Greeley on Poetry

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GREELEY ON POETRY.—

It is a common error for men to mistake their vocation. Horace Greeley¹ undertook to lecture on poetry last night. Poetry! who that has waded through the philosopher’s interminable effusions on The Tariff, Hard Money, the Liquor Traffic, and the Troubles of Kansas, ever suspected him of worshipping at the foot of Parnassus . Before reading the lecture, if we had been asked to point out the subject of all subjects least likely to engage Greeley’s attention as a lecturer and writer, we should have named poetry. And now that we have perused it, we are confirmed in the belief that though he bears the name of a celebrated poet, he has not a spark of the poetic fire—the divine afflatus—in his composition. He condemns Homer, Chaucer and Spenser as bores, and Shakspere as a Tory; he regards Goldsmith, Thompson, Gray, Young, and Cowper, as mere sermonisers; Coleridge, Rogers, Southey, Campbell, could all be spared. The highest laudation, on the other hand, was lavished by this unique critic on two or three mawkish, sentimental “poetesses” of the present century. O! cobbler, stick to thy last! Confine thyself, O! Philosopher, to the Tariff, the Banks and Bleeding Kansas²; but if thou dost not wish to call the shades of departed poets from the vasty deep, abstain from criticising their productions.

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