It seems to me, and may seem to the reader, strange that we should need to ask the question, “What is poetry?” Here is a word we have been using all our lives, and, I suppose, with a very distinct idea attached to it; and when I am now called upon to give a definition of this idea, I find myself at a pause.  What is more singular, I do not at present recollect hearing the question often asked, though surely it is a very natural one; and I never recollect hearing it answered, or even attempted to be answered.  In general, people shelter themselves under metaphors, and while we hear poetry described as an utterance of the soul, an effusion of Divinity, or voice of nature, or in other terms equally elevated and obscure, we never attain anything like a definite explanation of the character which actually distinguishes it from prose.

I come, after some embarrassment, to the conclusion, that poetry is “the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions."[39] I mean, by the noble emotions, those four principal sacred passions—­Love, Veneration, Admiration, and Joy (this latter especially, if unselfish); and their opposites—­Hatred, Indignation (or Scorn), Horror, and Grief,—­this last, when unselfish, becoming Compassion.  These passions in their various combinations constitute what is called “poetical feeling,” when they are felt on noble grounds, that is, on great and true grounds.  Indignation, for instance, is a poetical feeling, if excited by serious injury; but it is not a poetical feeling if entertained on being cheated out of a small sum of money.  It is very possible the manner of the cheat may have been such as to justify considerable indignation; but the feeling is nevertheless not poetical unless the grounds of it be large as well as just.  In like manner, energetic admiration may be excited in certain minds by a display of fireworks, or a street of handsome shops; but the feeling is not poetical, because the grounds of it are false, and therefore ignoble.  There is in reality nothing to deserve admiration either in the firing of packets of gunpowder, or in the display of the stocks of warehouses.  But admiration excited by the budding of a flower is a poetical feeling, because it is impossible that this manifestation of spiritual power and vital beauty can ever be enough admired.

Farther, it is necessary to the existence of poetry that the grounds of these feelings should be furnished by the imagination.  Poetical feeling, that is to say, mere noble emotion, is not poetry.  It is happily inherent in all human nature deserving the name, and is found often to be purest in the least sophisticated.  But the power of assembling, by the help of the imagination, such images as will excite these feelings, is the power of the poet or literally of the “Maker."[40]