Posts
A Defence of Poetry (1821)
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom
of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols
of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the
Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their
worshippers; so that earth became peopled with the inhabitants of a diviner
world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and
heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this
creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the
instrument of their art: “Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse” [“Galeotto was
the book and the one who wrote it”—ed.].
No comments:
Post a Comment