There is a common phrase, which some poet must first have invented--"the
luxury of woe." Poets certainly have found their most constant themes in
suffering. When the late Edgar Poe, who prided himself on reducing
literature to an art, sat down to write a poem which should attain the
height of popularity, he said sorrow must be its theme, and wrote "The
Raven." Tragedy will always have a deeper hold upon the public than
comedy; it appeals to deeper principles, stirs more powerful emotions,
imparts an assured sense of strength, is more intimate with our nature, or
certainly it would not be tolerated. There is no delight in the exhibition
of misery as such, it is only painful and repulsive; we discard all vulgar
horrors utterly, and keep no place for them in the mind. Let, however, a
poet touch the string, and there is another response when he brings before
us pictures of regal grief, and gives grandeur to humiliation and penalty.
Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and
circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler
minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to
the elegiac verse of Tennyson.
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