Opis: Gifts to the Muses Poems (Classic Reprint) - Ritchey James Abraham

Excerpt from Gifts to the Muses Poems

All literary composition is either prose or poetry. But this classification is only formal. It overlaps, and has therefore no critical value. Some of the finest passages of prose are highly poetical, and some poems are prosaic. Prose and poetry cannot be distinguished by the forms in which they are expressed. Versify the Declaration of Independence, and no poetry makes its appearance. Write out Tennyson's Maud into prose lines of average length, and it will not cease to be poetry. The essential elements of prose and the same of poetry may be mixed in almost any proportion in either prose or poetry. Take all the prose out of a poem, and nothing may be left but the empty schema for its scansion. Take all the poetry out of a piece of prose, and not a single sentence of prose may remain. A whole chapter of prose may be all poetry, and a correctly versified poem may be all prose. But the most highly finished specimen of prose is never called a poem; nor is a poem, even without a line of poetry in it, ever called prose. Prose is therefore not antithetic to poetry, but the poem is, at least conventionally, antithetic to prose. The making of verse is one thing, but the making of poetry quite another. One may write poems "faultily faultless," and yet may have no pretension to the name of poet.

What then is poetry It is not prose. It does not consist in subject. Prose and poetry may take the same subject. The drama and the epic take the same themes as history. It does not consist in rhyme; or blank verse is not poetry, and Homer and Virgil and Milton are not poets. It does not consist in feet, meter, rythm, verse. For a prose translation destroys these, but leaves the poetry intact, if the translation is faithful. Ossian's poems translated into English prose, thence into Italian, thence into Spanish, French, German and so onward, did not and could not cease to be poetry. The essence of this most tenuous and volatile of all poetry did not evaporate in this process any more than if the translation had been made in verse. The preservation of the poetry depends upon the correctness of the version, but not any more than would the quality of prose history in like transition. Every human heart feels the charm of Ossian's poetry, let the head think what it may. Its sublime heroism made his poems the favorite book of Paul Jones and Napoleon. It has never been successfully versified. Macpherson says it cannot be. Poetry is greater than a poem. Meters cannot measure the depth of the heart. Put Fingal and Agandecca into verse, and they would lose themselves In its precision.

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Szczegóły: Gifts to the Muses Poems (Classic Reprint) - Ritchey James Abraham

Nazwa: Gifts to the Muses Poems (Classic Reprint)
Autor: Ritchey James Abraham
Wydawnictwo: FB &c Ltd
Kod paskowy: 9781330649763
Języki: angielski
Ilość stron: 174
Format: 15.2x22.9cm
Oprawa: Miękka

Recenzje: Gifts to the Muses Poems (Classic Reprint) - Ritchey James Abraham