English poet (1835-1913)
We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always peril in generalizations.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Our modern pessimists cannot see a tree, a flower, or a mountain, but straightway they drop into what I may call a falling sickness, and all the beauty of the woods, fields, and sky merely suggests to them a picturesque background for their own superior sighs and sorrows.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Never did form more fairy thread the dance
Than she who scours the hills to find it flowers;
Never did sweeter lips chained ears entrance
Than hers that move, true to its striking hours;
No hands so white e'er decked the warrior's lance,
As those which tend its lamp as darkness lours;
And never since dear Christ expired for man,
Had holy shrine so fair a sacristan.
ALFRED AUSTIN
Madonna's Child
Through the dripping weeks that follow
One another slow, and soak
Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Spring Carol", Soliloquies in Song
Falling stars are high examples sent
To warn, not lure. Gross fancy says they are
Substantial meteors; but that is not so.
They are the merest phantasies of Night,
When she's asleep, and, dimly visited
By past effects, she dreams of Lucifer
Hurled out of Heaven.
ALFRED AUSTIN
Savonarola
Is life worth living? Yes, so long
As Spring revives the year,
And hails us with the cuckoo's song,
To show that she is here;
So long as May of April takes,
In smiles and tears, farewell,
And windflowers dapple all the brakes,
And primroses the dell.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Is Life Worth Living?", Lyrical Poems
In my song you catch at times
Note sweeter far than mine,
And in the tangle of my rhymes
Can scent the eglantine.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems
Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
Your voice would have silenced merle and thrush,
And the rose outbloomed would have blushed to blush,
And Summer, seeing you, paused, and known
That the glow of your beauty outshone its own.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"My Winter Rose", Lyrical Poems
Sycophants, therefore, can dance attendance on the Many as easily and as mischievously as on the One.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Why from the plain truth should I shrink?
In woods men feel; in towns they think.
Yet, which is best? Thought, stumbling, plods
Past fallen temples, vanished gods,
Altars unincensed, fanes undecked,
Eternal systems flown or wrecked;
Through trackless centuries that grant
To the poor trudge refreshment scant,
Age after age, pants on to find
A melting mirage of the mind.
But feeling never wanders far,
Content to fare with things that are.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Defence of English Spring", Lyrical Poems
Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
If it be urged that Dante, and even Shakespeare, do not always yield up their meaning to the reader at once, the allegation must be traversed absolutely. The immediate apprehension of the meaning of the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the various dialects of the Italian language existing in Dante’s time, and likewise with the erudition he scatters so profusely, if allusively, throughout his verse. But to the Italian readers of Dante, even superficially acquainted with those dialects, and adequate masters of the theology and the astronomy of Dante’s time, those poems present no difficulty. Of Shakespeare, the greatest of all the poets in our language, let it be granted that he is not unoften one of the most careless and even most slovenly; but rarely is he so to the obscuring of his meaning, and never save casually, and in some brief passage. Yet let it not be inferred that I am of opinion that the full meaning of the greatest passages in the greatest poems is to be seized all at once, or by the average reader at all. That is "deeper than ever plummet sounded," though Tennyson’s "indolent reviewer" apparently imagines that he at once fathoms the more intellectual poetry of his time. There can be but few readers, and possibly none but poets themselves, or persons who, to quote Tennyson again, "have the great poetic heart," who master the full significance of Hamlet or of the tersely told story of Francesca da Rimini. But the whole world at once understood the more obvious tenor of both, and is not puzzled by either. There is a sliding scale of understanding, as there is a sliding scale of inspiration. "We needs must love the highest when we see it"; but "when we see it" is an important qualification in the statement.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
I think the proposition still holds good that men of letters who aspire to high distinction do well not to disdain altogether the politics of their time.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
It is the business of poets to deal with the relation of the individual to himself, to the silent uniform forces of nature, and to other individuals, singly and collectively: in other words, to be dramatic or epic, as well as lyrical or idyllic.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
In protesting, therefore, against Pessimism in Poetry, I am only returning to the oldest, soundest, and noblest traditions in English Literature, and in the English character. I trust no one supposes I am denying or that I am insensible to the existence of pain, woe, sadness, loss, even anguish and acute suffering, as integral and inevitable elements in life; and if poetry did not take note of these, and give to them pathetic and adequate expression, poetry would not be, as it is, coextensive with life, would not be the Paraclete or Comforter, with the gift of tongues. In poetry the note of sorrow will be, and must be, occasionally, and indeed frequently struck; it should not be the dominant key, much less the only key in which the poet tunes his song. There is much in our modern civilization that is very unbeautiful, nay, that is downright ugly, whether we look on it with the eye of the artist or with the vision of the moralist. Moreover, I perceive—who could fail to perceive?—that we have in these days some very dark and difficult social problems to solve. Then let the poet come to our assistance by accompanying us with musical encouragement. For, remember, the poet has to make harmony, not out of language only, but out of life as well. I was once looking at a violin, a very lovely violin, a Stradivarius of great value and exquisite tone, and I asked the lady to whom it belonged of what wood the various parts of the instrument was composed. She told me, with much loving detail; but, she said, "I ought to add that I have been told no violin can be made of supreme quality unless the wood be taken from that side of the tree which faces south." It is the same with the Poet. If he is to give us the sweetest, the most sonorous, and the truest notes, his nature must have a bias towards the sunny side.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
For great poetry, as Wordsworth teaches us in a single line, is not mere emotion, not mere subtle or sensuous singing, but "Reason in her most exalted mood."
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Do you remember the winter days
When we piled up the leaves and made them blaze,
While the blue smoke curled, in the frosty air,
Up the great wan trunks that rose gaunt and bare,
And we clapped our hands, and the rotten bough
Came crackling down to our feet, as now?
ALFRED AUSTIN
"The Last Night", At the Gate of the Convent and Other Poems
What may be called the first principles of poetry having thus been propounded, without any necessity for reaffirming them in the investigation of other conclusions yet to be reached, I may move on to what I imagine will be less familiar and perhaps more original in the search for "The Essentials of Great Poetry." If we carefully observe the gradual development of mental power in human beings, irrespectively of any reference to poetry, but as applied to general objects of human interest, we shall find that the advance from elementary to supreme expansion of mental power is in the following order of succession, each preceding element in mental development being retained on the appearance of its successor: (1) Perception, vague at first, as in the newly born, gradually becoming more definite, along with desires of an analogous kind; (2) Sentiment, also vague at first, but by degrees becoming more definite, until it attaches itself to one or more objects exclusively; (3) Thought or Reflection, somewhat hazy in its inception, and often remaining in that condition to the last; (4) Action, which is attended and assisted by the three preceding qualities of Perception, Sentiment, and Thought or Reflection. In other words, human beings perceive before they feel, perceive and feel before they think, perceive, feel, and think before they act, or at least before they act reasonably, though it may be but imperfectly, and though the later or higher stages may in many cases scarcely be reached at all.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus