“Surveying the American pulpit, I find it occupied by men who can legitimately be divided into two great classes, and these, for the present purpose, I will call the poetical and the unpoetical. I am not sure that these designations are sufficiently suggestive, but I will tell him what I mean by them. The class which I denominate poetical is composed of men who possess imagination, strong and tender sympathies, profound insight into human character and motives, and power to attract to themselves the affections of those around them. These men possess also what we term individuality, in an unusual degree – a quality which carries with it the power to transmute truth into life – to resolve system into character—to appropriate, digest, and assimilate all spiritual food whatsoever, so that when they preach they do not preach as the mouthpieces of a school, or a sect, or a system, but as revelators and promulgators of a life. These are the preachers who touch men, because they preach out of their own life and experience. These are the men who speak from the heart and reach the heart – the men who possess what, for lack of a better name; we call magnetism.
The unpoetical class may roughly be defined by the statement that they are the opposites of the poetical. They have no imagination; they are not men of strong and tender sympathies; they do not possess fine insight (Though some of them possess a degree of cunning which is mistaken for it); they have not the power to attract to themselves the affections of those around them; they do not possess true individuality (although they may have peculiarities or idiosyncrasies which pass for it); and, in their utterances, they are little more than the mouthpieces of the systems and schools to which they are attached.”
Timothy Titcomb 1884 One of my favorite authors. Photo by Bianca Van Der Werf - "Brainiac".