Critical and miscellaneous essays Author:John Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AN HOUR'S TALK ABOUT POETRY. (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1831.) Ours is a poetical age ; but has it produced one great poem? Not one. If you think it ... more »has, you will perhaps favour us with the name of the author and his work. But haply you may first demand of us what we mean by a great poem ? If you do, we shan't answer you ; for we deal not in reasonings, but in assertions. Reasonings are apt to be tedious and unsatisfactory; assertions are short —and if correct—which ours always are—they carry their own demonstrations along with them—neatly folded up—and all that you have to do is to allow them to evolve themselves at their leisure in the light of truth, till they appear before you like " bright consummate flowers," which it is pleasant to gaze on, and profitable to gather. From the commencement of our career we have flourished on assertions, while most of our contemporaries have "faded, languished, grown dim, and died," on demonstrations. We learned this great secret from the observation and meditation of half a century ; and applying to literature the philosophy of life, we have become immortal. In vain would you search through nearly twenty decades of Maga for one specimen of an argument above an inch long; whereas in every page the most astounding assertions stare you in the face, till you are out of countenance, and shut your eyes in the sudden and insupportable effulgence of the naked truth—only to open them again with gifted ' vision on a wider revelation of earth and heaven. We therefore repeat our assertion—that ours is a poetical age, but that it has not produced one great poem. Just look at them for a moment. There is the Pleasures ofMemory—an elegant, graceful, beautiful, pensive, and pathetic poem, which it does one's eyes good to gaze on— one's ears goo...« less