The
fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with,
gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of
actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early
literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has
in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows
remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward
meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it
becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in
lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal
enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human
scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art
which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in
Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in
Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in
many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and
shows a purely spiritual body.
This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history.
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