NOTES. 11. After the title I have omitted the sub-title, "Part I." See notes on 45 6 and 45 21. 1 10. The one is the To Toleîv. Cf. Sidney, Defense 6 30. 1 13. The To λoyífew. Shelley inadvertently substitutes an active for the proper deponent form. 1 24. Shadow to the substance. Cf. 24 14. 3 13-15. The future... the seed. Cf. 6 6-8: "He beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time." And see 38 19-25. 4 28. Unapprehended. Cf. 11 21, 13 26, 46 25. 5 4-6. The same footsteps, etc. De Augment. Scient. cap. I, lib. iii. (Shelley's note). Cf. Adv. Learning 2. 5. 3. 5 20-29. But poets religion. Cf. Shelley, Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients: "For all the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connection between each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual or of society." 61. Prophets. Cf. Sidney, Defense 5 12-16. 6 14-15. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one. Cf. the discussion in my edition of Sidney's Defense of Poesy, Introduction, p. xxix ff. 6 31-7 2. But poetry, etc. Cf. Plato, Symposium 205 (Shelley's trans.): “... Poetry, which is a general name signifying every cause whereby anything proceeds from that which is not into that which is; so that the exercise of every inventive art is poetry, and all such artists poets. Yet they are not called poets, but distinguished by other names; and one portion or species of poetry, that which has relation to music and rhythm, is divided from all others, and known by the name belonging to all." 7 14. Mirror. Shelley is partial to this figure. Cf. 10 30-32, 18 16, 19 6 ff., 24 11, 46 26. 8 13-18. Hence the language, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 5 33-34, 11 25-31, 33 19-24 8 19. Hence the beauty of translation. But cf. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Th. 3, B. 11, quoted in Hayward, Statesmen and Writers 2. 307: "I honor both rhythm and rime, by which poetry first becomes poetry; but the properly deep and radically operative — the truly developing and quickening, is that which remains of the poet when he is translated into prose. The inward substance then remains in its purity and fulness; which, when it is absent, a dazzling exterior often deludes with the semblance of, and, when it is present, conceals." 8 30 ff. Yet it is, etc. Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies 2. 351: "But the exact line which separates grave novels in verse, like Aylmer's Field or Enoch Arden, from grave novels not in verse, like Silas Marner or Adam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. . . . We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than prose." And see also Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets: "I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so; namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated some of the last into English rime, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being 'married to immortal verse.' If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way." To these add Sidney, Defense of Poesy 11 18-22: "Which I speak to show that it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet- - no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armor, should be an advocate and no soldier." 9 8-19. Plato was essentially a poet, etc. To the same effect in Shelley's Preface to his translation of Plato's Symposium: "Plato exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendor and harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward as in a breathless career. His language is that of an immortal spirit rather than a man. Lord Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer who in these particulars can be compared with him; his imitator Cicero sinks in the comparison into an ape mocking the gestures of a man.” Cf. also Sidney, Defense 3 27, note. 9 20. Lord Bacon was a poet. See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death particularly (Shelley's note). 10 9 ff. There is this difference, etc. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 9 1-3: "The real distinction between the poet and the historian is not found in the employment of verse by the former, and of prose by the latter, for, if we suppose the history of Herodotus to be versified, it would be nothing but history still, only now in a metrical form. The true ground of difference is that the historian relates what has taken place, the poet how certain things might have taken place. Hence poetry is of a more philosophical and serious character than history; it is, we might say, more universal and more ideal. Poetry deals with the general, history with the particular. Now the general shows how certain typical characters will speak and act, according to the law of probability or of necessity, as poetry indicates by bestowing certain names upon these characters, but the particular merely relates what Alcibiades, a historic individual, actually did or suffered." And see Sidney, Defense 18 25 ff. 10 27-29. Hence epitomes, etc. Cf. Bacon, Adv. Learning 2. 2. 4: "As for the corruptions and moths of history, which are epitomes, the use of them deserveth to be banished, as all men of sound judgment have confessed, as those that have fretted and corroded the sound bodies of many excellent histories, and wrought them into base and unprofitable dregs." 11 4-5. A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. Cf. 32 33-34 2: "Each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought." 11 5-12. And thus 11 11. Interstices. 11 16-18. Poetry is 252, 29 19-26. images. Cf. Sidney, Defense 4 5–15. Cf. 14 17, 39 28 ff.; also 41 13. with its delight. Cf. Sidney, Defense 23 13 12 3-7. The poems of Homer, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 2 27 ff. 12 7-8. Homer embodied, etc. Cf. Gladstone, Gleanings 2. 148: "Lofty example in comprehensive form is, without doubt, one of the great standing needs of our race. To this want it has been from the first one main purpose of the highest poetry to answer. The quest of Beauty leads all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man, as the summit of attainable excellence. . . . The concern of Poetry with corporal beauty is, though important, yet secondary: this art uses form as an auxiliary, as a subordinate though proper part in the delineation of mind and character, of which it is appointed to be a visible organ. But with mind and character themselves lies the highest occupation of the Muse." 12 11. Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses. See Sidney, Defense 16 3417 2: "See whether wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes, valor in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Euryalus, even to an ignorant man carry not an apparent shining." 13 13-14. To temper, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 58 3-5: "But if . . you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry." 13 23-24. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. Cf. Jowett's words accompanying his translation of Plato, 2. 312–3 (2d edition): "In modern times we almost ridicule the idea of poetry admitting of a moral. The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in primitive antiquity are one and the same; but in later ages they seem to fall apart. The great art of novel writing, that peculiar creation of our own and the last century, which, together with the sister art of review writing, threatens to absorb all literature, has even less of seriousness in her composition. Do we not often hear the novel writer censured for attempting to convey a lesson to the minds of his readers? "Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to give amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind, good or bad, or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There have been poets in modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have not forgotten their high vocation of teachers; and the two greatest of the Greek dramatists owe their sublimity to their ethical character. The noblest truths, sung of in the purest and sweetest language, are still the proper material of poetry. The poet clothes them with beauty, and has a power of making them enter into the hearts and memories of men. He has not only to speak of themes above the level of ordinary life, but to speak of them in a deeper and tenderer way than they are ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of them in others. The old he makes young again; the familiar principle he invests with a new dignity; he finds a noble expression for the commonplaces of morality and politics. He uses the things of sense so as to indicate what is beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. He expresses what the better part of us would fain say, and the halfconscious feeling is strengthened by the expression. He is his own critic, for the spirit of poetry and of criticism are not divided in him. His mission is not to disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to them their own nature, and make them better acquainted with the world around them. True poetry is the remembrance of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the happiest and holiest moments of life, of the noblest thoughts of man, of the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to his greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may not be effected for the human race by better use of the poetical and imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of pleasure to be excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we raise men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make an ideal, or rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand sermons? Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and artistic influences, though he is not without a true sense of the noble purposes to which art may be applied. metre. "Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato's language, a flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose, the poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language and Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he has the 'savoir faire,' or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit of poetry. He has no conception that true art should bring order out of disorder; that it should make provision for the soul's highest interest; that it should be pursued only with a view to 'the improvement of the citizens.' He ministers to the weaker side of human nature; he sings the strain of love in the latest fashion; instead of raising men above themselves he brings them back to the 'tyranny of the many masters,' from which all his life long a good man has been praying to be delivered. And often, forgetful of measure and order, he will express not that which is truest, but that which is strongest. Instead of a great and nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy of a heated brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is not the master of his words, but his words—perhaps borrowed from another - the faded reflection of some French or German or Italian writer, have the better of him. Though we are not going to banish the poets, how can we suppose that such utterances have any healing or life-giving influence on the minds of men? "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter': Art then must be true, and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true and not a seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought out of disorder, truth out of error and falsehood. This is what we |