§ 1
When, after the revival of letters in Europe, Chancellor Bacon, legislator of thought, sketched with bold strokes the tree of human knowledge, and brought back each branch of science to that of the moral faculties upon which it depends, he did not fail to observe sagaciously that it was necessary to distinguish in poetry two things, its essence and its form[1]: its essence as pertaining wholly to the imagination, and composing by itself alone one of the principal branches of science[2]; its form, as making part of the grammar, and entering thus into the domain of philosophy and into the rational faculty of the understanding.[3] This celebrated man had borrowed this idea from a man much older and more celebrated than himself, Plato. According to this admirable philosopher, poetry is either a simple talent, an art which one uses to give to his own ideas a particular form, or it is a divine inspiration by means of which one clothes in the human language and transmits to men the ideas of the gods.[4] It is because, never having felt sufficiently this important distinction and having confused two ideas that ought to be separated, the essence and the form of poetry, which are as the soul and body of this science, that so many men among the modern nations proclaimed themselves poets, whereas they were, in strict truth, only clever versifiers. For it does not suffice, as Plato again said, to have poetic talent, it does not suffice to make verse and even good verse, to be called a poet[5]; it is necessary to possess that divine enthusiasm, that inspiration which elevates the soul, enlightens it, transports it, as it
- ↑ De Dignit. et Increment. Scient., l. ii., c. 13.
- ↑ Ibid., l. ii., c. 1.
- ↑ Ibid., l. vi., c. 1.
- ↑ Plat., Dial. Ion. Aristotle, who was often opposed to Plato, did not dare to be on this point. He agrees that verse alone does not constitute poetry, and that the History of Herodotus, put into verse, would never be other than history.
- ↑ Ibid.
