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Prose

Notes simply enough. Love, he says, is a going out from our own selfish nature to an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful, which, as we know by now, is the most intense and comprehensive
realization of the fundamental order. The instrument of this going out and identification is the
imagination, or that capacity of the mind whereby “true” and “beautiful” syntheses of our
impressions are achieved. At first, poetry expresses the imagination of the poet, the man of genius;
but, equally important, once expressed by genius, the poetry affects the imagination of the man of
common sense, causing his basic humanity to go beyond its personal embodiment to awareness of
unity — identification — with the universal order of humanity.
Hunt has chosen a complex passage from Shelley to stand as his summation, but his choice reveals
deep critical insight and an editor’s keen skill as he incorporates the passage and its reverberations
with his own ideas. The dual perspective of the paragraph as it shifts from poet to reader reenacts
the passage of insight from genius to common sense. In the first half of the passage the poet extends
his own humanity, his own sense of fundamental order, out to nature to represent or “impersonate”
it and make it partake of this order. Then, as described in the second half of the passage, the reader
recognizes his own deepest self in this impersonation of nature and other beings. Thus not only is
that deepest self evoked, but it is also extended into imaginative identification — love — with the
order (the beautiful) in persons not himself. Because of this identification — at the deepest level of
common humanity benevolence, goodwill, tolerance, and so forth, the profoundest acts of moral
good are brought about. Poetry achieves this end by acting upon the cause of this end, which is,
simply, the imaginative perception of beauty or fundamental order.
There is another sense of the word love evoked in Hunt’s quotation from Shelley that goes beyond
the ideal of imaginative identification with the fundamental order of beauty. In distinguishing
between beauty and love, Hunt overleaps the kind of dangerous aestheticism or solipsistic
indulgence which might rest satisfied in a “Palace of Art” (a topic written on by Tennyson in his
poem of that name first published in 1832 and in revised form in 1842, respectively twelve and
two years before Hunt’s essay appeared). Hunt emphasizes instead the active progression in
knowledge and being that accords with his liberal social hopes for man kind. The two words
depict a staged response to perception of the fundamental human order. The first stage is simply
the most comprehensive and pleasurable apprehension of this order, experienced as beauty. The
second stage, however, is the sense of this beauty made self-conscious and active. This is the stage
called love. Relatively speaking, beauty might be experienced in a passive or receptive mode of
pure delight — a passion and hence a power, but a quiescent, inwardly absorbed one, perhaps not
even fully cognizant. But love, more self-conscious and explicitly active in its association with
moral good, as Shelley’s passage stipulates, unites itself with the quieter state. And the union of
quiescent receptive power with active outgoing power, both emanating from percep tion of the
fundamental human order, results in a new birth of expression, a new utterance of the fundamental
order — a new utterance of power, passion, truth, and beauty, which we recall was Hunt’s basic
definition of poetry. Keeping in mind the dual aspect of imagination that Hunt evoked by selecting
this particular passage from Shelley’s essay, involving both the reader of the poem and its maker,
let us note that the utterance or expression of the reader will be active and moral whereas the
utterance of the poet proper will be cognitive and verbal. It is in this rich sense that Hunt refers to
poetry as the child of love and beauty.
Hunt’s formulation, then, is another redeployment of the powerful romantic concepts concerning
poetry, art, and social responsibility created by his great precursors. His is not so complex as their
fuller analyses, but neither does it merely mimic, nor does it distort in its greater simplicity. His
remarks resonate with theirs. Is this resonance absolutely essential to our understanding of romantic
literary theory? Rationally, perhaps it is not. But romantic literary theory emphasizes other qualities
than the coldly rational. It cares for pleasure, taste, and passion, too. And the pleasure of knowing
Leigh Hunt at his best and appreciating his intelligence, his taste, and his passion for literature,
just as his great contemporaries knew and appreciated it, is available to us still in his finer work.
It is integral to the even richer pleasure of knowing the era we recall as the romantic age of genius
and common sense.

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