"Religion is the Poetry of the collective Soul."
I fear that not only he, but perhaps you too, would ask for explanations which would fill up a lecture, not a note. Suppose that I quoted lines like these:
"A Poet's art
Lies in tolerating wholly, and accounting for in part
By his own heart's subtle working, those of every other heart"
he would say that that is charity, and nothing else; we would say that it is incomplete. Suppose that I adopted yours—which, with due comments and interpretations, I am not far from—that "Poetry is the soul of the Universe," it would not avail. You gave it already, I am sure, and it was declared unsatisfactory.
We must one day or other talk about this. I fear vaguely that even we do differ in some way respecting the essence of Poetry. I suspect that you leave out in your own definition the element of Action, which seems to me inseparable from it. Poetry is for me something like the third person of Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is Action. But this amounts to declare incomplete, the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. Is that a heresy for you? If so, our definitions will not agree.—ever faithfully yours,
Jos. Mazzini.
IV
Letter to Mr Peter Taylor [February 16, 1854].