Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter xv landscape in recent poetry coleridge, keats, shelley Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) presents a new, a more complex and difficult problem to us than his four great contemporaries. Every poet's treatment of Nature, we should often remind ourselves, like his treatment of Man, must always and inevitably be governed by his whole character, his heart, and head; what, in brief, was comprehensively named by the Greeks his fj6os. Scott, Byron, Keats, offer little analysis of human character, little ethical interpretation of life; nor can any serious validity be justly assigned to Shelley's incoherently eloquent boyish essays in philosophy. But Coleridge, as our lamented W. H. Pater notes, in an admirable sketch,1 to which I am here indebted, was a "svbtle-souled psychologist, as "Shelley calls him,"--"that is, a more minute observer "than other men of the phenomena of mind." This habit, when the landscape is concerned, takes the form, Pater remarks, "of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and ex"pression of natural scenery," as if physically piercing to the inner soul of Nature; or, perhaps, in Bishop Berkeley's fashion, almost thinking of the landscape itself, or at least its beauty, as half created by the observing eye and mind; in Coleridge's own phrase--We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live. Hence, perhaps, his landscape rarely takes the form of description as such; in exquisite hints and touches it is that we mostly find it; and hence, also, it is coloured by a peculiar and personal imaginative insight; has special reference to the human interests which constantly form the poet's subject; is deeply interfused with vital passion. 1 Ward's English Poets, vol. iv. A fuller study of Colerid