Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/55

Rh year, and long since become of record. This child's heart detected "poetry, poetry everywhere!" and proclaimed that

That our naïve little rhymer was a sibyl, and her statement hardly more vague than the definitions of poetry offered by older philosophers, who will deny?

All in all, various writers connected with the art movement of the present century have Clearer statements. most sensibly discussed the topic. They recognize poetry as an entity, subject to expressed conditions. Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt logically distinguished between it and poetic feeling, and believed one to be the involuntary utterance of the other, sympathetically modulating the poet's Shelley's noble "Defence of Poetry," 1821. voice to its key. Shelley, the Ariel of songsters, came right down to the ground of our enchanted isle, laying stress upon the dependence of the utterance on rhythm and order—on "those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty whose throne is contained within the invisible nature of man." More recently the poet-critic, Theodore Watts, in the best modern essay upon the