Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Browning's Essay on ShelleyB. Blackwell, 1921 - 112 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
age of brass Ages of Poetry Bavius beauty Bodleian Bodleian Library called Celtic nations character chimæras civil contained contemporaries creations cultivated Dante Defence Bod Defence of Poetry delight divine drama effect epic essay eternal existence expression Forman Four Ages fragment genius harmony Herodotus highest holograph draft Homer human imagination imitation influence inspired intellectual iron age Koszul language less letters light lived Livy Lord Byron manners Mary Shelley's transcript Memoirs of Shelley Milton mind Miscellany modern moral Muses nature Nonnus objects Ollier opinion original Orlando Furioso Paradise Lost passage passion Peacock Peacock's Memoirs PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY perfection Petrarch philosophers Plato pleasure poems poet poet's poetical faculty portion possessed present edition principle printed produced reason relation religion Richard Garnett sense sentence Shelley's Prose Sidney society songs soul spirit sympathy things THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK thought Thucydides tion truth universal verse words writers wrote
Popular passages
Page 33 - 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.
Page xix - Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended 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 unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Page 55 - 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.
Page 90 - ... cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
Page 55 - 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 presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes...
Page 30 - ... 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.
Page 31 - 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, beyond and above consciousness...
Page 65 - Not what man sees, but what God sees — the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand — it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do ; and he digs where he stands — preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak.
Page 26 - Their language is vitally metaphorical ; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts...
Page 30 - 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 circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy.