no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which
he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen
to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a
branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life is made." The
rest is "mere oblivion," a dead letter: for all that is worth
remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is
poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse,
admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is
that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises
our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's." Man is a
poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of
poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's _Bourgeois
Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child
is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the
story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he
first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman,
when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes
after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the
courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his
idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who
fancies himself a god;--the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the
choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich
and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own
making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others
think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness
at second hand. "There is warrant for it." Poets alone have not "such
seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler
reason" can.

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet