Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the
happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own
mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating
and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret
they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the
nature of its object. It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature
through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which
the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand
which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally
by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination;
and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The
enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked
with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom
to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of
the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with
the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and
reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the
cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best
and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which
haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with
whom their sisters abide—abide, because there is no portal of expression from
the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things.
Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty
of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and
change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It
transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of
its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit
which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous
waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity
from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the
spirit of its forms.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "A Defence of Poetry"
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