Complete. From “Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political.”

WORDS are rather the drossy part of poetry; imagination the life of it. The name which the Grecians gave to poets shows how much they honored their art; they called them Makers. And if some of them had had the power to give a reality to their conceits, how nearly would they have come to Deity! Poets who treat of human virtues by proposing things above us, kindle on their readers both wonder and imitation. And certainly such poets Plato never meant to banish. His own practice proves that he excluded not all. He was content to hear Antimachus recite his verses when all the herd had left him; and he himself wrote tragedies and other pieces. There is another name of honor which poets had, and that was Vates. I know not how to distinguish between the prophets and the poets of Israel. What are Jeremiah’s Lamentations but a kind of sapphic elegy? David’s Psalms are not only poems, but songs, and raptures of a flaming spirit. One thing recommends poetry above oratory:—it is ever acceptable to the sharpest wits. He is the best orator who pleases everybody. But that poetry must be poor which all should approve of. If the learned and ingenious like it, let the throng bray. They when it is best will admire it the least. Two things are commonly blamed in poetry, and these are lies and flattery; but it is only to the shallow understanding that they appear thus. Truth may dwell more clearly in an allegory, or a moral fable, than in a bare narration; and as to flattery, no man should take poetry in its literal sense. Its higher and imaginary descriptions rather show what men should be, than what they are; hyperboles in poetry, not only carry a decency, but even a grace along with them. The greatest danger that I find in poetry is, that it sometimes corrupts the mind and inflames the passions. To prevent this, let the poet strive to be chaste in his lines, and never profane, immoral, or licentious. When this is attended to, I think a grave poem the deepest kind of writing. It wings the soul up higher than the slack pace of prose. Long poems some cannot admire; and, indeed, they pall upon the reading. The wittiest poets have been all short, and changing soon their subjects; as Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, and the two Comœdians. Poetry should be rather like a coranto, short and nimbly-lofty, than a dull lesson of a day long. Nor can it be but flat, if distended; when it is good, it concentrates the powers of the mind, and seizes on the spirit of things. Foolish poetry is, of all writing, the most ridiculous. When a goose dances, and a fool versifies, there is a sport alike. He is twice an ass, who is a rhyming one; and he is something the less unwise, who is unwise in prose. If the subject be history, or contexted fable, then I hold it better to put it in prose, or blank verse; for ordinary discourse never shows so well in metre, as in the strain it may seem to be spoken in: the merit consists in doing it to the life. Surely, though the world think not so, he is happy to himself, who can play the poet; he can give vent to his passions by his pen, and ease his heart of the weight of them, and in his raptures he often experiences a delight which no man can perceive but himself. Surely, Ovid found a pleasure in it, even when he wrote his “Tristia.” I would not follow poetry as a profession, and I would not want it as a recreation.