Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/145

 not comparing, and that strong contrasts are the readiest aids to vision.

Bad poetry, roughly speaking, may be said to be of two main kinds—the poetry of no imagination, and the poetry of bad imagination. The last is of bigger quality than the first, and most great poets have, at some moment, been capable of it because genius in its uncritical exuberance is apt to pour forth good and bad alike. Such bad poetry involves bad taste, but it does not necessarily imply no poetry. It is positive, it is tangible, and is at least less devitalizing than those negative suburban regions—those jerry-built acres of mediocrity—to which so much of our 'minor poetry' belongs. Eliza Cook, for instance, that popular poetess of 1845, the creator of The Old Armchair, was made up of bad taste and sentiment, but her poems endure, because there is life in them. They are sincerely addressed to a particular section of society really nourished by sentiment: they are lodging-house poetry, and landladies and old housekeepers are still affected by them. Indeed, in as far as it really touches human hearts it is not altogether bad poetry.

It may rather surprise us to hear what the poetess tells us in the preface to her fifth edition: that her works have spread from English firesides to American prairies 'that my deep musings have been chanted in the Eastern desert and become dear to the banished convict'; but her verse, however cheaply expressed, is imbued with a true sense of association; it makes a false appeal to a right feeling—a appeal because an unreal one. Yet it has at least