The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of
individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_
Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a
re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and
essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the
main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years.
We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic
conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing
theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an
essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission.
It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is
not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt
has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each
question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is
inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the
lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the
spiritual in the sensual.
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