His earliest verses (none of which are
included in his collected works) can hardly be said to be good in any
sense. He seems in these to have chosen poetry as a fitting material for
the embodiment of his ardent, hopeful, indignant thoughts and feelings,
but, provided he can say what he wants to say, does not seem to
care much about _how_ he says it. Indeed, there is too much of
this throughout his works; for if the _utterance_, instead of
the _conveyance_ of thought, were the object pursued in art, of
course not merely imperfection of language, but absolute external
unintelligibility, would be admissible. But his art constantly increases
with his sense of its necessity; so that the _Cenci_, which is the last
work of any pretension that he wrote, is decidedly the most artistic of
all. There are beautiful passages in _Queen Mab_, but it is the work of
a boy-poet; and as it was all but repudiated by himself, it is not
necessary to remark further upon it. _The Revolt of Islam_ is a poem of
twelve cantos, in the Spenserian stanza; but in all respects except the
arrangement of lines and rimes, his stanza, in common with all other
imitations of the Spenserian, has little or nothing of the spirit or
individuality of the original.
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