Lectures on Poetry

Excerpt from Lectures on Poetry

More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Gray, the finest scholar and poet of his age, laid down in his famous Ode on the Progress of Poesy what still remain the main lines, the guiding ideas, of poetical criticism. That Ode is not less remarkable for its just thought and profound insight than for its perfection of phrasing and movement. In it he set forth, under the imaginative light which only poetry itself can throw upon poetry, the doctrine of the power and function of poetry in itself, and of its progress in the life of mankind. It remains true still that poetry, in Gray's classic words, is the controller of sullen care and frantic passion; that it is the companion in youth of desire and love; that it is the power which in later years dispels, or solaces where it cannot dispel, the ills of life  labour, penury, pain, disease, sorrow, death itself that it is the inspiration, from youth to age and in all times and lands, of the noblest human motives and ardours, of glory, of gene rous shame, of freedom and the unconquerable mind.