Treatises on Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric: Being the Articles Under Those Heads, Contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Seventh Edition (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Treatises on Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric: Being the Articles Under Those Heads, Contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Seventh Edition

Poetry may perhaps be defined to be an art which has creation of intellectual pleasure for its object, which attains its end by the use of language natural in an excited state of the imagination and the feelings, and generally, though not necessarily, formed into regular numbers. The proper antithesis, therefore, to poetry, as Mr Coleridge has remark ed, is not prose, but science. The proper antithesis to prose is verse. Science seeks to instruct, to discover and to com municate truth; the proper and immediate object of poe try is the 'communication of immediate pleasure. Poetry may indeed incidentally instruct, as science may indirectly communicate pleasure; but the object of each must be ga thered from its main direction and bearing, and in this sense the production of intellectual enjoyment is unquestionably the aim and the proper province of poetry.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.