1889. EBB to Sara Coleridge
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 167–169.
50 Wimpole Street
April 16. 1845.
My dear Mrs Coleridge
It was a great pleasure to me to receive your letter & to read your mind in it. You can only honour me by speaking quite openly, whether the subject refers to me immediately or otherwise,—for of course the greater the openness, the nearer the access. There is a face to face for the mind as well as for the body .. and I feel sure, even so early, that I cannot know you too well.
In respect to poetry, perhaps we do not differ very much after all—or the difference arises from my going further along the same line. Of course your explanation of the term ‘diversion’ leaves me nothing to object to—but for the moment I had in my head that school of critics, which declares ‘pleasure’ to be the end of poetry,—as if pleasure cd be the end of anything!–
For the rest, to define the true nature of poetry, is as hard & perhaps as impossible, as to put the soul itself into solution: & we are apt to render it harder than it need be by confusing & confounding the motive faculty of the poet with his subject matter, & even with his forms of expression. My intimate persuasion is, that poetry is truth, primitive absolute and universal truth—but less truth in abstraction than in relation—& that above all, it is truth in emotion. Take a flower—! The botanist will tell you a partial truth of its petals—the geometrician another partial truth of its diameter—a painter, another partial truth of its form & colour—but the poet will tell you of it (if he can speak) something different from all these, larger than them all, .. something which shall be recognized as truth by all men, & which shall strike into the deep relations of truth, octave upon octave, as far off as the soul can hear music. And if you tell me that philosophical truth has also its relations, I ask you if the relations of poetry are not different & higher,—more infinite & subtle,—finer than the naked eye of the cold reasoning intellect can discern at all. All indeed are equally the relations of God’s universe—but when the strings lie relaxed in the damp, we call them simply philosophical—& when they are tuned up to music, (as the loosest of all may be!) they are poetical– And now I have a misgiving of being unintelligible.
But you will see that I cannot indeed consent to give up the heights to the divinest of philosophies, while Poetry is in the clouds below, however beautifully you may paint them. I do not believe in a poetry of clouds—though I may have written a good proportion of cloudy poetry myself.
Would you agree to such a definition of poetry as this? Truth in relation, perceived in emotion? I think that if I had to try at a definition, or at my idea of a definition, I might put it so. I have often thought it,—for of course the subject keeps large wheel marks in my mind.
Of the divine discourses of the Saviour, I cannot say that I consider them out of poetry even by being beyond poetry.
And when “God said let there be light & there was light,” [1] we, who read the words, do not place them out of poetry even by placing them beyond poetry. Longinus is a witness to it that we do not. [2]
To All that you say of the use & wisdom of being natural & human .. “sensuous & passionate” .. in poetry, I listen with full consent & convictions,—& wish it cd be true of myself personally, & become truer & truer, .. what you observe in your kindness, .. that I have made some nearer approach to “the humanities” in my own later studies. Certainly we are not called to write fantasies, but interpretations—we are to read wisdom from an open book, & not to dream over it, idly. We can know nothing beyond what is revealed,—& the apocalypse of the present dispensation, with all that rustling of divine mysteries which we hear just beyond it, is in itself warm & throbbing with humanity,—& I feel this more & more deeply. I feel too more & more certainly, that to pass beyond, we must pass through,—through the grave to the resurrection,—& to speak it reverently, to God, through the flesh—this, for the poet, as for the man actually!– To spring from the earth, the foot must press on it strongly. I think it so much, that I class world-knowledge, life-knowledge, very high among the poetical writer’s necessary preparations, & look down on my own deficiencies in this respect, with profound sadness, whenever I am on the sad subject of my defects in general. You have written very kindly to me,—& if you had not, I shd be particularly loth to appear to you, as given to the meanness of affectations. But also, before you who have, as you say, lived all your life among true poets, (such poets!) & who bear the name of perhaps the greatest of them, .. I cannot help saying that I shrink from the assumption of any sort of poet’s rank myself,—I shd feel afraid of my own assuming words. Only I see higher than I climb—& I love more than I can see—think so much of me, if you can!–
I am able to appreciate, I hope, Mr Aubrey de Vere’s writings, [3] and I am sure I can feel pleasure from his good opinion.
But the pleasantest of all is to think of the ‘partition’ as down for ever, & of Mrs Coleridge being no longer as a stranger to me—& that to the esteem I have long borne to her character & high accomplishments, I may add the more personal feeling which leaves me always
her faithful & obliged
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett.
Publication: Earl Leslie Griggs, Coleridge Fille (1940), pp. 174–175 (in part).
Manuscript: University of Texas.
1. Genesis 1:3.
2. EBB refers to the example given by Longinus from Genesis as representation of the divine (see Longinus, “On the Sublime,” ix, 9, in Aristotle: the Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe).
3. Aubrey Thomas de Vere (1814–1902), Irish poet. De Vere was a friend of Wordsworth, and “the most valued of Aubrey’s friends acquired through Wordsworth was Sara Coleridge” (Th. A. Pijpers, Aubrey de Vere As A Man of Letters, 1941, Utrecht, p. 27). De Vere had published several volumes of poetry by this time, including The Waldenses and Other Poems (1842) and The Search after Proserpine, Recollections of Greece, and Other Poems (1843). For de Vere’s opinion of EBB’s writings, see Wilfrid Ward, Aubrey de Vere: A Memoir (1904), pp. 101–103.
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