human
He must have greatly enjoyed writing such a paragraph as this:
gpt
A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community. ... The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labours. These gay shafts had at any rate the merit of stinging Shelley to action. 'The Defence of Poetry' was his reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, and art generally, as an adventitious seasoning of life--ornamental perhaps, but rather out of place in a progressive and practical age. Shelley undermines the whole position by asserting that poetry--a name which includes for him all serious art--is the very stuff out of which all that is valuable and real in life is made.
human
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
gpt
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. And it is on the imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as exercises strengthen a limb. Historically, he argues, good poetry always coexists with good morals; for instance, when social life decays, drama decays. Peacock had said that reasoners and mechanical inventors are more useful than poets. The reply is that, left to themselves, they simply make the world worse, while it is poets and
human
who produce
gpt
or pleasure in the highest sense. Without poetry, the progress of science and of the mechanical arts results in mental and moral indigestion, merely exasperating the inequality of mankind.
human
Poetry and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and mammon of the world. While the emotions penetrated by poetry last,
gpt
Self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poetry's
human
It makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe anew.
gpt
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
human
Through all that earthly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness,