Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/272

262 those arts." Wordsworth's "Preface" to his epoch-making early poems should be read in connection with Coleridge's comments in the "Biographia Literaria," and in the light of the well-known fact as to the proposed division of labor between the two young poets in the composition of the "Lyrical Ballads." Coleridge intended to treat supernatural objects as if they really existed. Wordsworth wished to find in natural objects elements of novelty and surprise, that is, the romance of everyday experience. The two methods blended of course, like the colors at the extreme edges of the spectrum. Wordsworth's successive statements of his purpose emphasize now his use of "the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes," as if it were mainly a question of poetic diction; then he stresses the necessity of truth to "the primary laws of our nature," and debates the æsthetic question of "the association of ideas in a state of excitement"; finally, he qualifies his first utterances by pointing out that the diction should be a "selection of language really used by men," and that the incidents and situations treated by the poet should have "a certain colouring of the imagination." Such criticism as this, if accompanied by close study of the verbal alterations which Wordsworth made in the text of his poems as his theories changed, is in the highest degree stimulating and profitable.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The influence of Coleridge is traceable throughout Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" (1821). Shelley rides into the lists with as high a heart as Sidney, to repel the attack, not of the "moralists" but of the utilitarians. He is not conscious, like Sidney, Dryden, and Arnold, of the history of criticism. He has steeped himself, it is true, in Plato, but he writes with the enthusiasm of a new and personal vision. Poetry, to him, is primarily the expression of the imagination: "it redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man"; "it is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds"; "a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth"; poetry "acts in a divine but unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness"; "a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one." Though the