Publisher's Synopsis
From the PREFACE.
THOUGH the essays here collected have, with one exception, appeared in current periodicals and reviews, they are not merely reprints. Most of them have been much enlarged, one or two have been almost re-written and all have been carefully revised. Though the subjects of which they treat are various, I venture to hope that a certain unity may be discerned in them, arising from an endeavor to regard both criticism and poetry more seriously than is at present the fashion. The first seems to be resolving itself almost universally into a loose record of personal impressions, the second to be regarded as little more than a medium of aesthetic trifling. In the wretched degradation into which belles lettres have fallen we seem to be losing all sense of the importance once attached to them, when critics were scholars and poets something more than aesthetes. In the essay on Longinus an attempt has, therefore, been made to recall criticism to its old sources and traditions, and thus to illustrate how, if it is to be what it is of power to be, it must rest on far more solid foundations than undisciplined and uninstructed susceptibility, -- on the foundations, that is to say, laid by its classical masters.
So, too, in the essay on the True Functions of Poetry I have ventured to re-state and bring home what once were truisms, but what will now appear-and to too many-paradox and extravagance. How far my estimates of the poets whom I have passed in review will recommend themselves to others I know not, but this I should like to say: I hope emphasis will not be mistaken for dogma. Such estimates, even were they those of a critic entitled to far more authority than I can pretend to possess, must be experimental, and can have no approximation to finality. But it is right that when well-weighed they should be attempted. Thus only can the literary product of each age be sifted and proved, thus only the balance at last adjusted. My thanks are due to the proprietors of the North American Review for permission to use the articles on the Poets and Poetry of America; to Mr. John Murray for permission to use the articles on Longinus which appeared originally in the Quarterly Review, and on Byron; to the editor of the Contemporary Review for permission to reproduce that on the poetry of Mr. Gerald Massey; to the editor and proprietor of the National Review for allowing me the use of that on Miltonic Myths. The original sketch of the essay on Mr. William Watson's poetry appeared in the Westminster Gazette, but it has been much enlarged and, indeed, almost rewritten. The paper on the True Functions of Poetry has not been printed before.
