No More Learning

I
have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont
Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down
mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come
forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among
mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions
which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled
multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages
of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of
black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished
upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of
genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and
our own country, has been to me, like external nature, a passion and
an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the
imagery of my Poem have been drawn. I have considered Poetry in its
most comprehensive sense; and have read the Poets and the Historians
and the Metaphysicians (In this sense there may be such a thing as
perfectibility in works of fiction, notwithstanding the concession
often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility
is a term applicable only to science. ) whose writings have been
accessible to me, and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic
scenery of the earth, as common sources of those elements which it is
the province of the Poet to embody and combine. Yet the experience and
the feelings to which I refer do not in themselves constitute men
Poets, but only prepares them to be the auditors of those who are. How
far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of
Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which
animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not;
and which, with an acquiescent and contented spirit, I expect to be
taught by the effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now
address.

I have avoided, as I have said before, the imitation of any
contemporary style. But there must be a resemblance, which does not
depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular
age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which
arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to
the times in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of
the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded.
Thus, the
tragic poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of ancient
learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded
the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser,
the Dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon (Milton
stands alone in the age which he illumined. ); the colder spirits of
the interval that succeeded;--all resemble each other, and differ from
every other in their several classes. In this view of things, Ford can
no more be called the imitator of Shakespeare than Shakespeare the
imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other points of resemblance
between these two men than that which the universal and inevitable
influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which
neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest genius of any era can
escape; and which I have not attempted to escape.

I have adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly
beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical
harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in
the latter there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed
or fail. This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. But I was
enticed also by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind
that has been nourished upon musical thoughts can produce by a just
and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this measure. Yet there
will be found some instances where I have completely failed in this
attempt, and one, which I here request the reader to consider as an
erratum, where there is left, most inadvertently, an alexandrine in
the middle of a stanza.

But in this, as in every other respect, I have written fearlessly. It
is the misfortune of this age that its Writers, too thoughtless of
immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame.
They write with the fear of Reviews before their eyes. This system of
criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when Poetry was not.
Poetry, and the art which professes to regulate and limit its powers,
cannot subsist together. Longinus could not have been the contemporary
of Homer, nor Boileau of Horace. Yet this species of criticism never
presumed to assert an understanding of its own; it has always, unlike
true science, followed, not preceded, the opinion of mankind, and
would even now bribe with worthless adulation some of our greatest
Poets to impose gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations, and
become unconscious accomplices in the daily murder of all genius
either not so aspiring or not so fortunate as their own.