"
. . . and even at this day
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
And Venus who brings everything that's fair."
No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in
human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others--
critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness
of experience--but behind each natural phenomenon is the
immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness,
which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust.
The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will
always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the
world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its
inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is
immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic
keenness of perception allied with feeling.
"For Nature beats in perfect time
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
The wood is wiser far than thou;
The wood and the wave each other know
Not unrelated, unaffected,
But to each thought and thing allied
Is perfect Nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty heart."
And again in his "Ode to Beauty," he rejoices in the
"Olympian bards who sung
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.
Pages:
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99