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[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry._]
Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Shelley precisely. In
_The Crystal,_ Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been
embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts
their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And in _Life
and Song_ he repeats the same idea:
None of the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,
Or truly sung his true, true thought.
Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life
arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and
the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the
poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with
the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges,
instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote:
Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the
senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal.
Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic
expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence
to absolute virtue.
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