Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, harmony—what you will—leading him to see life as a unity.
The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as
A many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error
This true, fair world of things.
[Footnote: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound.]
It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described the poet's achievement:
With a sorrowful and conquering beauty,
The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes.
[Footnote: Ode.]
"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the artist's imitation of life, inquiring,
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the infinite.
[Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]
The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work:
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
[Footnote: Prometheus Unbound.]
Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; [Footnote: Aurora Leigh.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; [Footnote: The Function of the Poet.] Emerson calls him "the only teller of news." [Footnote: Poetry and Imagination. The following are some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: Blake, Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard; Montgomery, A Theme for a Poet; Bowles, The Visionary Boy; Wordsworth, Personal Talk; Coleridge, To Wm. Wordsworth; Arnold, The Austerity of Poetry; Rossetti, Sonnet, Shelley; Bulwer Lytton, The Dispute of the Poets; Mrs. Browning, Pan is Dead; Landor, To Wordsworth; Jean Ingelow, The Star's Monument; Tupper, Wordsworth; Tennyson, The Poet; Swinburne, The Death of Browning (Sonnet V), A New Year's Ode; Edmund Gosse, Epilogue; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment; Bayard Taylor, For the Bryant Festival; Emerson, Saadi; M. Clemmer, To Emerson; Warren Holden, Poetry; P. H. Hayne, To Emerson; Edward Dowden, Emerson; Lucy Larcom, R. W. Emerson; R. C. Robbins, Emerson; Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy; G. E. Woodberry, Ode at the Emerson Centenary; Bliss Carman, In a Copy of Browning; John Drinkwater, The Loom of the Poets; Richard Middleton, To an Idle Poet; Shaemas O'Sheel, The Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One.]