Wordsworth's poetry has for
the most part roots deeply hidden.
Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a
body. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and
deserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but
healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is
chargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy do
the work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of the
memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inward
impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with
coldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the
intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts
springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and
thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and
upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject
that has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and
not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing
over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of
association.
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