" It
thus appears that it is not the multiplication of details which
constitutes poetry; nor their subtraction which constitutes history,
but that there must be something either in the nature of the details
themselves, or the method of using them, which invests them with
poetical power or historical propriety.
It seems to me, and may seem to the reader, strange that we should
need to ask the question, "What is poetry?" Here is a word we have
been using all our lives, and, I suppose, with a very distinct idea
attached to it; and when I am now called upon to give a definition of
this idea, I find myself at a pause. What is more singular, I do not
at present recollect hearing the question often asked, though surely
it is a very natural one; and I never recollect hearing it answered,
or even attempted to be answered. In general, people shelter
themselves under metaphors, and while we hear poetry described as an
utterance of the soul, an effusion of Divinity, or voice of nature, or
in other terms equally elevated and obscure, we never attain anything
like a definite explanation of the character which actually
distinguishes it from prose.
I come, after some embarrassment, to the conclusion, that poetry is
"the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble
emotions.
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