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"An article that appeared in the April 1797 edition of the Monthly Magazine entitled "On Artificial Taste" offered readers a meditation on two of the most widely noted dimensions of this popular theme: "a taste for rural scenes" and the more "natural" quality of poetry that had been "written in the infancy of society." In some ways, both of these were standard topics, frequently discussed in the literary magazines of the day, though the article addressed them with compelling rigour and clarity, and with a refreshing impatience for empty poses and cultural double standards. It was curious, the author suggested, given people's widely professed love of nature, "how few people seem to contemplate nature with their own eyes. I have 'brushed the dew away' in the morning; but, pacing over the printless grass, I have wondered that, in such delightful situations, the sun was allowed to rise in solitary majesty, whilst my eyes alone hailed its beautifying beams." Having offered a no-nonsense reflection on the state of people's real interest in nature beyond the sort of "romantic kind of declamation" that was so much in vogue, the author moved on to offer a fairly standard list of the age's assumptions: poetry is a "transcript of immediate emotions" transfigured by the effects of those "happy moment[s]" in which the poet is enriched by images "spontaneously bursting on him" without the need for any recourse to "understanding or memory." This account of creativity, like the article's definition of the poet as "a man of strong feelings" giving "us a picture of his mind when he was actually alone, conversing with himself, and marking the impression which nature made on his own heart" seemed to converge with William Wordsworth's ideas about poetry in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Its related insistence on the higher spiritual worth of those moments when the poet worshipped "in a temple not made with hands, and the world seems to contain only the mind that formed and contemplates it" seemed to echo Pysche's declaration of sublime internalization in Keats' ode. Except, of course, that the article was published in April 1797, well ahead of Wordsworth's account in the Preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads and a full generation before Keats's work"--
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