. . . Can any poet shoot his soul's arrow
to its best height, when at once bow and string and muscle and nerve
are slackened in this vaporous and relaxing air, that comes up
out of the old dreams of fate that were false and of passions
that were not pure?"*
--
* `Music and Poetry', p. 198.
--
Lanier's enthusiasm for Chaucer is typical of much of his critical writing.
He was a generous praiser of the best literature, and generally
his praise was right. "Lyrics of criticism" would be a good title
for many of his passages. There was nothing of indifferentism in him.
In a letter to Gibson Peacock he wrote of a certain type of criticism which,
it may be said, has been widely prevalent in recent years:
"In the very short time that I have been in the hands of the critics,
nothing has amazed me more than the timid solicitudes with which
they rarefy in one line any enthusiasm they may have condensed
in another -- a process curiously analogous to those irregular
condensations and rarefactions of air which physicists have shown to be
the conditions of producing an indeterminate sound. Many of my critics
have seemed -- if I may change the figure -- to be forever conciliating
the yet-unrisen ghosts of possible mistakes." Enough quotations
have already been given from his lectures in Baltimore to show his enthusiasm
for many of the periods and many of the authors of English literature.
It is a distinction for him as a critic that he has set forth
in so many passages his conception of the mission of poetry, --
passages that are in the line of succession of defenses of poetry
by Sidney, Hazlitt, and Shelley.
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