tional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I
answer it must be one the parts of which mutually support and explain each
other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose
and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all
ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries in equally denying
the praises of a just poem on the one hand to a series of striking lines or
distichs,9 each of which absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself
disjoins it from its context and makes it a separate whole, instead of a har
monizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from
which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the com
ponent parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by
the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final
solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of
the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the
emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at
every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement
collects the force which again carries him onward. 'Praecipitandus est liber
spiritus,'' says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet liber here balances
the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in
fewer words. But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have
still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor,
and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet,2 furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the
highest kind may exist without meter, and even without the contradistinguish
ing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed a very large propor
tion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be
9. Pairs of lines. (1613?1667), author of Holy Living and Holy1. 'The free spirit [of the poet] must be hurled Dying. Coleridge greatly admired the elaborate and onward.' From the Satyricon, by the Roman satirist sonorous prose of both these writers. He took from Petronius Arbiter (1st century C.E.). a work by Burnet the Latin motto for The Rime of 2. Thomas Burnet (1635??1715), author of The the Ancient Mariner. Sacred Theory of the Earth. Bishop Jeremy Taylor
.
482 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
not less irrational than strange to assert that pleasure, and not truth, was the
immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach
to the word poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary conse
quence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry.
Yet if a harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be
preserved in keeping3 with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected
than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement as will partake of
one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. And this again can be no other
than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the
language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word,
have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy and
imagination. What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a
poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For
it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and
modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into
activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their
relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends
and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to
