While the epic mania, while the idea that to merit in poetry
prolixity is indispensable, has for some years past been gradually
dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we
find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated,
but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said
to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature
than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresies of The
Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and
indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every
poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the
poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially
have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially
have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to
write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to
have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically
wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:- but the simple fact
is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we
should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither
exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more
supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem
which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the
poem's sake.
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