Crabbe is a writer of great power, but of a perverse and morbid taste. He gives the very objects and feelings he treats of, whether in morals or rural scenery, but he gives none but the most uninteresting or the most painful. His poems are a sort of funeral dirge over human life, but without pity, without hope. He has neither smiles nor tears for his readers.
Coleridge has shewn great wildness of conception in his Ancient Mariner, sublimity of imagery in his Ode to the Departing Year, grotesqueness of fancy in his Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, and tenderness of sentiment in his Genevieve. He has however produced nothing equal to his powers.
Mr. Wordsworth‘s characteristic is one, and may be expressed in one word;—a power of raising the smallest things in nature into sublimity by the force of sentiment. He attaches the deepest and loftiest feelings to the meanest and most superficial objects. His peculiarity is his combination of simplicity of subject with profundity and power of execution. He has no fancy, no wit, no humour, little descriptive power, no dramatic power, great occasional elegance, with continual rusticity and boldness of allusion; but he is sublime without the Muse’s aid, pathetic in the contemplation of his own and man’s nature; add to this, that his style is natural and severe, and his versification sonorous and expressive.
Mr. Southey‘s talent in poetry lies chiefly in fancy and the invention of his subject. Some of his oriental descriptions, characters, and fables, are wonderfully striking and impressive, but there is an air of extravagance in them, and his versification is abrupt, affected, and repulsive. In his early poetry there is a vein of patriotic fervour, and mild and beautiful moral reflection.
Sir Walter Scott is the most popular of our living poets. His excellence is romantic narrative and picturesque description. He has great bustle, great rapidity of action and flow of versification, with a sufficient distinctness of character, and command of the ornaments of style. He has neither lofty imagination, nor depth or intensity of feeling; vividness of mind is apparently his chief and pervading excellence.
Mr. C. Lamb has produced no poems equal to his prose writings: but I could not resist the temptation of transferring into this collection his Farewell to Tobacco, and some of the sketches in his John Woodvil; the first of which is rarely surpassed in quaint wit, and the last in pure feeling.
Montgomery is an amiable and pleasing versifier, who puts his heart and fancy into whatever he composes.
Lord Byron‘s distinguishing quality is intensity of conception and expression. He wills to be sublime or pathetic. He has great wildness of invention, brilliant and elegant fancy, caustic wit, but no humour. Gray’s description of the poetical character—‘Thoughts that glow, and words that burn,’—applies to him more than to any of his contemporaries.
Thomas Moore is the greatest wit now living. His light, ironical pieces are unrivalled for point and facility of execution. His fancy is delightful and brilliant, and his songs have gone to the heart of a nation.
Leigh Hunt has shewn great wit in his Feast of the Poets, elegance in his occasional verses, and power of description and pathos in his Story of Rimini. The whole of the third canto of that poem is as chaste as it is classical.