SHAKSPEARE,

WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE.


DEFINITION OF POETRY.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is
opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object
of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper
and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate
pleasure. This definition is useful; but as it would include novels and
other works of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there must be
some additional character by which poetry is not only divided from
opposites, but likewise distinguished from disparate, though similar,
modes of composition. Now how is this to be effected? In animated prose,
the beauties of nature, and the passions and accidents of human nature,
are often expressed in that natural language which the contemplation of
them would suggest to a pure and benevolent mind; yet still neither we
nor the writers call such a work a poem, though no work could deserve
that name which did not include all this, together with something else.
What is this? It is that pleasurable emotion, that peculiar state and
degree of excitement, which arises in the poet himself in the act of
composition;--and in order to understand this, we must combine a more
than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents
contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common sensibility,