|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Book, page 231 / 276 But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such distinctions. If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works. The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." [Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. [Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_,
|
Knowledgerush Search
|
|
Contact Us
| Privacy Statement & Terms of Use
|