or poet, whether dithyrambic, encomiastic, choral, epic, or iambic, is excellent in proportion to the extent of his participation in the divine influence and the degree in which the Muse itself has descended on him. In other respects poets may be sufficiently ignorant and incapable. For they do not compose according to any art which they have acquired, but from the impulse of the divinity within them; for did they know any rules of criticism, according to which they could compose beautiful verses upon one subject, they would be able to exert the same faculty with respect to all or any other. The God seems purposely to have deprived all poets, prophets, and soothsayers of every particle of reason and understanding, the better to adapt them to their employment as his ministers and interpreters; and that we, their auditors, may acknowledge that those who write so beautifully are possessed, and address us inspired by the God. A presumption in favor of this opinion may be drawn from the circumstance of Tynnichus the Chalcidian having composed no other poem worth mentioning except the famous poem which is in every body's mouth, — perhaps the most beautiful of all lyrical compositions, and which he himself calls a gift of the Muses. I think you will agree with me that examples of this sort are exhibited by the God himself to prove that those beautiful poems are not human nor from man, but divine and from the Gods, and that poets are only the inspired interpreters of the Gods, each excellent in proportion to the degree of his inspiration. This example of the most beautiful of lyrics having been produced by a poet in other respects the worst seems to have been afforded as a divine evidence of the truth of this opinion." 41 5-8. A word, a trait. . . will touch the enchanted chord. Cf. Byron, Childe Harold Bk. 4, stanza 23: And slight withal may be the things that bring A tone of music-summer's eve- or spring A flower the wind the ocean - which shall wound, Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound. 42 5-6. The mind, etc. Paradise Lost 1. 254-5. 42 19-20. It creates anew the universe. Cf. Sidney, Defense of Poesy 7 26-9 5. 42 23. Words of Tasso. Somewhat differently quoted in Shelley's letter to Peacock of 16th August, 1818, where it stands: Non c'è in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, che Dio ed il Poeta. In either case the translation would be much the same: None merits the name of creator except God and the poet. Cf. Sidney, Defense of Poesy 8 2730: "But rather give right honor to the Heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature." 437. Confirm. There is a variant reading, confine. 43 13. "There sitting where we dare not soar." Adapted from Milton, P. L. 4. 829: Ye knew me once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar. 43 21-31. This passage is framed out of Scriptural reminiscences. Some or all of the following sentences must have been present to Shelley's mind: Dan. 5. 27. Isa. 40. 15. counted as the Isa. 1. 18. snow. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are small dust of the balance. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as Rev. 7. 14. Washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Heb. 9. 15. The mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament. Heb. 12. 24. And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling. Matt. 7. 1. Judge not, that ye be not judged. 44 26. The passions purely evil. Shelley seems to have in mind some such classification of sins into lesser and greater as Dante adopts in the Inferno. The threefold division of Dante is into sins of I. Incontinence. II. Malice. III. Bestiality. Of these the former are regarded as the more venial, the latter as the more deadly. For the subdivisions, see Longfellow's Notes to the Inferno, the portion preceding the Commentary on Canto I., or Miss Rossetti's Shadow of Dante, ch. 5. 44 32. A polemical reply. To the essay of Peacock, for which see pp. 47-61. 45 6. I, like them, etc. This statement is illustrated by the following quotation from one of Shelley's letters to Peacock (Peacock's Works 3. 473; Shelley's Prose Works, Forman's edition, 4. 196–7): "MY DEAR PEACOCK, "PISA, March 21, 1821. "I dispatch by this post the first part of an essay intended to consist of three parts, which I design as an antidote to your 'Four Ages of Poetry.' You will see that I have taken a more general view of what is poetry than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched. But read and judge; and do not let us imitate the great founders of the picturesque, Price and Payne Knight, who, like two ill-trained beagles, began snarling at each other when they could not catch the hare. "I hear the welcome news of a box from England announced by the Gisbornes. How much new poetry does it contain? The Bavii and Mævii of the day are very fertile; and I wish those who honor me with boxes would read and inwardly digest your 'Four Ages of Poetry'; for I had much rather, for my own private reading, receive political, geological, and moral treatises than this stuff in terza, ottava, and tremillesima rima, whose earthly baseness has attracted the lightning of your undiscriminating censure upon the temple of immortal song. These verses enrage me far more than those of Codrus did Juvenal, and with better reason. Juvenal need not have been stunned unless he had liked it; but my boxes are packed with this trash, to the exclusion of better matter." 45 7. Codri. Codrus was perhaps a fictitious name. In any case a tragedy on the subject of Theseus is attributed to a certain Codrus, or, as some manuscripts read, Cordus, by Juvenal, who at the beginning of his First Satire speaks of the author and his production in terms of bitter railing (Juv. Sat. 1. 1-2): "What! always a mere hearer? What, never to retort, bored as I am so often by the Theseid of Cordus hoarse with reciting?" See also the last note. 45 8. Bavius and Mævius. Associated together by Virgil, Ecl. 3. 90: "Let him that hates not Bavius, love your verses, Mævius." Mævius is likewise the object of Horace's detestation (Epode 10). In Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biography it is said of them: "Bavius and Mævius, whose names have become a byword of scorn for all jealous and malevolent poetasters, owe their unenviable immortality to the enmity which they displayed toward the rising genius of the most distinguished of their contemporaries." See also note on 45 6. 45 21. The second part. This was never written. 45 31. Low-thoughted. An epithet borrowed from Milton, Comus 6: "low-thoughted care." 46 10 ff. The persons, etc. The thought seems to owe something to the arguments of Plato's Ion. See note on 40 23–25. 46 32. Legislators. Cf. 6 1-3. |