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Unit 16: Hazlitt--On Genius and Common Sense...

for the liberal cause. Shelley’s discussion of the prophetic spirit, not of common sense precisely, Notes
but of poetry in general, must have buoyed Hunt’s spirits for the task he was undertaking. Shelley
optimistically describes an inevitable progress in human society and human morality led by and
expressed by the poets:
[The poets] are not only the authors of language and of music;... they are the institutors of laws,
and founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into
a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the True, that partial apprehension of the agencies of
the invisible world which is called religion Poets .... Poets.... were called, in the earlier epochs of
the world, legislators or prophets; a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.
For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are
the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time.
The special appeal such a passage would have for Hunt is its sense of a powerful sweep of society
forward into ever better institutions, manners, and enjoyments, precisely the sort of movement
that he too served as a liberal editor and man of letters. To be associated in this kind of constructive
activity with two of the most powerful poets of his time was the purpose of his emigration to Italy.
Because Leigh Hunt’s knowledge of Shelley’s and Hazlitt’s theoretical essays was so close and so
basic to his own critical attitudes, some further attention to the details of their thought will help
place Hunt’s contribution to romantic criticism in its proper frame. In Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,”
“imagination” — that workhorse term of romanticism — refers to a class of mental actions that
compose from individual thoughts, “as from elements,” other more complex thoughts which are
synthesized integrities or unities. Poetry is defined as “the expression of the imagination” or, in
other words, as the creation or synthesis of these unities. Furthermore, “poetry is connate with the
origin of man,” because to be human means to engage in the process of perceiving or constructing
these unities. In a lyrical but completely empirical formulation that John Locke would not have
disagreed with, Shelley states, “Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
impressions are driven.” This experiential process is delightful, and the child or the primitive man
will try to express in voice and gesture both its delight and its shaping of these impressions into
the most comprehensive unities possible. And indeed as the experiential impressions fade, he will
try to prolong them by those expressions he has associated with them. These expressions constitute
the products and history of the poetic or synthesizing spirit. At the earliest stages man delights in
the external world; then comes self-consciousness, social consciousness, and finally civilized societal
awareness. At each stage imagination strives to create those unified expressions of experience that
assure the keenest delight: “For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these
classes of mimetic representation from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and
purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called
taste by modern writers.”

Hazlitt, we have seen, had used the word taste, or its synonyms tact and finesse, in his
description of Hunt.

In the earliest stages of human development, Shelley continues, every individual can express this
order well. Shelley rather cumbersomely calls this power of expression the “faculty of approximation
to the beautiful.” As time goes on some persons are recognized to possess the faculty to a much
higher degree than others, and to them is granted the specialized task of expressing the fundamental
human order most fully so that “the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the

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