Study of Poetry Author:Bliss Perry 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: CHAPTER in THE POET'S IMAGINATION "The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights." Sa... more »muel Johnson "The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets." Walt Whitman We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radical distinction between "the poet" — as we have called him for convenience — and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that this distinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets after a certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, at some moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, the other day, spoke of a telegraph wire as "that message-vine." Her father and mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was a child's instinctive "poetizing" imagination, but the father and mother, while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, were conscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, for the instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart'sdesire. That is to say, they could still feel "poetically," though their wonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon as the gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood. All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, and that if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And all readers agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker of poetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But the moment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin. 1. Feeling and Imagination What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? The psychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors of generati...« less
ISBN-13: 9780804606325 ISBN-10: 0804606323 Pages:407 Edition:Facsimile of 1920 ed Rating: