Rider 2 (1902): A decadent book of aesthetics from a master horror writer.
How does it happen that the English are both the greatest poets and the greatest tradesmen of the modern world? Superficially, it seems that keeping shops and making poetry are incompatibles, and Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, should have come from Provence or Sicily. But if we trace back the trading instinct to the love of a risk – the desire for the unknown – the antinomy disappears, and it will become perfectly natural that the race which has gone to the world’s end with its merchandise, has penetrated so gloriously into the further regions of poetry. It’s the English desire of wandering, of “going on and on” in the manner of a knight-errant or a fairy tale hero. Of running away from the mapped and charted road, to the word of the enigma, out of the ancient eternal desire for the unknown world, in perpetual readiness for a drowned Atlantis deep beneath the waves, of a haunted quire where a flickering light burns before the veil.
Art should exist to portray those unknown spheres of the infinite and ourselves. All the arts being glorious, the art of literature is in particular the most glorious of all, because it is the most natural to man, to mark the permanent in sign, as dinner customs, for example, are artificial, constantly shifting in taste and style so that later ages cannot decipher them. The most perfect form of literature is, no doubt, lyrical poetry, which is, one might say, almost pure Idea, simple incantation, without any description of the circumstance or occasion, with scarcely an alloy of artifice, expressed in magic words, in the voice of music. A perfect lyric is almost pure soul, a spirit with the luminous body of melody. And what is exquisite lyric poetry but the cry of the emotions, set to music? It is the sole media by which the very highest truth can be conveyed, in the language of symbols. Poe suggests, for this, the old figure of the Shadowy Companion, unknown or half-known who walks beside each one of us all our days, though his feet are in the Other World, treading a path parallel but different from our own; I think that it is he who whispers to us his ineffable secrets in an unknown tongue, which we clumsily endeavor to set down in mortal language.
From the Poet Tree record: Howl. Again.
