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Many people suppose poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings; but wherever there is a sense of beauty or power or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower, that 'spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun' -- there is poetry, in its birth.
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Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us that expands, refines, rarefies, raises our whole being; without it, 'man's life is poor as beasts'.
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The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-Killer; the shepherd boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god- the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second-hand.
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Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their description of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow or anger, to be cast down nor elated by anything. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.
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The light of poetry is not only a direct, but a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of our thought, and penetrates our whole being.
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Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed.
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The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself, that it impatient of all limit, that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur...
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It is not... the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose...
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We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others... The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.
--William Hazlitt, 'On Poetry in General'
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