PASSION AND IMAGINATION IN POETRY. 1 



BY HENRY CHARLES BEECH I KG 



[Henry Charles Beeching, Canon of Westminster Abbey, since 1902; formerly 

 Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. b. 1859: educated at 

 Balliol College, Oxford; Litt.D. Durham; Rector of Yattendon. Berkshire, 

 1885-1900; Professor of Pastoral and Liturgical Theory at King's College, 

 London, 1900-1903. Author of Love in llleness; Love's Loo/cing-Glass; 

 In a Garden, and other poems; Conferences on Books and Men; and Two 

 Lectures on Poetry. Editor of Milton's Works; Shakespeare'* Sonnets; 

 A Paradise of English Poetry, and various other authologies and editions 

 of English poets.] 



The unsatisfactoriness of definitions of poetry arises usually from 

 one or other of two causes. If the definition is that of a critic, it is 

 the resultant of a long analytical process, and therefore not very intel- 

 ligible apart from the process by which it has been arrived at; if it is 

 the definition of a poet, it is certain to contain that element of poetry 

 which it professes to explain. Nevertheless, the most helpful aper^us 

 into poetry are those which the poets themselves have given us, and of 

 them all none is more helpful than that inspired parenthesis in which 

 Milton one day summed up its characteristics as " simple, sensuous 

 and passionate." 



"We may presume that by his first epithet Milton intended that sim- 

 plicity which is another name for sincerity. He meant that a poet 

 muSt look at the world frankly and with open eyes; with the spirit, 

 though with more than the wisdom, of a child. We sometime? express 

 another side of the same truth by saying that poetry is "universal," 

 meaning that it cares nothing for superficial and transient fashions, 

 but is interested only " in man, in nature, and in human life,'' in their 

 permanent elements. This first epithet seems to fix beyond dispute 

 an indispensable quality of all poetry. If a writer is insincere, or if 

 ho is conventional and fashionable, we are sure, whatever his airs and 

 graces, lhat ho is no poet. Y->\ 'sensuous''' it is probable that Milton 

 meant what, in more technical language, we should describe as "con- 

 crete/' Poetry deals with thing-, and it deals with people; it sings of 

 birds and flowers and stars; it sings of the wrath of Achilles, the wan- 

 dering- of rivsses and .'Eneas, the woes of King (Edipus, the problems 

 of Brutus and Hamlet; whatever be the thought or the emotion it is 

 concerned with, it is concerned with them as operating on a par- 

 ticular occasion ; it lias no concern with (he intellect or the emotions 

 or the will in abstraction from this or that wise or passionate or 



