If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at
all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its
shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in
his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst
of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living
writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
evaporates unrecorded.]
Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
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