It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of
pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there
is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of
the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.
I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted
with the alternatives of reading "Paradise Lost" and going round
Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would
choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease
advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.
If poetry is what is called "a sealed book" to you, begin by reading
Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in general." It is
the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it
can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval
torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and
kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental
state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt's essay, is not urgently
desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal.
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