ABSTRACT
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. It is destined not merely to reunite the separate genres of poetry and to link poetry to philosophy and rhetoric. It would and should also mingle and fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic poetry and natural poetry, make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetic, poetise wit, fill and saturate the forms of art with worthy cultural matter of every kind, and animate them with a flow of humour. It embraces all that is poetic, from the greatest art system that enfolds further systems, down to the sigh, the kiss uttered in artless song by the child creating its own poetry. It can so identify with what is being represented that one might well think its sole aim was to characterise poetic individuals of every sort; but there is as yet no form designed fully to express the author’s mind: so that some artists, who want only to write a novel, have come to portray themselves. Romantic poetry alone can, like the epic, become a mirror to the whole surrounding world, an image of its age. At the same time, free of all real and ideal interests, it can also float on wings of poetic reflection midway between the work and the artist, constantly reinforcing this reflection and multiplying it as in an unending series of mirrors. It has the potential for the highest, most manifold evolution by expanding not only outward but also 5inward, for each thing destined to be a whole entity is organised uniformly in all its parts, so that the prospect is opened up of a boundlessly developing classicism. Among the arts Romantic poetry is what wit is to philosophy, and what sociability, friendship and love are to life. Other types of poetry are complete and can now be wholly analysed. Romantic poetry is still in the process of becoming; this indeed is its very essence, that it is eternally evolving, never completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a divinatory criticism could dare to try to characterise its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free, recognising as its prime law that the poet’s caprice brooks no law. Romantic poetry is the only type of poetry that is more than merely a type of poetry; it is in fact the very art of poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.
