Of all skill in gentle artistic touches, poetry requires the most delicate mental qualities. Poetry is as difficult to describe as the protoplasmic germ. To give an analysis of poetry is to destroy its simplicity and grandeur. Poetry may be called the power of seeing the unseen. As generally held, poetry is not a pure art. It partakes less of the sensuous than painting, and is nearer pure metaphysics. Sculpture presents the sensuous object directly; the spiritual idea is only suggested. In poetry, it is the spiritual only that is to be directly reproduced.
Artists content themselves by copying nature. The poet cannot copy nature as did Scott. He should take the object as a text, divested of its material accompaniment, round which the creative genius is to act, without further reference to that object; the outward manifestation should be looked upon as not being the real thing. The subject should have some moral and elevating purpose, and not for Art's sake. Poetry ascends from sense to the spiritual fact beyond. In a state of exuberant rush of emotions, filling the poet's imagination, there must be no patchwork. It must flow, as it were, ready made, in one luminous flood. Love, pity, horror, joy, indignation, usually serve as incentives to the poet's zeal; also the true, the good, the beautiful, all virtue, all glory, all power.
Poetry is the original language of Soul. The rhythmic favors pathos, and wields a subtle influence, and carries thought deeper than the language of prose.
