Identity and Society in American Poetry: The Romantic Tradition
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Identity and Society in American Poetry: The Romantic Tradition B ...

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The description of the poet as a “maker” likens him to a tradesman and strikes a balance between the empirical “stuff” of the world feigned by the poet’s mimetic art and the poet’s intellectual creativity. There is still a respectful distance between the poet and God here, but, by the elimination of the Platonic ideas, the poet, in a parallel relationship with God, is interacting with a more substantial world.

The Augustan poet John Dryden, whose work was later derided for overemphasizing the intellectual, grounds poetry in the social and political by valuing the Aristotelian concepts of unity and decorum, which were associated with Englishness amid the nationalism of the Restoration. Nineteenth-century poetry represented a break, in a sense, with the history of English poetry in that it eschewed any idea of a transcendental source for poetry, whether the Platonic forms, the muses, the Daedalus, or God himself. In a sense, this period of poetry is most important for the lasting backlash against it, just as Hume may be most important for the birth of Kantian transcendentalist ideas, all of which led to Romanticism. The Augustan poets saw no shame in imitation:

The imitation of nature is…justly constituted as the general, and indeed the only, rule of pleasing, both in poetry and painting. Aristotle tells us, that imitation pleases, because it affords matter for a reasoner to inquire into the truth or falsehood of imitation, by comparing its likeness, or unlikeness, with the original; but by this rule every speculation in nature, whose truth falls under the inquiry of a philosopher, must produce the same delight; which is not true. I should rather assign another reason. Truth is the object of our understanding, as good is of our will; and the understanding can no more be delighted with a lie, than the will can choose an apparent evil. As truth is the end of all our speculations, so the discovery of it is the pleasure of them; and since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must of necessity produce a much greater: for both these arts, as I said before, are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature, of that which is wrought up to a nobler pitch. They present us with images more perfect than the life in any individual; and we have the pleasure to see all the scattered beauties of nature united by a happy chemistry, without its deformities or faults. (310–311)