poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth."
"The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,
to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others;
the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination." And it
is on the imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as
exercises strengthen a limb. Historically, he argues, good
poetry always coexists with good morals; for instance, when
social life decays, drama decays. Peacock had said that
reasoners and mechanical inventors are more useful than poets.
The reply is that, left to themselves, they simply make the
world worse, while it is poets and "poetical philosophers" who
produce "true utility," or pleasure in the highest sense.
Without poetry, the progress of science and of the mechanical
arts results in mental and moral indigestion, merely
exasperating the inequality of mankind. "Poetry and the
principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation,
are the God and mammon of the world." While the emotions
penetrated by poetry last, "Self appears as what it is, an atom
to a universe." Poetry's "secret alchemy turns to potable gold
the poisonous waters which flow from death through life." It
makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe anew.
"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