CRITICAL APPRECIATIONS


"The proportion of his poetry that can be so called is small. But a
great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very
beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which
rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable
rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail
rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a
representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a field of
poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable--in which
these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are
legitimately and fruitfully exercised. All poetry is in the realm of
feeling, and thus less exclusively dependent on the thought that is
the sole reliance of prose. Being genuine poetry, Lowell's profits by
this advantage. Feeling is fitly, genuinely, its inspiration. Its
range and limitations correspond to the character of his
susceptibility, as those of his prose do to that of his thought. The
fusion of the two in the crucible of the imagination is infrequent
with him, because with him it is the fancy rather than the imagination
that is luxuriant and highly developed. For the architectonics of
poetry he had not the requisite reach and grasp, the comprehensive and
constructing vision. Nothing of his has any large design or effective
interdependent proportions. In a technical way an exception should be
noted in his skilful building of the ode--a form in which he was
extremely successful and for which he evidently had a native aptitude
... Lowell's constitutes, on the whole, the most admirable American
contribution to the nature poetry of English literature--far beyond
that of Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, I think, and only
occasionally excelled here and there by the magic touch of