Jane Austin was acknowledged in her own time as a great artist. She was accused of having no poetry in her soul, but that was only true in the sense of not being sentimentally "poetic". In a larger sense (the only sense that counts) she was a great poet who can only be compared with Shakespeare. Here is what R. G. Collingwood says of her in one of his two great essays on Jane Austin and her art:
"Minor art is a dream, indulged in because we can dominate it when we cannot dominate real life: great art is the domination of real life itself by our own understanding of it."
R. G. Collingwood, "Jane Austin," (1921) ; rpt. in The Philosophy of Enchantment, (2005), p. 26.
Is Jane Austin a great artist? Collingwood calls her the "Napoleon of the Novel" and argues that she was the greatest novelist from the origin of the genre to date. I don't think anyone has surpassed her from 1921 up till today.
We have been . . .
Speaking of Poetry
James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University
Big Bone, Kentucky
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.