Page 168 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose

Notes Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling,
which is more or less shared by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling such as we see
it in the poet’s book, is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embody ing and
illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle
of variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains; and its end, pleasure and
exaltation. Poetry stands between nature and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment
of the external and spiritual world: it has constituted the most enduring fame of nations; and next
to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found
in all things, and of the probable riches of infinitude.
Every point that Hunt develops in the 46 pages of his essay is touched on in this outline, and the
transitions he will develop in full are intimated. Each of the topics can be paralleled in an important
precursor essay by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Shelley, or others, but Hunt richly illustrates
each and treats it with his own taste and good sense. Notice the opening distinction between
poetry as the actual expressions in the poet’s book and a more general poetic feeling “which is
more or less shared by all the world.” This has been regarded by Stephen F. Fogle, among others,
as so much soft and meaningless verbiage padding out an already overblown statement. [27]
Although “general poetic feeling” is a concept easily and often sentimentalized, Hunt is making
an important point here, one already commented on in relation to Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.”
Hunt wishes to insist that what the poets express in their books is not foreign, alien, effeminate, or
imaginary. Rather, poets express a fundamental human order shared by all members of the species,
an order expressible with greatest comprehensives and pleasurableness by the best poets in their
achievements of greatest truth and beauty.
The concepts of truth and beauty, as well as two others equally important to Hazlitt and Shelley,
are referred to then in the section of Hunt’s outline that might properly be singled out as the
“definition.” The more limited “definition” reads “Poetry ... is the utterance of a passion for truth,
beauty, and power.” Each of these key terms receives further elaboration.
• ”Poetry is a passion, because it seeks the deepest impressions; and because it must undergo,
in order to convey them.” The poet must feel, and feel deeply, the myriad impressions that
nature and his own responses play across his sensibility. He must willingly undergo these
feelings if he is genuinely to register and thus be able to express truly the fundamental
human order.
• ”It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would be false or defective.”
“Truth” here means an accurate registration of the realities of nature. In Hazlitt’s terminology
passion for truth would involve the distinction between common sense and vulgar opinion.
The passion for truth, for instance, is what Hunt showed to be operative in Byron’s attack on
hypocritical moralities in his review of Don Juan.
• ”It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and refine by means of pleasure, and
because beauty is nothing but the loveliest form of pleasure.” Hunt is referring here to
Shelley’s notion of beauty as the degree of expression approximating most closely to the
fundamental order or rhythm of experience from which, accordingly, the purest and most
intense degree of pleasure ensues. Thus he calls it the “loveliest,” meaning the most desirable,
the most pleasing form of pleasure. It must be remembered also that, in his time, Hunt would
need to distinguish by some such adjective the pleasure he is discussing because of the
Benthamite Utilitarian scheme to reduce all pleasures to the same qualitative level.
• Finally, “It is a passion for power, because power is impression triumphant, whether over
the poet, as desired by himself, or over the reader, as affected by the poet.” Only by feeling
deeply, by “ardent subjection of one’s self to emotion” can one realize the pleasure, the
beauty, the truth, and so on. In a way this axiom repeats the earlier three, but by stating it in
this form, Hunt is able to recall Hazlitt’s doctrine that the synthesis or ordering of experience,
poetry triumphant, occurs across the nodes of most intense feeling or impression.

162 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY