Meredith has presented the case of the comic spirit better than any one else. He says: "The comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest song fully poetic," and he shows how this spirit enters the work of Menander, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Terence, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Restoration Comedians, Pope, Molière, Fielding, Smollett. These men were all poets; that is, they gave us poems here and there in their work. Meredith might have added Dickens's and his own work among comic works that contain poetry. The writers of comedy deal with feelings and emotions; most of them were men of intellect and deep feeling.
In a passage that is itself a poem, Meredith describes the Comic spirit, which he recognized as allied to poetry. And this in part is his delineation of it:
It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of the faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and wherever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.