Note 8 — Chapter XV
Reading edition
These poems, whether good or bad, serious or trivial, are all written with such transparent sincerity that they bring the poet before us almost as if he were our contemporary. They make him known to us in many different moods,—in joy and grief, in the ecstasy and the despair of love, in the frank outpouring of affection and the enjoyment of social intercourse, in the bitterness of his scorn and animosity, in the license of his coarser indulgences. They enable us to start with him on his travels; to enjoy with him the beauty of his home on the Italian lakes; to pass with him from the life of letters and idle pleasure and the brilliant intellectual society of Rome to the more homely but not more virtuous ways and the more commonplace people of his native province; to join with him in ridiculing some affectation of an acquaintance, or to feel the contagion of his admiration for genius or wit in man, grace in woman, or beauty in Nature. In the glimpses of him which we get in the familiar round of his daily life, we seem to catch the very turn of his conversation8, to hear his laugh at some absurd incident9, to see his face brighten as he welcomes a friend from a distant land10, to mark the quick ebullition of anger at some slight or rudeness11, or to be witnesses of his passionate tears as something recalls to him the memory of his lost happiness, or makes him feel his present desolation12. His impressible nature realises with extraordinary vividness of pleasure and pain experiences which by most people are scarcely noticed. To be rightly appreciated, his poems must be read with immediate reference to the circumstances and situations which gave rise to them. We must take them up with our feelings attuned to the mood in which they were written. Hence, before attempting to criticise them, we must try, by the help of internal and any available external evidence, to determine the successive stages of his personal and literary career, and so to get some idea of the social relations and the state of feeling of which they were the expression.