The same peculiarity deprives his poetry
of continuous harmony or profound unity of conception. His lively sense
of form and proportion enables him indeed to fill up a simple framework
(generally of borrowed design) with an eye to general effect, as in the
Rape of the Lock or the first Dunciad. But even there his flight is
short; and when a poem should be governed by the evolution of some
profound principle or complex mood of sentiment, he becomes incoherent
and perplexed. But on the other hand he can perceive admirably all that
can be seen at a glance from a single point of view. Though he could not
be continuous, he could return again and again to the same point; he
could polish, correct, eliminate superfluities, and compress his meaning
more and more closely, till he has constructed short passages of
imperishable excellence. This microscopic attention to fragments
sometimes injures the connexion, and often involves a mutilation of
construction. He corrects and prunes too closely. He could, he says, in
reference to the Essay on Man, put things more briefly in verse than in
prose; one reason being that he could take liberties of this kind not
permitted in prose writing. But the injury is compensated by the
singular terseness and vivacity of his best style. Scarcely any one, as
is often remarked, has left so large a proportion of quotable
phrases,[25] and, indeed, to the present he survives chiefly by the
current coinage of that kind which bears his image and superscription.
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