Search -
The Poetical And Dramatic Works Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Poetical And Dramatic Works Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. I return my acknowledgments to the different Reviewers for the assistance which they have afforded me, in detecting my poeti... more »c deficiencies. I have endeavoured to avail myself of their remarks: one third of the former volume I have omitted, and the imperfections of the republished part must be considered as errors of taste, not faults of carelessness. My poems have been rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets, and a general turgidness. I have pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction. This latter fault, however, had insinuated itself into my Religious Musings with such intricacy of union, that sometimes 1 have omitted to disentangle the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower. A third, and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that of obscurity ; but not, I think, with equal justice. An author is obscure, when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, or unappropriate, or involved. A poem that abounds in allusions, like the Bard of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstruct truths, like Collin's Ode on the Poeticai Character —claims not to be popular—but should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the reader. But this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his contemporaries. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it; not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention, who should profess not to understand them. But a living writer is yet sub...« less