Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to the most deeply Platonic poets of our period—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,—one may inquire, Does not your description of the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, The Garden of Boccaccio; Kirke White, Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets; Bulwer Lytton, Milton; George E. Woodberry, Agathon.] Surely if the quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows trivial, but let us see how the case stands.
From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes.
[Footnote: To William Wordsworth.]
Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts,
Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
We must be ever seeking?
[Footnote: Expostulation and Reply.]
But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, "Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: A Defense of Poetry.]
To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends,
True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: What is Art?]
Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has pronounced the philosopher's attitude of mind wholly antagonistic to poetry.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
[Footnote: Lamia.]