Identifier: cu31924103992628 (find matches)
Title: The appreciation of literature
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Woodberry, George Edward, 1855-1930 St. John, Cynthia Morgan, 1852-1919. fmo Schurman, Jacob Gould, 1854-1942. sgn Wordsworth Collection
Subjects: Literature
Publisher: New York, The Baker & Tayor company
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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d shall be,not in any practical achievement in the realworld but in its own consciousness of its ideals.They belong to the most impersonal of mansworks; they are social poems, condensations ofbroad human life into which centuries arecompressed, landmarks of the progress of therace through change. If the poet individuallywrites them, they are no less the combinationof ages of tradition, its product and embodiment.In the earlier examples the tradition is national;in Homer and Virgil, it is Greek and Romangenius that are treasured up; but in later writersit is rather the tradition of the civilization towhich they belong than the pure nationaltradition that is expressed. In English thegreat examples are three, Spensers FaeryQueene, Miltons Paradise Lost and TennysonsIdyls of the King. The first and second arepoems of the Renaissance spirit, and involve,one the tradition of chivalry and the middleage, the other that of Christian story and an-tiquity, while Tennyson resumes the Arthurian 62
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14 HW o O H Narrative Poetry legend. It is obvious that such poems requirein the reader much preparation by study beforethey can be inteUigently read; for such readingthere must be a knowledge of Scripture, my-thology and chivalry in particular, but alsomuch besides. These poems are, in truth, themost fascinating form of history, and perhapsits most eflficient form; and as the English kingsare most humanly known in Shakespeare, pasthistory in general is most alive in the epicsthat sum it up imaginatively and interpret it interms of the immortal spirit of man. Actualhistory, life as it was, is to this reincarnation of itin poetry merely dead annals; like the excavatedruins of Troy, in comparison with the Iliad, —a desolation, debris, a thing of the gray annihila-tion of time. The power of historical imagina-tion is, therefore, indispensable to the reader,whose assimilation of the poem will be propor-tionate to his exercise of it. For each of thegreat epics there is a stock of interpr

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