note of sadness and regret. This was simply his own highest range and emotion. His formula, however, will always be tenderly regarded by refined souls, for Beauty, pure and simple, is the alma mater of the artist; her unswerving devotee is absolved—many sins are forgiven to him who has loved her much.
But often a poet, great or small, has burnished some facet of the jewel we are setting.The Miltonic canon. Milton's declaration that poetry is "simple, sensuous, passionate," is a recognition of its most effective attributes.[1] Lowell has sprinkled the whole subject with diamond-dust, and he, of all, perhaps could best have given a new report of its tricksy spirit. Arnold's phrase, "a criticism ofArnold's Delphic outgiving. life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic
- ↑ Milton's phrase has become familiar as a proverb since Coleridge used it with great force in the prelude to his lectures on Shakespeare and on the Drama, but it is seldom quoted with its context, as found in the tractate On Education, addressed to Samuel Hartlib, A. D. 1644. The poet there speaks of "Rhetoric" as an art "to which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's poetics, in Horace,... teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and playwriters be; and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent, use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things."
