 the consequences of these events. 
 
 The abolition of personal slavery is the basis 
 of the highest political hope that it can enter 
 into the mind of man to conceive. The free- 
 dom of women produced the poetry of sexual 
 love. Love became a religion, the idols of 
 whose worship were ever present. It was as 
 if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had 
 been endowed with life and motion, and had 
 walked forth among their worshippers ; so that 
 earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a 
 diviner world. The familiar appearance and 
 proceedings of life became wonderful and 
 heavenly, and a paradise was created as out 
 of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation 
 itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; 
 and language was the instrument of their 
 art: "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." 
 The Proven9al Trouveurs, or inventors, pre- 
 ceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, 
 which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains 
 of the delight which is in the grief of love. 
 It is impossible to feel them without becom- 
 ing a portion of that beauty which we con- 
 template : it were superfluous to explain how 
 the gentleness and the elevation of mind 
 194 
 
Shelley. 
 
 connected with these sacred emotions can 
 render men more amiable, more generous 
 and wise, and lift them out of the dull 
 vapours of the little world of self. Dante 
 understood the secret things of love even 
 more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an 
 inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment 
 and language : it is the idealised history of 
 that period, and those intervals of his life 
 which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis 
 of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of 
 his own love and her loveliness, by which as 
 by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to 
 the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most 
 glorious imagination of modern poetry. The 
 acutest critics have justly reversed the judg- 
 ment of the vulgar, and the order of the 
 great acts of the "Divine Drama," in the 
 measure of the admiration which they accord 
 to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The 
 latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. 
 Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato 
 alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated 
 by a chorus of the greatest writers of the 
 renovated world ; and the music has pene- 
 trated the caverns of society, and its echoes 
 still drown the dissonance of arms and super- 
 stition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, 
 Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, 
 Rousseau, and the great writers of our own 
 age, have celebrated the dominion of love, 
 planting as it were trophies in the human 
 mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality 
 and force, The true relation borne to each 
 195 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 other by the sexes into which human kind is 
 distributed, has become less misunderstood ; 
 and if the error which confounded diversity 
 with inequality of the powers of the two sexes 
 has been partially recognised in the opinions 
 and institutions of modern Europe, we owe 
 this great benefit to the worship of which 
 chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets. 
 The poetry of Dante may be considered as 
 the bridge thrown over the stream of time, 
 which unites the modern and ancient world. 
 The distorted notions of invisible things which 
 Dante and his rival Milton have idealised, are 
 merely the mask and the mantle in which these 
 great poets walk through eternity enveloped 
 and disguised. It is a difficult question to 
 determine how far they were conscious of 
 the distinction which must have subsisted in 
 their minds between their own creeds and 
 that of the people. Dante at least appears 
 to wish to mark the full extent of it by 
 placing Riphseus, whom Virgil calls justis- 
 simus unus, in Paradise, and observing a 
 most heretical caprice in his distribution of 
 rewards and punishments. And Milton's 
 poem contains within itself a philosophical 
 refutation of that system, of which, by a 
 strange and natural antithesis, it has been a 
 chief popular support. Nothing can exceed 
 the energy and magnificence of the character 
 of Satan as expressed in "Paradise Lost." 
 It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever 
 have been intended for the popular personifica- 
 tion of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, 
 196 
 
Shelley. 
 
 and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict 
 the extremest anguish on an enemy, these 
 things are evil; and, although venial in a 
 slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; 
 although redeemed by much that ennobles 
 his defeat in one subdued, are marked by 
 all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. 
 Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far 
 superior to his God, as one who perseveres 
 in some purpose which he has conceived to 
 be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, 
 is to one who in the cold security of undoubted 
 triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon 
 his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of 
 inducing him to repent of a perseverance in 
 enmity, but with the alleged design of ex- 
 asperating him to deserve new torments. 
 Milton has so far violated the popular creed 
 (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as 
 to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue 
 to his God over his Devil. And this bold 
 neglect of a direct moral purpose is the 
 most decisive proof of the supremacy of 
 Milton's genius. He mingled as it were 
 the elements of human nature as colours 
 upon a single pallet, and arranged them in 
 the composition of his great picture accord- 
 ing to the laws of epic truth ; that is, accord- 
 ing to the laws of that principle by which a 
 series of actions of the external universe and 
 of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated 
 to excite the sympathy of succeeding genera- 
 tions of mankind. The Divina Commedia 
 and Paradise Lost have conferred upon 
 197 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 modern mythology a systematic form; and 
 when change and time shall have added one 
 more superstition to the mass of those which 
 have arisen and decayed upon the earth, 
 commentators will be learnedly employed in 
 elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, 
 only not utterly forgotten because it will have 
 been stamped with the eternity of genius. 
 
 Homer was the first and Dante the second 
 epic poet : that is, the second poet, the series 
 of whose creations bore a denned and intelli- 
 gible relation to the knowledge and sentiment 
 and religion of the age in which he lived, and 
 of the ages which followed it, developing itself 
 in correspondence with their development. 
 For Lucretius had limed the wings of his 
 swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible 
 world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill 
 became his genius, had affected the fame of 
 an imitator, even whilst he created anew all 
 that he copied ; and none among the flock 
 of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, 
 Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, 
 Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even 
 to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton 
 was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic 
 in its highest sense be refused to the ^Eneid, 
 still less can it be conceded to the Orlando 
 Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the 
 Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen. 
 
 Dante and Milton were both deeply pene- 
 trated with the ancient religion of the civilised 
 world ; and its spirit exists in their poetry 
 probably in the same proportion as its forms 
 198 
 
Shelley. 
 
 survived in the unreformed worship of modern 
 Europe. The one preceded and the other 
 followed the Reformation at almost equal 
 intervals. Dante was the first religious re- 
 former, and Luther surpassed him rather in 
 the rudeness and acrimony, than in the bold- 
 ness of his censures of papal usurpation. 
 Dante was the first awakener of entranced 
 Europe ; he created a language, in itself 
 music and persuasion, out of a chaos of 
 inharmonious barbarisms. He was the con- 
 gregator of those great spirits who presided 
 over the resurrection of learning ; the Lucifer 
 of that starry flock which in the thirteenth 
 century shone forth from republican Italy, as 
 from a heaven, into the darkness of the be- 
 nighted world. His very words are instinct with 
 spirit ; each is as a spark, a burning atom of 
 inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie 
 covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant 
 with the lightning which has yet found no con- 
 ductor. All high poetry is infinite ; it is as the 
 first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. 
 Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost 
 naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. 
 A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing 
 with the waters of wisdom and delight ; and 
 after one person and one age has exhausted 
 all its divine effluence which their peculiar re- 
 lations enable them to share, another and yet 
 another succeeds, and new relations are ever 
 developed, the source of an unforeseen and an 
 unconceived delight. 
 
 The age immediately succeeding to that of 
 199 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was charac- 
 terised by a revival of painting, sculpture, and 
 architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred in- 
 spiration, and the superstructure of English 
 literature is based upon the materials of Italian 
 invention. 
 
 But let us not be betrayed from a defence 
 into a critical history of poetry and its influence 
 on society. Be it enough to have pointed out 
 the effects of poets, in the large and true sense 
 of the word, upon their own and all succeeding 
 times. 
 
 But poets have been challenged to resign the 
 civic crown to reasoners and mechanists on 
 another plea. It is admitted that the exercise 
 of the imagination is most delightful, but it is 
 alleged that that of reason is more useful. Let 
 us examine as the grounds of this distinction 
 what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or 
 good, in a general sense, is that which the 
 consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent 
 being seeks, and in which, when found, it 
 acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleasure, 
 one durable, universal, and permanent ; the 
 other transitory and particular. Utility may 
 either express the means of producing the 
 former or the latter. In the former sense, 
 whatever strengthens and purifies the affec- 
 tions, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit 
 to sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning 
 may be assigned to the word utility, confining 
 it to express that which banishes the impor- 
 tunity of the wants of our animal nature, the 
 surrounding men with security of life, the dis- 
 
Shelley. 
 
 parsing the grosser delusions of superstition, 
 and the conciliating such a degree of mutual 
 forbearance among men as may consist with 
 the motives of personal advantage. 
 
 Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this 
 limited sense, have their appointed office in 
 society. They follow the footsteps of poets, 
 and copy the- sketches of their creations into 
 the book of common life. They make space, 
 and give time. Their exertions are of the 
 highest value, so long as they confine their 
 administration of the concerns of the inferior 
 powers of our nature within the limits due to 
 the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic de- 
 stroys gross superstitions, let him spare to de- 
 face, as some of the French writers have defaced, 
 the eternal truths charactered upon the imagina- 
 tions of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, 
 and the political economist combines labour, 
 let them beware that their speculations, for 
 want of correspondence with those first prin- 
 ciples which belong to the imagination, do 
 not tend, as they have in modern England, to 
 exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and 
 want. They have exemplified the saying, ' ' To 
 him that hath, more shall be given ; and from 
 him that hath not ; the little that he hath shall 
 be taken away." The rich have become richer, 
 and the poor have become poorer ; and the 
 vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla 
 and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such 
 are the effects which must ever flow from an 
 unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. 
 
 It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 sense; the definition involving a number of 
 apparent paradoxes. 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 prin- 
 ciple ; tragedy delights by affording a shadow 
 of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is 
 the source also of the melancholy which is in- 
 separable from the sweetest melody. The 
 pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the 
 pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the 
 saying, "It is better to go to the house of 
 mourning, than to the house of mirth." Not 
 that this highest species of pleasure is neces- 
 sarily linked with pain. The delight of love 
 and friendship, the ecstacy of the admiration 
 of nature, the joy of the perception and still 
 more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly 
 unalloyed. 
 
 The production and assurance of pleasure in 
 this highest sense is true utility. Those who 
 produce and preserve this pleasure are poets 
 or poetical philosophers. 
 
 The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, 
 Voltaire, Rousseau,* and their disciples, in 
 favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, 
 are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet 
 
 * Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he 
 was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, 
 were mere reasoners. 
 
Shelley. 
 
 it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and 
 intellectual improvement which the world would 
 have exhibited, had they never lived. A little 
 more nonsense would have been talked for a 
 century or two ; and perhaps a few more men, 
 women, and children burnt as heretics. We 
 might not at this moment have been congrat- 
 ulating each other on the abolition of the 
 Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all ima- 
 gination to conceive what would have been 
 the moral condition of the world if neither 
 Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shak- 
 speare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had 
 ever existed ; if Raphael and Michael Angelo 
 had never been born ; if the Hebrew poetry 
 had never been translated ; if a revival of the 
 study of Greek literature had never taken place ; 
 if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been 
 handed down to us ; and if the poetry of the 
 religion of the ancient world had been ex- 
 tinguished together with its belief. The human 
 mind could never, except by the intervention 
 of these excitements, have been awakened to 
 the invention of the grosser sciences, and that 
 application of analytical reasoning to the aber- 
 rations of society, which it is now attempted to 
 exalt over the direct expression of the inventive 
 and creative faculty itself. 
 
 We have more moral, political, and historical 
 wisdom than we know how to reduce into 
 practice ; we have more scientific and economical 
 knowledge than can be accommodated to the just 
 distribution of the produce which it multiplies. 
 The poetry in these systems of thought is con- 
 203 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 cealed by the accumulation of facts and calcu- 
 lating processes. There is no want of know- 
 ledge respecting what is wisest and best in 
 morals, government, and political economy, 
 or at least, what is wiser and better than what 
 men now practise and endure. But we let ' ' / 
 dare not wait upon / would, like the poor cat 
 in the adage." We want the creative faculty 
 to imagine that which we know ; we want the 
 generous impulse to act that which we imagine ; 
 we want the poetry of life : our calculations 
 have outrun conception ; we have eaten more 
 than we can digest. The cultivation of those 
 sciences which have enlarged the limits of the 
 empire of man over the external world, has, 
 for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally 
 circumscribed those of the internal world ; 
 and man, having enslaved the elements, re- 
 mains himself a slave. To what but a culti- 
 vation of the mechanical arts in a degree 
 disproportioned to the presence of the creative 
 faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, 
 is to be attributed the abuse of all invention 
 for abridging and combining labour, to the 
 exasperation of the inequality of mankind? 
 From what other cause has it arisen that the 
 discoveries which should have lightened, have 
 added a weight to the curse imposed on 
 Adam ? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of 
 which money is the visible incarnation, are 
 the God and Mammon of the world. 
 
 The functions of the poetical faculty are 
 two-fold; by one it creates new materials of 
 knowledge, and power, and pleasure ; by the 
 204 
 
Shelley. 
 
 other it engenders in the mind a desire to 
 reproduce and arrange them according to a 
 certain rhythm and order which may be called 
 the beautiful and the good. The cultivation 
 of poetry is never more to be desired than at 
 periods when, from an excess of the selfish and 
 calculating principle, the accumulation of the 
 materials of external life exceed the quantity 
 of the power of assimilating them to the in- 
 ternal laws of human nature. The body has 
 then become too unwieldy for that which 
 animates it. 
 
 Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at 
 once the centre and circumference of know- 
 ledge ; it is that which comprehends all science, 
 and that to which all science must be referred. 
 It is at the same time the root and blossom 
 of all other systems of thought ; it is that from 
 which all spring, and that which adorns all ; 
 and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit 
 and the seed, and withholds from the barren 
 world the nourishment and the succession of 
 the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect 
 and consummate surface and bloom of all 
 things ; it is as the odour and the colour of 
 the rose to the texture of the elements which 
 compose it, as the form and splendour of 
 unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy 
 and corruption. What were virtue, love, 
 patriotism, friendship what were the scenery 
 of this beautiful universe which we inhabit ; 
 what were our consolations on this side of 
 the grave and what were our aspirations 
 beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring 
 205 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 light and fire from those eternal regions where 
 the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not 
 ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a 
 power to be exerted according to the deter- 
 mination of the will. A man cannot say, " I 
 will compose poetry." The greatest poet even 
 cannot say it ; for the mind in creation is as 
 a fading coal, which some invisible influence, 
 like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory 
 brightness ; this power arises from within, like 
 the colour of a flower which fades and changes 
 as it is developed, and the conscious portions 
 of our natures are unprophetic either of its 
 approach or its departure. Could this in- 
 fluence be durable in its original purity and 
 force, it is impossible to predict the greatness 
 of the results ; but when composition begins, 
 inspiration is already on the decline, and the 
 most glorious poetry that has ever been com- 
 municated to the world is probably a feeble 
 shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. 
 I appeal to the greatest poets of the present 
 day, whether it is not an error to assert that 
 the finest passages of poetry are produced by 
 labour and study. The toil and the delay 
 recommended by critics can be justly inter- 
 preted to mean no more than a careful 
 observation of the inspired moments, and an 
 artificial connexion of the spaces between their 
 suggestions by the intertexture of conventional 
 expressions; a necessity only imposed by the 
 limitedness of the poetical faculty itself: for 
 Milton conceived the "Paradise Lost" as a 
 whole before he executed it in portions. We 
 206 
 
Shelley. 
 
 have his own authority also for the muse 
 having "dictated" to him the "unpremedi- 
 tated song." And let this be an answer to 
 those who would allege the fifty-six various 
 readings of the first line of the "Orlando 
 Furioso." Compositions so produced are to 
 poetry what mosaic is to painting. This in- 
 stinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is 
 still more observable in the plastic and pictorial 
 arts : a great statue or picture grows under the 
 power of the artist as a child in the mother's 
 womb ; and the very mind which directs the 
 hands in formation is incapable of accounting 
 to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the 
 media of the process. 
 
 Poetry is the record of the best and happiest 
 moments of the happiest and best minds. We 
 are aware of evanescent visitations of thought 
 and feeling sometimes associated with place 
 or person, sometimes regarding our own mind 
 alone, and always arising unforeseen and de- 
 parting unbidden, but elevating and delightful 
 beyond all expression : so that even in the 
 desire and the regret they leave, there cannot 
 but be pleasure, participating as it does in the 
 nature of its object. It is as it were the inter- 
 penetration of a diviner nature through our 
 own ; but its footsteps are like those of a wind 
 over the sea, which the coming calm erases, 
 and whose traces remain only as on the 
 wrinkled sands which paves it. These and 
 corresponding conditions of being are experi- 
 enced principally by those of the most delicate 
 sensibility and the most enlarged imagination ; 
 207 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 and the state of mind produced by them is at 
 war with every base desire. The enthusiasm 
 of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is 
 essentially linked with such emotions ; and 
 whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an 
 atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject 
 to these experiences as spirits of the most refined 
 organisation, but they can colour all that they 
 combine with the evanescent hues of this 
 ethereal world ; a word, a trait in the repre- 
 sentation of a scene or a passion will touch 
 the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those 
 who have ever experienced these emotions, the 
 sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the 
 past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is 
 best and most beautiful in the world ; it arrests 
 the vanishing apparitions which haunt the 
 interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in 
 language or in form, sends them forth among 
 mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy 
 to those with whom their sisters abide abide, 
 because there is no portal of expression from 
 the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit 
 into the universe of things. Poetry redeems 
 from decay the visitations of the divinity in 
 man. 
 
 Poetry turns all things to loveliness ; it exalts 
 the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and 
 it adds beauty to that which is most deformed ; 
 it marries exultation and horror, grief and 
 pleasure, eternity and change ; it subdues to 
 union under its light yoke all irreconcilable 
 things. It transmutes all that it touches, and 
 every form moving within the radiance of its 
 208 
 
Shelley. 
 
 presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to 
 an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes : 
 its secret alchemy turns to portable gold the 
 poisonous waters which flow from death 
 through life ; it strips the veil of familiarity 
 from the world, and lays bare the naked and 
 sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms. 
 
 All things exist as they are perceived : at 
 least in relation to the percipient. "The 
 mind is its own place, and of itself can make 
 a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." But 
 poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be 
 subjected to the accident of surrounding im- 
 pressions. And whether it spreads its own 
 figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil 
 from before the scene of things, it equally 
 creates for us a being within our being. It 
 makes us the inhabitants of a world to which 
 the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces 
 the common universe of which we are portions 
 and percipients, and it purges from our 
 inward sight the film of familiarity which 
 obscures from us the wonder of our being. 
 It compels us to feel that which we perceive, 
 and to imagine that which we know. It 
 creates anew the universe, after it has been 
 annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of 
 impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies 
 the bold and true words of Tasso Non merita 
 nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. 
 
 A poet, as he is the author to others of the 
 
 highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, 
 
 so he ought personally to be the happiest, 
 
 the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious 
 
 i o 209 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged 
 to declare whether the fame of any other in- 
 stitutor of human life be comparable to that 
 of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, 
 and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is 
 equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets 
 have been men of the most spotless virtue, of 
 the most consummate prudence, and, if we 
 would look into the interior of their lives, the 
 most fortunate of men : and the exceptions, 
 as they regard those who possessed the poetic 
 faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be 
 found on consideration to confine rather than 
 destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop 
 to the arbitration of popular breath, and 
 usurping and uniting in our own persons the 
 incompatible characters of accuser, witness, 
 judge, and executioner, let us decide without 
 trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives 
 of those who are "there sitting where we dare 
 not soar," are reprehensible. Let us assume 
 that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was 
 A flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that 
 Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was 
 a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, 
 that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is in- 
 consistent with this division of our subject to 
 cite living poets, but posterity has done ample 
 justice to the great names now referred to. 
 Their errors have been weighed and found 
 to have been dust in the balance; if their 
 sins "were as scarlet, they are now white as 
 snow " ; they have been washed in the blood 
 of the mediator and redeemer, Time, Observe 
 
Shelley. 
 
 in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of 
 real or fictitious crime have been confused 
 in the contemporary calumnies against poetry 
 and poets ; consider how little is, as it appears 
 or appears, as it is ; look to your own 
 motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. 
 
 Poetry, as has been said, differs in this 
 respect from logic, that it is not subject to 
 the control of the active powers of the mind, 
 and that its birth and recurrence have no 
 necessary connection with the consciousness 
 or will. It is presumptuous to determine that 
 these are the necessary conditions of all mental 
 causation, when mental effects are experienced 
 unsusceptible of being referred to them. The 
 frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it 
 is obvious to suppose, may produce in the 
 mind a habit of order and harmony correlative 
 with its own nature and with its effects upon 
 other minds. But in the intervals of inspira- 
 tion, and they may be frequent without being 
 durable, a poet becomes a man, and is aban- 
 doned to the sudden reflux of the influences 
 under which others habitually live. But as 
 he is more delicately organised than other 
 men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both 
 his own and that of others, in a degree un- 
 known to them, he will avoid the one and 
 pursue the other with an ardour proportioned 
 to this difference. And he renders himself 
 obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to 
 observe the circumstances under which these 
 objects of universal pursuit and flight have dis- 
 guised themselves in one another's garments. 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 But there is nothing necessarily evil in this 
 error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, 
 and the passions purely evil, have never formed 
 any portion of the popular imputations on the 
 lives of poets, 
 
 I have thought it most favourable to the 
 cause of truth to set down these remarks ac- 
 cording to the order in which they were sug- 
 gested to my mind, by a consideration of the 
 subject itself, instead of observing the formality 
 of a polemical reply ; but if the view which 
 they contain be just, they will be found to 
 involve a refutation of the arguers against 
 poetry, so far at least as regards the first 
 division of the subject. I can readily con- 
 jecture what should have moved the gall of 
 some learned and intelligent writers who 
 quarrel with certain versifiers ; I confess my- 
 self, like them, unwilling to be stunned by the 
 Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. 
 Bavius and Msevius undoubtedly are, as they 
 ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs 
 to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather 
 than confound. 
 
 The first part of these remarks has related 
 to poetry in its elements and principles ; and 
 it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits 
 assigned them would permit, that what is 
 called poetry, in a restricted sense, has a 
 common source with all other forms of order 
 and of beauty, according to which the ma- 
 terials of human life are susceptible of being 
 arranged, and which is poetry in an universal 
 sense. 
 
 212 
 
Shelley. 
 
 The second part will have for its object an 
 application of these principles to the present 
 state of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence 
 of the attempt to idealise the modern forms of 
 manners and opinions, and compel them into 
 a subordination to the imaginative and crea- 
 tive faculty. For the literature of England, 
 an energetic development of which has ever 
 preceded or accompanied a great and free 
 development of the national will, has arisen 
 as it were from a new birth. In spite of the 
 low-thoughted envy which would undervalue 
 contemporary merit, our own will be a mem- 
 orable age in intellectual achievements, and 
 we live among such philosophers and poets 
 as surpass beyond comparison any who have 
 appeared since the last national struggle for 
 civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing 
 herald, companion, and follower of the awak- 
 ening of a great people to work a beneficial 
 change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At 
 such periods there is an accumulation of the 
 power of communicating and receiving intense 
 and impassioned conceptions respecting man 
 and nature. The persons in whom this power 
 resides, may often, as far as regards many 
 portions of their nature, have little apparent 
 correspondence with that spirit of good of 
 which they are the ministers. But even whilst 
 they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled 
 to serve, the power which is seated on the 
 throne of their own soul. It is impossible to 
 read the compositions of the most celebrated 
 writers of the present day without being 
 213 
 
The Prelude to Poetry- 
 startled with the electric life which burns 
 within their words. They measure the cir- 
 cumference and sound the depths of human 
 nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrat- 
 ing spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the 
 most sincerely astonished at its manifestations ; 
 for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the 
 age. Poets are the hierophants of an unappre- 
 hended inspiration ; the mirrors of the gigantic 
 shadows which futurity casts upon the present ; 
 the words which express what they understand 
 not ; the trumpets which sing to battle, and 
 feel not what they inspire ; the influence which 
 is moved not, but moves. Poets are the un- 
 acknowledged legislators of the world. 
 
 314 
 
KEATS 
 
 (1796-1821) 
 
 This poem was written 
 by Keats on the blank 
 page of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's " Fair Maid of 
 tO the PoetS. the Inn.' 1 It was first 
 
 published in the u Lamia" 
 volume of 1820. 
 
 t>ARDS of Passion and of Mirth, 
 Ye have left your souls on earth ! 
 Have ye souls in heaven too, 
 Doubled-lived in regions new ? 
 Yes, and those of heaven commune 
 With the spheres of sun and moon ; 
 With the noise of fountains wond'rous, 
 And the parle of voices thund'rous ; 
 With the whisper of heaven's trees 
 And one another, in soft ease 
 Seated on Elysian lawns 
 Browsed by none but Dian's fawns ; 
 Underneath large blue-bells tented, 
 Where the daisies are rose-scented, 
 And the rose herself has got 
 Perfume which on earth is not ; 
 Where the nightingale doth sing 
 Not a senseless, tranced thing, 
 But divine melodious truth ; 
 Philosophic numbers smooth ; 
 
The Prelude to Poetry. 
 
 Tales and golden histories 
 Of heaven and its mysteries. 
 Thus ye live on high, and then 
 On the earth ye live again ; 
 And the souls ye left behind you 
 Teach us, here, the way to find you, 
 Where your other souls are joying, 
 Never slumber'd, never cloying. 
 Here, your earth-born souls still speak 
 To mortals, of their little week ; 
 Of their sorrows, and delights ; 
 Of their passions and their spites ; 
 Of their glory and their shame ; 
 What doth strengthen and what maim. 
 Thus ye teach us, every day, 
 Wisdom, though fled far away. 
 
 Bards of Passion and of Mirth, 
 Ye have left your souls on earth ! 
 Ye have souls in heaven too, 
 Double-lived in regions new ! 
 
 *x6 
 
LANDOR 
 
 (1775-1864) 
 
 (Second conversation 
 between Southey and 
 
 A Passage 
 
 from the 
 
 " Imaginary 
 
 Conversations.' 1 Porson : Porson Ioquitur ' ) 
 1824. 
 
 1 HATE both poetry and wine without body. 
 Look at Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton ; were 
 these your pure-imagination men ? . . . . Did 
 the two of them who wrote in verse build upon 
 nothing? Did their predecessors ? And, pray, 
 whose daughter was the muse they invoked ? 
 Why, Memory's. They stood among substantial 
 men, and sang upon recorded actions. The 
 plain of Scamander, the promontory of Sigoeum, 
 the palaces of Tros and Dardanus, the citadel 
 in which the Fates sang mournfully under the 
 image of Minerva, seem fitter places for the 
 Muses to alight on, than artificial rockwork, 
 or than faery-rings. 
 
 217 
 
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