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Poetry review: Fire to Fire by Mark Doty
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Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books written by Charles W. Eliot

C >> Charles W. Eliot >> Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books




None of the other Classes, except those of Fancy and Imagination,
require any particular notice. But a remark of general application may
be made. All Poets, except the dramatic, have been in the practice of
feigning that their works were composed to the music of the harp or
lyre: with what degree of affectation this has done in modern times, I
leave to the judicious to determine. For my own part, I have not been
disposed to violate probability so far, or to make such a large
demand upon the Reader's charity. Some of these pieces are essentially
lyrical; and, therefore, cannot have their due force without a
supposed musical accompaniment; but, in much the greatest part, as a
substitute for the classic lyre or romantic harp, I require nothing
more than an animated or impassioned recitation, adapted to the
subject. Poems, however humble in their kind, if they be good in that
kind, cannot read themselves; the law of long syllable and short must
not be so inflexible,--the letter of metre must not be so impassive
to the spirit of versification,--as to deprive the Reader of all
voluntary power to modulate, in subordination to the sense, the music
of the poem;--in the same manner as his mind is left at liberty, and
even summoned, to act upon its thoughts and images. But, though the
accompaniment of a musical instrument be frequently dispensed with,
the true Poet does not therefore abandon his privilege distinct from
that of the mere Proseman;

He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.

Let us come now to the consideration of the words Fancy and
Imagination, as employed in the classification of the following Poems.
'A man,' says an intelligent author, 'has imagination in proportion
as he can distinctly copy in idea the impressions of sense: it is the
faculty which _images_ within the mind the phenomena of sensation. A
man has fancy in proportion as he can call up, connect, or associate,
at pleasure, those internal images ([Greek: phantazein] is to cause
to appear) so as to complete ideal representations of absent objects.
Imagination is the power of depicting, and fancy of evoking and
combining. The imagination is formed by patient observation; the fancy
by a voluntary activity in shifting the scenery of the mind. The more
accurate the imagination, the more safely may a painter, or a poet,
undertake a delineation, or a description, without the presence of the
objects to be characterized. The more versatile the fancy, the more
original and striking will be the decorations produced.'--_British
Synonyms discriminated, by W. Taylor_.

Is not this as if a man should undertake to supply an account of
a building, and be so intent upon what he had discovered of the
foundation, as to conclude his task without once looking up at the
superstructure? Here, as in other instances throughout the volume, the
judicious Author's mind is enthralled by Etymology; he takes up the
original word as his guide and escort, and too often does not perceive
how soon he becomes its prisoner, without liberty to tread in any
path but that to which it confines him. It is not easy to find out
how imagination, thus explained, differs from distinct remembrance of
images; or fancy from quick and vivid recollection of them: each is
nothing more than a mode of memory. If the two words bear the above
meaning, and no other, what term is left to designate that faculty of
which the Poet is 'all compact;' he whose eyes glances from earth to
heaven, whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt
in turning to shape; or what is left to characterize Fancy,
as insinuating herself into the heart of objects with creative
activity?--Imagination, in the sense of the word as giving title to
a class of the following Poems, has no reference to images that are
merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external
objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the
mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition,
governed by certain fixed laws. I proceed to illustrate my meaning by
instances. A parrot _hangs_ from the wires of his cage by his beak or
by his claws; or a monkey from the bough of a tree by his paws or
his tail. Each creature does so literally and actually. In the first
Eclogue of Virgil, the shepherd, thinking of the time when he is to
take leave of his farm, thus addresses his goats:--

Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro
Dumosa _pendere_ procul de rupe videbo.
----half way down
_Hangs_ one who gathers samphire,

is the well-known expression of Shakespeare, delineating an ordinary
image upon the cliffs of Dover. In these two instances is a slight
exertion of the faculty which I denominate imagination, in the use
of one word: neither the goats nor the samphire-gatherer do literally
hang, as does the parrot or the monkey; but, presenting to the senses
something of such an appearance, the mind in its activity, for its own
gratification, contemplates them as hanging.

As when far off at sea a fleet descried
_Hangs_ in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate or Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs; they on the trading flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply, stemming nightly toward the Pole; so seemed
Far off the flying Fiend.

Here is the full strength of the imagination involved in the word
_hangs_, and exerted upon the whole image: First, the fleet, an
aggregate of many ships, is represented as one mighty person, whose
track, we know and feel, is upon the waters; but, taking advantage
of its appearance to the senses, the Poet dares to represent it as
_hanging in the clouds_, both for the gratification of the mind in
contemplating the image itself, and in reference to the motion and
appearance of the sublime objects to which it is compared.

From impressions of sight we will pass to those of sound; which,
as they must necessarily be of a less definite character, shall be
selected from these volumes:

Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove _broods_;

of the same bird,

His voice was _buried_ among trees,
Yet to be come at by the breeze;

O, Cuckoo I shall I call thee _Bird_,
Or but a wandering _Voice_?

The stock-dove is said to _coo_, a sound well imitating the note
of the bird; but, by the intervention of the metaphor _broods_, the
affections are called in by the imagination to assist in marking the
manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs her soft note, as if
herself delighting to listen to it, and participating of a still and
quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from
the continuous process of incubation. 'His voice was buried among
trees,' a metaphor expressing the love of _seclusion_ by which this
Bird is marked; and characterizing its note as not partaking of the
shrill and the piercing, and therefore more easily deadened by the
intervening shade; yet a note so peculiar and withal so pleasing, that
the breeze, gifted with that love of the sound which the Poet feels,
penetrates the shades in which it is entombed, and conveys it to the
ear of the listener.

Shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering _Voice_?

This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of
the voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a
corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of
her power by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost
perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes
an object of sight.

Thus far of images independent of each other, and immediately endowed
by the mind with properties that do not inhere in them, upon an
incitement from properties and qualities the existence of which is
inherent and obvious. These processes of imagination are carried
on either by conferring additional properties upon an object, or
abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses, and
thus enabling it to react upon the mind which hath performed the
process, like a new existence.

I pass from the Imagination acting upon an individual image to
a consideration of the same faculty employed upon images in a
conjunction by which they modify each other. The Reader has already
had a fine instance before him in the passage quoted from Virgil,
where the apparently perilous situation of the goat, hanging upon
the shaggy precipice, is contrasted with that of the shepherd
contemplating it from the seclusion of the cavern in which he lies
stretched at ease and in security. Take these images separately, and
how unaffecting the picture compared with that produced by their being
thus connected with, and opposed to, each other!

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.

* * * * *

Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether if it move at all.

In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying
powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all
brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the
power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast
stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone;
which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing
the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the
figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of
the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where
the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison. After what has
been said, the image of the cloud need not be commented upon.

Thus far of an endowing or modifying power: but the Imagination also
shapes and _creates_; and how? By innumerable processes; and in none
does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into
unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,--alternations
proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the
soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers. Recur to the passage
already cited from Milton. When the compact Fleet, as one Person, has
been introduced 'sailing from Bengala,' 'They,' i.e. the 'merchants,'
representing the fleet resolved into a multitude of ships, 'ply' their
voyage towards the extremities of the earth: 'So' (referring to the
word 'As' in the commencement) 'seemed the flying Fiend'; the image
of his Person acting to recombine the multitude of ships into one
body,--the point from which the comparison set out. 'So seemed,' and
to whom seemed? To the heavenly Muse who dictates the poem, to the eye
of the Poet's mind, and to that of the Reader, present at one moment
in the wide Ethiopian, and the next in the solitudes, then first
broken in upon, of the infernal regions!

Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.

Hear again this mighty Poet,--speaking of the Messiah going forth to
expel from heaven the rebellious angels,

Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints
He onward came: far off his coming shone,--

the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Messiah himself, lost
almost and merged in the splendour of that indefinite abstraction 'His
coming!'

As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than to throw some
light upon the present Volumes, and especially upon one division of
them, I shall spare myself and the Reader the trouble of considering
the Imagination as it deals with thoughts and sentiments, as it
regulates the composition of characters, and determines the course
of actions: I will not consider it (more than I have already done by
implication) as that power which, in the language of one of my most
esteemed Friends, 'draws all things to one; which makes things animate
or inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects with their
accessories, take one colour and serve to one effect[4].' The grand
storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of poetical,
as contra-distinguished from human and dramatic Imagination, are the
prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of
Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add to those of Spenser. I select
these writers in preference to those of ancient Greece and Rome,
because the anthropomorphitism of the Pagan religion subjected the
minds of the greatest poets in those countries too much to the bondage
of definite form; from which the Hebrews were preserved by their
abhorrence of idolatry. This abhorrence was almost as strong in our
great epic Poet, both from circumstances of his life, and from the
constitution of his mind. However imbued the surface might be with
classical literature, he was a Hebrew in soul; and all things tended
in him towards the sublime. Spenser, of a gentler nature, maintained
his freedom by aid of his allegorical spirit, at one time inciting him
to create persons out of abstractions; and, at another, by a
superior effort of genius, to give the universality and permanence of
abstractions to his human beings, by means of attributes and emblems
that belong to the highest moral truths and the purest sensations,--of
which his character of Una is a glorious example. Of the human and
dramatic Imagination the works of Shakespeare are an inexhaustible
source.

I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you Daughters!

And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distinguished by this prime
quality, whose names I omit to mention; yet justified by recollection
of the insults which the ignorant, the incapable, and the
presumptuous, have heaped upon these and my other writings, I may be
permitted to anticipate the judgment of posterity upon myself, I
shall declare (censurable, I grant, if the notoriety of the fact above
stated does not justify me) that I have given in these unfavourable
times evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its worthiest
objects, the external universe, the moral and religious sentiments of
Man, his natural affections, and his acquired passions; which have
the same ennobling tendency as the productions of men, in this kind,
worthy to be holden in undying remembrance.

To the mode in which Fancy has already been characterized as the power
of evoking and combining, or, as my friend Mr. Coleridge has styled
it, 'the aggregative and associative power,' my objection is only that
the definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke
and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy; but
either the materials evoked and combined are different; or they are
brought together under a different law, and for a different purpose.
Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of
should be susceptible of change in their constitution, from her touch;
and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose if
it be slight, limited, and evanescent. Directly the reverse of these,
are the desires and demands of the Imagination. She recoils from
everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite. She leaves
it to Fancy to describe Queen Mab as coming,

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman.

Having to speak of stature, she does not tell you that her gigantic
Angel was as tall as Pompey's Pillar; much less that he was twelve
cubits, or twelve hundred cubits high; or that his dimensions equalled
those of Teneriffe or Atlas;--because these, and if they were
a million times as high it would be the same, are bounded: The
expression is, 'His stature reached the sky!' the illimitable
firmament!--When the Imagination frames a comparison, if it does
not strike on the first presentation, a sense of the truth of the
likeness, from the moment that it is perceived, grows--and continues
to grow--upon the mind; the resemblance depending less upon outline
of form and feature, than upon expression and effect; less upon
casual and outstanding, than upon inherent and internal, properties:
moreover, the images invariably modify each other.--The law under
which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as capricious as
the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful,
ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be
appositely produced or fortunately combined. Fancy depends upon
the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and
images; trusting that their number, and the felicity with which they
are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual
value: or she prides herself upon the curious subtilty and the
successful elaboration with which she can detect their lurking
affinities. If she can win you over to her purpose, and impart to
you her feelings, she cares not how unstable or transitory may be her
influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power to resume
it upon an apt occasion. But the Imagination is conscious of an
indestructible dominion;--the Soul may fall away from it, not being
able to sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by
no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired,
or diminished.--Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the
temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the
eternal.--Yet is it not the less true that Fancy, as she is an active,
is also, under her own laws and in her own spirit, a creative faculty?
In what manner Fancy ambitiously aims at a rivalship with Imagination,
and Imagination stoops to work with the materials of Fancy, might be
illustrated from the compositions of all eloquent writers, whether in
prose or verse; and chiefly from those of our own Country. Scarcely a
page of the impassioned parts of Bishop Taylor's Works can be opened
that shall not afford examples.--Referring the Reader to those
inestimable volumes, I will content myself with placing a conceit
(ascribed to Lord Chesterfield) in contrast with a passage from the
_Paradise Lost_:

The dews of the evening most carefully shun,
They are the tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.

After the transgression of Adam, Milton, with other appearances of
sympathizing Nature, thus marks the immediate consequence,

Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completion of the mortal sin.

The associating link is the same in each instance: Dew and rain, not
distinguishable from the liquid substance of tears, are employed as
indications of sorrow. A flash of surprise is the effect in the former
case; a flash of surprise, and nothing more; for the nature of things
does not sustain the combination. In the latter, the effects from the
act, of which there is this immediate consequence and visible
sign, are so momentous, that the mind acknowledges the justice and
reasonableness of the sympathy in nature so manifested; and the sky
weeps drops of water as if with human eyes, as 'Earth had before
trembled from her entrails, and Nature given a second groan.'

Finally, I will refer to Cotton's _Ode upon Winter_, an admirable
composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in
which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of
Fancy. The middle part of this ode contains a most lively description
of the entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as 'A palsied king,' and
yet a military monarch,--advancing for conquest with his army; the
several bodies of which, and their arms and equipments, are described
with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of _fanciful_ comparisons,
which indicate on the part of the poet extreme activity of intellect,
and a correspondent hurry of delightful feeling. Winter retires from
the foe into his fortress, where

a magazine
Of sovereign juice is cellared in;
Liquor that will the siege maintain
Should Phoebus ne'er return again.

Though myself a water drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure of
transcribing what follows, as an instance still more happy of Fancy
employed in the treatment of feeling than, in its preceding passages,
the Poem supplies of her management of forms.

'Tis that, that gives the poet rage,
And thaws the gelid blood of age;
Matures the young, restores the old,
And makes the fainting coward bold.

It lays the careful head to rest,
Calms palpitations in the breast,
Renders our lives' misfortune sweet;

* * * * *

Then let the chill Sirocco blow,
And gird us round with hills of snow,
Or else go whistle to the shore,
And make the hollow mountains roar,

Whilst we together jovial sit
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit,
Where, though bleak winds confine us home
Our fancies round the world shall roam.

We'll think of all the Friends we know,
And drink to all worth drinking to;
When having drunk all thine and mine,
We rather shall want healths than wine.

But where Friends fail us, we'll supply
Our friendships with our charity;
Men that remote in sorrows live,
Shall by our lusty brimmers thrive.

We'll drink the wanting into wealth,
And those that languish into health,
The afflicted into joy; th' opprest
Into security and rest.

The worthy in disgrace shall find
Favour return again more kind,
And in restraint who stifled lie,
Shall taste the air of liberty.

The brave shall triumph in success,
The lover shall have mistresses,
Poor unregarded Virtue, praise,
And the neglected Poet, bays.

Thus shall our healths do others good,
Whilst we ourselves do all we would;
For, freed from envy and from care,
What would we be but what we are?

When I sate down to write this Preface, it was my intention to have
made it more comprehensive; but, thinking that I ought rather to
apologize for detaining the reader so long, I will here conclude.


[Footnote 3: As sensibility to harmony of numbers, and the power
of producing it, are invariably attendants upon the faculties above
specified, nothing has been said upon those requisites.]

[Footnote 4: Charles Lamb upon the genius of Hogarth.]




ESSAY SUPPLEMENTARY TO PREFACE

(1815)


With the young of both sexes, Poetry is, like love, a passion; but,
for much the greater part of those who have been proud of its power
over their minds, a necessity soon arises of breaking the pleasing
bondage; or it relaxes of itself;--the thoughts being occupied in
domestic cares, or the time engrossed by business. Poetry then becomes
only an occasional recreation; while to those whose existence passes
away in a course of fashionable pleasure, it is a species of luxurious
amusement. In middle and declining age, a scattered number of serious
persons resort to poetry, as to religion, for a protection against
the pressure of trivial employments, and as a consolation for the
afflictions of life. And, lastly, there are many, who, having been
enamoured of this art in their youth, have found leisure, after
youth was spent, to cultivate general literature; in which poetry has
continued to be comprehended _as a study_.

Into the above classes the Readers of poetry may be divided; Critics
abound in them all; but from the last only can opinions be collected
of absolute value, and worthy to be depended upon, as prophetic of the
destiny of a new work. The young, who in nothing can escape delusion,
are especially subject to it in their intercourse with Poetry. The
cause, not so obvious as the fact is unquestionable, is the same as
that from which erroneous judgements in this art, in the minds of men
of all ages, chiefly proceed; but upon Youth it operates with peculiar
force. The appropriate business of poetry (which, nevertheless, if
genuine, is as permanent as pure science), her appropriate employment,
her privilege and her _duty_, is to treat of things not as they _are_,
but as they _appear_; not as they exist in themselves, but as they
_seem_ to exist to the _senses_, and to the _passions_. What a
world of delusion does this acknowledged obligation prepare for the
inexperienced! what temptations to go astray are here held forth for
them whose thoughts have been little disciplined by the understanding,
and whose feelings revolt from the sway of reason!--When a juvenile
Reader is in the height of his rapture with some vicious passage,
should experience throw in doubts, or common sense suggest suspicions,
a lurking consciousness that the realities of the Muse are but shows,
and that her liveliest excitements are raised by transient shocks
of conflicting feeling and successive assemblages of contradictory
thoughts--is ever at hand to justify extravagance, and to sanction
absurdity. But, it may be asked, as these illusions are unavoidable,
and, no doubt, eminently useful to the mind as a process, what good
can be gained by making observations, the tendency of which is to
diminish the confidence of youth in its feelings, and thus to abridge
its innocent and even profitable pleasures? The reproach implied in
the question could not be warded off, if Youth were incapable of being
delighted with what is truly excellent; or, if these errors always
terminated of themselves in due season. But, with the majority, though
their force be abated, they continue through life. Moreover, the fire
of youth is too vivacious an element to be extinguished or damped by a
philosophical remark; and, while there is no danger that what has been
said will be injurious or painful to the ardent and the confident,
it may prove beneficial to those who, being enthusiastic, are, at the
same time, modest and ingenuous. The intimation may unite with their
own misgivings to regulate their sensibility, and to bring in, sooner
than it would otherwise have arrived, a more discreet and sound
judgement.