An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry

An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry

Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclids Elements, Newtons Principia, Spinozas Ethica, and Kants Critique of the Pure Reason, do not properly belong to literature. (By the spiritual I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.) The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, beauty to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit, the accommodation, in Bacons words, of the shows of things to the desires of the mind. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 260
Author: Browning, Robert
Release Date: Jul 5, 2008
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Corson, Hiram, 1828-1911