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Title: The Literature of Ecstasy

Author: Albert Mordell

Release date: February 14, 2011 [eBook #35279]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Lisa Reigel, and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY ***




Produced by David Edwards, Lisa Reigel, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)







Transcriber's Notes: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
left as in the original except in the Index where the spelling has been
changed to match the spelling in the body of the text. A complete list
of corrections follows the text. Other notes also follow the text.

Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
Ellipses match the original. A row of asterisks represents a thought
break.




     THE LITERATURE
     OF ECSTASY


     BY

     ALBERT MORDELL
     Author of:
     The Erotic Motive in Literature
     Dante and Other Waning Classics
     The Shifting of Literary Values


     BONI AND LIVERIGHT
     Publishers    New York




     THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY

     COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
     BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

     _Printed in the United States of America_




CONTENTS


                                                   PAGE
     CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION                          9

     CHAPTER II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
       ECSTASY                                       18

     CHAPTER III. ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM,
       ESSENTIAL TO POETRY                           42

     CHAPTER IV. PROSE THE NATURAL
       LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF
       ECSTASY                                       77

     CHAPTER V. PROSE PRECEDES VERSE
       HISTORICALLY                                  96

     CHAPTER VI. BLANK VERSE AND FREE
       VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE                      111

     CHAPTER VII. MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL
       IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH
       ECSTASY                                      123

     CHAPTER VIII. POETRY RISES ABOVE
       ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION             138

     CHAPTER IX. HIGH FORM OF POETRY
       ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF ADVANCED
       SOCIAL IDEALS                                152

     CHAPTER X. LITERATURE OF ECSTASY
       EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS                179

     CHAPTER XI. LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN
       POETRY                                       203

     CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION                        226




THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


From time immemorial it has been assumed that poetry is something which
is caviare to the general public. A "poem" even to-day is supposed to be
a literary composition that is in artificial language arranged in a
metrical pattern, often conveying a trite idea or enshrining an
ineffective image. Thousands of volumes and essays have been written on
poetry, and instead of fathoming a true conception of its nature, they
have dealt with the trappings and garments which clothe it; these indeed
have often been confused with poetry itself. As a result, there has
grown around the pathway leading to poetry an endless maze of shrubbery.
The reader who has no knowledge of rules and laws relating to verse, who
is ignorant of technical requirements and established uses, labors under
the delusion that he does not like poetry. Though he reads many works in
prose that stir a deep emotional appeal within him, he does not regard
himself as one of those lovers who haunt the foot of Parnassus Hill.

I wish in this volume to present a conception of poetry freed from
academic and conventional standards. I wish to restore to the term
poetry its primary and fundamental significance as a verbal composition
in which the predominating feature is ecstasy. Poetry is an emotional
atmosphere that pervades all literature in its finest parts; it
characterizes any purely personal expression of the creative
imagination. As the reader perceives, my definition of poetry includes
prose literature in which ecstasy is present. I do not think of poetry
as a branch of literature couched in a metrical form, following regular
rules of rhythm, diction, figures of speech or rhyme. My conception of
poetry then, is not that of a department of literature which is opposed
to prose, but of an emotional spirit hovering over any kind of writing,
whether in verse or prose, which conveys ecstasy.

I shall try to show especially that the prose literature of ecstasy
fulfils all the intrinsic conditions which have been associated with
poetry. I shall consider the question of how much, or rather how little,
the element of rhythm or any other pattern is essential in determining
the nature of poetry. In fact, I shall even maintain that prose
irregularly rhythmical or even unrhythmical,[10:A] just as the
exigencies of the emotion require, is the natural language of the
emotions, that it was so at the very beginnings of literary history, and
has in fact never ceased being used as such a vehicle. I shall further
take the position that the set forms of verse which have grown up among
all nations as a vesture for emotional writing, have been more or less
pervaded with artificiality. The final judgment as to the nature of
poetry resides in the appeal to the emotions. The test of poetry is not
in the form which the writer uses, or in compliance with rules of
prosody, but in the soul of the reader or hearer. If two emotional
passages, one in a set pattern and one in prose have the same effect
upon the responsive mechanism of the human soul, if they both arouse
ecstasy, it matters not if you refuse to call the prose passage poetry;
its effect is however that of poetry. It stirs and moves you to rapture,
it is a product of the author's unconscious, it speaks from soul to
soul, it is beautiful in its expressiveness, it has a rhythm of its own.
I shall not be concerned if you refuse to call this emotional prose
passage poetry, but it does belong to the literature of ecstasy, and
ecstasy was and is the first condition of poetic composition. The poetry
in verse is but part of the literature of ecstasy.

I shall hence deal in this volume largely with emotional or impassioned
prose; for it belongs to the literature of ecstasy, although it is often
termed poetic prose, or sometimes disparagingly, prose poetry. Under
this term I shall include not only the so-called "fine writing" but
emotional passages in the language of the average man, dialogues from
prose dramas, novels and short stories, and I shall also regard
criticism, essays and works on science and philosophy highly charged
with feeling as part of the province of the literature of ecstasy.

This work becomes thus a treatise on poetics, and will present a new
definition of poetry which will include all emotional prose writing.

A very important phase of the subject will take in the connection
between poetry or the literature of ecstasy, and various spheres of
human thought, such as ethical and social questions. The _idea_ will be
shown to be an important factor in the literature of ecstasy, for
ecstasy does not preclude the intellectual and moral activities. The
notion of art for art's sake thus assumes a rather trivial aspect. Any
idea whether scientific or philosophic, moral or social, if ecstatically
presented, becomes itself literature of ecstasy, or poetry.

Should the reader conclude to accept the prose literature of ecstasy as
poetry, he will find there was much poetry in the world's prose
literature that he has never recognized as such. He will also be
compelled to admit that much of what has been called poetry, because
written in verse, does not properly belong to poetry, as not being of
the literature of ecstasy. He will also see that the artificial
classifications of the different kinds of poetry, such as epic,
dramatic, pastoral, satirical, the ode, the sonnet, the ballad, the
didactic poem, the idyl, the elegy, etc., were based on fallacies and
were confusing and erroneous. There is only one species of poetry, the
utterance of the ecstatic state, and this is always personal, whether in
verse or prose, and hence, has a lyrical quality. If the poet gives the
utterances of other people in ecstatic states, these also are lyrics.
Hence every composition whether in verse or prose, that records ecstasy
here and there, is lyrical in those parts where the ecstasy is depicted.

The distinction between prose and verse will be more clearly defined, if
we refer to the poetry that is written in both these forms as poetry in
verse, and poetry in prose.

Sidney, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Whitman, all of whom, besides
being great poets themselves, were probably the greatest critics of
poetry in the English language, took cognizance of the fact that the
great emotional prose writers of the world were poets. But most of the
critics have resented this attitude and have gone on in the unjust
classifications that recognize as a poet the petty rhymster, who is
often barren of both emotions and ideas. They also deny the glorious
epithet of poet to many great prose masters of the delineation of human
passions.

The question of free verse, naturally will come in for consideration. I
shall show that it is really rhythmical prose arranged so as to call
attention to the rhythms. I believe, however, that the free verse
writers have a right to make such linear arrangement. The bulk of the
poetry of the future may very likely be written in free verse forms, or
in prose. If much of the free verse of to-day fails in being poetry, it
is not because of the form, but because there is no ecstasy in it, or in
the poet's soul. Most of the poetry of the Bible is really in free
verse; it is poetry, however, not because of the free verse, but because
it presents universal phases of human ecstasy.

I have expressly ignored most of the great authors who wrote epics and
dramas in verse, and also most of the great English verse poets, for I
wish to arrive at a conception of poetry chiefly from prose examples.
Most critics have assumed that they could never learn what poetry was
unless they gave examples from men like Homer and Shakespeare, Sophocles
and Dante, Spenser and Milton. I rarely quote from them, not because I
do not recognize the greatest poetry in these authors, but because I
wish to show that one may arrive at a true conception of the nature of
poetry by illustrations from prose writers of ecstatic literature alone.

Although I feel that the artificial verse forms hamper instead of
beautify the expression of the poet's emotions, I do not think that such
forms ever will be, nor need be utterly abandoned. Man will always love
a ringing, rhyming ballad or song.

I have devoted a chapter to the poetry of the most poetical nation, the
Arabs; their poets produced the anomaly of utilizing the most artificial
metres, and yet never lost sight of the fact that ecstasy was the very
life of the poem. Probably no poets in the world have produced such
exquisite love poetry as the Arabs; they have also had great influence
on modern European poetry, for it is being recognized that modern
romantic fiction, especially in its employment of the tenderness of the
love sentiment as a frequent theme, was transplanted from them.

Poetry is the soul of literature, and we should cease limiting the term
to rhythmical or patterned productions, and apply it to emotional
writing in general. No term for the word poet in any language that I am
acquainted with includes in its etymological significance the idea of
rhythm or metrical pattern. The Hebrew word for poet is one who utters
prophecies or parables; the Greek word signifies a "maker"; the Latin
word "seer," the Arabian word "one who knows." Critics of the Bible have
especially recognized that the chief characteristic of both the true and
the false prophet (Nabi) was the ecstatic state; the Bible itself is of
course authority for this fact. The inferior prophet was one, however,
in whom the ecstatic state was hypnotically produced, in whom the
rational and moral faculties were suspended; the great prophets were
those in whom a powerful sense of social justice was illuminated by the
ecstatic state; hence the prophecies of the Bible are not orations
wherein rhetoric is a factor, but genuine literature of ecstasy, or
poetry in rhythmical prose, using parallelism.

I need not continue to give analyses of the Greek "poetes," the Latin
"vates," or the Arabian "shair," for it has been usually conceded that
these words all refer in their primary significance to the imaginative
work, or ecstatic state of the author, and not to the mere dabbler in
verse forms.

With theories of poetry being a product of the unconscious, as
developed by Freud and his disciples, or as being expression as advanced
by Croce, my task does not become so utterly devoid of reason as may
appear at first sight. One must not forget that the critics of poetry
have formed their conceptions of poetry by deducing rules from the verse
poems of the world's literature. Instead of looking ahead, they have
always looked back. Whenever a new great poet appeared, like Wordsworth,
Whitman or Ibsen for instance, they had to modify their theories, and to
revise their books on poetics and rhetoric. If the productions of Homer
and Æschylus had been entirely different, we no doubt would have had
other conceptions of poetry prevailing. Yet it is only by mere accident
that Homer dealt with gods, wars, mythical events and employed dactylic
hexameter. It is again also by pure chance that Æschylus used various
metres, made Prometheus and the Furies living beings, was sponsor for a
philosophy of divine punishment and often indulged in artificial
diction. Had these poets written novels instead, conveying just as much
genius and ecstasy as they did in their verse works, the critics of
poetry would have deduced an entirely different conception of it.

To Democritus belongs the honor of having first recognized among the
Greeks that ecstasy is the condition of the poet. To Plato goes the
distinction for having fully developed this theory. Aristotle accepted
also the view that poetry is ecstasy. The author of the ancient treatise
_On the Sublime_ perceived that the characteristic of poetic genius is
in the arousing of the ecstatic state. He says, in a passage which
deserves citation: "For it is not to persuasion (i. e., rhetoric) but to
ecstasy that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer."

But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the
prose form of poetry, but with poetry as a psychological process, as a
social force and as a philosophical expression.

Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and
synonymous terms for the primary source of poetry. They are the fruitage
of the turmoil of the soul, due to the apparently forgotten memories in
us of the emotional lives in all our ancestors. They represent also the
impassioned activities of our logical and rational faculties, the sum of
the views of life of the past. They emanate from the dream life of man,
whether this occurs in the waking or sleeping state. They are the
workings of the force we call inspiration.

My view of poetry as emotional prose literature enables me, I hope, to
eliminate many of the so-called conflicts between poetry and philosophy
and between poetry and morals. Philosophical and moral essays become
poetry in those parts lit up by ecstasy or emotion. If philosophy deals
with rare and profound truths in regard to the universe, if morals treat
of the noblest relations between man and man, then I know of no higher
form of poetry than a philosophical truth, or a moral or social
conception, when ecstatically stated; I can think of no higher
literature of ecstasy than the imaginative utterance of great
intellectual conceptions or impassioned expression of the love of
justice. Shakespeare's line, "We are but such stuff as dreams are made
of," is but a metaphysical theory emotionally put; Isaiah's rebuke to
the corrupt rich is but a didactic saw, ecstatically delivered. Poetry
finds its best material in metaphysical and ethical truths emotionally
presented. Lofty ideas, however, and not commonplace deductions or
conclusions are the best material for poetry.

I recognize, then, as great poetry, all writings in which metaphysical
or scientific truth and the spirit of social service are ecstatically
formulated in prose, though I make no terms with dry didactic works that
pretend to be poetry. I see the workings of the intellect in a product
of the imagination and I try to show that logic and morality have not
been so hostile to the poetic faculty as they have been usually deemed.
At the same time I find that all poetry is a product or expression of
the unconscious.

This is, then, not a book to teach the writing of poetry, but a study of
the poetic faculty in literature, not in rhetorical terms, but by an
appeal to the emotional life of the reader. It aims to point out the
best examples of the literature of ecstasy (or poetry) whether in verse
or prose. It shows that poetry is the very life of man's soul, that he
has always loved it, that he has in lieu of gratification of a good and
true poetic faculty often spent himself in cultivating substitutes for
it. What a superficial assumption that because people do not like verse
or read verse (especially trivial, lifeless, unhuman verse) they
therefore do not care for poetry! Furthermore, I try to relate the
poet's own literary revelation back to himself, just as the poet sought
to reveal his soul to the reader.


FOOTNOTES:

[10:A] All prose has rhythm. I use the word "unrhythmical" merely to
designate such prose where the rhythm is not marked. There is no sharp
dividing line between rhythmical and unrhythmical prose.




CHAPTER II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY


"The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy," says Huneker in his
essay "Anarchs and Ecstasy" in _Bedouins_, "is bestowed upon few. Keats
had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the
austere Wordsworth[18:A]--who had, perhaps, loftier compensations.
Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson and Browning, only in
occasional exaltation. Like the cold devils of Felicien Rops, coiled in
frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of
Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy. . . .
William Blake and his figures, rushing down the secret pathway of the
mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of
materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy."

Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means _to make stand out_;
the mind makes sensible things stand out because it is concentrated on
particular emotions, and on the ideas associated with and springing from
these emotions. We must not make the mistake of thinking that ecstasy
has nothing to do with thought. On the contrary, it is too much occupied
with thought. It in fact represents a form of monomania connected with a
certain idea. It is a rapturous state in which the person is governed by
preoccupation with a definite viewpoint. The poetic condition of
ecstasy to which I refer is that mentioned by the poet Gray, in his
famous _Elegy_, when he speaks of one of the dead who might have "waked
to ecstasy the living lyre." He again uses the word in his _Progress of
Poesie_, when he speaks of Milton, who rode "upon the seraph wings of
ecstasy." Undoubtedly Gray understood by ecstasy the poetic emotion
primarily. In fact, any emotion that grips a man strongly may be called
ecstasy. Great grief or joy, pleasure or pain, passion or tragedy,
enthusiasm for an idea or a cause, are all ecstatic conditions. The
passion for social justice, an intense love for humanity, devotion to
art, beauty, knowledge, the emotions of a happy or an unhappy lover, all
constitute important subjects in the literature of ecstasy.

But the ecstasy must be a universal and secular ecstasy. There are two
kinds of ecstasies which though universal may manifest themselves in
such primitive forms as to appear only to limited circles. I refer to
the ecstasy of chauvinism, or fanatical, local, unjust patriotism, and
to the ecstasy of the pathologically religious victim whose views border
on hallucination. For example, if a man goes into extreme rhapsodies
about his particular race or country, and vituperates the people of
other races or countries, and justifies tyrannical measures towards
them; if, furthermore, he writes under the assumption that all the
intellectual and moral virtues reside in his people,--in short, if he is
purely clannish one can scarcely expect his literary product to appeal
to other people than his own. Again, if we hear or read the outburst of
a devotee of a particular religious sect, and we find that we can agree
with him in none of the views or dogmas he entertains; if, moreover, we
observe there is something also anti-human in the attitude that he takes
towards life, we are revolted by his passionate outpourings.

Though every nation and every religion is and should be to some extent
clannish and sectarian, still no literature that is purely so can have a
universal appeal. Hence, morbidly mystical poems, celebrating union with
an anthropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of conquest and
imperialism, poems seething with hatred for people of other races or
religions, poems poisoned by hatred for humanity, are all examples of
the literature of ecstasy of a low order.

On the contrary, however, the literature of ecstasy may be both
religious and patriotic, and still appeal to the world at large. I
suppose the best illustration of such kind of literature is the psalms
in the Old Testament. They strike a universal note and move Christians,
Mohammedans, Jews, free thinkers alike. The ecstasy here does not depend
upon the author's attachment to a dogma, but springs most frequently
from a love of righteousness and humanity; hence the emotional appeal of
the poet touches even those who are not deists. There are also fine
touches and poignant prayers here and there that move even the
non-Christian in some of the works of St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis,
Pascal and Bunyan.

We are not concerned here with the idea of ecstasy as a state that is
supposed to give us glimpses of the deity, nor with any attempt to
purify us by divesting our soul from the imperfect body and liberating
it from the frailties of the flesh. On the contrary, ecstasy is nothing
more than accumulated ordinary emotions and it speaks not only with the
body, but with all the memories of the body. It makes use in its
communications to us of those very physical infirmities that mystics
assume it shuns, those residing in the body as a medium. Ecstasy employs
the mind, and thus depends on the brain, the nerves, the physical
senses, which are unconsciously active even in a trance, and speak out
of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body.[21:A]

Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of poetry is not the
same as that known to mysticism. However, the ecstasy in both springs
from the unconscious and is the fruit of an emotional soul because of
inherited memories of past emotions. In the ecstasy of the mystic, which
is usually what is called "religious experience," there is really little
application of the reason. It is even often pathological and is both the
product and the cause of a belief in absurd dogmas. It is often merely a
sublimated passion for morality, or the result, as Freudians have shown,
of a hysterical attachment to parents, or the idealization of a father.
It is often a sublimated sex love due to repression. Every one has been
struck with the sensuous images in the conceptions of the mystics.
Broadly speaking, mysticism seeks a condition of being united to a
personal God who is supposed to exist outside of nature; it craves to
partake of His holiness, and to cultivate purity and be rid of the
earthy. He who rejects belief in an anthropomorphic God or to the
mystics' particular religions can have little of the mystics' feelings.
He does not enter into sympathy with their ideas, and this militates
against the university of mystic poetry. The ecstasy does not "catch."
Most of the mystic poetry of the world, especially that centering around
asceticism and dogma, has importance only for the believer in the
mystic's philosophy. Very little of it has literary value, although it
often is presented in an emotional and effective manner.

But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism that is
universal and modern, and will appeal to all in spite of their religious
beliefs. When the poet recognizing God in nature seeks to identify
himself with nature by love and admiration for her, by a passion for a
life that is in accordance with her commands, his poetry embodying such
ecstasy is universal and is lifted into a high plane. It becomes a sort
of ecstatic statement of pantheistic philosophy that even the believer
may accept. That is why the Persian poet, Jalalu 'l-Din Rumi, for
example, appeals to us and why his works are of such high order.

Sufism or Persian mysticism began in asceticism and ended in pantheism.
It became a desire of a union with nature. In fact, it was an ecstatic
state of love for man, nature, God. It had its roots however in physical
love, and a story is told of a man who, wanting to become a Sufi, was
told first to love some woman. Some critics even declare that many of
the Persian love poems are really mystical poems, and though this is
only partly true, it is certain that the Persian mystical poems are
really love poems.

The mystic poems of the later Mohammedan Sufis are in fact
anti-Mohammedan, and yet by a curious paradox they become after much
controversy acceptable to the Church.

There is also much that is modern in the Pre-buddhistic _Vedas_ and
_Upanishads_, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the pantheistic
character of the ideas and the universality of the emotions.

The ecstasy of the pantheistic mystic is a secular feeling that we all
experience, and is the substance of literature in prose and verse. We
have much modern mystical poetry that has a universal appeal; it is also
pantheistic in character and shows the poet's desire for union not with
an anthropomorphic God, but with nature whom he recognizes as his God.
The best illustration of it is the famous passage in Wordsworth's lines
composed above Tintern Abbey, in which he tells us he hears in nature
"the still, sad music of humanity." The entire passage is great poetry,
not because of the blank verse but because of the mystical pantheistic
ecstasy.

Sane mystical poetry may then be of a very high order. You will find
examples of it in Blake, Emerson, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold.
Shelley's _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_,
Whitman's _Chanting the Square Deific_ and Swinburne's _Hertha_ are
great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the _Oxford Book
of Mystical Verse_, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.

Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book,
_Hieroglyphics_, where he touched the borders of the truth of the
distinction between the literature of ecstasy and general literature,
but he introduced too many unbalanced views about literature being
unrelated to life. He was also thinking too exclusively of that
religious ecstasy that is found in the Catholic Church only. He also
took as his model for an example of ecstasy, _Pickwick Papers_, where
there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in _Vanity Fair_ where
there is much. He also, strange to relate, found no ecstasy in Meredith
or the later Hardy novels, and in no intellectual productions marked
with liberal thought except those of Rabelais. He showed no insight into
the real greatness of literature, because of his narrow conception of
ecstasy.

Ecstasy in the broad sense is any excited condition of the emotions.
Besides the meaning the word has in a narrow mystic and a medical sense,
with neither of which significances are we here concerned, it is
understood generally as referring to any condition where man is
overpowered by his feelings. It is this condition which makes the poet
write, and the reader is brought into a similar state with the poet by
reading the poems. Hence when the prose writer describes his ecstatic
state, or draws people into such a state, he is also a poet. The
critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when
ecstatical, are therefore poetry.

It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted
piece of ecstatical writing.

Many people are under the impression that when we speak of ecstasy we
mean a state where reason is utterly dethroned. Yet the Greeks, who make
inspiration the source of art, never let the passions so rule that utter
chaos resulted in the poet's creation. In Greek literature we have a
blending of reason and ecstasy. Professor Butcher has pointed out in his
excellent essay on "Art and Inspiration," in his _Harvard Lectures on
Greek Subjects_, the potency of reason in Greek poetry. The ideas of the
Greek writers were emotionalized, and there were ideas in their
emotional products. Demosthenes was like Plato, a passionate thinker;
Pindar, Æschylus and Sophocles were reasoning poets.

The Greeks used the word ecstasy in a modern secular sense rather than
in a spiritual or pathological one. It was the unconscious memory of the
poet coming to the fore and utilizing the intellect to pour light on the
soul. It was not the mystic's ecstasy where irrational conclusions were
arrived at because of some abnormality in the seer. The poet was always
a critic and a philosopher who tamed his wildest thoughts. "Moderns are
prone," says Butcher, "to believe that the action of poetic genius
abdicates its rights and descends to the lower level of talent when it
begins to reason. Greek literature decisively refutes such a notion. It
exhibits the critical faculty as a great underlying element in the
creative faculty."

Greek poetry then is the portrayal of reasoning passion, using at the
same time a conscious technique. It was the outpouring of the
personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It
represented the breaking forth of the unconscious into expression,
controlled by a censorship on the part of the poet.

Plato's idea about poetry being a form of madness may, however, still be
accepted, when we understand by madness the being imbued with one's
emotions in a manner not depriving the poet of his intellectual powers.
Poetry is only the result of inspiration, if by this term we mean that
rationalized emotions have so accumulated as suddenly to seek
expression. Every poet, in prose or verse, writes from the unconscious
and he usually gets lost in his own characters or speaks directly in his
own person. The writer, however, is not mad, nor is his art allied to
madness. He is usually too sane, using his judgment at the same time
that his emotions are aroused. So we can still subscribe to Plato's idea
of unconscious art, put in the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue _Ion_:

     All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
     poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed;
     like the Corybantian revellers in their dances, who are not in
     their right mind when they are composing their beautiful
     strains, yet who, when falling under the power of music and
     metre are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who
     draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the
     influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in possession of
     their mind. And the soul of the lyric poets does the same, as
     they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs
     from the honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens
     and dells of the Muses; they are like bees, winging their way
     from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a
     light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him
     until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the
     mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this
     state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.

            *       *       *       *       *

     The expressions referring to being out of the mind and senses
     must not be taken literally.

As long as we bear in mind that Plato's idea of madness is merely the
concentration on one topic, his idea of poetry is true.

A remark of Socrates in the _Phaedrus_ should be well pondered by
disciples of art for art's sake. "He who having no touch of the Muses'
madness in his soul comes to the door and thinks that he will get into
the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not
admitted."

Plato himself was one of the finest of ancient poets, in spite of the
fact that he wanted to exclude poets from his ideal commonwealth. Some
of the finest prose poems and allegories of ancient literature are found
in his _Republic_, the _Phaedrus_ and _Symposium_. Most of these are
known to us, and need no mention. When Plato speaks of love, he does so
as a poet, and the passages on the subject in the last two named
dialogues are full of poetry.

I wish to give, besides the above passage, as an illustration of Plato's
own prose poetry, part of a speech by Alcibiades. It is at the
conclusion of the _Symposium_, and is part of Alcibiades's tribute to
Socrates and his speeches. Socrates, himself, thinks the speech is
delivered to create trouble between him and Agathon, of whom Alcibiades
is jealous. The speech is ruined also by a reference at length to a
phase of Greek life which is repulsive to us. After likening Socrates to
Silenus and to Marsyas, Alcibiades continues in the following prose
poem:

     For my heart leaps within me fore than that of any Corybantian
     reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I
     observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I
     have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought
     that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my
     soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought
     of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me
     to such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure
     the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit);
     and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him
     and fly as from the voice of the siren my fate would be like
     that of others--he would transfix me, and I should grow old
     sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not
     to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and
     busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I
     hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only
     person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to
     be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same.
     For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to
     do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of
     popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and
     fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have
     confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead,
     and yet I know that I should be more sorry than glad, if he
     were to die; so that I am at my wit's end.

Symonds tells us that Æschylus was the great example of unconscious art
among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of
poetry.

Æschylus's creation Cassandra is a good illustration of a character in
an ecstatic state. Cassandra is both prophetess and poetess, and her
cries move us to this day, when much of Æschylus's moral and religious
philosophy bores and irritates us. She is the incarnation of woman
suffering. She was ravished at Troy by Ajax and was given to Agamemnon
as prisoner of war, she the princess, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She
had lost most of the members of her family and now anticipated great
trouble for Agamemnon whose wife Claetemnestrae was unfaithful to him.
She also foresaw her own death at the queen's hands, but it was her
punishment that her prophecies would not be heeded. She is partly mad,
but hers is the poetic frenzy, tempered by logic. Her most meaningless
ravings are full of meaning. They are poetry not because of the metre in
which they are rendered, but because of the rational ecstasy. This
ecstasy remains intact even in the English prose translation.

Nietzsche divided art into Apollonian and Dionysian. He found that the
Dionysian state depended on emotional or orgiastic intoxication. He
perceived that the ecstasy in this state was largely of a sexual
character. As he boldly put it, "The desire for art and beauty is an
indirect longing for the ecstasy of sexual desire, which gets
communicated to the brain." This is the thesis that Freud developed.
Croce, who has, however, something of the metaphysician and mystic in
him, is not in sympathy with this view, for he ridicules the idea that
the genesis of aesthetism lies in the desire of the male for the female.
Yet he agrees with Freud in the conception that art is a means of curing
oneself of sexual neurosis. "By elaborating his impressions," says
Croce, "man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes
them from him and makes himself their superior. The liberating and
purifying function of art is another aspect and another formula of its
character and activity. Activity is the deliverer, just because it
drives away passivity."

Finely put, indeed, are the words of Nietzsche's views on ecstasy. "To
the existence of art, to the existence of any aesthetic activity or
perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is
indispensable, namely ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the
sensitiveness of the whole mechanism; until this takes place art is not
realized.

"All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, possess this
power; above all the ecstasy of sexual excitement, the oldest and most
primitive form of ecstasy."

Plato, it will be recalled, compared the state of the poet to that of
the reveller in the Bacchanalian rites. The favorable side of the
worship of Dionysius or the Bacchic revels has been shown by Euripides
in his play the _Bacchae_. He shows how King Pentheus was torn to pieces
in mistake by his own mother for his hostility to the bacchic rites.
Bacchus himself is the hero of the play. As the chorus says, Bacchus is
innately modest and modest women will not be corrupted at the revels.
Who is not moved by the song of the Chorus? "Would that I could go to
Cyprus, the island of Venus, where the lovers dwell, soothing the minds
of mortals, and to Paphos, which the waters of a foreign river flowing
with an hundred mouths fertilize without rain--and to the land of
Pieria, where is the beautiful seat of the Muses, the holy hill of
Olympus. Lead me thither, O Bromius, Bromius, O master thou of
Bacchanals. There are the Graces and there is Love and there is it
lawful for the Bacchae to celebrate their orgies."

The ecstasy of the revellers at the rites was poetic ecstasy, for it was
an unconscious or conscious erotic nature manifesting itself in the form
of a religious rite. Bacchus, aside from being god of wine, was the
symbol of productiveness and was accompanied by Priapus, and the phallus
was carried about. He was youthful and his symbols were animals like the
goat, ass, bull, tiger, lion, all of which had erotic significance. The
ecstatic rites with which he was worshipped were introduced from Thrace.

Aristotle attributes the origin of tragedy to the use of the dithyramb
of the revellers, and comedy to the phallic songs sung by them. The
point is that love frenzy leads to poetry, and we have an illustration
of it in the connection between the Bacchic rites and poetry, between
love and art. The rites degenerated under the Romans and were soon
suppressed by law.

Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the
twelfth section of _The Birth of Tragedy_. It is the old story of the
battle between the emotions and reason, the instinct and the intellect,
problems which men as different as Hearn, Bergson, Nietzsche, Pater and
Freud solved by seeking liberties for the instinct. Pentheus, who
represents reason, is the enemy of Bacchus, but fascinated by him, loses
his life; reason leads to death when it makes no concession to the
instincts. The play was a protest by Euripides against his own
moralizing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and Tiresius is,
in the words of Nietzsche, that we must display a diplomatically
cautious concern in the presence of the emotional forces. Don't trifle
with poetry and the ecstasies that produce it.

The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his _Greek
Studies_, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal
views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek
religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown
the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.

The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with
the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love,
for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the
pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most
hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this
reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different
nations.

True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth and Whitman,
dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and
Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of
liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes
which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.

And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as
well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not
given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.

Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always will
be with us, and probably more so in prose than in verse. We want
literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the
prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame
Lespinasse, or in the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, or in
the verse of Hafiz, Burns, Shelley, Browning, Heine or Verlaine.

Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his _Inspiration of
Poetry_ for a return of poetry to poetic madness. Emotion is the chief
and most important element of poetry. "Emotion" as Woodberry says, "is
the condition of their (the poets') existence; passion is the element of
their being." When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to
us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth,
Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald
Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any
emotion in which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine,
Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions
expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we
find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial
event important poetry.

But emotions described by the poet affect people differently. I may
find great emotion in reading about a man who sacrifices himself for a
great and unpopular idea, but others may not be interested in that man
or his idea and hence will not be moved by the work. Such a work is
poetry to me and like minded readers. Further, differences of
intellectual outlook on the part of the readers count in determining
poetry. Socrates, Buddha, Bruno and Galileo are poetic figures to us
to-day; they have been enshrined in poetry and history and we accept
many of their ideas. But to their contemporaries who rejected them they
were not poetic figures. Who knows but that there are figures to-day we
scoff at who may have a halo of poetry in history?

A distinct but by no means essential quality of the literature of
ecstasy is that of pain. There is more pain depicted in the world's
literature than pleasure. In his _The Nature of Poetry_, Edmund Clarence
Stedman speaks of a certain sadness or melancholy in the poetry of the
nineteenth century but he might have said this was true of the poetry of
any century. Most poetry is sad, for life often is, and the poet is
naturally interested in and pays most attention to the painful emotions
that trouble him. Tragedy and elegy (and the term elegy was used by the
Romans not only to bemoan the dead, but to deplore sad love affairs) are
predominant in all literature, prose and verse.

We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the
Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read by us
because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the
substance of poetry and in the public mind there has always been an
association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said--"our sweetest
songs are those that told the saddest thought."

It is assumed that Christianity made poetry sad but this is not so, for
there is sad poetry in the Old Testament and among the Romans and the
Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is
intertwined with human nerves. The most frequent note in poetry is
wailing and lamentation, self-pity and passionate rebuke.

In Professor William A. Neilson's _Essentials of Poetry_, there is an
interesting chapter on sentimentalism in poetry, in which the author
dwells on the sentimentalism in the poetry of the English Romantic
School. He defines it as the cultivation of an emotion for the sake of
the thrill. Most certainly there can be no great poetry where the
sentimentalism is forced, where it becomes ridiculous, where it bubbles
over and becomes monotonous. Sentimentalism often characterizes popular
poetry and if the public is likely to err in judging poetry it is
particularly likely to confuse sentimentalism with normal human
emotions. Yet it is hard often to draw the line between sham emotions
and genuine sentiment.

The poet is bound to be always sentimental to an extent because he must
wear his heart on his sleeve. No one need be ashamed of unadulterated
emotions, for life is made up of them.

Besides, nationalities differ. The Irish, the Jews and the Russians, for
example, do not consider their own poems sentimental because these are
genuine records of actual feelings characteristic of sentimental
peoples; to be sure, such expressed emotions may appear as sentimental
to the rest of the world. Many think that the emotion of pity, and also
sympathy for the criminal that we find in Russian novels is rather
sentimental and nauseating, but it is genuine Russian emotion.

We should be on our guard, however, in regarding sentimentalism as
poetry. The public loves cheap popular songs and mushy lachrymose
verses. The many poems, stories and plays about "mother," "baby," "the
flag," "home," "our country," etc., are often drivelling sentimentalism
and not poetry.

Ecstasy was the keynote of Oriental poetry. We are fortunate in having a
translation in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_ for 1901 and
1902 by Duncan B. Macdonald, of a book on the laws of music and singing
of ecstasy from Al Ghazzali's work on the _Re-vivifying of the Sciences
of the Faith_. Ghazzali (1060-1111) was the greatest apologist for Islam
and is known as "The Proof of Islam." He was held to be the only man who
was worthy of being a prophet, next to Mohammed himself. He
unfortunately dealt the death blow to Mohammedan philosophy and Averroes
wrote against him. But no one among Arabs had as grand a conception of
ecstasy in connection with poetry as he did. He was influenced by the
Persian Sufis and defined ecstasy in a very modern manner. We may
dispense with his mystic conception of it and pay attention only to his
definition of it in its relation to poetry. Great admirer as he was of
the _Koran_ he recognized that poetry is more in accord with human
nature than that work, and he quotes an authority to the effect that our
being constituted of fanciful desires makes us more moved by poets than
by the word of God. He finds various reasons for the power of poetry
over us, the principal one being its quality of ecstasy. He sees that
poetry has a mission in conveying ecstasy; that one of its uses is to
arouse us to lamentation, to joy, to love, to courage and to religion.
He analyzes the tender longing caused by love poetry, though, good
Moslem that he was, he is always discriminating between poetry that
arouses a lawful love, and that which has mere lust as its object.

His main contribution, however, to the philosophy of ecstasy is his
recognition of its identity with the unconscious. He quotes some one to
the effect that music and singing do not produce in the heart what is
not in it but stir up what exists there. Ecstasy to him is the result of
hearing and of understanding what is heard and applying it to an idea
which occurs to the hearer. It is a condition produced in the hearer's
soul due to knowledge or emotion, and the condition is varied. The
following passage is especially worthy of quotation: "As for the states,
how many a man gets so far as to perceive in his heart, on some occasion
which may appear in it, a contraction or an expansion, yet he does not
know its cause! And a man sometimes thinks about a thing, and it makes
an impression on his soul. Then he forgets the cause, but the impression
remains upon his soul, and he feels it. And, sometimes, the condition
which he feels is a joy which arose in his soul on his thinking about a
cause which produces joy; or it may have been a sorrow; then he who was
thinking about it forgets it, but feels in the impression its
consequence. And sometimes that condition is a strong condition which a
word expressing joy or sorrow does not indicate clearly and for which he
cannot come upon a suitable expression for what was intended."

Al Ghazzali gives then, as the essence of ecstasy, its unconscious
nature. Ecstasy is related to longing for something unknown. All people
experience in their hearts states demanding things unknown to them. He
compares the situation to that of the innocent and ignorant youth in
puberty who is in a state unexplained to him. Al Ghazzali is one of the
first of modern critics to formulate the theory of ecstasy as the end of
poetry, and his argument explains the vogue of love and mystic poetry.
He recurs, it is true, to the influence of metre in poetry in inducing
ecstasy, but he is always thinking of the ecstasy of love of man and
God as the element of poetry, and in this he is a predecessor of
Tolstoy. He also gives rules as to one's behavior in the ecstatic state
and does not sanction undue madness.

A much higher form of the literature of ecstasy than the product of the
immoral rites of Dionysus or the mystic poetry of Persia is the prophecy
as it was known and delivered among the ancient Hebrews. Indeed,
prophecy is the ideal form of the literature of ecstasy and represents
the zenith of its achievement. It is the emotional verbal utterance of
the unconscious of the poet, who is usually in a state of ecstasy, and
who, as passages in the Bible testify, receives his message in a vision
or dream. The act of prophesying was even contagious. The early prophets
were like dancing dervishes in their prophesying and influenced others
to do as they did. We recall how Saul stripped himself naked. The Hebrew
word prophecy means utterance and the idea of foretelling the future was
incidental to it. If the idea of futurity emanated from prophets, it was
such insight as any gifted person may experience when he notes certain
facts from which he can predict inevitable results. But the ecstatic
state was always associated with the idea of prophecy, the only person,
according to the account of the Bible, exempt from this state being
Moses. The prophetic state was not allied to divination but resulted
from moral and aesthetic inspiration such as we find in modern poets.
When the Bible says, God spoke to the prophet, or the hand of God
touched him, it means that the prophet was in a state of ecstasy due to
a highly developed moral and social viewpoint. The true prophet's
ecstasy was not accompanied by immorality or superduced by drugs or
physical abuse. Music, however, was at one time used to produce the
prophetic state. The aesthetic mechanism of the ancient prophets was no
different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times.
Moses Maimonides in his _Guide to the Perplexed_ analyzes the ecstatic
state of prophecy and his analysis may be applied to any high form of
poetic inspiration.

Prophecy was, according to Maimonides, an emanation sent forth to man's
rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty; it consisted in
the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty; the logical and
imaginative faculties had to be balanced in the prophet; he overflowed
with the frenzy of ecstasy to help his fellow-men and could not rest
even at risk of personal suffering; he had courage and intuition; he
reserved his message in a dream or a vision.

The psychology of the prophetic inspiration has been studied by many of
the higher critics of the Bible. One of the best books on the subject is
_The Psychology of Prophecy_ by Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan, Philadelphia 1908,
(Julius H. Greenstone) who says:

     The ecstasy of the wild and mad kind was seen only in the
     early days of Hebrew prophecy, when wine and dance and music
     and other external means were used for bringing about this
     state, but the subdued elevated ecstasy due to religious
     temperament and patriotic fervor, due to constant and profound
     contemplation, was certainly the characteristic of the later
     prophets. . . . Ecstasy is usually the spring whence all the
     other prophetic streams flow.

While the Greeks mingled reason with inspiration to produce poetry, the
prophets went further, and interpenetrated their ecstasy with a high
sense of social justice. An ecstatic state, with a keen intellect, a
high moral outlook, and a noble social ideal characterized the prophet.
His state of ecstasy was due to this highly developed social
conscience. He was not so much concerned with religious rites as with
the decline of the nation's ideals of justice. The prophet of that day
fulminated against the economic evils of society. He was possessed of an
exalted type of aesthetic soul, the ecstasy to social justice. No
literature gives us such types of men who rebuke unjust kings as we find
in the stories of Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, Jeremiah and
Hezekiah. No literature shows us such courageous types as Amos and
Isaiah. They were not flatterers, these men who risked their lives in
shouting back to eastern autocratic monarchs their iniquities. They did
not say what society or public opinion wanted them to say but what they
felt was their duty. They overflowed not with the immoral and insane
ecstasy of the rites of Dionysius, but the ecstasy of the man who loves
his neighbor as himself, of the man who would not have the rich crush
the poor, of the man who sought kindness for the stranger, the
oppressed, the widow, the fatherless.

And the prophets, in spite of their virulency, produced the highest
forms of artistic beauty. Not all the revolutions of opinions and
changes in religious beliefs have made them obsolete. Shaw once said,
substitute the word ideals for the word idols, in the Bible, and you
have messages that are still true.

So the prophets instead of being miracle performers, foretellers of the
future, preachers of theology, are really poets of ecstasy, with a
social message revealed in a dream. The old word of God, in the form of
a high social ideal, to-day is still making prophets. Shelley, Ibsen and
Ruskin have done work that is akin to the prophets of old; they have
given us works of art inspired by a state of ecstasy springing from the
possession of social ideals. Santayana rightly regards the prophet, one
who portrays the ideals of experience and destiny, as the greatest
poet. (See _Poetry and Religion._)

Nor did the prophets of old sing their messages in artificial form. They
did not count their syllables and give us metre, though they indulged in
parallelisms. They wrote in rhythmical prose.[39:A]

The prophets had a true conception of what constituted a high form of
poetry, an ecstatic production in prose with a social ideal behind it.
Ecstasy was the first condition of their poetry but it was not
pathological as with monks who tortured their bodies, or decadent poets
who resorted to drugs.

If there is a high form of the literature of ecstasy it surely is that
in which the ecstasy of humanitarianism is described. It is that which
shows a man with a highly developed sense of social justice, who is
making sacrifices because he observes the misery of many due to the
privileged few. _Don Quixote_ is one of the greatest poems because the
knight wants to help mankind, even though he is insane and never recks
his own bruises, but persists and is laughed at by all.

In speaking of the literature of ecstasy, something should be said about
De Quincey's famous distinction of the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power. He defined the former as that which teaches and the
latter as that which moves. In the literature of power he included also
that which taught by means of passions, desires and emotions and that
which had its field of action in relation to the great moral capacities
of man. The literature of power, according to De Quincey, includes that
which appeals to the reason and understanding through the affections.
It restores "to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of
mercy, of retribution." De Quincey included under the literature of
power, prose as well as verse, fairy tales and romances as well as
tragedies and epic poems.

The question is, what relation is there between De Quincey's idea of the
literature of power and that of the literature of ecstasy. Of course he
included under the literature of power his masterly prose poems; also
all his imaginative writings. Now, the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_,
for instance, belongs only in parts to the literature of ecstasy,
noticeably in the dream phantasies. By the literature of power De
Quincey meant all literature except science. The only illustration of
the literature of knowledge he gives is Newton's _Principia_, and the
marked characteristics he finds in this as in all literature of
knowledge is that it may be and usually is superseded by later
discoveries. The literature of power in his opinion is permanent; this
statement is not true when we think of the many imaginative works of the
past that have no longer any message or appeal to us.

The point is that De Quincey's literature of power includes not only
poetry in verse and prose, but the entire field of general literature
which hovers on poetry, or in which the poetry is diffused so that we
call it prose literature. The literature of ecstasy then is the more
emotional literature of power, that section of it where the ecstasy is
concentrated. It would include chiefly the impassioned prose and prose
phantasies of De Quincey's own work.

De Quincey was no art-for-art's-sake man, and he recognized the
importance of the rational and the moral element in the sphere of the
literature of power.

There remains a distinction between power and ecstasy. De Quincey does
not identify power with ecstasy (a term he does not even use) even
though he demands a moving effect in the literature of power. He does
not contend that the emotion should be concentrated and hold complete
sway over the author. His literature of power would include, for
example, all good novels or histories in their entirety. To us only
those portions of such novels and histories where the passion is
concentrated belong to the literature of ecstasy or poetry.

Literature of ecstasy is always poetry, literature of power is not,
being rather the equivalent of _belles lettres_, reaching the heights of
poetry only at times.

The literature of ecstasy is all writing, in verse or prose, wherever an
emotional atmosphere hovers, where a feeling is concentrated, and hence
it is really poetry. Poetry is the language of ecstasy and ecstasy is
that possessive faculty of the imagination capable "of projecting itself
into the very consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly
possessed by the emotion of its object that in expression it takes
unconsciously the tone, the color and the temperature thereof." (James
Russell Lowell: _The Function of the Poet._ "The Imagination." P. 70.)


FOOTNOTES:

[18:A] I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth missed
ecstasy.

[21:A] This is the idea in Donne's poem, _The Ecstasy_. Professor
William Lyon Phelps in the preface to his _The Advance of English Poetry
in the Twentieth Century_ claims that the influence of Donne has never
been greater than at present.

[39:A]

     "Hebrew poetry is
       Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.
       'Ecstasy affords
       The occasion and expediency determines the form.'"

                          MARIANNE MOORE in _Others_ (1916).




CHAPTER III

ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY


Aristotle was the first critic who placed little stress on the
importance of metre in poetry. If the critics had followed him, instead
of merely referring to his _Poetics_ and trying to discover the
"borderland between prose and poetry," there probably would have been
little confusion as to what is poetry. He saw there was poetry in the
prose mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and in the dialogues of Socrates,
though these were not classified as poetry. Incidentally he found little
poetry in Empedocles, who in spite of his metre was primarily a
physicist. The passage from the _Poetics_ is worth quoting entire for it
contains the nucleus of all arguments for prose poetry. I quote from S.
H. Butcher's translation:

     For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of
     Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one
     hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic,
     elegaic, or any similar metre. People, do, indeed, add the
     word "make" or "poet" to the name of the metre, and speak of
     elegaic poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, _as if it
     were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that
     entitles them all indiscriminately to the name_.[42:A] Even
     when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out
     in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author;
     and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the
     metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the
     other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even
     if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all
     metres, as Chaeremon did in his _Centaur_, which is a medley
     composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under
     the general term poet.

He also says: "The Poet or maker should be the maker of plots rather
than of verse; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he
imitates is actions."

Aristotle's idea that metre is an unessential element in determining
poetry has never really taken root in literary criticism. It was voiced
by men like Erasmus and Savonarola, and was again restated by the
Italian critic Castelvetro, who in his commentary on Aristotle's
_Poetics_ (1570) said that verse is not the essence of poetry, that it
does not distinguish it but clothes it, and that therefore matter and
not metre is the test of poetry. He believes like Aristotle, that metre
aids poetry, but that the imitation or creation itself determines it.

George Saintsbury in his scholarly and fascinating _History of Criticism
in Europe_ cannot forgive Aristotle for this "pestilent heresy," as he
calls it. He severely berates Wordsworth and Coleridge for having
supported it. He attacks all the critics who countenance it. He adulates
Dante's treatise _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ as an antidote to the heresy,
because Dante wants the rhythm (as well as the diction) of poetry to be
different from that of prose.

But we are learning to-day that metre is not only an unnecessary element
in poetry, but often an artificial, hampering encumbrance, frequently
vitiating the poetical quality of a poem.

Yet Professor Saintsbury has given us in his _History of English Prose
Rhythm_ some of the finest emotional and rhythmical passages from
English prose writers. He chose the selections primarily for their
rhythm and not for their emotional qualities, yet most of the passages
are poems. His book practically convinces one that nearly all the great
English writers of prose wrote not only rhythmical prose, but emotional
or ecstatic prose, or poetry. Professor Saintsbury finds the essence of
prose rhythm, in variety and divergence, and he divides prose into three
kinds, according to the rhythm. These are hybrid verse-prose, pure
highly rhythmed prose, and prose in general. In the first class he
includes much of the Bible, especially where the parallelisms are
present, Anglo Saxon poetry, Ossian, Blake's _Prophetic Books_ and Walt
Whitman. He no doubt would include free verse here. But this so-called
"hybrid verse prose" is really highly rhythmed prose generally arranged
in verse form. There is no real distinction between the two forms.

Poetry in prose, however, does not depend on the rhythm. The only effect
on the reader of reading the chapter on "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of
Poetry" in Professor Gummere's book _The Beginnings of Poetry_ is to
convince him that the learning amassed there does not prove the
professor's thesis. For example Gummere cites Bagehot's statement, "the
exact line which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer's Field_
or _Enoch Arden_ from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ and
_Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence," and thus
comments: "Adam Bede remains prose, and Enoch Arden is commonly set down
as poetry and there an end." This impatient remark does not do away with
the fact that the story of Hetty's troubles after she had met Arthur
Dimmesdale, and the scene of the interview with her in prison by Dinah
Morris are two examples that fulfill every definition of poetry, even to
irregular rhythm. Some of the free verse poets have given us
compositions made up of the outbursts of people in distress, with their
story in simple language like Hetty Sorrel's tale.

My contention then is that what decides whether a composition is poetry
is not the rhythm but the ecstasy. The academic critics have found an
argument for rhythm in the fact that when a man is moved, the expression
of his emotions tends towards rhythmical language. This is certainly
very often true, but the rhythmical character of language in these cases
is entirely different from that in verse, for in verse you have a
patterned regular rhythm obeying an artificial law of accents, a
continued series of rise and ebb of the voice that must not break down
for hundreds and even thousands of monotonous lines. In the rhythm of
the natural language of emotion you have no rules or fetters on how the
accents should be distributed. You have rhythmical and unrhythmical
lines, regular and irregular arrangements of accents, all thrown
together. No pattern is present, and no uniformity or similarity of any
kind is kept up. This is the language of poetic prose.

If I say that rhythm is not necessary in poetry, I merely mean that no
patterned or strong rhythm is necessary, for all prose is more or less
irregularly rhythmical. Often the prose rhythm is more marked than the
rhythm of metre, as you may find out by comparing passages from Whitman
or Pater with let us say some of the blank verse of Wordsworth.
Professor Patterson claimed that all prose has rhythm, and he called
prose "syncopated rhythm." He rightly pointed out that passages of prose
have a rhythm which in nowise differs from the rhythm of free verse. He
refuses to regard free verse, as some seek to do, as a third medium for
poetic expression. He shows that the arrangement of free verse into
irregular lines merely calls attention to the rhythms. All prose may be
arranged as free verse and all free verse as prose. Since such is the
case, all literature of ecstasy in prose has rhythm besides ecstasy and
should certainly be called poetry. Dr. Patterson made one error,
however, to which Dr. Cary F. Jacob calls attention in her _Foundations
and Nature of Verse_. Prose may have rhythm but it has no continuity of
progress in the rhythms, which must eventually break down; it has no
intention of continuous rhythmic flow. But poetry, I urge, may exist in
prose without a continuity of progress of rhythms or even without rhythm
at all--(after all, in spite of Dr. Patterson, there is unrhythmical
prose).

The view that rhythm is vital to poetry is fallacious. Accentuation at
unequal intervals of time no more creates or heightens poetic fervor
than, as was formerly supposed, measured stress on syllables did so. If
the prime motive of an unrhythmical prose work, in whole or part, is the
communication of an emotion or the ecstatic treatment of an idea, that
production is emphatically a poem; or at least some portions of it are
separately entitled to that name. If you deny it you will be compelled
to maintain that the able unrhythmical prose translations we have of the
Greek and Latin poets contain no poetry. In fact the best way to judge
if a composition in verse is poetry is, as Goethe and Hearn said, to
translate it into the prose of another language; if poetic emotions are
not then revealed, rest assured that they were never present in the
original work. When the rhyme, metre and rhythm have been abstracted and
the poetic fire still glows almost undiminished, we have the best proof,
first that its existence did not depend upon the use of verbal measures
and sounds, and secondly, that the poetry is not lost even when
transferred into the prose of another tongue.

The first question the reader will now ask is: "Well, what then
constitutes the difference between prose and poetry if you take away
the distinguishing feature of rhythm?" And some misguided critics assert
that the term prose poetry is a hybrid and a contradiction in terms. The
embarrassment of the former and the misconception of the latter will
disappear if they remember that the opposite of prose is not poetry, but
verse or metre. As Coleridge said, science is the proper antithesis of
poetry. An unemotional presentation of dull facts is, however, the real
antithesis.

Poetry is absolutely independent of any adornment it may be given, such
as rhyme, metre, or, as I am especially trying to show, rhythm; even
though it is true that emotional language may tend to become rhythmical.
Verse is simply an ordering of words so that the modulation by the voice
especially attracts the ear by the regularity of stress. We have
stories, dramas and essays in different measures of verse just as we
have them in prose. Description, narration, exposition, even argument
and exclamation, appear in verse as well as in prose. There are, as it
has always been recognized, innumerable products in verse that from the
nature of their contents are destitute of the attributes of poetry.
Humorous and didactic efforts, mere jokes or commonplace sermons, do not
become poetical because they are put in metre or rhythm. Abstract
philosophy, concrete science and barren theology remain arid and
unemotional discourses even in the epics of Dante and Milton. A bare and
not particularly interesting statement of facts or a procession of dull
and platitudinous ideas is, even in verse, anything but poetry. In the
range of the world's metrical writings the poems are few and far
between.

On the other hand, it has always been recognized that there were prose
compositions that partook of the nature of poetry or were replete with
poetical parts. It was difficult to classify this literature, for the
extreme beauty and emotion which pervaded it lifted it above ordinary
prose and yet because of the absence of measure it was not classified as
poetry. The first English critic who perceived that the authors of such
work were really poets and should be designated by their appropriate
name was Sir Philip Sidney. He showed that verse was but an ornament and
did not make poetry, and that there were many poets, among whom he named
Xenophon, who never versified. Shelley, however, has given the widest
vogue to the feeling that the distinction between poets and prose
writers was a vulgar error. He maintained that philosophers like Bacon
and Plato, historians like Herodotus, Plutarch and Livy, authors of
revolutions in opinion such as Jesus and Rousseau, were poets.

Coleridge held that the object of poetry was to communicate pleasure,
and remarked: "But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate
object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been
in a high degree attained, as in novels and romance. Would then the mere
superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name
of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does
not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. . . .
The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the _Theoria Sacra_ of
Burnet, furnish undeniable proof that poetry of the highest kind may
last without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of
a poem."

"There are also prose poets," said Emerson in his essay on "Poetry and
Imagination" in _Letters and Social Aims_. "Thomas Taylor, the
Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of imagination, a better
poet, or perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man
between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had the magnanimity to say,
'If Burke and Bacon were not poets (measured lines not being necessary
to constitute one), he did not know what poetry meant.' And every good
reader will easily recall expressions or passages in works of pure
science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in
professed poets."

Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of
_Tristram Shandy_ a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a
poet more because of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ than the _Deserted
Village_.

Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry
without absolutely being poetry, instancing _Robinson Crusoe_,
_Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _Decameron_.

Heine spoke of _Don Quixote_ as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called
_Wilhelm Meister_ poetry. Brandes regards Lord Beaconsfield a poet.
Matthew Arnold characterized Chateaubriand, Senancour and Guérin poets.
Balzac considered himself a poet and Ibsen in mentioning his prose
dramas often used the word "poems."

The habit of calling productions in metre or rhythm poetry has been so
strongly ingrained in us that we denominate every lengthy performance in
verse a poem _in toto_. Before Poe, Coleridge said that "a poem of any
length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry." Poe gave us the
reasons for this proposition and demonstrated to us that a long epic
poem is but a series of short poems connected by uninspired passages in
metre. The same thing may be said of literary verse performances of
moderate length. To those who object to using the word "poem" in
connection with any prose composition one may reply that these, like
verse productions, are also often made up of poetical parts here and
there; they simply lack regular rhythm and this is not a sufficient
line of demarcation as to what constitutes poetry and what does not.

There are many short stories in verse which are known as poems while
there are many poetical tales and sketches in prose which no one finds
to be poetry, although they often contain more of it than many specimens
in measure. I think Poe's _Eleonora_ with its description of the Valley
of Many Colored Grass and Hawthorne's _Haunted Mind_ are greater poems,
though in prose, than most of Holmes' and Bryant's verse poems are. I
see no reason why we should not designate as poetry, prose tales where
ecstasy and emotion predominate. Kipling's _Brushwood Boy_ or Bret
Harte's _Outcasts of Poker Flat_ is as poetical, I believe, as any tale
in Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The same laws of emotional
appeal are working in the one as in the other; a similar artistic stamp
is printed on all these stories. In fact, Longfellow's tales are
inferior in the quality and quantity of poetry to the stories specified.
His compositions could easily be arranged in prose and the stories of
Kipling or Harte could be transposed into metrical verse. The transfer
would not affect the poetry in either of them.

It is a confused system of literary classification which does not permit
calling these tales of Harte and Kipling poetry, but crowns the same
writers' doggerel verses like _The Heathen Chinee_ and _Fuzzy Wuzzy_
with the title "poems."

To bring sharply before the reader's mind the idea that a piece in verse
is often not poetry and that a prose passage frequently is a poem, I
will quote at random two passages.

One is from a work that is rich with poetry and written by one of
England's greatest poets and yet the particular section, though in
metre, is but a dry statement of facts. I quote from Wordsworth's
_Michael_, one of the finest things in English literature, yet
unpoetical in the first part:

     Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale
     There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.
     An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
     His bodily frame had been from youth to age
     Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
     And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt
     And watchful more than ordinary men.

Here are unpoetical lines which might have been written in prose, but
Wordsworth had to give us some preliminary information so that we could
follow his story. Incidentally, he has the reputation for having much
prosy material in the body of his work.

The other passage I quote is purposely a translation from a foreign
novel and yet it has not lost any of its poetry. The paragraph, of which
I give part, is a poem and part of a larger one in prose. It is from
D'Annunzio's _Triumph of Death_ and describes the music in Wagner's
"Tristan and Isolde":

     And in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy,
     wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed.
     The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing,
     interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another,
     dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more
     restless poignant anxiety passed over all the instruments and
     expressed a continual and ever vain effort to attain the
     inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions
     there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every
     grasp, although it shone ever so near, etc.

I shall show more fully that our definitions of what is poetry and what
is a poem have been faulty. The error is so perceptible that it is
surprising that so few critics have detected it. Meanwhile I will give
my definitions:

_Poetry is not a department of literature in the sense that the novel or
the essay or the drama is, but is an atmosphere which bathes literature
whenever ecstasy and emotion are present. It is not a distinct division
of art as literature, music or painting is, for poetry is the very
essence of all these arts whether it is transmitted by words, sounds or
colors. It is the ecstatic emotional spirit which pervades all good
literature (or any of the arts) whether in verse or prose, in their
finest parts. It is an aesthetic quality which gives tone to a literary
work or any portion or portions of it. It may exist without figures of
speech, rhyme, metre or rhythm.[52:A] Its most natural language is prose
or free verse._ Let us have no more such classification of literature as
fiction, drama, essay, criticism, _poetry_, etc. There is fiction in
verse and there is prose fiction; there are verse dramas and prose
plays, etc., and any of these may be steeped in poetry. However, the
customary lyric verse may be comprised under the heading of poetry not
because of the measure, but on account of the poetic emotion that
usually characterizes it. Let us also not speak of the arts like music,
painting, sculpture and poetry when instead of the last we mean
literature, for poetry is a quality of all the arts including
literature. Poetry is the spirit of ecstasy and emotion which pervades
the arts like music, painting, sculpture and literature, and hence it
may be found in every branch of literature whether in verse or prose,
like the drama, fiction and the essay.

We are now in a position to define what a poem is. Critics are agreed
that it must consist of the artistic expression of words which arouse
the reader's emotion, but they have insisted that these words be
rhythmically arranged. I think if the latter limitation is withdrawn,
all our confusion as to what is a poem will disappear. _A poem is any
literary composition, whether in verse or prose, which as a whole is an
imaginative creation, a vehicle of emotion, an expression of ecstasy; or
that portion or every portion of such a composition where the emotion or
ecstasy has been concentrated. It does not follow that the work as a
whole is necessarily poetry. Its most natural language is prose or free
verse._

Poems may therefore be found in imaginative philosophical works like
Plato's _Symposium_, _Phaedrus_, _Republic_ and other dialogues, Bacon's
_Essays_, Schopenhauer's _World as Will and Idea_, Nietzsche's _Thus
Spake Zarathustra_, Emerson's _Essays_, in critical works like Pater's
_Renaissance_, Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, Wilde's _Intentions_, in
histories like Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French
Revolution_, in autobiographies like St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and
Rousseau's _Confessions_, in letters like Madame Lespinasse's and Mrs.
Browning's, in diaries like those of Amiel, in novels by Balzac,
Dickens, Hawthorne, Hardy, Tolstoy, etc.

Some of the best poetry is found in the world's prose fiction. For
example, _The Scarlet Letter_ has as good poetry in it as the _Aeneid_.
Like the old epic, it is made up of great poems connected by extended
portions that belongs to general literature, sections that have not
enough emotion to be regarded as poetry nor are yet arid or passionless
enough to be termed science. But the story of Hester Prynne is poetry as
truly as the tale of Dido, and undoubtedly you cannot refuse the
appellation poetry to the chapter in Hawthorne's novel which describes
how Arthur Dimmesdale gets up in the pulpit and confesses to the
congregation his part in Hester Prynne's guilt. The _Aeneid_ is really a
novel in verse.

We are not often moved by metrical writing as we are by the last part of
the chapter in _David Copperfield_ entitled, "A Greater Loss," where we
see the agonizing grief of the elder Pegotty and of Ham over the
elopement of Emily, Ham's betrothed. You recall the love scene telling
of the meeting of Richard and Lucy in Meredith's novel _The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel_, only as poetry. This is how the passage, which being
rhythmical besides, begins:

     Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on
     the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the
     fields and the waters.

     The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters
     shout to him golden shouts. He comes and his heralds run
     before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and the planes and
     the beeches lucid green, and the pine stems redder gold;
     leaving the brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded barks,
     where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline, and the bramble
     shoots wander amid moist rich herbage, etc.

If the sphere of poetry has thus been widened to include many
compositions in prose formerly excluded, it has, on the other hand, been
narrowed by omitting much in verse that was formerly admitted into the
domain of the Muses. I refer especially to the whole body of unecstatic
philosophical, scientific and theological discourses in verse which
usurp a name not belonging to them; I refer to much descriptive and
narrative verse that lacks the poetic glow; I would exclude nearly all
of the so-called "light," "occasional" and "humorous" verse. Winnow the
voluminous verse writers and but a modicum of poetry remains.

Critics as a rule agree that neither rhythm nor metre makes a literary
performance poetical if the author's soul does not enter into the work,
but they refuse to countenance the corollary that when unrhythmical
prose is used as a medium for the singer's poetical sentiments the
result should also be called poetry. It is an easy matter to arrange any
fine poetical prose in blank verse or irregular rhythmical lines. Just a
few slight verbal changes are necessary. The new product then fulfills
the conditions of the old theory which demands metre or rhythm. Does it
become poetry because of these unimportant changes? No, these do not
work so miraculous an effect upon the writing. It acquires no higher
qualities than it had before in prose.

I hence fail to see why the _Idylls of the King_ should be alone called
poems and not also parts of Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, which Tennyson
paraphrased in blank verse. Malory has, however, been deemed a poet by
some critics and any one who will read the lament over the death of Sir
Lancelot will not begrudge the author that title. One admits that the
_Tales_ of La Fontaine and Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ are very rich in
poetry, but why say that the original prose stories which these poets
often re-tell in verse (undoubtedly improving them by their own genius)
are not? And who will deny the statement that the best of Scott's
novels, say _The Heart of Midlothian_, contains as much, if not more,
poetry than some of his novels in verse like the _Lady of the Lake_?
Even in his day the reviewers saw that there was no difference between
Scott's verse and prose stories as far as the quality of the poetry was
concerned; indeed they saw that there was more of the divine afflatus in
the latter than there was in the former. In fact the _Quarterly Review_
referred to Scott's novels as poems.

One may even say that the great Shakespeare found in the dramas, tales
and chronicles that were his sources some of the poetry we note in his
plays. Especially is this true in regard to his use of Plutarch. Brandes
has pointed out that _Julius Cæsar_ is found in every detail in
Plutarch's Lives of Cæsar, Brutus and Mark Anthony. The dramatist
followed the biographer point for point, repeating word for word
passages of North's translation, accepting the characters as they stood
there and repeating all the leading incidents. If _Julius Cæsar_
contains poetry, as it certainly does in abundance, then surely those
lives of Plutarch which were followed by Shakespeare must also possess
it.

Nor can I understand why the parts of Shakespeare's plays which are in
prose and are often superior to many portions in blank verse should also
not be called poetry. Take the first scene of the fifth act of
_Macbeth_, where Lady Macbeth is walking in her sleep. The entire
section, though prose, is one of the most poetic pieces in the entire
drama. If the passage had been written in blank verse it could not have
been improved. The poetry is there in the scene itself and not in any
possible metre. Other lines might be cited, like Hamlet's remarks to
Guildenstern, who tried to pry out his secret and play upon him as upon
a pipe; or his reflections on what a wonderful piece of work was man; or
his comments over Yorick's skull. All these selections are in
impassioned prose and are as much entitled to the rank of poetry as are
most of the blank verse of the drama. Hamlet's advice to the players
though art criticism, and prose, is so lit up with poetic glamor that it
deserves the name poetry more than the metrical version of some of the
moral commonplaces in the play.

One may ask various questions of the critic who clings to the old
definition that metre or rhythm must accompany poetry. Why should
Conrad's supreme poetic description of a storm at sea in his _Nigger of
the Narcissus_ not be called a poem, when you designate by this word
Virgil's famous description in dactylic hexameters in the first book of
the _Aeneid_? Powerful and deservedly renowned as the Virgil passage is,
I venture to say that it does not as a poem rank higher than some of
Conrad's descriptions. One would wish to be informed where the story of
ingratitude in Balzac's novel _Père Goriot_ is any the less poetical
than that of Shakespeare's verse play _King Lear_. Why is the succession
of ideas in Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ called poetry and not, let us
say, Emerson's essay on _Self-Reliance_? Why call the descriptions of
battles by Homer poems, but not those of Stendhal or Tolstoy or Zola in
_Le Chartreuse de Parme_ or _War and Peace_ or _Le Debâcle_? And how can
you on any pretence refuse to include in the category of poetry De
Quincey's famous prose poems _The Dream Fugue_ and _Levana and Our
Ladies of Sorrow_?

Since the critics would not admit that any unrhythmical prose is poetry,
it is little wonder that Baudelaire founded as a distinct and conscious
form the composition he called "poem in prose." We are told by his
translator, Mr. Sturm, that he had dreamed in his days of ambition "of a
miracle of poetical prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme." He
understood and proved that rhythm was not necessary to poetry. He
derived the idea of this separate form from Poe and Bertrand. He has
been followed by Turgenev, who left us some prose poems which he called
_Senilia_. The reader may recall the love scene in _The House of
Gentlefolk_ and the concluding chapters of _Rudin_ and _Fathers and
Sons_, which are all prose poems. Gorki has written some exquisite prose
poems. One of them, _The March of Man_, is one of the most beautiful
poems ever written. (Translated in _The Cosmopolitan_ for July, 1905.)

Really, every great literary man is a poet, for he is constantly
occupied with ecstasy and human emotions. Do you think Hugo was a poet
only when he chanted in verse and ceased being one when he wrote _Les
Misérables_ or _Notre Dame de Paris_? It is not necessary to use the old
poetical machinery of rhythm, or metaphors or similes, or apostrophe or
personification or any other figure of speech; one may dispense with
allusions to mythology or the use of any but current expressions and
idioms; one may write almost as one talks; and poetry may nevertheless
be produced. When Macpherson in the eighteenth century and Chateaubriand
in the early part of the nineteenth century gave us in imitation of the
old epics the long prose poems _Fingal_ and _Les Martyrs_, respectively,
they sinned artistically only because they were imitators and were
stilted and rhetorical. These books contain excellent poetry in prose;
we to-day can scarcely imagine the vogue they had. Had they been more
natural they would still be read.

I believe the application of the theory of poetry I advocate would work
many changes in literary values. Who can doubt that Ibsen and Balzac are
greater poets than John Hay or Edmund Clarence Stedman, both of whom
have respectable rank elsewhere, the former as a statesman and the
latter as a critic? Yet our system of literary classification stamps
these two as poets because of a few popular and able lyrics in verse,
while Ibsen and Balzac, who wrote in prose, are not even considered
poets, according to academic standards. It is true Ibsen also wrote some
lyrics and a few plays in verse, but he is as much a poet in _The Wild
Duck_ or _The Master Builder_ as he is in _Peer Gynt_ or _Brand_. The
scenes of Oswald losing his mind at the end of _Ghosts_ or of Ella
Rentheim rebuking _John Gabriel Borkman_ for his desertion of her are
magnificent poems. As for the poems of Balzac they are too numerous to
mention. The picture of the miser in _Eugénie Grandet_ is surely poetry.
Balzac regarded his stories _Louis Lambert_, _Séraphita_ and _The Lily
of the Valley_ as poems. Inflated as they occasionally are, they are
suffused with poetical qualities. One could go on selecting poems from
_Cousin Pons_, _The Wild Ass's Skin_, _Lost Illusions_, etc. Balzac and
Ibsen are poets and any definition of poetry that would exclude them as
such is faulty.

Under the new method of distinguishing poets that I seek to promulgate,
many writers will be admitted as such whom the world never dreamt of as
seers. It might astonish some people if I make a claim for Mark Twain as
a poet. But who that has read _Huckleberry Finn_ and recalls the
description of the sunrise on the Mississippi, given in the nineteenth
chapter, will be prone to exclude our greatest imaginative and
philosophical humorist from the ranks of Apollo's servants?

To convince the skeptical, I quote from the famous passage where Huck
fearing he would go to hell if he freed a "nigger" slave, determines to
disclose Jim's whereabouts and writes a note to that effect. We all
recall his mental struggles, how he finally tore the letter, with the
words "All right, I'll _go_ to hell." The few pages telling of the
reflections and memories which led to this decision are certainly
poetry.

     I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim
     before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time,
     sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating
     along, talking and singing and laughing. . . . I'd see him
     standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I
     could go on sleeping; . . . and would always call me honey,
     and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and
     how good he always was.

Our definition allows us to include the author of the few lines
beginning "With malice towards none, with charity towards all" as a
poet. Indeed, I have been anticipated in the claim that Lincoln was a
poet, as the Gettysburg speech has been on several occasions called a
poem.

It may be asserted that it is rather difficult to differentiate the
poetical portions of a prose work from the rest. This same problem
confronts us in verse. Who can point out exactly which lines in the
_Iliad_ are poetry? The fact is that there are passages in both prose
and metrical literature that we unhesitatingly call poems because they
instantly transform us. Just as you never doubted that the speeches of
Andromache are poetical and that the catalogue of the ships is not, so
you will find it no problem to discard the tedious descriptions in
Balzac as unpoetical while you accept the emotional sections as poems.
Just as critics have selected the poems from lengthy metrical works,
choosing the story of Margaret from Wordsworth's _Excursion_, for
example, so they could glean the poems of prose literature.

One objection raised to the use of prose as a poetical vehicle is its
tendency to diffusiveness. It is claimed that here there are always
temptations to digress and become trivial; hence we get the interminable
novels and stupendous treatises which as a rule we do not have in verse.
But one may grow verbose and expatiate too much in metre as well: the
matter rests entirely with the author. Note how ponderous are some of
the old epics, the _Iliad_, the _Divine Comedy_ and _Orlando Furioso_.
In modern times Byron's _Don Juan_, Browning's _Ring and the Book_ and
Mrs. Browning's _Aurora Leigh_ are examples of lengthy stories in verse.
All of these books are more voluminous than the prose plays, essays,
short stories, and novelettes to which we are accustomed. The prose poet
may weed out the trifling incidents and expunge the redundant from his
composition as easily as the verse writer. Wordy insignificant passages
in a literary product are the outcome, not of a particular rhythmical
arrangement, such as prose or verse, but of a want of artistic feeling,
to which even great geniuses are at times subject. It does not follow
that a powerful description or an emotional idea or an impassioned state
of mind need tend to diffusiveness if written in prose. The poet who has
learned self-restraint in composing does not lose his sense of
proportion even when writing in prose.

Nor need we prefer the verse form to prose, because, as it is alleged, a
metrical poem gives us the maximum poetry in the fewest words. It is
true we get an immediate thrill out of a rhymed lyric or sonnet, while
we often have to read a few chapters in a novel to get a similar
sensation. Nevertheless this is not because the lyric or sonnet is in
verse and the novel in prose. It was the intention of the verse poet to
captivate us instantly in these forms. Translate the sonnet or lyric
into the prose of another language and the excitement seizes us just as
quickly. Poe's _Raven_ is known to French readers chiefly in a literal
prose translation. They respond to it as quickly as we do, though they
have to forego the rhyme and the metre. The writer of unrhythmical prose
may concentrate any emotions in a short space if he wishes to do so.
Many brief prose poems in literature are dynamos of emotion. Ecstasy can
be concentrated in a short prose poem as readily as in a verse, lyric
or sonnet. The important thing is that the poet record the sentiments
instantly, avoiding preliminaries.

Yet the bulk of the prose we have will not become poetry because of the
new outlook I suggest. It is after all only at times that we can single
out poems in them. Most prose works of merit fall short of being poetry
as a whole or in parts. The ecstasy or emotion is often not concentrated
in any particular part of the work. The facts, notions or ideas are not
emotionally presented. Yet the volume is literature, and is more akin to
poetry than to science. But it is no discredit to a book because it is
just literature and not poetry.

Gurney in his _The Power of Sound_ calls attention to the fact that when
Lessing defined the limits between the plastic arts and poetry, he made
no distinction between verse and prose in his conception of poetry.
Whatever Lessing says about poetry in the _Laocoon_ applies equally well
to prose. True, he uses Homer as an illustration, but he could just as
well have used a modern novel, for the question of metre is never raised
in determining the province of poetry, which he differentiates from that
of painting. The only place he mentions the prose writer is in the
seventeenth section, where he says that the prose writer usually aims
only after intelligibility and clarity, while the poet seeks also to be
vivid. He does not say that the prose writer may not also be a poet if
he is vivid. In fact this is the very inference. He states also that the
verse writer who aims at producing no illusion but addresses the
understanding is not a poet, instancing Virgil when in the _Georgics_ he
describes a cow fit for breeding.

This is then the singular and most remarkable fact about the _Laocoon_
that the author includes all vivid emotional narrative prose under the
term poetry, which he distinguishes from painting. It is easy to see
that his famous distinction, that objects side by side in space or
bodies with their visible properties are the fit subjects for painting,
while actions or objects which succeed each other in time are the
peculiar subjects of poetry, is really also a distinction between the
plastic arts and the prose novel or short story. Painting, according to
Lessing, was descriptive, poetry was narrative. Now narrative properly
is the object of the novel. It is true Lessing defined poetry in a
limited manner, as if it were only narrative literature; but we are
grateful to him for implying that vivid prose narrative is poetry, and
that poetry extends beyond metrical compositions.

It is commonly said that an emotional piece of prose writing is not
poetry, but the raw material for poetry. Even Arthur Symons calls such
warning only poetical substance. One critic has even designated it as a
sort of bastard writing that is neither prose nor poetry. In fact
rhythmical emotional prose has been a thorn in the academic critic's
side. He has become more confused than ever since the vogue of free
verse, some of which though really prose is beyond question poetry. He
no longer refuses the title of poet to Whitman and he shrinks from
denying that the best free verse is poetry. He feels vaguely that since
prose is also often rhythmical, the old definition of poetry as an
emotional piece of rhythmical writing is faulty, for it must include
also emotional rhythmical prose, and he objects to this inclusion.
Professor Lowes, who, in his _Convention and Revolt in Poetry_,
recognizes the similarity between the rhythm of free verse and that of
prose, unsuccessfully solves the problem by saying that poetry is used
in a loose as well as in a more rigid sense and that free verse is an
artistic medium of not fully developed possibilities. He, like most
critics, falls into the error of saying that we cannot include prose
whenever we speak of poetry. Still we must be grateful to Lowes for his
liberal attitude towards new verse forms.

Critics who say that emotional prose should be metrical to be called
poetry remind us of the paraphrasers of a few centuries ago who put the
Psalms into rhyme. They did not make them poetry, they usually robbed
them of it, and spoiled their effect. Even Milton succumbed to the vice.
And Gosse, in his article on "Lyrical Poetry" in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_, tells us of one Azzi who in 1700 put the book of _Genesis_
into sonnets. Emotional prose, rhythmical or not, is poetry. No one
to-day thinks of employing Matthew Arnold's touchstone theory of poetry
whereby we are to have a few metrical lines of some great poets to apply
as a test as to what is poetry.

It is really strange that with the English prose Bible before them,
critics should have insisted on the metrical element in poetry. And one
must add that parallelisms are not the fundamental features of poetry.
The poetry of Isaiah and David would have been poetry without a single
parallelism. But we need not go to the prophets or the Psalms, where we
have parallelism, for poetry in the Bible: we have it in the narrative
portions, in the stories of Ruth and Joseph. Who does not feel the
poetical emotions surge through him as he comes to the forty-fifth
chapter of _Genesis_, where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers?
Fearing they will be dismayed because they sold him, he assures them
that their criminal deed was just what has enabled him to become a ruler
and save them from starvation. A poet was he who wrote this chapter
beginning with the lines:

     Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all that stood by
     him; and he cried, "Cause every man to go out from me." And
     there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known
     to his brethren, etc.

We must always remember that the emotional appeal whether in prose or
verse is the same to us. We do not get one kind of ecstasy by reading
poetical prose and another kind by reading verse. Our inner soul is
stirred, our aesthetic faculties are touched in the same way if we read
a beautiful love letter like one in prose of Eloise's, or a love poem in
verse. And it may be said here that no poet has improved upon those
prose epistles by changing them into metrical form. An idea colored with
emotion and a beautiful description give us the same effects in prose as
they do in verse. The test of poetry is in our own souls.

We can find poetry in the most unexpected places, and the reader who
wants to look for it will be able to see that poets like Wordsworth and
Whitman were poets in their prose critical prefaces as well as in the
_Lyrical Ballads_ and _Leaves of Grass_. As a matter of fact, Whitman
used paragraphs from his critical essays, word for word, in _Leaves of
Grass_, but arranged in free verse form.

It is true that at times the poetry cannot be distilled, as it were,
from the body of a prose work; a particular passage cannot be lifted up
and called poetry, though it be such (dependent, however, on what goes
before and after). For example, every reader is thrilled with emotion
when he comes to the conclusion of the chapter in _Vanity Fair_, where
Amelia Sedley is praying for George Osborne, who was lying dead on his
face with a bullet through his heart. This line is poetry, but only by
reason of our taking it into consideration with earlier parts of the
novel. It could not be published alone, for it would be meaningless.
But the same is true of poetry in verse. When Horatio says of Hamlet
"now cracks a noble heart," and hopes that flights of angels will sing
him to his rest, the passage is effective only because we have lived
with Hamlet and felt with him and admired him. Printed alone the words
would mean little. The poetry of a great novel, like that of a verse
play, is not always in isolated passages, but in the entire novel or
play from which it cannot be extracted by quotation.

All lovers of poetry cannot help being indebted to Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch, who showed he knew what constitutes poetry when he
composed the famous _Oxford Book of English Verse_. But one is grieved
that one must differ with him when it comes to literary criticism. In
his book on the _Art of Writing_ there is a chapter called "On the
Difference Between Verse and Prose" which justifies inversion of the
natural order of words in verse and affirms that this inversion (of
course along with metre and rhyme at will) is the difference between
verse and prose. He uses the old illustration that rhyme, metre and
inversion help the memory, and that since the first poets sang their
poems to the harp, and music and emotion were introduced, everything is
changed down to the natural order of the words.

Now, aside from the fact that not all of the earliest emotional
compositions were sung to the harp, it is admitted on all sides that
poetry is no longer written primarily to be sung to the harp. Hence
there is no further necessity for this inversion of words. The natural
order of prose should be retained in emotional writing, with occasional
deviations. But most certainly this inversion does not constitute the
difference between poetry and non-poetry even if it often does make
verse different from prose.

Sir Arthur gives us a few lines of Milton in the inverse order in which
they were written and says they are verse with the accent of poetry. He
then rewrites them in prose order. The inference is that they no longer
have that accent of poetry. They are not poetry in the prose version,
however, because they were not poetry in the original verse order. He
takes four lines from the second book of _Paradise Regained_, describing
Christ's ascent up a hill, and gives us a prose paraphrase of them. Here
are the lines as Milton wrote them:

     Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
     From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
     If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
     But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

Here is Quiller-Couch's prose rendering:

     Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from
     its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation--a
     herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see
     nothing of the sort.

This prose paraphrase really proves that the original had no touch of
poetry. Because the passage as written in metre uses poetic diction like
"anon," and "ken," employs inversion like "steps he reared," "none he
saw," it is assumed that the passage must be poetry, but it is not, for
it lacks ecstasy. It is merely one of the prosaic passages in a
composition that contains poems, and is needed to bridge over the poems.

A prose paraphrase or explanation of a verse poem is always interesting
in helping us understand the nature of poetry. For example, Hearn, a
poet himself, took up many English poems and paraphrased and explained
them to his Japanese students. Some of his paraphrases are actually
greater poems than the originals. Most of the great poems in literature
have been analyzed or paraphrased by biographers and commentators. No
one calls these paraphrases poetry. But are we sure that they are not?
Are we certain that none of the original emotion or ideas are left
intact in the paraphrase? On the contrary, I believe that the poetry
still remains in the paraphrase. True, often the manner of expressing an
idea or emotion is what counts in making it poetry, but expression alone
does not make poetry. Even a metrical, emotional and beautiful utterance
of a commonplace idea sometimes becomes poetry, but I cannot concede
that the prose version of a great verse poem may not be poetry if still
emotionally expressed.

Let me take a concrete instance. The following passage from _Paradise
Lost_ is considered, no doubt justly, poetry, because of the idea, the
emotion and the rhythm (academically speaking):

     What though the field be lost?
     All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
     And study of revenge, immortal hate,
     And courage never to submit or yield,
     And what is else not to be overcome.

Let us paraphrase this passage and try to retain the idea, the emotion
and a prose rhythm by just changing a few words.

     And suppose we lost the battle? We have not lost everything.
     We still have our unconquerable will, our plans for revenge,
     our eternal hatred, and courage never to give in or surrender,
     and above all never to be defeated.

Is this passage poetry or not? I submit that it is, if the original is.
It is rhythmical (though it doesn't have to be so), the original idea is
there, and the passion of the speaker has not been rooted out. All this
proves, then, that much of what we call poetry in verse is either not
poetry at all or that there is more poetry in the prose of the world
than we ever imagined.

Is there any poetry in Lamb's _Tales from Shakespeare_? Beyond doubt;
just as there is poetry in the tales and histories from which
Shakespeare drew his plays. Is there not poetry in the critical
discourses about poets where the critic loses himself in the poet's
emotions and becomes that poet and gives you his spirit, as, for
example, Carlyle does in his study of Burns, or Symonds in his _Greek
Poets_?

All this leads to one conclusion: that we should not be concerned as to
whether a piece of literature is or is not something that may be
included in a definition of poetry, but whether it is a humane,
ecstatic, emotional, thoughtful piece of writing. Do not be worried
where the poetry is. Rest assured it is there somewhere, for we should
judge poetry by the effect on us and not by the compliance with rules of
rhythm or any other rules of composition. And all great literature which
has a similar emotional effect upon us, whether it is in verse or prose,
has poetry in it. Walt Whitman did not insist that his _Leaves of Grass_
be called poetry; yet that is what it turns out to be.

The reader may reply that if poetry is to be found to a large extent in
the prose of the world, all distinctions are broken down as to what
poetry is and is not, and you might as well look for it in the stories
in the newspapers. I gladly accept the challenge: there is poetry in the
newspapers. When the _Spoon River Anthology_ appeared many critics said
it was nothing more than a collection of newspaper obituaries, told in
the first person, that differed from news items only in that the lines
were printed as free verse, and that therefore it was no more poetry
than a newspaper story. On the contrary, it would have been poetry had
it appeared as prose in a newspaper.

I have no doubt many readers will recall newspaper stories that moved
them like a poem. Those especially well written ones of love tragedies
are often poetry; by virtue of their ecstatic nature they arouse our
emotions.

The poetry of our day is not monopolized by dabblers in metre and is not
shared exclusively by readers of verse. It is being written by our prose
writers and occasionally by our journalists, and is being read by the
general public. It is not the heritage of the professor or the critic.
The verse poets and readers are not the only lovers of poetry, but the
great public who reads _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _Lorna Doone_ is reading
poetry, albeit not of the highest order.

I do not mean to imply that there is more poetry in the prose writings
of a nation's literature than in its verse writings. The prose writer
usually travels leisurely and waxes ecstatic occasionally. He does not
concentrate his emotions nor seek to depict them immediately. The verse
writer as a rule tries to depict emotions from the start. He is greater
as a poet than many prose writers, because he poetizes, thinking he must
do this naturally in verse, while the prose writer does not believe it
is his duty to do so in prose, but he is often a poet because he cannot
help it. There is more poetry in a volume of Burns or Shelley or Heine
than in a volume of similar length by a prose writer, because these
poets tried to put emotion into every separate portion, no matter how
small. Yet a prose writer can do the same thing if he wants to do so.

Any one who is a great reader of books of travel is impressed by the
fact that in these works there is occasionally literature of ecstasy of
a high order. There are descriptions and narratives recorded with
beauty, vividness, interest; there are reflections, insight into human
nature that often surpass the works of prose fiction and verse poetry we
read. Yet because these works are called "travels," they are not
supposed to contain poems or creative literature. Had the authors given
us as good description in verse, the critics would have called them
poets.

Hearn's books on Japan are after all works of travel, but they contain
poetry or the literature of ecstasy because Hearn was a poet. I am not
claiming for many works of travel a place only as literature, for it is
usually conceded that the best books of travel are literature, but I
urge that many of these books are in parts poetry, and their authors are
poets. It is recognized, however, that Pierre Loti is a poet in his
books of travel. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_ is full of poetry.

_Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver's Travels_ are but works of travel, and
are poetry because of the ecstatic presentation of ideas. You will find
poems in prose not only in the travels of great writers, like Goethe,
Taine, Heine, in the works of old writers who were chiefly travelers,
like Hakluyt, Mandeville, Marco Polo, but in many volumes that have been
published in our own day.

Anthologies of thousands of poems in prose could be compiled. The prose
of every literature is full of poetry, even concentrated poetry, more or
less rhythmical. You may cull poems out of the prose writings of men in
England to-day, from Hardy, Moore, Yeats, Symons, Kipling, Hudson,
Conrad, Galsworthy, Hewlett and D. H. Lawrence.

You can find poetry in various scenes of the great body of prose
dramatists that have grown up in Europe since Ibsen, in Hauptmann, in
Synge, in Chekhov, in Jacinto Benavente, in dialogues where an idea is
fought for or an emotion displayed. It is manifestly absurd to crown
with the name of poetry every petty emotion or description by some
versifier, and deny it to the great dramatists who depict passions and
color great ideas with emotion. No one thought of denying the title of
poets to the dramatists when they formerly wrote in verse. Are you going
to deny it to them because they give us the same, if not a greater
effect in their prose than the old dramatist did in verse?

And I find much poetry, especially in letters, memoirs and biographies.
I find poems in biographies like Bisland's _Hearn_, Meynell's _Francis
Thompson_, Woodberry's _Poe_, Lawton's _Balzac_. I give these more or
less recent books as examples. The works are full of emotional passages
dealing with crucial events in the lives of the subjects. You will find
poetry in famous biographies like Moore's _Byron_, Dowden's _Shelley_,
Forster's _Dickens_, Cooke's _Ruskin_, Bielschowsky's _Goethe_, Froude's
_Carlyle_, etc., to name just the lives of some literary men.

It is particularly pleasing to find poetry in literary prose criticism.
For it was always held that criticism was but a secondary art, rarely
creative in the same sense as poetry, supposed to be a product of the
mind and not the soul, and merely a commentary on poetry. It is true,
formerly poets were often inclined to write their criticism in verse,
thinking that thus it became poetry. But it is only the ecstatic
presentation of critical ideas that makes criticism poetry, whether in
prose or verse. Poets have often described the mission of poetry in
verse, and given us genuine poems. Horace and Verlaine have done this.
But we have had great poetry in the critical work in prose of many
critics. You will find poetry in Carlyle, Ruskin, Goethe, Pater,
Brandes. You will find it in the prose essays of poets very often in
spite of the popular tradition that poets are not good prose writers.

I give two examples. The first is from Swinburne's book on Blake:

     To him the veil of outer things seemed always to tremble with
     some breath behind it; seemed at times to be rent in sunder
     with clamour and sudden lightning. All the void of earth and
     air seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and
     palpitate under the pressure of conscious feet. Flowers and
     weeds, stars and stones, spoke with articulate lips and gazed
     with living eyes. Hands were stretched towards him from beyond
     the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to support, to
     guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest
     allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were
     literal, all literal things symbolic. About his path and about
     his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play
     of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang.
     Spirits imprisoned in the husk and shell of earth consoled or
     menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels; the pulse of
     every minute sounded as the falling foot of God; under the
     rank raiment of weeds, in the drifting down of thistles,
     strange faces frowned and white hair fluttered; tempters and
     allies, wraiths of the living and phantoms of the dead,
     crowded and made populous the winds that blew about him, the
     fields and hills over which he gazed.

The second is from James Thomson's essay on Shelley:

     The only true or inspired poetry is always from within, not
     from without. The experience contained in it has been
     spiritually transmuted from lead into gold. It is severely
     logical, the most trivial of its adornments being subservient
     to, and suggested by, the dominant idea; any departure from
     whose dictates would be the "falsifying of a revelation." It
     is unadulterated with worldly wisdom, deference to prevailing
     opinions, mere talent or cleverness. Its anguish is untainted
     by the gall of bitterness, its joy is never selfish, its
     grossness is never obscene. It perceives always the profound
     identity underlying all surface differences. It is a living
     organism, not a dead aggregate, and its music is the
     expression of the law of its growth; so that it could no more
     be set to a different melody than could a rose-tree be
     consummated with lilies or violets. It is most philosophic
     when most enthusiastic, the clearest light of its wisdom being
     shed from the keenest fire of its love. It is a synthesis not
     arithmetical, but algebraical; that is to say, its particular
     subjects are universal symbols, its predicates, universal
     laws: hence it is infinitely suggestive. It is ever-fresh
     wonder at the infinite mystery, ever-young faith in the
     eternal soul. Whatever be its mood, we feel that it is not
     self-possessed but God-possessed; whether the God came down
     serene and stately as Jove, when, a swan, he wooed Leda; or
     with overwhelming might insupportably burning, as when he
     consumed Semele.

Criticism deals with ideas that relate to life, and when written with
ecstasy on human topics and not on technique it is poetry. The passage
in Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_, beginning with the words "Poetry is
the record of the best and happiest moments, etc.," as well as the
conclusion of Poe's essay on _The Poetic Principle_ are poetry. The
critics here were poets in their prose criticism, no less than in their
rhymed lyrics.

As the reader will fathom by this time, my aim is to free poetry from
its bondage to requirements that were thought essential to it. I object
most emphatically to demands for rhyme, metre, rhythm, alliteration,
assonance, parallelism, repetition of word or phrase or line, tropes or
figures of speech, poetical diction, and any form of pattern. The poet
has the right to use any of the above instruments as he sees fit,
whenever he thinks they enhance the ecstasy in his work. But no critic
has a right to lay down a definition of poetry and insist that metre or
rhythm must be employed by a poet. Professor Mackail in his _Oxford
Lectures on Poetry_ defines poetry as patterned language, formally and
technically, adding that the technical essence of the pattern is the
repeat, and that when there is no repeat there is technically no poetry.
If this definition were true, then passages in the Bible full of poetry,
which use no parallelism, would not be poetry. The pattern does not make
the poem, it often ruins it. While it is true that when excited we
repeat expressions and become rhythmical, we do not do so with
regularity and uniformity. How puerile many poems by savages, and even
by the early civilized Babylonians and Egyptians, sound because the
first impediment of art, the repeat, is employed, and a phrase is
repeated _ad nauseam_ like the words of a child learning how to talk.
(!)

When we shake off our subservience to the pattern in poetry we shall
have little use for the numerous works on the art of writing poetry. We
shall find that many of the old books on poetry written with much
learning by scholars and poets, like Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger,
Vossius, Fabricius, Boileau, Pope, Opitz, Gottsched, Dante, are in part
obsolete. I do not mean that these worthy works have all to be thrown on
the scrap heap. But they laid down absurd rules as to how to write
poetry and how to determine it; they sought to confine it by rules
gleaned from older poets and insisted future poets obey these rules. Yet
great poets, who never even read them, disregarded all their rules and
created great poetry.

The chief thing that can be said for these critics is that they excel
the moderns in scholarship. These learned men represent an almost
extinct class, men who knew all the classics and all the books of
Europe. They make us regret that the day of the man of learning is
over, especially at a time when so many ignorant poets and critics and
reviewers discuss and decide emphatically on many matters wherein a
little learning is not a dangerous thing.


FOOTNOTES:

[42:A] The italics are mine.

[52:A] "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge."
Wordsworth. "The atmosphere wherein all the arts exist is poetry."
Wilhelm A. Ambros: _The Boundaries of Music and Poetry_.




CHAPTER IV

PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY


Wordsworth believed that the language used by people in poetry should be
that of the natural language of men under the influence of their
feelings and that the diction of metrical poetry should differ in no
wise from that of prose. Yet the only writers who use the natural
diction of men are novelists, prose dramatists and short story writers,
and, curiously enough, because they did not write verse, it has not
often been suspected that these men were poets. Wordsworth's views are
really proofs that poetry is found in prose, for the prose writers
comply with his requirements of using in their compositions the natural
conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. They also
comply with Wordsworth's definition of poetry, recording "emotions
recollected in tranquillity."

Hazlitt has ably summed up the influence of the French Revolution on
Wordsworth. Our poet did away with mythological references, with tales
about legendary characters. He wrote about the emotions of the common
people and introduced no far-fetched metaphors, nor made pedantic
allusions.

Wordsworth, however, did not claim, as Coleridge thought he did, that
the language of verse poetry must be that of ignorant people. Wordsworth
never asserted that he wanted the poets to use the language of peasants,
except when peasants were portrayed and represented as speaking. He
simply protested against stilted, artificial language in verse poetry.
He held the use of such language in verse poetry to be ridiculous, as it
was in prose. He was not an exponent of prose poetry, even though he
laid little stress on the importance of metre. As the authors of the
article on Wordsworth in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ state, the
farthest he went in defense of prose structure in poetry was to say that
if the words in verse happened to be in the order of prose, they were
not necessarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not
(unfortunately) try to eliminate metre in poetry. He no doubt agreed
with Coleridge's own defense of meter in the _Biographia Literaria_. He
did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre
and--except in some ballads--a diction that was even literary.

Though both Wordsworth and Coleridge were not overawed by the necessity
of metre in poetry, they believed in its use, and were opposed to prose
poetry. Coleridge, however, wrote a prose poem _The Wanderings of Cain_
and some of his essays are prose poetry. Coleridge also devoted an
entire chapter in his _Biographia Literaria_ to the defense of metre as
a vehicle for poetry. He attributes the origin of metre to the fact that
the mind makes a conscious effort to hold passion in check by fettering
it with regular numbers. On the contrary, this conscious check is due to
imitation of old examples, to fear in defying the critics, for the
natural language of passion is irregular rhythm, and it is impatient of
being confined in regular, artificial numbers. Coleridge thinks the
effect of metre is "to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of
the general feelings and the attention" by the continued excitement of
surprise. I submit that metre often distracts the attention from the
poem's real object, which is to depict ecstasy. Metre often diverts our
ear to the singsong tone in which the emotions are couched. Instead of
adding to the vivacity and susceptibility of the feelings it really
makes us suspect that the poet is not sincere, for the man of emotions
expresses them spontaneously and does not trick them out in pattern.
Next, Coleridge assumes that because of custom, metre must have some
property in common with poetry. This argument cannot stand when we take
into consideration the innumerable emotional passages that have been
written in prose. A custom is only a passing practice, and free verse
writers have abandoned the custom of writing in metre and in many cases
have produced good poetry. Lastly, our critic thinks that every poet is
impelled "to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing
the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be
assimilated to the more important and essential parts." But why assume
that there is no unity of harmonious adjustment in an emotional passage
in prose? Or why identify such unity with a metrical pattern? Isn't a
Psalm in the Bible a unity of harmonious adjustment? Even if the
essential part of a poetic piece tends to assume a certain pattern it
does not mean that the whole piece should be given a patterned form.
Some day it will be recognized that a long composition recording
different emotions is really unaesthetic in a uniform pattern.

"As to the accents of words," says Bacon, in his _Advancement of
Learning_, Book VI, Ch. I, "there is no necessity for taking notice of
so trivial a thing; only it may be proper to intimate that these are
observed with great exactness, whilst the accents of sentences are
neglected; though it is nearly common to all mankind to sink the voice
at the end of a period, to raise it in interrogation, and the like."

This passage is the first attack in English on metre.

It was Whitman who gave the death blow to metre. He brought poetry back
to rhythmical prose, and is the greatest liberator poetry has ever had.
He demonstrated that an entire volume might be written in rhythmical
prose (with the lines broken up), and that the product could be the
highest poetry. His _Leaves of Grass_ ignored all the rules laid down in
various books on poetics. Whitman has done more than most critics to
convey to the world what poetry really is.

"In my opinion," says Whitman, "the time has arrived to essentially
break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the
latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of
rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and
that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium
for inferior writers and themes (especially for persiflage and the
comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something
inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow), the truest and
greatest _Poetry_ (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and
distinguishable enough) can never again, in the English language, be
express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest
eloquence, or the truest power and passion."

We have long been laboring under the mischievous Aristotelian division
of poetry into Epic, Dramatic and Lyric, and critics have exhausted
themselves trying to determine which of these was the highest form of
poetry.

As a matter of fact, the epic poem was only the primitive author's
method of writing a poetical novel centering around wars; or a later
poet's imitation of that form. The dramatic poem was another way of
telling a story without introducing much narration or description.
Poetry does not inhere in an epic of Homer or a play of Sophocles by
virtue of the form, but because of the emotions described, and similar
descriptions of emotions are to be found in our fiction and prose plays.

Again we have followed the ancients in subdividing lyric poetry into
elegy, pastoral, ode, satire, idyll. The moderns introduced the sonnet,
the ballade, the ballad and other forms. These divisions have perverted
our knowledge as to the nature of poetry. Any one can make a similar
classification of the poetry in prose, but it is useless to do so.
Poetry is recorded emotion and depicts various characteristics. The Song
of Deborah is a war song, a hymn and a satire, all in one.

Professor Posnett in his _Comparative Literature_ protested long before
Croce against these artificial divisions in poetry.

Poetry is the voice of excited man; it is as Baumgarten said--"perfect
sensitive speech," a definition that Croce regards as probably the best
ever given of poetry, while Saintsbury scoffs at it. It is immaterial
whether the rhythm is there or not. Prose is always poetry when it is
sensitized. Nietzsche, himself a great poet, also saw this. "Let it be
observed," said Nietzsche, "that the great masters of prose have almost
always been poets as well, whether openly, or only in secret and for the
closet; and in truth one only writes good prose _in view of poetry_." He
names Leopardi, Landor, Emerson and Merimée among the great prose
writers who were poets. We can add many other writers of essays,
dialogues, and criticisms to complement his list.

"The distinction between poetry and prose cannot be justified," said
Croce. "Poetry is the language of sentiment; prose of intellect; but
since the intellect is also sentiment, in its concretion and reality, so
all prose has a poetical side." "There exists poetry without prose, but
not prose without poetry." Poetical material permeates the souls of
all; any expression of it in verse or prose, in painting or music, is
poetry. Since all poetry is expression and all expression lyric, the
divisions of different kinds of poetry into epic, dramatic, etc., or
different divisions of one poem into scenes, books, chapters, acts,
stanzas, paragraphs, are of little importance, and are matters of
convenience.

Poetry is essentially lyrical. There is no such thing as dramatic or
epic poetry. All poetry is the emotional outcry of the poet or his
characters. We may have an emotion recorded in a separate poem called a
lyric, or in a speech in a composition divided into acts, following
certain rules and known as a drama. Similarly the speeches in epic poems
are lyrics. The poetry of Homer or Shakespeare is not epic or dramatic,
for poetry is just an emotional outburst. Andromache's speeches and
Hamlet's soliloquies could have appeared alone and they would have been
considered lyrics; they remain lyrics even in the body of a long
composition. The emotional passages in all prose works are also lyrical
poetry. There is really only one kind of poetry, lyrical poetry, for all
poems are emotional outbursts of an individual. Every imaginative
literary composition, whether in verse or prose, is made up of lyrical
poems, more or less.

One should no more look for a chapter on the drama in a book like this
dealing with poetry than for a treatise on the novel. A drama,
considered merely as a series of scenes bound together by a plot in a
fit manner to be presented on the stage to move people, and based on
rules that relate to economy of words, concentration of facts and
strikingness of action, is a performance that has a technique of its
own; the dramatist is a poet only by virtue of the ecstasy he puts in
the work. Considered in its primary significance as a performance where
action is the chief feature, the drama becomes poetry in those parts
where the action and emotion are concentrated.

It is, however, often difficult to extract scenes from the play, as they
lose in effectiveness by being thus separated. But the fact remains that
there is no such thing as dramatic poetry, for the essence of all poetry
is its lyricism. Dramatic scenes contain the lyric cries of the
_dramatis personæ_. Action is but the emotional disturbances of the
characters and no longer merely means violent conduct, surprises,
battles, duels, suicides, murders. All great novels have dramatic scenes
and they are often as exuberant in poetry as are similar scenes in
plays. We no longer regard as tragedies only those plays in verse where
a virtuous person of high degree is in a frightful predicament because
of unjust and unlooked-for defeat with fate. No, in spite of Aristotle,
the suffering of even a wicked person of low station, depicted as due to
his own fault as of Hurstwood in _Sister Carrie_, and described in prose
narrative, is also tragedy. There is incidentally no such thing as a
comic dramatic poem, but a comic scene may be poetic if it moves to
ecstasy (not merely to farcic laughter), and if it is essentially
lyrical. Comedy also appears in works of fiction in prose, and may be
poetical. Moreover, most performances in prose dialogue or fiction
present an admixture of tragic and comic.

Tragedy often presents lyric poems greater than any other work of
literature; hence Aristotle and his imitators concluded that a verse
tragedy was the highest form of poetry. This is not so. If Shakespeare
and Sophocles lived in our day they might have written novels or essays,
and I daresay with their genius those novels or essays would have been
as good as their plays and would have contained as great poetry.

Our great poets do not owe their greatness to the use of the
stereotyped literary metrical forms. A man may have a great gift for the
use of these forms and not be a great poet, just as he may be a great
poet and fall flat when they encumber him. Ruskin and Dickens were great
poets, but when we say that their metrical compositions were not great
poetry we merely mean that they were not adept in choosing rhymes and
complying with metrical rules. To do this requires a distinct gift. An
amateur selects forced rhymes and has no ear. Swinburne, besides being a
great poet, had a distinct gift of creating melodious verse; but many
parodists have shown that they also had this gift without being able to
write poetry.

Mrs. Browning was a good poet both in verse and in prose. She wrote her
love poems in prose in her letters to her husband, and in verse in the
Portuguese sonnets which are nothing more than some of the letters put
into metre and rhyme; there are some who think that the letters are the
better poetry of the two. Her sentiments did not become poetry because
they were put in sonnet form.

The following letter is poetry:

     I pour out my thoughts to you, dearest, dearest, as if it were
     right rather to think of doing myself that good and relief,
     than of you who have to read all. But you spoil me into an
     excess of liberty by your tenderness. Best in the world!
     Oh--you help me to live--I am better and lighter since I have
     drawn near to you even on this paper--already I am better and
     lighter. And now I am going to dream of you . . . to meet you
     on some mystical landing place . . . in order to be quite well
     to-morrow. Oh--we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing
     grieves us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we
     are touched in _ourselves_ . . . in the apple of our eye . . .
     in the quick of our heart . . . in _what_ you are and _where_
     you are . . . my own dearest beloved! So you need not be
     afraid for _me_. We all look to our own, as I to _you_; the
     thunderbolts may strike the tops of the cedars, and, except in
     the first part, none of us be moved. True it is of me--not of
     you perhaps, certainly you are better than I in all things.
     Best in the world you are--no one is like you. Can you read
     what I have written? Do not love me less! Do you think that I
     cannot feel you love me, through all this distance? If you
     loved me less, I should know, without a word or sign. Because
     I live by your loving me! (June 24, 1846.)

It took the Greeks and Romans some time to learn that prose was the best
medium for philosophy and history. Plato had the good sense to write in
prose instead of following the ridiculous method of versifying of the
early Greek philosophers, like Parmenides and Empedocles.

In the first century A.D. various Roman historians wrote of historical
events in the form of epic poems. These are really histories with a
little occasional glimmer of poetry. Thus we had Silius's _Pontica_,
Valerius Flaccus's _Argonautica_, Statius's _Thebais_, and Lucan's
_Pharsalia_. The last two works were especially admired in the medieval
ages when rhymed or metrical historical chronicles were the fashion, and
they were favorites of Dante. Very few people to-day read these metrical
histories. English literature also is full of metrical and rhymed
histories, geographies, criticisms, scientific works, essays, etc. But
no one reads Warner's _Albion's England_, Drayton's _Poly Olbion_, or
Daniel's _First Four Books of the Civil War_. And Darwin's versified
_Botanical Garden_ has been a standing joke.

It is remarkable how past usages in literature influence us. The
examples of Lucretius versifying philosophy in his _Nature of Things_,
and that of Horace writing literary criticism in verse in his _Art of
Poetry_, have been fruitful of mischief. Even much of the lengthy works
of Shelley, Byron and Browning would have been better had they been
written in prose, and they would have lost none of their poetic
qualities. The greatness of the _Ring and the Book_, _Don Juan_ and the
_Revolt of Islam_ remains when these works are translated into the prose
of another language.

The French have perfected the art of poetical prose,[86:A] or prose
poetry, probably more than any other nation. The reason may be that they
have not been prolific of good poetry in verse, and have instead
reserved their poetry for prose, a more natural medium than Alexandrine
lines.

Fénelon was one of the first moderns who attacked verse. In two critical
works, _Dialogues on Eloquence_ and _Letters to the French Academy_
(there is an English translation of both, out of print), he emphasized
the insignificant part played by versification in poetry. He held that
there was no true eloquence without a due mixture of poetry, that poetry
was the very soul of eloquence. He said that there were many poets who
were poetical without making verses, and he considered versification
distinct from poetry. In his definition of poetry he excluded a
consideration of versification. He thought the perfection of French
verse impossible, that versification loses more than it gains by rhyme,
and that French poets were cramped by versification. He wanted
superfluous ornaments removed and the necessary parts turned into
natural ornaments. Still he did not insist on a complete abandonment of
rhyme, but wanted greater freedom. His biographer, St. Cyr, says that
Fénelon wanted to abolish verse altogether in French poetry. Fénelon
also wrote a novel in prose poetry in 1699, _Télémaque_. But prose
poetry existed in France before him, in old romances like the story of
_Aucassin and Nicolette_ and in Bossuet's funeral orations. His example
was followed by Sainte Pierre, in _Paul and Virginia_, by Prévost in
_Manon Lescaut_, by Rousseau and especially by Chateaubriand in _Atala_,
_The Genius of Christianity_ and _The Martyrs_. Unfortunately, Fénelon
insisted in introducing the clichés of verse into prose; artificial and
unnatural language hence ruined some of his work and assisted in
bringing the term prose poetry into contempt.

The French have always regarded the poet in a broader sense than have
the English. The article on poetry in the French Encyclopedia deals with
prose poems as well as with verse poems. Victor Hugo in his
_Shakespeare_, when he calls the lists of poets, mentions prose writers
like Diderot, Rousseau, Balzac, Chateaubriand, George Sand, Le Sage and
Cervantes. He who was himself a great poet knew that poetry did not
depend on metre.

Eugene Véron, the great French critic, author of a valuable work on
_Æsthetics_ (fortunately translated into English), also takes a broad
conception of the term poetry. He says that it would be absurd to deny
Molière's _L'Avare_ is poetry because it is in prose, for poetical,
creative imagination and personal emotions are at work here. He states
that there was poetry in the story of Don Juan before Corneille put it
in verse. Versification, he urges, does not constitute poetry. He sees
that verse would not have improved such prose poems as _Paul and
Virginia_, _La Mare au Diable_, or _L'Oiseau_ (Michelet), and he places
in the front rank of poetry passages from Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet
(no doubt referring to some of the famous funeral orations) and
Mirabeau. He also says it is impossible to refuse to see poetic
character in the novel, for this deals with the creation of character
and the portrayal of passions.

I do not wish to go into the prose poetry written by other nations, for
every literature is full of it.

There is a growing tendency in England to encourage prose poetry.[88:A]
De Quincey having made a special plea for impassioned prose is looked
upon as the father of it, though there was prose poetry in English
literature from the earliest times; Malory, Sidney, Sir Thomas Browne,
Raleigh, Drummond, Milton, Bunyan, Taylor and Fuller were great prose
poets.

John Stuart Mill and Lord Beaconsfield both recognized the utterly
negligible rôle of metre in determining the nature of poetry. In an
early essay, originally published before he was thirty and collected
with another under the title _Poetry and Its Varieties_, Mill gives us
his definition of poetry. Guided by a statement of the author of the
_Corn Law Rhymes_, Ebenezer Elliot, that poetry is impassioned truth,
and by another definition from Blackwood's, that poetry is "man's
thought tinged by his feelings," he says, "Every truth which a human
being can enunciate, every thought, even every outward impression, which
can enter into his consciousness, may become poetry when shown through
any impassioned medium, when invested with the coloring of joy, or
grief, or pity, or affection, or admiration, or reverence, or awe, or
even hatred, or terror: and, unless so colored, nothing, be it as
interesting as it may, is poetry." There is nothing said in this
definition about rhythm or metre, and indeed Mill regarded as the
vulgarest of all any definition of poetry which confounds it with
metrical composition.

An idea emotionally treated becomes poetry whether in prose or verse,
whether rhythmical or not. Mill understood that, yet he erred when he
assigned a minor rôle to the emotions excited by the incidents in prose
fiction, though it is true that the emotions of excitement wakened by
the mere novel of adventure are indicative of a lower order of poetry.
It is to be regretted, however, that about five years later he somewhat
modified his main views.

Prose poetry was consciously written by Lord Beaconsfield, who tells us
in the early preface to his novel, _Alroy_, that he was trying to write
rhythmical prose poetry in that novel. He did not always succeed, but
throughout all his novels are found many excellent prose poems. He was
writing prose poetry in the early eighteen thirties before Baudelaire,
and in some of his tales, like _Pompanilla_, we have prose poems. He
often became bombastic, but he was a poet, nevertheless.

Later English critics have returned to the subject of prose poetry.

In his _Aspects of Poetry_ Professor John C. Shairp says that he grants
"that the old limits between prose and poetry tend to disappear." He
concludes his book with two chapters on prose poets, on Carlyle and
Newman. And Courthope, worshipper of metre that he is, concludes his
_History of English Poetry_ with a chapter on the poetry in the Waverly
Novels. We also recall that Bagehot could see little difference between
Tennyson's novels in verse and George Eliot's novels in prose.

A great critic like Pater maintained the rights of the poet in prose. In
his essay on Style he said "Prose will exert in due measure all the
varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero,
Michelet, or Newman, gives its musical value to every syllable."

The first lengthy and systematic plea for prose poetry I know of in
English, outside of Disraeli's and De Quincey's modest apologies for
writing in this manner, was made by David Masson in an essay on _Prose
and Verse: De Quincey_, published as a review of De Quincey in 1854. De
Quincey's preface, pleading for impassioned prose, suggested Masson's
essay. Masson had, however, dwelt on the poetic side of prose the year
before in an article on Dallas's _Poetics_, called _Theories of Poetry_.
Both of Masson's essays are to be found in his _Wordsworth, Shelley,
Keats and Other Essays_. Masson very ingeniously asks why we are not
allowed to write prose in the manner that Milton writes in verse, or in
the manner of Æschylus in prose translation. He concludes that poetry
and prose are not two entirely separate spheres, but intersecting and
penetrating. To-day we go even farther than Masson and urge that prose,
except in short lyrics when verse may be used, should be the sole
language of passion and the imagination. He vindicates De Quincey's
right to use impassioned prose; he quotes as an example of prose poetry
a beautiful passage from the conclusion of Milton's pamphlet, _Causes
That Have Hindered the Reformation in England_, and mentions especially
Jean Paul Richter, the prose poet who was responsible for the prose
poetry of two disciples, De Quincey and Carlyle. Richter's _Christ and
the Universe_ is highly regarded by him as prose poetry.

Masson's prediction that the time was coming when the best prose should
more resemble verse than it had done in the past, and that the best
verse should not disdain a certain resemblance to prose, is being
fulfilled. Remember Masson wrote before the _Leaves of Grass_ appeared,
and before the vogue of free verse.

Yet his viewpoint was severely criticized by a scholar like John Earle,
whose _English Prose_ contains an attack on prose poetry. Earle says
that prose poetry is found chiefly in ages of literary decadence like
the Latin Silver Age in writers from Tacitus to Boethius. On the
contrary, it is found as well in the golden ages of literature, as, for
example, in Sidney's _Arcadia_, which he himself quotes from, in Plato,
in Pascal, in Dante's prose. It is strange that this view of Earle's
should still largely prevail. Poetry and prose are still regarded by
academic scholars like Earle, Saintsbury, Courthope, Bosanquet
Watts-Dunton and Gummere as two distinct branches of literature. Earle
is right only when he objects to the clichés of verse in prose, but
to-day we object to all clichés.

Poetic prose, however, should not be used on every occasion, but only
when an ecstasy is to be expressed. And, above all, it should be
avoided--and this is how prose poetry got into disrepute--in expressing
sentimental emotions, commonplace ideas, and the merely popular. When we
read in eloquent prose, the grand eulogies on the flag, on the purity
and redeeming virtues of mother-love, on the dignity of toil, on the
glory of dying for one's country, on the goodness of God, etc., themes
which have been celebrated so often that they are nauseous to us because
nothing new is said, then we see how ridiculous prose poetry may become.

But as Pater says--impassioned prose has become the special and
opportune art of the modern world, and it can exert all the varied
charms of poetry down to the rhythm.

"The muse of prose-literature," says Masson, "has been hardly dealt
with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be much of that license
in the fantastic, that measured riot, the right of whimsy, that
unbalanced dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world
allows, by prescription, to verse. Why may not prose chase forest-nymphs
and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in peonies and musk-roses,
and invoke the stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the sea
thundering through caverns and dashing against the promontories? Why,
in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly in the one hand, or blush with
shame at too much of the exquisite on the other? Is Prose made of iron?
Must it never weep, never laugh, never linger to look at a butterfly,
never ride at a gallop over the downs?"

Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his
_Avowals_ that the greatness of English genius does not appear in its
prose, but in its poetry, i. e., in verse. The greatness of English
genius _is_ in its poetry, but in the poetry of its prose as well as in
the poetry of its verse. It appears in the ordinary dialect of its
novels and prose plays.

As a matter of fact, poetic prose has always been used. It is found in
the earliest as well as the later literature of every nation. The Bible,
Oriental Literature, the medieval romances, early Saxon prose are full
of it. It made a reappearance with renewed force in the romantic
movement that spread over England, Germany and France in the latter part
of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. In an age
like the romantic, when the right to live and express emotions was
pleaded, poetic prose, seeking restraint from metre, was especially
appropriate. George Brandes has studied this movement in his _Main
Currents_. Many of the leading writers of the romantic period used
impassioned prose. Saintsbury has found much poetry even in the prose of
John Wilson, who is not much read, one who was to some extent an enemy
of the romantic movement, and Saintsbury reprints in his _Specimens of
English Prose Style_, Wilson's _The Fairy's Funeral_.

America has contributed greatly to the development of prose poetry.
Hawthorne, Poe and Emerson were the first great masters in prose poetry
we have had, and I doubt if as poets they have been surpassed by any of
our metrical verse writers. One of the finest poems in American
literature is undoubtedly Hawthorne's reflections of his lonely life in
the Ivory Tower, when he revisited his old chamber in Salem where he
spent so many years. The famous passage from his diary, quoted in all
big biographies, is as great a poem, though in prose.

Emerson's essays are studied with prose poems. I shall mention only one,
the address to the poet, at the conclusion of the essay on "The Poet."

The Hawthorne passage is as follows:

     Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).--. . . . Here
     I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in
     days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,--many that
     have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the
     same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for
     thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it;
     and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever
     I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of
     this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth
     was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed;
     and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been
     despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently
     for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did
     not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at
     all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it
     seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life
     enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at
     least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the
     possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my
     lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud
     roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and
     forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought
     preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin
     to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this
     lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the
     viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape
     into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been
     covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become
     callous by rude encounters with the multitude. . . . But
     living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still
     kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . .
     I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings,
     and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!
     . . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with
     real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the
     thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched.
     That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are
     beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . .

And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith:

     O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures,
     and not in castles or by the sword-blade any longer. The
     conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world,
     and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the
     times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but
     shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled
     from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal
     hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants,
     and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate
     a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that
     others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and
     shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others
     shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie
     close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the
     Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations
     and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a
     fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and
     sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and
     thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console
     thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to
     rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old
     shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the
     ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual
     world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not
     troublesome to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the
     sole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and
     navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the
     rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein
     others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord!
     sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or
     birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever
     the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever
     are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
     into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and
     love,--there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and
     though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be
     able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.


FOOTNOTES:

[86:A] See the selections in _Pastels in Prose_ (1890), and the
sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.

[88:A] See _The Chapbook_, April, 1921, London. _Poetry in Prose_, Three
Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard Aldington.




CHAPTER V

PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY


One of the frequent sayings in the text books of literary history is
that the literature of a nation always begins with poetry in verse, and
that good prose is a later development. England and Greece are
especially cited as examples, since Homer lived before Herodotus and the
author of _Beowulf_ before King Alfred.

Scholars follow one another often like sheep. When a man of prominence
utters an idea, it is taken up by a disciple and soon becomes a
convention. The academic critics and professors usually enshrine the
idea and it becomes a heresy to question it. The best illustration of
this is the almost universal adherence given to the idea that verse
poetry came before prose, a view first set forth by the geographer
Strabo in speaking of Homer in the beginning of his _Geography_. His
views were not entertained, I believe, by Plato or Aristotle. The
passage is worth quoting as I know of no other in literature that has
raised so much confusion and misapprehension as to the nature of poetry:

     Prose discourse--I mean artistic prose--is, I may say, an
     imitation of poetic discourse; for poetry as an art first came
     upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then came
     Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, with prose
     writing in which they imitated the poetic art, abandoning the
     use of metre, but in other respects preserving the qualities
     of poetry. Then subsequent writers took away, each in his
     turn, something of these qualities, and brought prose down to
     its present form, as from a sublime height. In the same way we
     might say that comedy took its structure from tragedy, but
     that it also has been degraded from the sublime height of
     tragedy to its present "prose-like" style, as it is called.
     _Geography_, 1. 2. 6.

Most critics have accepted this view. Scaliger, however, in the middle
of the sixteenth century repudiated it. He asked whether the first
so-called poems, the metrical records in temples, antedated everyday
speech.

Strabo was led to his error by the fact that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
were among the very few survivals of the end of an epoch of verse
poetry, and also because some of the pre-Socratic philosophers like
Parmenides and Empedocles wrote in verse. Now scholars are all agreed
that the authors of the Homeric poems had many predecessors in the art
of composing poetry for many ages back down into legendary times. The
perfected poems in a pattern as regular as the dactylic hexameter were a
stage of evolution and did not spring up out of the darkness of an age
which had no literature. The Delphians claim that their first priestess
invented the dactylic hexameter; the Delians said that Olen, a mythical
singer from Asia Minor, first used it, but it was, of course, a
development. Prose was not a development from verse, as Strabo thought.
On the contrary, all verse, including Greek verse, was a development
from rhythmical prose. The stories about Troy were first told in prose;
next they were sung in ballads; then they were combined into epics.

Musæus, one of the earliest legendary poets, antedating Homer, was said
to have composed prose.

As the earliest literatures of most nations have not been preserved to
us, we can examine various literatures in their earliest stages only; we
shall in almost every case find that these are written in rhythmical
prose or possess the beginning of a pattern hardly differing from
rhythmic prose. It is against all human experience to conclude that an
elaborate work of art following laws of measure could precede the
production in prose that represents the transcription of the natural
language of people which is in prose. We shall discover, however, that
in some cases, like the _Sagas_ of Iceland, we have in prose, the very
first poetical compositions, while other poetical compositions, like the
epics of Ireland, show us the prose along with the metrical development
in the body of the compositions.

First let us briefly note the characteristics of the poetry of natural
savages. This is always in rhythmical prose, or free verse, and this may
be seen in the anthology of Indian poems collected by Cronyn in _The
Path of the Rainbow_. The writer of the preface, Mary Austin, ventures
the opinion that the writers of free verse poems in America are merely
returning to the primitive form of poetry written by the native
Americans. Similarly the emotional outbursts of native African tribes
are in rhythmical prose. The only form of pattern in the poems of
savages as well as of people in an early stage of civilization is a
tendency to repeat the same phrase. But in their most emotional stories,
fables and legends, in their proverbs and crude moral and religious
philosophizing they use plain prose. This prose, especially that of the
legends, contains their first poetry, and of course there is no pattern
here. The pattern, assuming the form of irregular rhythm and repetition
of phrase, appears chiefly in hymns and chants, and these are only two
aspects of poetry.

The first change that occurs in a later stage of the hymn is that the
phrase or clause, instead of being repeated exactly, is varied by a
change of words, having a similar import. In short, we have the
beginning of parallelism. There is parallelism in the poems of all
early civilizations. It reaches its fullest development in an age of
civilization, as we observe in the poems of the Bible.

Probably the oldest poetry we have is that of the Egyptians and the
Babylonians, and there is no regular metre of any kind in these except
parallelism. The works are all irregularly rhythmical and in many cases
the lines are arranged like modern free verse, to call attention to this
irregular rhythm.

Dr. James H. Breasted, speaking of the Pyramid Texts, in his _Religion
and Thought in Ancient Egypt_, says: "Among the oldest literary
fragments in the collection are the religious hymns and these exhibit an
early poetic form, that of couplets displaying parallelism in
arrangement of word, and thought--the form which is familiar to all in
the Hebrew Psalms as 'parallelism of members.' It is carried back by its
employment in the Pyramid Texts in the fourth millennium B.C., by far
earlier than its appearance anywhere else. It is indeed the oldest of
all literary forms known to us. Its use is not confined to the hymns
mentioned, but appears also in other portions of the Pyramid Texts,
where it is, however, not usually so highly developed."

All the poems of the Egyptians were written simply in rough, irregular
lines of rhythmical prose. Read the famous _Song of the Harper_ where an
epicurean life is praised; it is impassioned rhythmical prose. Take up
the love poems, elegies, fairy tales and prayers of the ancient
Egyptians. They have no device of metre, rhythm or rhyme. The only
pattern is the parallelism. A few hymns are arranged in stanzas of ten
lines with a break in the middle of each line, but no definite metrical
laws existed for the lengths of lines or number of feet, so as to make a
uniform rhythmical pattern of the composition.

The Egyptians wrote much of their poetry in parallelistic prose. If we
do not know how they pronounced their vowels, we know enough of their
literature to see that regularity of accents and equal numbers of
syllables were not characteristic of their poetry.

The epic of _Gilgash_, the chief poem of the Babylonians, and the
various hymns translated by Professor Langdon, are all in irregular
rhythmical prose. These may be older than the poetry of the Egyptians,
but in form they are a great deal alike--simply prose with a rough
rhythm, frequent parallelism, but no uniform device. The lines are
arranged often like free verse. "It is difficult to draw the line
between their poetry and the higher style of prose," says Francis
Brown.[100:A] "There is a primitive freedom and lack of artificiality in
the poetic movement, much greater than in the Hebrew Psalms. Metre is
felt and observed at times, but then abandoned--the thought carrying
itself along beyond the strict boundaries of metrical division."

We have seen that critics find in the hymns of the Egyptians and
Babylonians the irregular rhythm and parallelisms of the Psalms, in
short, impassioned rhythmical prose.

Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the Bible.

W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of the Old
Testament," posthumously collected in _Lectures and Essays_, showed that
Hebrew poetry was rhythmic without possessing laws of metre, for the
rhythm of thought created a naturally rhythmic prose. Rhythm is the
measured rise and fall of feeling and utterance, to which the rhythm of
sound is subordinate. Prosodic rules are not necessary, "for the words
employed naturally group themselves in balanced members, in which the
undulations of the thought are represented to the ear." When poetry
becomes more artificial people do not trust to the rhythm of thought but
attribute importance to metre and finally "we are apt to forget its
essential subordination to rhythmic flow of thought."

There has been no more amusing game than the ever-renewed attempt to
find metres in the Bible. One of the most ridiculous claims, at one time
widely in vogue, was that the Greek metres were to be found in the
Bible. Vossius and the younger Scaliger denounced these views, first
advanced by Josephus and Philo.

We are beginning to see to-day that the chief characteristic of the form
of the poetry in the Bible is parallelism in irregular rhythm.

Dr. König and other scholars agree that it is this irregular rhythm
based on accent of syllable that distinguishes Hebrew poetry. Each line
had a number of accented syllables ranging from two to five, but the
lines did not regularly or alternately have the same number of accented
syllables. The unaccented syllables were also not counted. The poem
became nothing more than rhythmical prose. Sir George A. Smith says, in
his _The Early Poetry of Israel_, that the Hebrew poets indulged
deliberately in the metrical irregularities of verse. They deviated more
than Shakespeare, who did not always confine himself to the iambic foot
and pentameter line in his blank verse. "In every form of Oriental art
we trace the influence of what may be called Symmetrophobia, an
instinctive aversion to absolute symmetry, which if it knows no better,
will express itself in arbitrary and even violent disturbances of the
style or pattern of the work." The more correct view, however, is that
this symmetry was never intended by the Hebrew poets; that the
irregular arrangement of accents with occasional symmetry was the rule.

Both Smith and König cite G. Dalman, who says that this irregular rhythm
is found in the songs of Arabia to-day sung in Palestine. These songs
are made up of lines of from two to five syllables, of which one to four
are unaccented, the poet being bound by no definite numbers. This is the
irregular rhythm of Hebrew poetry, and also, by the way, of the
_Nibelungen Lied_. It is the rhythm of all early poetry, the Egyptian
and Babylonian.

But even those who have given up the hope of finding metres in Hebrew
poetry insist that a regular metrical form was used for the Kinoth or
lamentations. Professor Budde held that the Kinoth had a regular metre.
But the discovery merely amounted to this: that a long line was followed
regularly by a short line. There was no uniformity of accented syllables
in successive or alternate lines. There are two, three and four
syllables in them almost at the will of the poet.

We may then conclude that rhythm is never regular in the poetry of the
Bible.

All ancient Hebrew poetry was in rhythmical prose; prophecies, elegies,
songs, hymns, parables, and dialogues. The irregular rhythmical form was
a natural outflow of the ecstatic element.

But what about the parallelism? Does this make the Bible verse? Bishop
Lowth, in his _Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews_, delivered
at Oxford in the middle of the eighteenth century, no doubt performed
great service in calling attention to the parallelisms of Hebrew poetry.
The importance of these in ancient Hebrew poetry has, however, been
overestimated. Parallelism did not create poetry, but was often its
garment. There are passages employing parallelisms that are not poetry,
while many poems exist in which these are not used. Dr. Edward König, in
his article on Hebrew Poetry in the _Jewish Encyclopedia_, concludes
that the poets of the Bible were not bound by parallelism, often setting
it aside and not using it.

In his account of _The Literary Study of the Bible_, Professor Richard
G. Moulton has given an excellent study of the parallelism of the Bible,
but he admits that parallelisms of clause are also prose devices. If
parallelism, then, is also a property of prose, we cannot say that
parallelism alone is sufficient to distinguish poetry from prose, or
even Hebrew poetry from Hebrew prose. Moulton finds that prose and
poetry overlap each other in the Bible. All this merely proves that
parallelisms were no doubt anciently used to differentiate prose
literature conveying emotions from prose literature barren of feeling.
But parallelism was not indispensable to the literature of ecstasy.

Yet we cannot deny the fact that parallelisms occur in the Bible with
such frequency as almost to have become a pattern of Hebrew poetry.
Bishop Lowth thought the origin of the parallelism was due to the system
of chanting hymns where there was a response by the congregation, and
that the practice of the parallelism soon extended to all poetry. But,
for example, proverbs from their very epigrammatic nature tend towards
parallelism. The origin was most likely due to the variations of phrase
introduced by individuals who tired of the incessant, silly repetition
of similar words such as are indulged in by savages.

There is parallelism in all poetry, in _Beowulf_ and the _Kalevala_, and
even in prose. For it must be admitted that under emotion a man tends to
repeat an idea, in the same or in a synonymous language.

There can be no doubt that parallelism was consciously and deliberately
indulged in by the Hebrew poets, but it is as absurd to confuse it with
Hebrew poetry as to confuse metre with English poetry. There are
poetical passages in the Bible containing no parallelisms. It should
also be borne in mind that parallelism developed as a perfect pattern
when poetry was at a high stage. Like all patterns it was a product of a
type of civilization. No rude state of society can develop a pattern,
which is the result of evolution.

Parallelism is not used frequently to-day as a pattern of verse, though
it can be found in all modern literature. Yet it is a more natural means
of expressing one's emotions than rhyme or metre.

The only pattern of importance, then, that appears extensively in the
Bible is that of parallelism. There is no pattern of rhythm at all, for
this is free. The result is that the poetry of the Bible is in what may
be called prose, for the repetition of the idea and language in the
parallelism is natural even in prose. Parallelism in the Bible did not
create a distinct branch of literature called verse, as metre did. Those
Psalms that have parallelism are very little different from those Psalms
where it is absent. They are both really prose.

It was unfortunate that Hebrew poetry later eschewed the rhythmic prose
used in the Bible and adopted first rhymed prose and then rhymed metre.
There were several circumstances that led to this.

It has been usually recognized that rhymed prose was first used among
the Hebrews in the Liturgy by Jannai, who flourished in the seventh
century. Metre was introduced in the tenth century by Dunash ben Labrat.
Both these poets followed Arabic models. Saadyah, the Hebrew
philosopher, blamed Dunash for having ruined the beauty and naturalness
of the Hebrew language for poetry. Even Jehudah HaLevi, the great
national poet who used Arabic meters, regretted, in his philosophical
work, _Hacuzari_,[105:A] that these foreign Arabian influences should
prevail among the Hebrew poets.

The oldest Arab poetry was also in prose. The earliest pattern for
poetry among the Arabians was the Saj (cooing), or rhymed but unmetrical
prose. Goldziher calls the Saj the oldest form of poetic speech; it
continued to exist even after the regular metres were established, the
Koran, for instance, being in Saj. At first it was unrhymed, as
Goldziher says; the earliest Arabic poetry was in unmetrical prose.

From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly metrical, and forms
the transition to the artificial Arabic meters.

The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of the
_Muallaqat_, composed before Mohammed, are so perfect in form that all
Arabic scholars assume they were produced after a long period extending
through many years of poetic practice. They were not rude products, but
had an historical background, as did the _Iliad_. They are written in
perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj is older than these.

We have two other proofs that poetry was in early times written in
rhythmical prose, or at least in a rhythm that makes only a slight
approach to metre. These are to be found in two of the oldest Aryan
literary monuments extant, the _Rigveda_ of India and the _Avesta_ of
Iran.

Two-fifths of the hymns of the _Rigveda_ are composed in a metre called
trishtubh, the most frequent measure in the _Veda_. It is made up of
stanzas of four lines, each of eleven syllables, the last four of which
only have to follow a pattern, this consisting of two iambuses or an
iambus and a spondee. This requirement left a good deal of liberty to
the poet. Here is an example of it, in the _Hymn to Dawn_, in
MacDonnels' _Sanskrit Literature_ (P. 83):

     Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us:
     Darkness has gone away and light is coming.
     She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel:
     We have arrived where men prolong existence.

Max Müller in his translation in prose has adhered in many cases to the
original metre, and the reader feels he is reading prose. The Hindus,
like the free verse writers, merely arranged their lines to call
attention to the rhythm, but it was really prose employing metrical
rules only at the end of the line. It has none of the hampering
qualities of classic or English metres, or of the metres in the later
Indian epics when the quantity of every syllable was determined.

The _Rigvedas_ are fixed by some scholars at 1500 B.C.

When we come to the _Avesta_ of the Iranians who left India and wrote
their work in a language that is almost Sanskrit, we find more liberty
as regards the metres. The _Gathas_, which are said to be the oldest
portions of the work, the work of Zoroaster himself, have the same or
nearly the same kind of metre as the Vedic hymns, but there is greater
liberty. The syllables need not be of a uniform quantity at the end of
the line, but each line, as in the _Rigvedas_, also has the same number
of syllables. The third of the five _Gathas_ uses the trishtubh or most
frequent metre of the _Veda_, four lines of eleven syllables, but
without restrictions as to quantity of final vowels.

Of course the reader can see that such verse is really prose, for there
are no limitations as to when accent or quantity should uniformly be
used. L. H. Mills in his translation of the _Gathas_ keeps close, as he
tells us, to the original metres. He wisely breaks up the metrical line,
based merely on the counting of syllables, and the result reads like
prose, which it really is in the original.

A study of the five "metres" of the five _Gathas_ appears in Martin
Haug's _Essays in the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the
Parsis_.

The _Gathas_ were written about the fourteenth century B.C. by Zoroaster
and hence are not much later than the _Rigvedas_.

In the _Rigvedas_ and _Gathas_ we have the first stage of metre used by
Aryan nations; these are the basis of all later metres. They were
written, it must be recalled, not in ages of barbarism, and represent
the transition from prose to regular metre. They are so near prose that
only an arrangement into lines makes us call them metrical. After all,
they do not differ much from the rhythmical prose in which the poetry of
Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Hebrews was written. We see thus that
rhythmical prose was the first language wherein poetry was written, and
that hampering metre is always late in the literary development of a
nation. We learn how great is the delusion of literary historians that
metrical poetry is the first literature of all nations and that prose is
a later growth.

The earliest poetry of a country is expressed first in prose by word of
mouth. It is then put down first in writing in prose, and later versions
sometimes change the prose into meter. Often the earlier prose version
is lost and it is then concluded that a literature of a nation begins in
verse.

Let us examine the form of the earliest Irish literature. The oldest
stories in Irish literature center around the exploits of Cuchulinn, who
is reputed to have died at the beginning of the Christian era. This
means that the tale about him was told by word of mouth up till the time
they were written down in the seventh or eighth century. The versions of
a few centuries later are the copies we now have in the epic _Táin Bó
Cualnge_. According to Edmund C. Quiggin's article on Irish Literature
in the _Britannica_, the original Tain consisted of prose interspersed
with rhythmical prose called rhetoric. Later metrical poems were largely
substituted for the rhetoric. As Mr. Quiggin says, the Tain is of
interest as showing the preliminary stage through which the epics of all
other nations had gone. No doubt even the _Iliad_ was originally told in
prose (and probably written in prose) while the verse versions are the
latest we have of the story.

Eleanor Hull, in _A Text Book of Irish Literature_, also says in Vol. 1,
p. 95, that there are few verse poems in the earlier _Táin Bó Cualnge_,
most of the poetry being usually in declamatory prose style known as
rosg, while in the later version long verse poems are frequent.

The earliest Teutonic verse was rather rhythmical prose, with some
alliteration. It is often hard to distinguish Anglo-Saxon prose from
Anglo-Saxon verse. Ælfric, who is regarded by many as one of the fathers
of English prose, wrote his _Lives of the Saints_ in rhythmical prose,
arranged in irregular lines just like our modern free verse. The reader
may consult Professor Skeat's edition. This arrangement, needless to
say, did not make poetry of it. But free verse, as we see, was written
in England in 1000 A.D.

Dr. Edwin Guest, in his _History of English Rhythms_, says that the
Anglo-Saxon writers sometimes gave a very definite rhythm to their
prose, and he cites a few passages characterizing King William, from the
Chronicle attributed to Wulfstan in the latter part of the eleventh
century. Dr. Guest adds that in his opinion this rhythmical prose was
one of the instruments in breaking up the alliterative system of the
Anglo-Saxons. The passage he cites, however, is no more rhythmical than
many passages in modern English prose. Anglo-Saxon prose, then, often
was rhythmical, and even arranged like free verse, but it became
genuine poetry only when the element of ecstasy was present. Even the
middle-English impassioned alliterative prose poem, _The Wooing of Our
Lord_, of the thirteenth century, does not differ much from Anglo-Saxon
verse.

The earliest Teutonic poetry was emotional prose, and only later did
definite rules bind it. The author of _Beowulf_, though the first
English verse poet, is not the oldest Teutonic poet; he had predecessors
in rhythmic prose. "When we consider primitive Teutonic verse closely,"
says Gosse in his article in the _Britannica_ on Verse, "we see that it
did not begin with any conscious art, but as Vigfussen had said, 'was
simply excited and emphatic prose' uttered with the repetition of catch
words and letters. The use of these was presently regulated." English
poetry, then, began in the use of excited and emphatic prose. One of the
best pieces of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry is the _Sermon to the English_
on the ravages of the Dane by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the early
part of the eleventh century. It reads like Anglo-Saxon verse. One sees
the unconscious influence of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry as late as
Drummond's _The Cypress Grove_ (1623), an ecstatic prose poem against
death.

The fact that the _Sagas_, the earliest literature of Iceland, were
written in perfect prose has puzzled those who claim that the early
literature of all nations is verse poetry, and that prose is a later
development. The events which the _Sagas_ celebrate took place in the
tenth century, and the following century was the period of their
narration. They were written down in the present form chiefly in the
thirteenth century. Ari Frodi (1067-1148) is considered by many the
first inventor of classic Norse prose. The most famous of the _Greater
Sagas_ is the _Njala_ written about the middle of the thirteenth century
and celebrating events of the beginning of the eleventh century.

Earlier Icelandic verse poetry did exist, but it does not belong to
Iceland proper. The great strength of real Iceland poetry was in the
_Sagas_, which Morris calls "unversified poetry." Some of these existed
as early as the first part of the tenth century. It seems anomalous to
the literary historian that a nation should at the very beginning of its
literary history have developed prose before verse, that it should have
celebrated its heroes in prose instead of verse song. All stories among
ancient people were, however, originally told in prose; the first
expression was always in rhythmical poetical prose.

It is not true, then, that verse is the first form in which a nation's
poetry is written, or that prose developed from verse. Prose was the
original language of poetry, and to prose it should return. The pattern
was a gradual development.


FOOTNOTES:

[100:A] "The Religious Poetry of Babylonia." _Presbyterian Review_,
1888, p. 76.

[105:A] There is an English translation of this work.




CHAPTER VI

BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE


The unrhymed iambic pentameter known as blank verse is really a form of
free verse; it is a modified form of the unrhymed classical measure. It
made its appearance in Italy in the early part of the sixteenth century,
and was used by Ariosto in his comedies, except that he employed a final
additional unaccented syllable, making eleven syllables in each line.
Surrey, who used it in his translation of two books of the _Æneid_,
imported it from the Italians. It was called by the Italians _versi
sciolti_, "untied or free verse." It was, then, the old classical
measure with more freedom.

In his essay, _Blank Verse_, John Addington Symonds dwells especially on
the plasticity and variety of blank verse, which he says it has more
than any other national metre. It may be used for the commonplace and
the sublime, the tragic and the comic, etc. It does not have to consist
of five iambuses only, but other feet may be substituted almost at the
caprice of the poet. This, however, practically amounts to saying that
blank verse is after all a great deal like prose; indeed, it may be
arranged like modern free verse with great ease. Its plasticity and
variety are due to the fact that its artificial requirements are less
than those of most other metres. It was a fortunate day for English
drama and poetry when Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton, following in the
footsteps of Surrey's translation of two books of the _Æneid_, and
Sackville's and Norton's play, _Gorboduc_, made blank verse fashionable.
The writers really brought poetry back into prose. For blank verse is
but a restricted prose, because there is as often as not no natural
pause at the end of the line, and because other feet may be substituted
for the iambus.

One of the reasons why English verse poetry excels French is because
blank verse, a more natural medium than the rhymed Alexandrines, became
the chief vehicle for poetry.

In fact, the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists is really
prose, for it is less rhythmical than that of Shakespeare. Blank verse
was said to have degenerated with them. It is also said to be prosaic as
used by Wordsworth. These poets, however, are merely less rhythmical
than the alleged masters of blank verse. All blank verse is as near
prose as any metrical medium that has been hitherto introduced. Bernard
Shaw said he found it easier than prose. It appears very often in prose
without the writer being aware of it. Dickens had a tendency, as also
did Ruskin, to drop unconsciously into blank verse in his prose.

The great English blank verse poets and nearly all the poets of England
in the nineteenth century used this medium, and are really our supreme
prose poets.

The experiment of arranging blank verse in the form of prose and of
putting prose in the metre of blank verse has been often tried with
success. I have no intention of using this means of showing that blank
verse is really a more modulated prose. Any passage of blank verse can
naturally also be put into modern free verse, into the free rhythms of
Whitman, for example.

The lovers of blank verse imagine, however, that its beauty is partly
derived from the existence of a pause at the end of the fifth foot and
because the next line begins with a capital letter. As a matter of fact,
there is no particular virtue in having that pause, and the next line
need not begin with a capital letter, and should be continued as of the
same line. For the real pauses are, after all, not in these artificial
places but where our natural speech and punctuation marks dictate them.

The virtues of blank verse are the virtues of rhythmic prose, which is
still freer and more natural than blank verse, just as blank verse is
preferable to the heroic couplet.

Our English poets who write in blank verse would have done even better
to use prose, rhythmical or unrhythmical. To us moderns there is
something of a distortion in chopping up good prose into lines of five
feet, each beginning with a capital letter. The more beautiful and
natural medium is prose, for blank verse is but a confined prose. It is
not fair or right to make characters speak in this fettered prose. It is
absurd to state that their speeches become poetry only because of this
fettered prose. Every great passage in Shakespeare in blank verse would
have continued to be poetry in regular prose. We observe that the great
prose passages of Shakespeare are poetry even though not in blank verse.
English poetry should free itself from the bondage of blank verse, and
use prose. However, next to free verse blank verse is the best medium
that English poetry has yet found.

Blank verse was in disfavor in the eighteenth century and was regarded
as prose. We may smile at Samuel Johnson's remark upon it in his _Life
of Roscommon_, but on reflection we find that he was, after all, right.
"Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little operation either on
ear or mind; it can hardly support itself without bold figures and
striking images. A poem frigidly didactic, without rhyme, is so near
prose that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse." He
argues, either write prose or rhyme, but choose no intermediate measure.

The free verse of modern times, the revival of which is due to Walt
Whitman, is really the oldest form in which poetry was expressed. It
existed along with parallelism among the Egyptians, Babylonians, and
Hebrews, among the Hindoos and the Anglo-Saxons. It is rhythmical prose,
arranged so as to call attention to the rhythm. It is not a third medium
for expression, next to prose and the regular verse-forms. The lines do
not return upon themselves, that is, there is no repeat any more than in
rhythmical prose.

In its present form in English it dates from Aelfric's _Lives of the
Saints_, about 1000 A.D.

Free verse has come to stay, and numbers many able poets among its
devotees. It is more natural than rhymed or metrical verse, which,
however, it will not wholly displace. The manuscripts of many poets who
used conventional metres show that the original form of composition was
free verse. The detractors of free verse need not think they bring a
valid argument against it when they arrange free verse in prose form,
and, vice versa, chop up prose sentences into brief lines beginning with
a capital, and ask what is the difference between the two. It is
admitted there is none. It matters not if the poet wishes to arrange his
composition in free verse forms to call attention to the rhythm, or to
print it as prose. It is immaterial if you call _vers libre_ rhythmical
prose or a distinct verse form. The poetry is independent of any
ordering of the lines. Neither of the resulting products loses or gains
in poetical attributes by the objector's turning prose into free verse,
or free verse into prose. The question is, how much ecstasy or emotion,
what impassioned ideas there are in the work.

Free verse may or may not have a cadence all its own, but one feels that
those who advocate free verse need not try to prove that it does and
must possess a cadence peculiar to itself. Free verse may have great
poetic value even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose into
prominence lately because poets wanted to be freed from the bonds of
metre. They should not encumber themselves with the shackles of a new
prosody.

Let us illustrate our point: we shall take a few lines from a great
prose poem by Lafcadio Hearn and arrange them in free verse. It is from
the essay called "The Eternal Haunter" in the volume _Exotics and
Retrospectives_. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit
of life in the past.

     Ancient her beauty
     As the heart of man,
     Yet ever waxing fairer,
     Forever remaining young.
     Mortals wither in time
     As leaves in the frost of autumn;
     But time only brightens the glow
     And the bloom of her endless youth.
     All men have loved her
     But none shall touch with his lips
     Even the hem of her garment.

It is seen that this prose passage in the free verse transformance has
the cadences which were present before. It is still poetical, as it was
in the original version as well. It really matters little if Hearn had
written it as it now stands. It is a question of personal preference
with the poet, in what form he wishes to write.

Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for October,
1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a
passage from Pater's _Renaissance_ and arranged it in free verse form,
and then a passage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose,
and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become
free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose.
His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a
patterned form, and in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were
too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages from Pater, Hewlett,
Fiona Macleod, Conrad and George Meredith and printed them as free
verse, and they truly read like free verse poems.

The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, but there is hardly
any of it in Masters's poems in the _Spoon River Anthology_ which could
have been printed as prose passages. They would have been just as good
and poetical as they are in free verse, but Masters has the right to
make any arrangement he wanted. Ecstasy is more important than cadence,
and he has ecstasy.

The following passage from Roosevelt's essay on _History as Literature_
is poetry by virtue of its ecstasy and visualizing effect, though
printed in prose form. Roosevelt might have arranged it in the long
lines of irregular lengths like those of Whitman into which it fits
better than it would into lines of brief, irregular length. But its
poetry does not depend upon the rhythms which are in the original prose.
It is only one of the few cases where Roosevelt succeeds in being a
poet, for he was rather the orator who swayed by rhetoric many of the
worst of popular prejudices.

     The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it
               were the present . . .
     Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities,
     And the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled
               to dust ages ago;
     Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces, its
               caravans shall move;
     And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean with
               their lonely prows,
     Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed
               hosts.
     We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have
               changed the course of time.
     We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers.
     Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly,
     Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty
     That never have they been reached
     By the sons and daughters of men.
     Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might
     And the love and the beauty of women.

Dr. Andrews in his _Writing and Reading of Verse_ has also given us
illustrations of rhythmic prose that he has resolved into free verse.
Like Professor Patterson, he rightly refuses to recognize free verse as
a distinct species of verse, holding it to have an affinity at least to
prose.[117:A] He notes that the free verse advocates have not really
defined special laws of free verse. He also recommends the would-be
practitioners of free verse to study the prose rhythms of men like Pater
and De Quincey.

Professor Corson, the Browning scholar, wrote to Walt Whitman that be
believed that impassioned prose would be the medium in which the poetry
of the future would be written, and that he considered the _Leaves of
Grass_ one of the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but
impassioned prose, shows that his prophecy is coming true. In England
Matthew Arnold and Walter Henley used it. Edward Carpenter had been
writing it as a result of Whitman's influence, in _Towards Democracy_ in
1883. In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse vogue
started, had been writing in his _The Conservator_ free verse poems. No
one paid attention to these even when some of them were collected in
_Optimos_ in 1910, except a few disciples. Richard Hovey, Ernest Crosby,
and Stephen Crane had also been writing free verse after Whitman before
the year 1900. About 1912 an impetus was given to free verse by the
poets of the new poetic era which set in and which Untermeyer calls the
_New Era in American Poetry_. Most of the contemporary free verse poets
began writing simultaneously.

Nearly all of our modern free verse poets are admittedly indebted to
Whitman; Louis Untermeyer names Whitman as the leading influence on
modern American poetry. Let us also be thankful that Whitman did not
write about the "technique of free verse," about "cadence," "strophe"
and "return."

Whitman is without a doubt the father of free verse in America and
England to-day. He did not claim to have originated it, since he found a
form of it in the prose poetry of the Bible and Ossian. It was also used
by Milton and Blake and in German by Goethe and Heine. As Bliss Perry
also shows, _The Lily and the Bee_ by Warren, the author of _Ten
Thousand a Year_, was written in free verse, before Whitman. Tupper also
used it. Free verse was adopted in France and Belgium as a result of
Whitman's influence. America owes nothing to French free verse which was
usually rhymed and corresponds to the Pindaric Ode founded by Cowley in
the middle of the seventeenth century.[119:A]

Dionysius of Halicarnassus was one of the few ancient critics who
brought the boundaries of prose and poetry close. His work _On Literary
Composition_ contains two chapters on the importance of rhythm, which he
considers an important element in prose as well as in verse, and he is
especially impressed by the rhythms of Thucydides, Plato and
Demosthenes. At the conclusion of this work, which has been translated
by W. Rhys Roberts, are two chapters entitled "How Prose Can Resemble
Verse," and "How Verse Can Resemble Prose." He wants prose not to be
cast in metre or rhythm but simply to appear rhythmical and metrical;
the metres and rhythms must be unobstrusively introduced. In this he
follows Aristotle's _Rhetoric_ which says prose should have rhythm but
of not too marked a character. Dionysius especially shows Demosthenes's
great care in the matter of rhythm, and instances as examples of
artistic finish among the Greeks the fact that Isocrates worked ten
years on his _Panegyrics_. After having shown how prose may resemble
verse he points out how verse resembles prose. When the clauses and
sense do not coincide with the metrical line but are carried over for
completion in another line, the result is prosaic. That is what makes
our English blank verse so much like prose.

Dionysius erred however in not emphasizing the importance of the
ecstatic element in making prose and verse resemble each other. He
over-valued the use of rhythm in prose, but he was after all swayed by
the ecstasy of the writer. He tells of the influence upon him of reading
one of Demosthenes's speeches. If Sidney said that he could not take up
the ballad of Percy and Douglas without feeling his heart moved as by a
trumpet, Dionysius says even more beautifully, "When I take up one of
his speeches, I am entranced and am carried hither and thither, stirred
now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, anxiety, fear,
disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, jealousy. I am agitated by
every passion in turn that can sway the human heart, and am like those
who are being initiated into wild mystic rites."

However, regularity of feet or metre in prose carried on to a great
extent makes the prose artificial. The Romans occasionally indulged in
it, but they generally used rhythmical prose, as the reader of Cicero
and Livy will observe. Quintilian, who recognized that prose has often
metrical feet that read like verse, thought it ugly and inelegant that
an entire verse should appear in a prose composition. He says that he
does not entertain "the idea that prose, which ought to have sweeping
and fluent motion, should dawdle itself into dotage in measuring feet
and weighing syllables. For this would be the part of a wretched
creature, occupied on the infinitely little. Nor could one who exhausted
himself in this care, have time for better things."

Probably we need not better reply than this to the high claims made for
the French form known as polyphonic verse. Prose that is interspersed
with metrical patterns is not natural.

The truth of the matter is that all the metrical features that are
demanded of poetry belong to the ornamental requirements like metaphors,
myths, rhetorical flourishes and all other gewgaws. There are always
stages in civilization when man wants adornment for his speech.
Something of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck and
bedrape our poetry with trappings without which it is better off.
Artificialities appear even in comparatively modern prose. The prose of
Milton is full of rhetoric and the great Burke had rhetorical
characteristics that we call Asiatic. We are familiar with the
euphuistic qualities of the Elizabethan prose, especially pervading John
Lyly's novel _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_.

In an excellent essay Plutarch shows that he understood that verse was
largely natural to man in a certain stage of civilization, because all
ornament was natural to him. In his essay on "Wherefore the Pythian
Priestess now Ceases to Deliver Her Oracle in Verse," he gives the love
of ornament as the real reason for the growth of metre as a form of
literary expression.

Often the topic is broached whether men like Hardy and Meredith are
greater as poets than as novelists. The question is not put properly. It
should be, Do these writers cease being poets when they use the fetters
of rhyme and metre, or are they with those fetters greater poets than
they were in their novels. I have no intention of trying to answer these
questions, though it is usually agreed that these writers are greater in
their novels than in their verse, but the point is that they are poets
whether they use prose or verse as their medium.

Some authors get more ecstasy into their work when they write in prose
than in verse, as readers of the novels and verse poems of Dickens,
George Eliot and Thackeray are aware. Other authors are successful in
crystallizing their ecstasy whether they write in prose or verse.
Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Scott, Emerson, Poe, James
Thomson, B. V., Hardy, Meredith, Symons, Hugo, De Musset, Goethe and
Heine, are examples of masters of the literature of ecstasy in both
prose and verse. Other verse poets have not at all succeeded nor tried
to succeed in writing ecstasy in ordinary prose. The authors who have
given us ecstasy only in prose but have not tried to do so at all in
verse are too numerous to mention.

I believe that poetry will again return to the natural language of
prose. Critics are taking an entirely different stand toward rhythm,
admitting that the poets have the right to vary their measures, create
new rhythm and not be held in bondage to old verse forms. The day is
disappearing when a man like Hegel could say that a production not in
metre is not poetry. A sane attitude towards the free use of rhythms by
poets has been given us in a _New Study of English Poetry_ by Henry
Newbolt. Liberal critics are helping the poets break their shackles; the
following passage from a review of Newbolt's book, by J. Middleton Murry
is worth quoting:

     Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry
     was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of
     which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as
     this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the
     prose which can most easily be assimilated to the conditions
     of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_, or Milton's
     _Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely
     the colloquial prose of Tchekov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good
     claim to be called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the
     D'Urbervilles_ as _The Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as
     _Phedre_. Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable
     progress by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If
     we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger
     of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening
     upon what will have to be in the last analysis a merely formal
     difference. The difference in such must be substantial and
     essential _aspects of Literature_.[122:A]


FOOTNOTES:

[117:A] Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ and Erskine's _The Kinds of
Poetry_, two excellent brochures in æsthetic criticism, take a similar
view point.

[119:A] For a history of French free verse see _Mercure De France_,
March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by Édouard Dujardin.

[122:A] Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor George
M. Harper in the preface to his _John Morley and Other Essays_, in
Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," _The Dial_, August, 1920, and
the preface to F. S. Flint's _Otherworld_.




CHAPTER VII

MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY


Our views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, illuminate many dark
crannies in one of the most unfathomable caverns of aesthetic
speculation; speculation of the connection between poetry and morals,
form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often
asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological
questions, and philosophical ideas. The question disappears when we
regard literature of ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt
with in prose and some may be ecstatically treated. If poetry is an
atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most various ideas.
Emotional treatment of the ideas gives us literature of ecstasy or
poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not
wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views
treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right who did not
want poetry (a long composition in verse, as he understood it) to deal
with ethics or science.

The question is then not really whether poetry should be concerned with
moral, sociological or psychological themes, for these themes always
have poetry in them, and an emotional treatment of them brings the
poetry into prominence. Ideas are the substance of poetry and nearly all
ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even scientific facts
and metaphysical utterances may be so stated by a writer as to show the
latent poetry. The two famous passages in _Leaves of Grass_ beginning
"I open my scuttle at night" and "I am an acme of things accomplished
and an encloser of things to be" are emotional statements of the facts
of the infinity of the universe and of the evolution of man,
respectively; Whitman brought out the poetry in a philosophical and in a
scientific idea.

Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be poetry. The theme of
_Great Expectations_ is a sermon against pride and snobbery, and the
emotional treatment, especially by force of example, makes part of the
book poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truthfully and
movingly artistic as to arouse an ecstatic state in the reader, become
poetry. Hence Tartuffe and Pecksniff are poetical portraits, even when
drawn in prose.

Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the
intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by the heart, prose by the
mind; fancy was thought to hold sway in poetry, logic in prose. But
nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning,
Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by
the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. Any
intellectual and even moral performance may be elevated into poetry,
when emotionally and ecstatically presented. And philosophers like
Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have demonstrated this.

Our definition of poetry throws much light on the subject of the
relations of politics and morals, of social and philosophical problems
to poetry. Poets should instruct, while delighting, is the contention of
one group. They ought merely to express beauty and emotions, is the
emphatic demand of another class. I doubt if there has ever been a great
poet who hasn't done both of these things. If a poet is to teach he
must teach something; he must express ideas, and ideas mean thoughts
about life, and these in turn refer to the relations of man to himself,
to one another, to the opposite sex, to society, to the universe, to
nature. But it is while doing this that he must give us beauty and
emotion.

When a prose writer is purely didactic without any emotional or
aesthetic appeal he is no poet. It is manifestly absurd also for an
author to give in metre didactic works which could be better written in
prose. To this extent the disciples of art for art's sake are right,
that the poet should not give us unecstatic political, philosophical or
moral lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions may be expressed
in prose or free verse probably more poetically than even in metre, it
is surely inadvisable to drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and
especially at great length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave
us an effective harangue against spiritualism in _Mr. Sludge, "The
Medium,"_ in blank verse, Byron proved a good critic of society in _Don
Juan_, in Ottava Rima metre, Shelley preached moral reforms in the
_Revolt of Islam_, in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of
the nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their authors, are
Swinburne's _Hertha_, and Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, and they are both
ecstatically didactic.

But the future poets will not spin out their ideas in metre at great
length. The short verse poem embodying an idea will always be with us,
but I doubt if we will have, or at least ought to have, philosophical or
moral works, extending into hundreds or thousands of lines of regular
verse.

John Addington Symonds has in his _Essays Speculative and Suggestive_
taken two of the most famous dicta in English literature regarding the
function of poetry in relation to form and matter, and given us a sane
viewpoint. He analyzes Arnold's statement that poetry is a criticism of
life, and Pater's assumption that all art, including poetry, aspires
towards the condition of music which thus in his opinion becomes the
true type or measure of consummate art. Symonds shuns both the
didacticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship of form
implied in Pater's statement; though it should be said that Pater in his
essay on "Style" urges that, after all, subject matter is the deciding
factor in determining great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us
rather a revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment according to
his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is more a reporter and a
seer than a judge. Poets take their final rank by matter and not by
form. Though Symonds mentions slurringly a great poet like Baudelaire,
still the following lines should be carefully pondered by many of our
versifiers: "The carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of
triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound and color without heed
for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure." Poetry appeals to the
imaginative reason, and must embody thought and emotion. As Symonds
remarks, Pater's discrimination between these two is fanciful.

Poetry then must not be timid about dealing with ideas in an emotional
or imaginative manner. It may even take up moral problems provided it
does not sink into the commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the
_Psalm of Life_ and _Excelsior_, two of Longfellow's most inferior and
popular poems. An idea that is the result of reason may be uttered with
ecstasy, and hence there may be logic in poetry.

In his _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_ in the essay on "Poetry for Poetry's
Sake," Professor A. C. Bradley takes issue with those who claim that it
is no consequence what a poet says but how he says it, and he rightly
regards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy which
encourages men to taste poetry as though it were wine. Poetry inheres in
ideas. To insist, as the poetry for poetry's sake school does, that a
poem has no more lesson for us than a tree is to institute a false
comparison, for the tree has a lesson for any one who finds it.

When one finishes a volume of poetry by some of the purely aesthetic
poets, one is amazed at the kind of life they embody in art. It is often
such a petty life, a talk to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an
old poet, or a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the
substance of which noble lives are made. We are pained to find that
trite utterances or references are tricked out in gaudy images and given
forth to the world in large quantities.

Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice are not
poetry. Indeed, it is a petty employment for poets to be giving vent to
labored conceits about gold fish, and vases, about dandelions and
kittens and lollypops, investing none of these themes with imagination
or intellect. Man is stirred by thousands of emotions arising from his
inability to adjust himself to surroundings, by his thwarted will and
suppressed desires. He is often wrapped in gloom for want of real
truthful consoling poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts
with relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or amorous
affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed out by the prevailing
of stupid and deplorable customs; he is often starving or being
insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy
circumstances. He is the victim of tyrants and unjust social systems,
and is engaged in soul-killing occupations. He faces the great
mysteries of existence, the riddle of the Sphinx. He witnesses cruelties
of all kinds, persecution of races and individuals, mismanagement of
affairs, lynchings, massacres, wars and imprisonments. Hypocrisy and
vindictiveness are rife and man suffers thereby. He thirsts for beauty,
he pants for happiness.

Yet poets who may find numerous and important subjects for the
literature of ecstasy, are busy writing sugared verses about mosaics,
candles, and puppies, and arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's
souls are starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish and
file and chisel verses on themes that interest no one. As Horace says,
the mountains are in labor and the issue is but a ridiculous mouse.

Indeed it is not the subject the poet chooses that one objects to, but
to the absence of ideas, or the shallowness or triviality of the idea.
Burns took a daisy and made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could
write about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal idea. Shelley
and Keats could endure emotions and thoughts by singing of a skylark or
a nightingale. But the petty poet cannot deduce anything but a trifling
idea, no matter what theme he selects.

Another feature which distinguishes the minor poet in prose or verse is
his investing a trite idea with an emotion out of all proportion. He
hales with enthusiasm a commonplace, he gets into ecstasy about that
toward which an intelligent man displays little or no emotion. It is the
distinction of the unknown author of the ancient Greek fragment _On the
Sublime_ that he deprecates the tendency to wax emotional about the
unemotional. The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get
excited are often an index to their own moral and intellectual failing,
as well as their aesthetic deficiency. From Sainte-Beuve Matthew Arnold
appropriately quotes a saying to the effect that, in judging a work, the
French question not only whether they are moved by it, but whether also
they have the right to be moved by it.

So when we look through much of the so-called popular poetry, we see why
we cannot often admit it to the high realm of the literature of ecstasy.
It contains the childish sentimental excitement about facts that every
thinking man takes for granted. When we read the eloquent sermon on the
advantage of practicing justice, we wonder at the folly of making a
comment about so obvious a truism. It is for this reason that moral
axioms lack the elements of poetry, because they do not admit of
exposition with appreciable ecstasy. Verse is full of stale themes sung
over so often that we almost rebel when the new poet comes along and
sings over the same old story.

It requires a great intellect to know when to judge rightly about the
propriety of one's emotions for the subject of literature. We do not
think that it is the subject matter of emotion to go into ecstatic
praises, for example, over a man who supports his child. We find that
animals provide food for their young; hence it is not fit to grow
eloquent because a man does what even the lowest animal has the instinct
to do.

Conventional morality only becomes poetry when colored by the
imagination or illustrated by an unusually pleasing ecstatic
presentment. When Fuller, for instance, says that we should not mock at
the defects of people who are physically or mentally disabled, he utters
a stale truism that is not poetry but ethics. When he adds that it is
pitiable to beat a cripple with his own crutches, the little prose
passage is lifted up into poetry, for we are brought into a state of
ecstasy by the imaginative illustration. Similarly take some of the
instances of self-sacrifice by the common people which Bret Harte and O.
Henry delighted in depicting. Some of their stories become poetry by
emotional presentation of a trite idea.

There must also be more or less sympathy with the poet's viewpoint. "All
right human song," says Ruskin in his _Lectures on Art_, "is the
finished expression by art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, for
right causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the
cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A
maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost
money."

Ruskin may have corrupted our artistic outlook somewhat by insisting on
an ethical aim. Yet we should remember that our aesthetic feelings are
influenced by our moral outlook. While we should not seek an ethical aim
in literature as an end in itself, while we should shun the preacher of
commonplaces who poses as a poet, we cannot respond to the sympathetic
depicting of an emotion which we ourselves could never feel because of
repugnance to it.

To appreciate a poem truly, we must feel as the poet does and sympathize
with the motives that inspired his feelings. The reasons that urge him
to express his emotions must appear to us just ones. If our intellect is
far greater than that of the poet, we shall find that many of the causes
that inspire him to sing as he does would not at all arouse in us the
emotions experienced by him; his poem is not the greatest art to us. If
his intellect is superior to ours, we shall not like his work; but then
it will be because he is more advanced than we are.

If a poet were to sing of an incestuous love; or decry sympathy for the
distressed; or to laud a cruel action; or to gloat over the schemes of
the fraudulent; or sing favorably of any action which we think a base
one, his poem would not be art for it does not evoke emotional response
from anybody.

Poe laid down the principle of art for art's sake that poetry deals with
beauty alone and that the only faculty for appreciating it is that of
taste. He held that poetry had nothing to do with truth or duty; that
the intellect and the moral sense were concerned with these and hence
had no field for exercising themselves either in writing or judging
poetry.

As a matter of fact all three faculties, taste, intellect and moral
sense, are called into use in creating and appreciating the highest kind
of poetry or any other form of literature. There is no reason why a poet
should not make use of all three faculties if he has them all developed.
Goethe and Ibsen possessed them. The highest form of taste can scarcely
be attained unless the poet's intellect and moral sense are fine. For
falsehood and sin are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is
absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a foolish and
inconceivable conception of intellectual values will be certainly
deficient in some phases of beauty. Our consciences and our minds are
unconsciously consulted in our conception of the beautiful. Not only
truth, but duty is beauty. Even Poe maintained that Taste held intimate
relations with Intellect and Truth and he therefore placed it between
them.

The greatest classics are those that appeal to all three faculties in us
and those works which offend both our intellect and moral sense do not
completely satisfy our sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to
Brandes understood that. Fortunately many of the classics have lost only
in parts their moral and intellectual value, and hence still hold sway
over us. And sometimes the beauty is so intensely striking that we
charitably overlook faults of morality and intellect.

As Professor Woodberry says in his _A New Defense of Poetry_ in _The
Heart of Man_: "Can there by any surprise when I say that the method of
idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the
art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as
belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than
to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind
is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are
two kinds of gravitation."

The connection between art and ethics is closer than some critics
imagine. Spingarn was mistaken when he said that we have done with all
moral judgment of literature. A book is often artistically great chiefly
because its ethical viewpoint is right. The rightness of it is often
what creates the ecstasy. Let us take Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The real
greatness of this play is not chiefly in its picture of heredity or of a
man becoming an idiot. Its real value lies in its attitude towards the
marriage problem and its contrast of the two characters, Mrs. Alving,
the representative of the new order, and of Pastor Manders, representing
society. The leading question there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone
back to her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a loathsome
disease which might be inherited by any possible progeny? Was she
justified in leaving him? That these are the important questions is
evident from the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, namely,
to answer the critics of the _Doll's House_. The conclusion reached by
Ibsen from the terrible picture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going
back to her husband, that there are times when it is justifiable to
leave one's husband. This is the moral lesson of the play, and is
conveyed with great ecstasy; in fact, the moral intensifies the ecstasy.
A conventional playwright would have concluded that Mrs. Alving should
have remained with her husband in obedience to duty, that the
simple-minded Pastor was in the right. The play even if handled as well
as by Ibsen could not have been the great work of literature that it is,
if written in defense of the conventional moral code. A great author
attacks conventional morality to battle for a higher morality.

The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary
excellence of his work.[133:A] But this does not mean that we must go
back to the old Greek idea that poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation
of the commonplace ethics. Nor does it imply that we cannot appreciate a
poet because we disapprove of the religion or political party with which
he is affiliated.

In the conclusion of his essay on "How a Young Man Should Study Poetry,"
Plutarch shows that the philosopher and the poet are engaged in the same
mission. He takes passages from the poets and shows us that they are
similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The doctrines of
Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas by the dramatists spoken on
the stage, and with those that lyricists sang to the harp. We may accept
Plutarch's views except in so far as he urges that poetry should preach
dogmatic and conventional ethics.

We also see that parts of Dante, Pope, and Shelley may be placed
parallel respectively to passages from thinkers who influenced them,
Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and Godwin, to learn that the poetry resided in
the original philosophic prose passage. It was enhanced not by the verse
form but by the process of ecstatic re-statement.

Should we say that Cowper and Wordsworth are poets, and that Rousseau,
from whom they got many ideas, is not? Is Browning only a poet and no
philosopher, and is Carlyle only a philosopher and not a poet? Is the
verse of Goethe where pantheism is taught, poetry, and do you find no
poetry at all in Spinoza's _Ethics_?

Among the most famous philosophical passages of Shakespeare is the one
in _The Tempest_ describing the transitoriness of this world and ending
with the famous line about our life being rounded with sleep. If there
is anything in Shakespeare that is poetry of a high order, this famous
passage is, and yet it is really philosophy. It is poetry not because it
is in blank verse or has rhythm, but because the ideas are stated in an
emotional and ecstatic manner. There is poetry in ideas and those
critics who shrink from applying the word poetry to intellectual
performances are urged to honeycomb their Shakespeare for numerous ideas
that are beyond question poetry.

A great idea is poetry; a profound and farseeing idea is poetry, whether
written with rhythm or not. If a commonplace thought, rhythmically
adorned, may sometimes be poetry, most certainly a profound idea
ecstatically but unrhythmically expressed is poetry.

What is the difference between poetry and philosophy? If we examine into
the nature of each we will find that there is a line at which they meet
and where it is hard to distinguish one from the other. As a rule, the
principles of metaphysics, epistemology and logic as written down in the
average philosophical work seldom are poetry. Only occasionally have
the philosophers waxed ecstatic. Yet many novelists, essayists and verse
writers have made many of these philosophical principles poetry by
stating them in an ecstatic manner. Any philosophical principle arousing
our emotions is poetry.

The general truths of sociology, ethics and psychology form the subject
matter of the literature of ecstasy, but they are poetry only when
ecstatically treated. The psychological novel and the problem play deal
with these truths. Go to some original treatises on sociological, moral
or psychological subjects and omit the statistics, the laboratory work
and the cold hard reasoning and you will often find great ideas
emotionally stated that belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have
parted with the idea that an author must be tearing a passion to
tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to
produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes love for a page and a half
and tells us how it is composed, we exclaim, this is the literature of
ecstasy even though we find it in a treatise on psychology. He describes
to us how we feel when we love by enumerating to us the different
sensations we experience. (_Principles of Psychology_ Vol. 1, Part IV,
Ch. 8, Par. 215.) The passage may not be passionate poetry, but it would
not have been out of place in a novel by Stendhal, George Eliot or
Meredith.

When Freud reveals our souls to ourselves, when Fabre writes a book on
the doings of insects, we often are reading poetry or the literature of
ecstasy, when we think we are reading science.

We might select many passages from philosophical works that belong to
the literature of ecstasy, passages from Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and
Hume, but more especially from Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche. There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we find
the imagination and the intellect fused; we cannot distinguish that
which belongs to the realm of logic and that which is the result of pure
emotion. Of philosophers of our own time, Bergson and Bertrand Russel
have occasional passages where a profound idea is emotionalized. Hence
these belong to the literature of ecstasy, or poetry.

We must no longer conclude that only that is poetry which sings a song
in verse. It is just because the verse lyric, epic, and tragedy are
among the oldest forms of literature that the theories of poetry have
been built up by examining chiefly these forms. Aristotle's _Poetics_,
except for a few vital passages, has done more mischief in literary
criticism than his _Logic_ has done in philosophy.

What a queer definition of poetry is that which includes a metrical
insipid utterance or a versified fact of microscopic importance, and
excludes the sublime reflections of philosophers who contemplate the
nature of the entire cosmos, who fathom the mysteries of the universe,
and who state for us our relation to it and give us profound conceptions
of it. If one finds poetry only in the saccharine sonnets of our
magazine writers and none at all in the great philosophers, he does not
understand what poetry is. If you, however, call a philosophical
principle poetry when you find it in verse, you must admit that the
poetry was there before it was put in verse, in the prose version. For
poetry, not being a branch of literature but an emotional spirit bathing
all literature, also holds philosophical ideas, intellectual conceptions
in solution, whenever these are in prose and move to ecstasy.

Aristotle and many others were also absorbed as to the difference
between poetry and history, as they had been between poetry and
philosophy. He stated truly enough that Homer as a poet did not differ
from Herodotus as a historian simply because of their difference in
metre. He found that the difference between poetry and history lay in
this, that poetry dealt with the universal and history with the
particular. This definition means very little to us to-day even though
commentators try to explain that Aristotle includes under poetry any
treatment also of the particular which presents universal situations and
depicts universal traits. History, however, also treats of the
universal, for it records universal traits in the particular events
which it describes. Aristotle's distinction falls, for history and
poetry deal with both the particular and universal. We cannot say with
Aristotle that history tells what Alcibiades actually did, while poetry
would tell what any man would do. An actual emotional account of the
deeds and character of Alcibiades is poetry, as you will observe by
reading Plutarch.

For all historical writing may be poetical and contain poems, if the
ecstasy is there. What distinguishes the poetry in history is the
emotion, and all history that is a dry narrative is history and not
poetry. Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French
Revolution_ contain much poetry though they deal with the particular,
but they are made poetry by the ecstasy. Some of Herodotus is poetry,
and much of Homer is history.

Again Aristotle's distinction is obsolete in these days of prose fiction
which deals with the particular, and often with the actual, and merely
changes the names. And these novels often contain poems. We recall
Fielding's distinction between novels and histories, the former being
true in everything but the names, and the latter being false in
everything but the names.

There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, and all great
historians.


FOOTNOTES:

[133:A] "Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism. . . .
The values of literature are in the last resort moral. . . . Literature
should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
prevails."--J. Middleton Murry.




CHAPTER VIII

POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION


The first lengthy formulation of the theory of art for art's sake was
made, I believe, by Gautier in the preface to his _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_, in 1833. The theory itself had previously also been advanced
and put into practice by Keats, and a little later by Poe. Hugo claims
to have been the first one to have used the term. He was also one of the
most bitter opponents of the idea, as the readers of his _Shakespeare_
will note. The view was supported in France by Baudelaire and Flaubert,
and by later schools like the Symbolists. In England Swinburne made an
excellent defense of it in his book on _William Blake_. The poets of
"The Nineties" like Wilde and Symons wrote in favor of it. Mention
should also be made of an exceedingly good chapter on the _Dignity of
Technique_ in R. A. M. Stevenson's _Velasquez_, and especially
Whistler's _Ten o'Clock Lecture_.

Needless to say, most of these writers had their own conception of what
art for art's sake was. They agreed on several phases of it--that the
subject matter and ideas of a work of art did not count, that the
important thing was the execution, that art was not to be judged by any
standard of morality, that it had its own morality, and that it did not
matter if from a conventional point of view it was immoral, provided it
was well executed. The theory was antagonistic to the introduction of
ideas, of humanitarian motives, of tendencies to the portrayal of life
and the analysis of emotions. Its use was certainly an undemocratic
phase of art.

In many respects the theory awakens sympathy in all lovers of
literature; it was a reaction to the moralist view which wanted art to
teach the commonplace ethical notions we all know. Art has always had an
enemy in the bourgeois moralist. He always looked for a sermon, and
stamped the artist as immoral who arrived at conclusions different from
those countenanced by the church or the state. He was not satisfied to
read of a wonderful portrayal of a passion, done as a lesson in
psychology without any moral comments by the author. He wanted the
artist to act like a preacher and condemn at all times, instead of
portray. The Puritan opposed the truthful description of natural
emotions; he looked askance upon references to the body; he wanted
people drawn in obedience to laws, instead of as breaking through them.
He tried to thrust subjects upon the artist and limit him. He had no ear
for sound, no eye for color, no appreciation of beauty.

Little wonder that the artist lost patience and sent morality to the
devil, and deified technique and deliberately chose unseemly subjects.
The disciples of art for art's sake did much good to the cause of art.
They broadened its field. They gave the artist the right to write about
a corpse or delirium tremens, to describe a murder or a crime without
pointing out lessons. They permitted him to use his imagination to the
full extent, and to invent any forms he chose.

But the theory overrode itself. It became an apology for abuses of art.
Writers began to create meaningless jargon, to waste words on trite
ideas, to avoid all contact with life, to eliminate man as a subject of
art. Art lacked soul, and if it showed a personality behind it, it was
a petty, sterile and inane one. Art fought against intellect as well as
against morals. Even those who advocated it were writing in direct
violation of it. Flaubert's realistic novel _Madame Bovary_ and
Swinburne's _Songs Before Sunrise_ were not art for art's sake. _The
Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not art for art's sake; imprisonment had
changed Wilde's views. Men like Gautier and Swinburne, who were the most
ardent champions of the theory of art for art's sake, found themselves
in a peculiarly inconsistent predicament by being the greatest admirers
of Victor Hugo, much of whose work was written with humanitarian
motives. Hearn in America started out as a believer in the theory and
ended by attacking it.

Tolstoy wrote most bitterly against the idea, and we may say that from
the time of the appearance of his _What is Art?_ in 1897, the theory
fell into disrepute. Not that people accepted Tolstoy's views that art
should teach the love of God and man, but his idea did much to humanize
art. Before Tolstoy, Nietzsche had also taken a fling at the theory.

Critics to-day recognize that life forms the substance of art, that art
gets all its material from life and that man is properly the subject of
art, thinking man as well as emotional man. They further perceive that
literature is so human in its origins that even unconscious human
emotions are present where they were not suspected. The more we humanize
literature the greater art does it become. It is true, however, that
after the art work is completed, it has influence on life. Our lives may
be devoted to art, we may have life for art's sake, but not art for
art's sake.

Still, art for art's sake is a good theory to be invoked against the
extreme didactic-minded one who thinks nothing should be written unless
it illustrates a lesson in our commonplace and bourgeois morality, a
morality very often false and outworn. They would ask writers to show us
men conforming to this morality, instead of revolting from it. They
would make literature exalt self-sacrifice in all circumstances and
would stamp out any tendencies to liberal speculation. They demand that
poetry uphold society in all its institutions, teach obedience, and
prevail on us to bow down before the mandates of priests and
capitalists. But literary men are often at variance with the moral views
entertained by the clergy and the ruling classes, and they have the
right to illustrate the views of morality that they consider much higher
than the customs of society. An author should not be bound by the views
of his age. He should in fact expose them and show their evil influence.
He does not, however, then write in conformity with the theory of art
for art's sake, for he expresses another morality than that of
society's, and thus has a higher moral purport in view. Ibsen's
greatness lies in the fact that he did not subscribe to conventional
morality: he attacked it and thus he really was an artist with a moral
aim.

Brandes has shown in his essay on Björnson how the attack upon art with
a purpose is really often a disguised means of objecting to liberal
thought in literature. Art for art's sake occasionally thus becomes an
apology for conventional morals too. Most of the great works were
written with a purpose. Dante and Milton have left records in their
prose works of the purpose of their poems. But no one objected to the
purpose of these poets, because they defend conventional morality. Yet
as soon as literature tries to advance new ideas we hear the cry against
its moralizing and didactic tendency. Art for art's sake is then the
shout of even the conventional moralist. Those who declare themselves
against the tendency of the intellectual element in literature are often
those who fear new ideas; they would want only romance, homely morals,
happy endings and impossible adventures, constant triumph of good, etc.
They do not understand what literature has to do with problems of
marriage and divorce, the state and the individual. They want it to be
separated from real life. Nevertheless, they cannot ignore the great
books of our day which deal with these questions. They have been driven
to the theory of "art for art's sake" by their hatred of liberal ideas.

"The formula, 'written with a purpose,'" says Brandes, "has been far too
long employed as an effective scarecrow to drive authors away from the
fruit that beckons to them from the modern tree of knowledge."

When Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Zola brought us messages in ecstatic
prose, the enemies of intellect in art called them preachers of filthy
ideas, misguided moralists, and would not consider them as artists and
poets. The moralist and aesthete joined forces in attacking Balzac and
Stendhal when these novelists gave us unpopular ideas emotionally
expressed. The critic who hates advanced thought exclaims that he wants
no ideas in art at all; he does not wish it to become the vehicle of
views he personally dislikes. Hence at times even the Philistine critic
who opposed the introduction of intellect in art found himself in
harmony with members of the art for art's sake school.

Nothing better illustrates the harm which may result from the theory
that shuns a purpose in art, than the neglect it brings about for books
with an unpopular message. England, for example, has neglected the best
work of one of the poets of the nineties, who intellectually ranks with
her best poets. Who reads the later work of Robert Buchanan? Attention
is riveted to his early lyrics, and good as these are, his more
thoughtful poetry has been forgotten. A. Stoddart-Walker wrote after
Buchanan's death _Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt_, and
Harriet Jay wrote a biography. Attention was called in these volumes to
the later works of Buchanan, where he stood for liberty of thought. Nor
was he didactic in his pleas, in such poems as _The City of Dreams_,
_The Wandering Jew_, _The Ballad of Mary the Mother_, _The Outcast_,
_The Devil's Case_, and _The New Rome_. Lecky called _The City of
Dreams_ the modern _Pilgrim's Progress_, and said that it would take a
prominent position in the literature of the time. But no one knows these
poems, and of Buchanan's work only a few ballads are known. Buchanan is
not any more didactic than Browning, but since he represents bold
speculation (and also made too many personal enemies) he was throttled
by Philistinism.

The opponents of utilitarianism in art have been the calumniators of
poets with ideas unacceptable to the majority. They have hindered the
popularity of pessimistic poets like Leopardi and Thomson. They are
shocked by the morbidities of Dostoievsky and Strindberg. But every
author has the right to describe emotions without being compelled to
draw a moral from them. In such case the writer becomes a great
psychologist, and his work is by no means devoid of intellectual
content. Thus the stories of Poe which have no moral outlook are really
stories with a purpose for they are profound documents in psychology. To
them psychologists like Mosso have gone for studies of the emotion of
fear. One finds ideas in them that throw light on the nature of our
emotions. Hence Brownell in his well written essay on Poe which attacked
him because of his indifference to moral problems (a view in which
Howells and James concur) is wrong in denying to Poe a high place in
art. Poe did what all artists do: he drew on his emotions and if he
could portray fear and grief for death, it was because he had known
them. Graham describes the timid nature of Poe, who was afraid to be
himself alone. That feeling accounts for the _Fall of the House of
Usher_. Poe's stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data.
None of them, except _William Wilson_, has an ethical aim, but they all
have an intellectual, utilitarian purport, in giving us profound
knowledge of man's hidden emotions. They are the result of Poe's keen
intellect as well as of his emotions. They have anticipated many
researches by psychologists; they have set circulating profound views of
the psychic constitution of man. They thus became art with a purpose,
not however to spread ethical truisms, but broad liberating ideas.

Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspiration from Poe's
essay on the _Poetic Principle_, sadly misunderstand their critic.
Except in two poems written as metrical and musical experiments, _The
Bells_ and _Ulalume_, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in
verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, _Shadow_, _Silence_, _The
Colloquy of Monos and Una_, _The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion_,
_The Power of Words_, and _Eureka_. He was justified in his pleading
that poetry should not become the mere vehicle of moral commonplaces,
for these are not beautiful, and the vogue of the New England school was
beginning to make the moral aims of poetry too paramount.

The poet should be free and if he wants to emotionalize a social message
he should be allowed to do so, risking aesthetic value if he becomes
didactic, or is false in his views. And he should also be allowed to
describe beauty and emotions, without being compelled to draw a moral
conclusion therefrom.

Croce, who defined poetry as intuition, has helped to keep on its last
legs the idea of art for art's sake. He falsely teaches that poetry
deals with pure emotions, and that emotions and ideas are two separate
functions, one of the feeling man, the other of the thinking man.

Though Croce admits that the intellectual has its aesthetic side, that
art deals with the philosophic and moral, yet this definition of
literature in terms of intuition is not a true account of the nature of
literature, for he regards the intuitive faculty as totally opposed to
the logical faculty, a Kantian relic. Intuition, however, is the
combined product of all the logical faculties exercised by man in the
past, just as the action of an involuntary muscle is the continued
action of a muscle once voluntary, but which by force of habit for ages
became involuntary.

Intuition is not merely the knowledge of our hearts but of our brain as
well. The great novels and plays of the world's literature are the
artistic results of the intellect collaborating with the emotions. Croce
presents an ingenious explanation to enable him to call works of art
which are full of intellectuality, works of intuition. He says that the
effect of the work as a whole is that of an intuition. He holds that
when intellectual concepts are mingled with intuition they are not then
intellectual concepts but part of the intuition. If this be so, the rule
works the other way around. If intuition is mingled with intellectual
concepts appearing in a philosophical or scientific work, why not then
say that the intuitive quality disappears and becomes part of the
intellectual concept and that the scientific or philosophic work becomes
a work of intuition or a work of art as a whole? There is intellectual
working in Hamlet and intuitive expression in a dialogue of Plato. The
former is not wholly intuitive nor the latter wholly intellectual.

This is Croce's great fault--that he tries to rid poetry of what he
calls any suggestion of intellectualism.[146:A] He identifies the first
rudimentary form of knowledge with intuition, he distinguishes the
so-called first degree of the activity of the mind, the unreflecting,
unreasoning emotion, from intellectual and perceptual knowledge, which
involves concepts, so that his view of poetry is that of the art for
art's sake school,--that poetry deals not with ideas but with intuitive
feeling.

Now, feeling and thought are not separable. Feeling involves knowledge
and instant reflection. The bereaved poet knows and reflects on many
things at the very instant he is suffering the shock of his loss. His
intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the
psychical activity of his emotions. The authors of the greatest
English elegies philosophized while bemoaning their loss. The moral,
intellectual and logical faculties are at work along with the intuitive
faculty, or immediate knowledge of feeling, in all great poets.

It is in his views on intuition that Croce reduces art to presentation
of childish impressions or views, divested of judgment and reflection.
He discourages reasoning and thinking on the part of the artist. He
seeks only the first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits
that in real life sensations are followed by reflections and mental
solutions. He thinks the purest artists are those who persist longest in
that first moment of intuition, and are innocent and childish in their
outlook.

Art is not, as Croce thinks, devoid of the character of conceptual
knowledge. No, discrimination and judgment, distinction between reality
and unreality, is an important part of the poet's work, and to say that
it matters little what the poet thinks or says or concludes, that
correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought from him, is
to reduce him to the level of a babbling child. The ideality of poetry
does not, as Croce thinks, disappear as soon as reflection and judgment
enter, for these may be bathed in ecstasy. Croce's definition of
imaginative literature excludes ideas, except as casually introduced, or
as the utterances in accordance with the truth of the character
portrayed. He levels literature to a primitive degree.

Croce seems to think that art is expression of only intuition, but is
not expression of intellectual concepts which he claims belong to
philosophy. He who did so much to clear away the artificial divisions
reigning in the various arts, commits a greater error. He assigns one
kind of expression--intuition--to one branch of human endeavor--art; and
another kind of expression--true concepts--to another branch of human
endeavor,--logic. Yet he admits that intuition and concepts are two
moments in a single process. As a matter of fact, expressed concepts are
also literature when emotionalized, and logic is poetry when combined
with ecstasy.

Man cannot separate the two faculties, and we seldom have what Croce
calls pure intuition, that is, knowledge free of concepts. Hence poetry
scarcely deals with intuition in Croce's understanding of the term.
Croce takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical sensation,
and from association. For him intuition is not unconscious memory but
the first degree of the mind's activity which is expression. One fails
to see why even sensation may not be intuition and hence art; some of
the world's best literature describes hunger. And to deny that intuition
includes unconscious memory is to deprive it of its essential quality.

Croce lost sight of the importance of that phase of art which deals with
the thinking man who feels, and he tried to bridge over the gap by
asserting that what determined the difference of the intellectual and
intuitive fact lay in the result, in the effects aimed at by their
authors. Yet Virgil thought he was a poet in his _Georgics_ but he gave
us a book in farming instead. Plato sought to be a philosopher in his
_Banquet_ but he wrote a poem also.

Croce's conclusions lead to strange anomalies. His view that
philosophical passages, that is, intellectual concepts occurring in a
novel or play, become part of the intuition of the author, would mean
that the most unecstatic concept transposed from, say Hegel, to a
Shakespearean play, becomes intuition. The converse would also follow
that a passage of Shakespeare incorporated in Hegel is no longer poetry.

One of the results of Croce's aesthetic views on intuition is to drive
out of literary criticism the exercise of the intellect. He would have
us judge a book by its own standards and merely seek to find if the
author succeeded in doing what he intended. This view has been wrongly
attributed also to Goethe and Carlyle. It is, however, Maupassant's view
about the novel as he expounded it in his preface to _Pierre and Jean_.
We cannot accept this view. We must ask why does the author intend what
he does, and is he justified in his intentions? We must go back of his
intentions and show him that his intellect and outlook are due to
certain causes and we must state whether or not we agree with him, and
why. An author may record his ecstasy in expounding absurd ideas. I
want to know why he believes in these ideas and I want to see if he can
make me believe them. If he does not, I cannot satisfy myself with
studying his intentions, even when they are in the form of verse or in a
novel. I also am concerned with the question whether he is right in
accepting these ideas, though I admit his sincerity.

Again I take up a Puritanical poem. I cannot judge the author by merely
studying the writer's intentions and contenting myself with the
knowledge that he has faithfully and beautifully recorded them. No, I
want to know why he is a Puritan; I seek to show the folly of his
expression; I must register my protest that I have not been moved by
him, that I consider him intellectually and morally deficient.

The great fault of Croce's views, however, is that in looking upon art
as expression he takes no interest in the question whether it meets with
sympathy. It is true he recognizes that the poet often expresses our own
intuitions for us, when he expresses his own. But he is not concerned
with the question whether the poet has a right to feel that way and
whether he has a sympathetic audience no matter how small. Yet the
artist who expresses his intuitions is always bound to have some
audience. It is because "every atom that belongs to me as good belongs
to you." He is bound to have sympathizers. If Croce had said that the
artist should not be concerned because the majority does not agree with
him, we could follow him, but only because we think the artist is right
and the majority is wrong. But to cast aside the question of sympathy
altogether, to refuse to take into consideration the emotions of any
readers, is to demoralize art and cast intelligence out of it.

It cannot be repeated then too often that poetry is not a matter of
emotions only, but of intellectual perception and moral outlook as well.
The poet who has described a painful episode in his life does not always
just merely record the pain, he goes further than his intuition. He
thinks and judges and condemns and plans. He is also a philosopher and a
moralist, excited to such states by his intuition. It wasn't intuition
that created the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen, it was a moral and
intellectual vision working with the poet's intuition. Logic, science,
metaphysics, ethics, are part of the poetic material. All ideas are
philosophic or scientific, and emotionally and beautifully expressed may
become poetry or literature.

However, Croce did good service in calling for the independence of art,
since reformers and moralists often seek to force upon art a practical
end outside and beside it. He also admits that the practical and
aesthetic are often found united, and that it would be erroneous to
maintain that the artist's independence of vision should be extended to
the communication. "If art be understood as the externalization of art,
then utility and morality have a perfect right to deal with it; that is
to say, the right one possesses to deal with one's own household." Since
the artist selects from his intuitions when he writes, his selection is
governed by the economic conditions of life and of its moral direction.
Hence Croce finds the artist's use of the concepts of morality to some
extent justified.

But where the ideas dealt with by an author are such as all accept, the
beauty of the work depends on the manner in which it is written. Here he
does not write for the purpose of the underlying idea, which he uses
merely as a pretext for artistic work. He seeks to portray an emotion
and to make the reader feel it. Drawing a picture may be the object of
the author. He may merely try to reproduce with vividness what we all
see; or narrate what we all know. The importance of his work lies then
in its technique. There is no question that technique is always to be
considered in determining one's greatness as a writer.

What distinguishes the layman from the artist is that the former has no
power of craftsmanship; he does not understand the secrets of any of the
forms of literature; he does not know how to set down his thoughts or
sentiments in a pleasing or beautiful manner. There are many laymen who
have better views on morality and who possess a greater intellect than
many successful authors, but they are not artists. If by knowing how to
tell a story or sing a poem they could move the world,--if they had
craftsmanship,--then we would call them artists.

It does not follow, however, that because an author has certain
technical genius, but is destitute of any intellect, and dallies with
trite ideas, that he is a great artist. To rank among the great artists
perfection of form should be welded with great and important ideas of
life.


FOOTNOTES:

[146:A] Wordsworth was on better ground when he said, "Our continued
influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts." _Preface
to Lyrical Ballads_ (1800).




CHAPTER IX

HIGH FORM OF POETRY ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF ADVANCED SOCIAL IDEALS


We are always fascinated by the poet who comes to the aid of the people,
and is even rejected by them for his advanced ideas. We like to think of
the poet as one who belongs to the minority, as a non-conformist, as a
champion of liberty, as a sponsor for advanced views. We want him not to
be uttering and singing the commonplaces of to-day but the truths of the
morrow. In the long run it is the Shelleys and Whitmans and Ibsens that
count. Even though the poets be mad like Don Quixote or Brand, and do
evil with good intentions, we admire them.

What sad figures the versifiers of unimportant conceits make when
confronted with the great poets who use their intellect. These petty
minstrels are the same types whom Milton attacked; they are the gossips
of literature who like housewives think every trivial fancy must be
voiced. And when we are bored by their nuances, their play with words,
their records of unprofitable incidents, they tell us we cannot
appreciate poetry, that we have not "taste." Man will always listen even
though disapprovingly and hostilely, if the poet reveals a soul. But the
minor versifier has no soul, or if he has he keeps it out of his verses.
He is ready to talk to you about his spectacles, his bath, or his
dinner, but he cannot refer to his inner thoughts and feelings. Even if
he does experience an emotion he often conveys it through the images of
books.

Poetry which champions human liberty and shows characters battling for
truth amidst persecution is always great poetry. We like to think of the
poet as Baudelaire characterized him, one whose own mother does not
understand him, one in whose food the public puts ashes, one with whom
his own wife is not in sympathy. We like to think of him as an
Ishmaelite, as one who is against his age, since the majority is often
incapable of welcoming a new and great idea even emotionally treated. If
he is merely a patriotic or a religious or conventionally moral poet, he
will appeal to most people, but these represent the audience that is not
of an elevated intellectual order. He is not universal, for people of
other countries and religions, and the people of the future who will
break away from the old morality will not find that he reaches their
sentiments.

We want the progressive poet, and not the eternal harper on the
commonplace.

Nor are these views inconsistent with the assertion that poetry should
not be the handmaid of religion and morality. If it must be a handmaid,
then let it be the handmaid of a universal religion, which finds its
roots in thought and sane feeling; of a morality of love and justice
that is still too ideal to be grasped by the age. No worthy poet to-day
would write a poem merely to teach us simple precepts of morality. In a
rude age, an emotional treatment of the most commonplace ethical maxims
was great poetry because these were in advance of the age. To us such a
production is stale. Hence the "great" poem of one age may become
nauseating to a later epoch.

Poetry is a progressive art. The emotion playing about the old ballads
and legends is not as compelling as that found in the great modern
novels and plays. Our great later poets and thinkers are more advanced
and do not worship superstition and defend false beliefs, or celebrate
revenge and war, as the old primeval poets do. When we think of the
ideal poet, it is not the champion of the middle class like Longfellow
and Tennyson, or one full of the early martial spirit and drawing
fighting heroes like the author of _Beowulf_, or the _Nibelungen Lied_.
Nor do we think of the poet who incorporates the religious errors and
legends of his time and imitates ancient epics, nor of one who portrays
a preceding and bygone age. We, or at least a few of us, like to think
of him as a man drawing people in the grip of passions and battling for
advanced ideas. We like to think of men like Shakespeare and Ibsen,
Isaiah and Job, Balzac and Cervantes, Molière and Goethe, Byron and
Shelley, Burns and Heine, Whitman and Swinburne, Carducci and Nietzsche,
Carlyle and Ruskin, Dostoievsky and Dickens, Hugo and Rolland. We like
to think chiefly of men who were largely personal in their appeal, and
depicted their own sufferings, and described grief brought about by the
social construction of society which they criticized. Such poets are no
dalliers with anaemic feelings. They felt what they sang and were not
afraid to give sway to their emotions and ideas. They are not
didacticists nor moralists, but emotional thinkers. They do not think
that they ought to deny the claims of the intellect and the moral
vision. I do not say that other kinds of emotional writers are not great
poets. I merely cite what I think is a high order of poetry. I do not
deny that poets may avoid any moral mission and just sing private
emotions, whether in prose or verse. The Troubadours, and the Roman
Elegists, De Musset and Verlaine, Hafiz and Keats, are among the very
greatest poets, even though they are not prophets.

Much of our so-called democratic poetry is not democratic at all. Poetry
does not become democratic because some poets dwell on the privileges
the working people of to-day have in contrast with those working people
had generations ago, or because writers have discovered that even common
people experience most of the emotions of the upper class. Literature
cannot be democratic, while poets write for the few who use them as
tools for their own interests, to defend a system which is courteously
called competition instead of exploitation. Much of our democratic
literature is either capitalistic or bourgeois literature that gives a
slight condescending nod to the proletariat. Many wealthy and cultured
authors have taken up the cause of the laborer just as they would that
of caged animals. They have suggested improvements in the treatment of
captives, but not complete freedom. Fortunately we have had works like
Galsworthy's _Strife_, Hauptmann's _Weavers_, Verhaeren's _Dawn_,
Sinclair's _Jungle_, Zola's _Germinal_, Gissing's _Nether World_.

Poetry will tend to become international, and instead of seeking to
encourage national prejudices, will seek to eradicate them. Race
prejudice is one of the deepest rooted prejudices which inferior poets
often encourage. The old idea that the man of another country is a
barbarian and that the alien is an enemy within our gates, a tolerated,
unwelcome guest, must be eradicated. Can any one contemplate without
disgust plays and photoplays that depict Chinese, Japanese, Negroes and
Jews as criminals, simply because of their creed or color? Is it true
that virtue resides in the breast of the Aryan race only? The eighteenth
century idea of the brotherhood of man is not extinct and the future
will use poetry to spread this idea. Poetry should not foster hatred of
people because they are followers of different customs.

It can hardly be doubted that the poetry of the future will deal more
with the emotions as experienced by the proletariat class. The feelings
to which many of our greatest poets have given vent in recent years have
been those of the middle and capitalistic class, just as bards in the
past voiced the emotions of the feudalist lords, and religious and
military leaders. The connection between economics and literature or
poetry is not as remote as it seems. Bernard Shaw has made use of his
knowledge of the subject in constructing his plays. The work of Gorki,
Hauptmann and Zola has taken into consideration the feelings that the
average working people go through in their struggle for existence. Yet
the works of these writers are art or poetry, and not tracts. Literature
written to encourage the working men in their abject and ill-paid
condition will not be countenanced by the future. The songs of the poet
with lily white hands who writes about the dignity of toil and
subservience to the employer will disappear. The emotions connected with
the struggle for a living and with a desire for a more equitable
distribution of wealth, will be the subject of our poetry.

Much of the old poetry should be discouraged for it is debased and
undemocratic. Take the themes of the epics of India, Persia, Ireland,
England, Greece, Finland, Rome, Italy, Spain, Germany and Iceland, all
of which are lauded as among the greatest literary productions of the
world. Wars are the subjects, fighters are the heroes. The lust for
fighting is encouraged instead of being decried. While all of these
epics contain beautiful passages and poems of glowing and even
unsurpassed beauty, they keep man back in the primitive stage, and
countenance a state of barbarism that he should outgrow.

It may after all be fortunate that the earliest poetry of nations is
seldom read, for most of it is of very little intellectual value,
celebrating the wars and religions of the writers. Occasionally there
are secular poems of modern and universal interest among them. But for
the most part, fighting absorbs the writers and all their interests are
in bloodshed, revenge, cruelty. There are many causes fostering the
hatreds and errors of our day, without our using these old works to
spread them. We find there silly codes of honor, idiotic conceptions of
justice, amazing viewpoints of morality. We want the emotions celebrated
in these old works to die out and not to be perpetuated.

The world of democracy belongs to poetry, not merely the democracy of
the realistic novel which was willing to concede that even the poor man
like the old kings and the nobility had love tragedies. Poetry will deal
not with that philanthropy, which often means the master throwing crumbs
to quiet the growling servant. No, it will be based on feelings that
emanate from a sincere desire to promote human justice. There is no
doubt that some day our system of society which permits a man to roll up
billions which he squanders, while it does not allow another enough to
keep himself and his family in comfort, will disappear, and poetry will
express the emotions prevalent under the new order.

Much of the poetry of the past has sung the praises of wage slavery. The
poetry of the future will sing as Amos did of old the beauty of social
and economic equality. To-day the hero of the poem is the successful
business man, or the submissive contented working man, just as in the
past the soldier and the monk were the heroes. To-morrow it will be the
man who fights for economic justice for himself or the masses. Our
standards of economic justice are changing and this change will effect
poetry. The poet who sings in defense of the capitalist or our economic
system has little in common with him who is the spokesman of the common
people.

Poetry springs from the people and must take into consideration their
emotions in connection with their economic problems. Very little of the
poetry of the past has done this. Consider the literature of the middle
ages and note how seldom the troubles of the serfs and villains were
expressed by the poets. There were slight efforts made in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, in the _Romance of the Rose_ and in Langland's
_Piers Plowman_, respectively, to give some expression to the feelings
of the masses.

Modern poetry tends to deal emotionally with social problems. The poet
who calls attention to the suffering of the poor, or the persecutions of
reformers, or shows the ills in family life brought about by our
marriage system, or announces a social message, is not a propagandist
when he writes something that evokes our emotions. When Untermeyer
published his book on poetry he was much criticized for the prominence
he gave to James Oppenheim and Arthur Giovanitti, who are excellent
poets. It is to be regretted that Untermeyer did not include also a
chapter on Horace Traubel. Untermeyer may insist too much on the social
mission of poetry, but he is nearer to an exalted conception of poetry
than those who weld words to metre and have neither ideas nor substance
in their writing.

Emerson said, "There is no subject that does not belong to him (the
poet),--politics, economics, manufactures and stock brokerage; as much
as sunsets and souls; only these things, placed in their order, are
poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic."

An English clergyman, F. W. Robertson, in his two lectures on the
"Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes," delivered in 1852, and
posthumously collected in _Lectures and Essays_, gave vent to many
remarkable ideas on the subject of poetry. The following passage was
written three years before the _Leaves of Grass_, and sums up Whitman's
ideas, and is worthy of quotation to-day for its timeliness:

     The Poetry of the coming age must come from the Working
     Classes. In the upper ranks, Poetry, so far at least as it
     represents their life, has long been worn out, sickly and
     sentimental. Its manhood is effete. Feudal aristocracy with
     its associations, the castle and the tournament, has passed
     away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott.
     Byron sang its funeral dirge. But tenderness, and heroism, and
     endurance still want their voice, and it must come from the
     classes whose observation is at first hand, and who speak
     fresh from nature's heart. What has poetry to do with our
     Working Classes? Men of work! We want our poetry from
     you--from men who will dare to live a brave and true  life;----

It does not follow that individualism in poetry will die out and that
ignorant laborers are to be the sole heroes and subjects of poetry. The
intellectual reader will still find in poetry his intellectual heroes.
There will never be equality of intellect, and hence there will also be
something of an intellectual aristocracy in connection with the
literature and poetry of democracy.

The note of ecstasy as a passion for righteousness and social justice is
of a high order usually. It was this note in which Greek and Roman
poetry, however, was deficient. It is this ecstasy that raises the
prophetic portions of the Bible to the high plane they occupy.

Professor Butcher, surely one in sympathy with Greek art, pointed out
the weakness of Greek criticism, in that it failed to consider the
social state in connection with the work of art. This state of criticism
was due to the fact that the poetry of the Greeks showed no deep
interest in social justice. Pindar, the greatest lyricist of the Greeks,
wrote about athletic contests; athletes were his heroes. The Greeks
glorified healthy bodies in their poetry, an exalted feature
undoubtedly. Homer wrote about wars, and Achilles remained the type of
Greek hero. Æschylus dwelt on the laws of divine retribution for
indulgence in crime. Sophocles contemplated the irony of fate. Sappho
recorded her love troubles.

The only exception of a work treating of poetry in connection with
social justice is Plato's _Republic_, and he concluded that the poet was
unnecessary. Yet he himself is one of the few Greek poets who showed
deep interest in social justice.

The first critic who pointed out the connection between poetry and
social conditions was the author of _On the Sublime_, who ends his
treatise with a beautiful attack on the love of money which hinders the
development of good art. This is the first passage in pagan antiquity to
point out the evils of commercialism in connection with art.

None of the Greek poets (except perhaps Aristophanes) thought it worthy
of their art to cry out against the social abuses of the time, and to
lament the existence of wrong. The Roman satires alone in pagan
literature approached, though weakly, the ecstasy for social justice in
the prophecies of the Bible. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah rank
higher than most of the Greek poems because they show a social
consciousness steeped in emotion. Passages like these are Hebraic and
not Greek. "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to
field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the
midst of the earth." _Isaiah_ (Ch. 5, v. 8). "They are waxen fat, they
shine: yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked: they judge not the
cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of
the needy do they not judge." _Jeremiah_ (Ch. 5, v. 28). "Take away from
me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.
But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty
stream." _Amos_ (Ch. 5, v. 23-24).

Fénelon in a famous passage eloquently proclaimed the superiority of
Hebrew poetry to Greek poetry. Heine, a pronounced Hellenist, came to
the final conclusion that the Greeks were children and the Hebrews men.

The Hebrew idea of righteousness was a different one from the later
Christian notion of consciousness of sin. The latter was really a
perversion of the former, and ended rather in social injustices as the
history of the medieval ages shows.

The discussion in regard to the merits of poetry with a mission, or
poetry that is purely aesthetic, was revived on the occasion of the
publication of Untermeyer's book _The New Era in American Poetry_. His
critics made the mistake of thinking that those who want poetry to deal
with social ideas are not ready to recognize poems that are beautiful,
or convey an emotion, even if there is little intellectual content
behind the work. There is no social message in Poe's _Raven_, for
example, but I could not imagine Untermeyer not being moved by that
poem, for it digs down into the emotions; it was written out of Poe's
tragic life and finds a response in us all. Untermeyer has not been
tardy in his appreciation of poets without a message like Frost and
Robinson. In fact Untermeyer ignores quite a number of Revolutionary
poets.

The reader may say that a new social idea in poetry is just as bad as an
old moral saw, in that they are both didactic. It all depends on the
ecstatic presentation, but I think that an idea that is advanced and
unrecognized is by virtue of its novelty and truth more capable of
swaying the emotion that we call poetic than the repetition of a
hackneyed ethical maxim which every child knows and hears usually
without emotion. Ibsen's plays are poetry not only because of the
treatment, but because of the ideas there, while many of the English
eighteenth century moralists in verse are poets neither in treatment nor
ideas.

The only country where critics have had almost no use for the theory of
art for art's sake has been Russia. Here they have also had no such
compromising views that seek to know only whether the poet has done his
work well, and whether he has delivered his message irrespective of its
value, importance or truth. The Russian critics were men who were
interested in the connection between life and poetry, and never failed
to have their eye on the former while considering the latter. They did
more, they had their eye on the future, and hence were usually liberal.
We know very little about these Russian critics, and only recently has
the nature of their work been outlined by Thomas G. Masaryk, who before
the war published _The Spirit of Russia_ just translated into English.
Previously Kropotkin and a few historians of Russian literature had
touched on their work. Some day perhaps we may be so fortunate as to
have translations into English of the works of Bielinski,
Tchernishevski, Dobrolubov, Pisarev and Mihailovsky. To these men art
was a serious thing, and they would not have its value lost in
metaphysical theories of aesthetics about beauty, in endless discussions
about the niceties and importance of metrical forms. Poetry dealt with
social problems and suggested changes in society. Its mission was to
deal with the unbared human soul and above all not to lie and affect.

Every one has conceived the function of poetry as being something
different, usually as something to spread his own views. Thus the
theologian looks upon it as a handmaid of religion, to show the beauty
of a dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with his religion.
The voluptuary thinks it merely a means of arousing sexual morality.
Some philosophers think it a vehicle to promulgate their own systems.
Thus Nietzsche believed poetry should spread the gospel of the will to
power, while Schopenhauer thought it reached its highest point when it
glorified the denial of the will to live.

The world can never be fully agreed as to what poetry is any more than
it can agree as to what beauty, truth, or duty is. A passage may appeal
to one person and not to another. It all depends on the beliefs, tastes,
experiences and education of the reader. Patriotic and religious poetry,
whether in verse or prose, falls flat on the internationalist and free
thinker respectively, because they do not adore the sentiments therein,
though they might admit the beauty of the writing and recognize the
appeal it makes to those who are in accord with the writer. They cannot
be responsive to the soul of the singer because they are differently
constituted in their beliefs and because the ideas that aroused in the
poet one train of emotions, move them to a contrary passion.

Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few centuries ago was
sentenced to be burned at the stake for his religious beliefs. A poet
who approved of this course wrote a poem where his emotions are
crystallized. He was sorry for the victim and hoped God would pardon him
and make him see the error of his ways. He praised the executioner who
himself was grieved that he had to take this course to save the
infidel's soul. He was certain that God was pleased with the sentence.
He deplored the evil effects that might follow if this man were allowed
to live to spread his infamous doctrines, he rebuked the man for the
trouble he brought on his family. On the whole he gave us a metrical and
emotional composition actually describing his sensations, not even
omitting sympathetic reference to the sufferings of the victim. This was
poetry to those thousands that day who approved of this act. But most of
us cannot to-day enter into the ecstasy of the writer; it is not poetry
to us. But while people to-day are not burned at the stake, they are
persecuted for advancing ideas that are beyond the public. The poets,
who are on a low level of thought with the public, in writing poems
against such individuals or the ideas or cause represented by them, are
not poets to those who support the persecuted individual or his ideas.
Most poets still write in defense of burning at the stake of great
humanitarians, but they advocate other measures than burning by real
fire.

When Ibsen said in reply to the critic who would not allow _Peer Gynt_
to be called poetry, that the definition of poetry would have to be
changed to take in his poem, he was stating a condition that always
takes place when a new poetic masterpiece appears. The conception as to
what is poetry always changes, for what moves man in one age does not
move him in another. The poets often have to do what Whitman and
Wordsworth did, create the tastes by which they are to be enjoyed. We
are all aware that in the eighteenth century poetry meant something
entirely different from what we believe it to be to-day. Many men were
considered poets then whom we do not regard as such. The same is true of
poetry in prose. There was hostility to the poetry in the novels of
Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, because the public did not want to accept
their artistic innovations, their frankness and their views.

Yeats in his essay "What is Popular Poetry" in the _Ideas of Good and
Evil_, said that poetry of a very high order, like the _Epipsychidion_,
is not popular for it presupposes more than it says. All good poetry,
whether springing from a written or an unwritten tradition, is always
"strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding," and
suggests remembrance of impossible things, and glimmers with thoughts
and images dating back to unknown history.

There is a great deal of literature or poetry which presupposes some
culture, and a sensitiveness to beauty, and especially a highly
developed intellect. The man with the commonplace mind, even though he
be educated and well read, is often unable to appreciate the beauty of
poetry in which new and advanced and unpopular ideas are held in
solution. The poetry in the work of Whitman and Nietzsche and Ibsen was
not felt by people who could not enter into the spirit of their revolt
from contemporary morality. The public cannot appreciate the prose
poetry of Hearn because of his rich language and aesthetic
sensitiveness.

The public can take an interest in the beauty and poetry of ideas it
understands, and written in language that it speaks and in images that
it uses; but the poet is often at his best an aristocrat in thought and
language, and then it takes a well trained individual reader to like
him. Poetry is no longer mere folklore or ballads or musical numbers,
all of which the public may enjoy.

There is no such thing as absolute truth. Truth is only a relative term.
When a man speaks of the truth he means those doctrines which he himself
embraces. Every man believes that the views that he entertains are true,
otherwise he would not hold them. Many people have in the past died for
the "truth," when we know that they upheld falsehood.

A writer who is liberally inclined will hold liberal ideas to be the
truth; a conservative regards only conservative views as true. An author
who embraces ideas from both the conventional and radical spheres,
considers only those books as true whose authors do the same thing.

In a sane essay on De Vigny, Mill makes a remarkable distinction between
the conservative and radical poet, concluding that the greatest poet
will always partake of the nature of both, mentioning as example Balzac
and De Vigny. Had he written on the subject a half-century later he
might have named Ibsen, whose _Brond_ and _Wild Duck_ are good
conservative poems. Mill, who was no disciple of art for art's sake,
said that the radical poet will paint passionate love, "will show it at
war with the forms and customs of society, nay even with its laws and
religion, if the laws and tenets which regulate that branch of human
relations are among those which have begun to be murmured against." "To
him, whatever exists will appear from that alone fit to be represented:
to probe the wounds of society and humanity is part of his business, and
he will neither shrink from exhibiting what is in nature, because it is
morally culpable, nor because it is physically revolting." Here Mill
anticipates Zola, Ibsen and Freud. No wonder that so radical a critic as
Brandes was attracted to him. It is a pity he did not continue literary
criticism.

It is probably vain to try to define different types of poetic or
literary excellence, but we may state some of these. Formerly a
first-class poet was one who successfully imitated a model and followed
certain rules. Or he was one who successfully voiced the current
accepted views of the age. It is these reasons that still make many
people consider Dante and Milton among the first-class poets. Again
there is a tendency to regard as poets of the first class those who
perfected their art technically. Hence Æschylus and Sophocles are ranked
among the greatest poets. Sometimes he is regarded among the greatest
poets because he is among the earliest, like Homer. The position of
poets like Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes and Goethe as first-class
world poets and writers, cannot be contested, because they are so
universal.

Under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw in his preface to a new edition of
his novel _The Irrational Knot_ laid down an interesting distinction
between literature of the first and of the second order. The distinction
applies to poetry as well. Shaw considered as literature of the first
order work which makes a distinct original contribution to morality,
even if such writing is literary criticism. He regards the writers who
accept ready-made morality as of the second order. Shaw admits that
writers of the first order are often less readable and less constructive
than writers of the second order. He mentions among writers of the first
order, Ibsen, Euripides, Byron, Wilde and La Rochefoucauld, and
Shakespeare in _Hamlet_. From prefaces in other books of his we know he
would include men like Blake, Shelley, Nietzsche, and Butler. As
writers of the second order he mentions Shakespeare, Scott, Dumas,
Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, and he would no doubt include writers like
Macaulay and Holmes. He does not mean that a writer of the first order
is always greater than one of the second order, but he does insist as
follows: "No man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion
and morality are offered to him on a long spoon, can share the same
Parnassian bench with those who make an original contribution to
religion and morality, were it only a criticism." In spite of the
contention of the art for art's sake school that poetry has nothing to
do with morality or religion, the greatest poets are those authors of
the literature of ecstasy who championed new ideas, fought for liberty
in their works, expressed the advanced ideas of the age, and gave us a
new and more liberal outlook on life. While it is true that often poets
of the second order have expressed strongly and movingly just the common
sentiments of everybody, on the whole the original poets rank higher. It
is this which puts Whitman above Longfellow, Nietzsche above Macaulay,
Byron and Shelley above Tennyson and Rossetti, Ibsen above Scott. Yet
there are many poets who made no distinct original contribution to a new
morality, but expressed common emotions so humanely, and powerfully,
that we think of them as poets of a very high order. The Dickens of the
_Christmas Carol_ and the Burns of the love songs were not original but
they are great nevertheless by the infectious depicting of universal
emotion, which is always of highest importance in literature. Though
there is nothing new in a novel like _Eugénie Grandet_ but a wonderful
description of a miser, it is poetry of a very high order, for an
account of a passion in an intense manner is great poetry. Most of
Hafiz's poems record his loves, but though he was a liberal and against
the asceticism of his day, he was in the main not an exponent of
anything new; nevertheless, he is a poet of a high order.

The world usually does not recognize the original poet and accepts a
poet of the second order as one of the first order, but posterity
adjusts the matter. Shelley and Ibsen finally won their places and I
think to-day the growing coldness to Scott and Tennyson is due to their
lacking in great original ideas.

We need not agree with Shaw when he says that Dickens, Ruskin and
Carlyle made no contributions to the morality of their day. The
humanitarian reforms suggested by Dickens' novels, the conceptions about
sincerity in history, and the importance of individualism and the heroic
Carlyle and Ruskin's views in art criticism and economics, were all
original. They all had in addition the great power of expression, and
though they were not always very profound in their views, they are poets
of a high order.

A poet, then, is of the first order if he expresses in prose the ecstasy
connected with a great original idea of social justice far in advance of
his age.

There is an opinion ruling among academic circles, also derived from
Aristotle, that poetry is the highest form of literature, and that a
verse epic, drama or lyric is, when at its best, always better than any
work in prose. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Who would say
that great novels like _Don Quixote_, great plays like Ibsen's, great
essays like Montaigne's are not superior as literature to many of the
best known verse productions. Nor must we assume that the literature of
emotion or ecstasy, whether in prose or verse, is always the highest
form of literature. The literature that shows great insight into
character, that brims most with intellectual ideas, that is universal
and human in interest even if not emotional, ranks higher than poetry
which voices no ideas. You will find greater literature in books like
Taine's _History of English Literature_, or Hazlitt's essays, even in
those passages which do not belong to the literature of ecstasy, than in
many poems of James Whitcomb Riley or Longfellow. The two latter
produced many poems that belong to the literature of emotion, but while
they are genuine poets, they are intellectually deficient.

Aesthetics and criticism have tended to place little aesthetic value on
the literature of ideas. A passage from Hume's _Essays_ is greater as
literature than many verses in our magazines. Much literature consists
of a succession of ideas or facts, no particular one of which moves us
to ecstasy, but the work as a whole does have aesthetic value and yet is
not poetry, but has greater literary value than some poetry.

Neither verse poetry, nor the prose literature of ecstasy, then, is the
highest literature necessarily. Shakespeare was one of the greatest
poets, not only because he depicted emotions, but because his intellect,
his psychological insight, his universality, his personality, all
combine to make him the great figure he is. He would have continued to
be as great a figure even if he had written nothing more than a diary.
It is genius that counts and not the form one uses. To say that the
drama or epic is the highest literary form is absurd; it may be the
essay, if a genius is using that form.

When we have a description of emotions, we have poetry or the literature
of ecstasy. But profound thought may give a work more enduring qualities
than ecstasy. A love song by Burns is wonderfully sweet, but I can see
no reason why, because it is poetry, we must say that it is a greater
piece of literature than even an emotional prose passage out of
Nietzsche or Carlyle at their best. Goethe's prose essays are profound
and are often greater as literature than his lyrics. There are
intellectual passages in _Wilhelm Meister_ that are superior as
literature to emotional scenes in _Faust_ as literature.

Critics like Henry Newbolt are supporting the view that poetry must be
in touch with life. Though he clings to the idea that poetry and rhythm
go together he thinks that the natural tendency of poetic rhythm will be
towards perpetual change; the value of his book, however, consists
especially in a chapter on "Poetry and Politics." He recognizes that
both reason and intuition play a part in poetry; men are not divided
into men of thought and men of feeling, the one speaking the language of
science, the other that of poetry. If man is a reasoning animal, he also
is a creature of instinct as well as of thought. Hence poetry depends on
science, the facts of which become part of our imagination. The poet
builds a more livable world; he may write great political poetry if he
does not become a partisan. Poetry seeks to change human feeling; that
is what the Prophets did, and they were in a sense political poets.
"Great poetry," says Newbolt, "is the poetry which has the power to stir
many men and stir them deeply," but is especially great when it "is the
expression of our consciousness of this world, tinged with man's
universal longing for a world more perfect, nearer to the heart's
desire."

Newbolt finds that the reason so much religious poetry is futile is
because it is remote from earth. But he finds in the _Psalms_ a fervor
of patriotism and moral enthusiasm that he compares to the common
liturgical poetry "as a great and sonorous bell to the vague whistle of
the wind." They preach no dogma, they are remote from practical
politics, they are rooted in human emotions, and are the product of no
particular church. That is why they always move.

Incidentally one may add that is why the great medieval Hebrew poets
like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah Ha Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra, are great
poets.[172:A]

Heine in his poem on _Jehuda Ben Halevi_ deplores the fact that these
three poets are not well known to Aryan peoples. In fact the liturgical
poetry of the medieval Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be
appreciated by any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of
poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's _Ode to Zion_, or Bachya Ibn
Pakuda's _My Soul_. There are able prose translations of these in B.
Halper's _Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. An Anthology_, Vol. II.

Any one who reads the history of the poetry of a country, that is, of
the poetry in verse, will find much to amuse him in the alleged progress
made in the conventions of poetry. One poet dethrones another and the
reader gets the impression that the later poet is always superior to the
earlier one because he has destroyed convention, and introduced what is
often a minor change. The eighteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser
rather low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, Tennyson
and Browning were assumed to have advanced upon Byron and Shelley, and
the mid-Victorians in turn were deemed to have been supplanted by the
poets of "the nineties." Though a later age may make some technical
improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is genius that counts.
Many problems about poetry have disturbed critics since Byron died, but
none of the succeeding generations have been able to detract from the
quality of poets like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and
Keats. For a poet is such by virtue of his ability to convey great
emotion and thought, and he does not become obsolete solely by the
technical innovations of a later age.

Many poets are praised for the "note of revolt" in their poetry, because
they have brought about some changes in the technical art of writing
poetry, or have written their poetry in a manner different from the
ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the fact that
these changes which are considered tokens of great courage on the part
of the innovators, amount to very little when these so-called audacious
poets remain on an intellectual and moral level with the masses and do
not rise as high as the older poet whose vision soared ahead of his
time.

A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the
supernatural, even though he indulges in artificial diction, clichés and
stereotyped metres, for what counts in poetry is the greatness and power
of a human soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an
advanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, freedom and
justice, the intensity and importance of his emotion. People are under
the impression that all the martyrs for human liberty perished in the
medieval ages; that the world has been set free by those who gave up
their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, and that there
is no more work to be done by poets to-day in championing human liberty.
Critics who admire Milton and Shelley as champions of liberty attack
to-day's unpopular champions of it. It amuses one to read of the
epithets, revolutionary and radical, applied to versifiers because they
have arranged a system of vowel-sounds combination in their poems, or
imported a metre, or broken with an old conventional metre, while the
substance of their poetry remains far below the intellectual and
aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries ago.

But what greater poetry has been produced in the last two generations,
than many of the novels and prose dramas written in Russia, Germany,
France, Italy, England and Scandinavia? Why is there greatness in the
poetry in these works? Is it not because of the character drawing, the
delineation of great emotional conflicts, of the ecstasy bathing the
ideas? Would these poets have been any the less great, had they
continued to use the same ideas, emotions and situations, tricked out
even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, tropes, allegories,
high personages, supernatural agencies? In fact plays like _Peer Gynt_
and _The Sunken Bell_ are rather technically conventional as verse
plays, but could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless and
trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern "revolutionary"
poets? The great poet who deals with the capabilities of man in
experiencing emotion, and fears not to track the human soul, even into
morbid feelings, who has the courage to challenge society with ideas,
even though these arouse the most bitter antagonism of some of the
leaders of society, is the man whom posterity will most enjoy, for he is
most human and bold and he never loses sight of the fact that he deals
with real ecstasy, and not with the cultivated nuances of some cliques
of versifiers.

If the reader will make a close study of many of the revolutions in
writing poetry, he will find that the great change often amounted to
nothing more than the substitution or creation of a new rhythm or trope
for the one used by the old poet; such changes are of minor importance.
No doubt our contemporary poets have done away with many conventions.
They no longer employ inversions of words and phrases, nor cultivate the
stock poetical terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic
license. They no longer tolerate clichés such as whenas, o'er, whatime,
dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, main, taen, athwart, e'en,
forsooth, alack, oh thou, didst, hath, perchance, methinks, steed,
gleeds, prithee, trow, 'neath, 'gainst, ween, wist, espy, twixt. But it
took them a long time to discover what the prose writers always knew;
namely, that distorted speech should be avoided in literature. But the
avoidance of clichés does not make a poet.

Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy Lowell are
artificial in substance and manner, labored and uninspired, dull and
bookish, and lacking in human interest, ecstasy and ideas. Their
technique may be different from that of the old poets, but these new
writers often have no ideas, reveal no poetic personality, and convey no
emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, and as a result they
fall below even the old New England poets whom they despise. A poet like
Longfellow may be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with
liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of such human
interest as _Evangeline_, presents an idea against war as in _The
Arsenal at Springfield_, or draws on his personal life in such fine
lyrics as _My Lost Youth_, _The Bridge_, _The Day is Done_, he moves us
and we know we are reading poetry, though it has not the emancipating
and stimulating effect of some of the work of Walt Whitman. Lafcadio
Hearn, by the way, condemned the tendency to depreciate Longfellow.

Many of our free verse writers produce no great poetry, even though they
write in a medium that is the proper language of poetry. The opponents
of the free verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's
productions, are often right; these productions are not poetry because
they lack ecstasy and ideas. Much of the work in the old forms produced
to-day has more ecstasy, and hence it is poetry.

Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence to-day is outside
the scope of this volume.

There has been much comment about the fact that we need and indeed are
getting an American or national poetry. Now one of the things that
Whitman has overdone was this demand for poetry that is distinctly
American. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man first. A great
idea like a passage in the _Song of Myself_ could have been written by
and can be appreciated by the people of another nation. A cry of
sympathy for the sufferings of animals and man such as you find in _Out
of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_ is not an American but a human note.

You can translate a love poem from the Greek, Latin, German, French or
Italian into English prose, and if you remove the proper names or other
unessential adjuncts, no expert or scholar will be able to tell what
nationality the poem represents. No one has better shown the hollowness
of the claimants for nationalism than James Russell Lowell in two essays
on nationality in literature, one written in sympathetic review of
Longfellow's _Kavanagh_ and collected in _The Round Table_, and another
in review of Piatt's poems, collected in _The Function of the Poet_.

Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely national poetry.
True, there are national traits and characteristics, modes of thought
and feeling peculiar to different peoples, that enter into and
distinguish every literature, but these do not usually make one
literature so national as to be incomprehensible to other nations. When
this does happen, the product has no universal appeal and hence is not
great poetry. Again poetry may have local color; it may be steeped in
national traditions, it may express a racial philosophy but it is then
of value only in so far as it represents the mode of thinking and
feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in the soil, be an
indigenous product, depict native customs or a provincial life; it may
depict certain types of heroes, and glory in the country of its birth,
and describe its richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human
nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is universal, though it
may be colored by national traits, though one nation may feel more
keenly, or indulge a certain emotion more frequently than others. The
heart and the head, the emotions and the mind, rule in writing. The _Old
Testament_ and Shakespeare are no longer national products for they
speak to the whole world. They have the local color and the ideas of
their time and depict a certain phase of life, but we all feel in
reading these books that they are written about ourselves and to
ourselves. "We have spoken too much about nationalist art, forgetting
that though the roots may lie in nationality and personality, the
results, independent of school and nation, should overleap boundaries
and enter the universal heart." (Isaac Goldberg, _Studies in
Spanish-American Literature_.)

Poetry then grows out of the soil, but like imported fruit tastes as
well to the man a thousand miles away as to the native.

The literature of a country however should be individualistic, not
imitative. Whitman is an American poet in the sense of recording his own
individuality, while Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a
Whitman rather than a Lowell who could have written the following
passages, which appear in the famous Preface to the first edition of
_Leaves of Grass_.

     In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty
     is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes
     wherever man and woman exist--but never takes any adherence or
     welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice
     and exposition of liberty. They out of the ages are worthy the
     grand idea--to them it is confided, and they must sustain it.
     Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade
     it.

I do not mean that the author of that bold poem in the first Bigelow
Paper, against the recruiting sergeant, and of the lecture on
_Democracy_, was not, in spite of his dislike of Whitman, in accord with
the above quoted passage. Nor do I mean that he could not have learned
to write a passage like that from the nation which gave us such fine
prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's _Areopagitica_, Locke's
_Letters on Toleration_, Jeremy Taylor's _Discourse of the Liberty of
Prophesying_, Mill's _Liberty_ and Morley's _Compromise_. But Whitman
was the first American poet who taking his cue from American political
documents embodied in his poetry views of political and individual
liberty, as the fruit of democracy. Even Whitman stopped short of
championing economic liberty. Some of his present-day disciples do
champion it. But Whitman's plea for liberty does not make him a national
poet, for European poets have also sung of liberty.


FOOTNOTES:

[172:A] The greatest authority in America on medieval Hebrew poetry is
Prof. Israel Davidson of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City.




CHAPTER X

LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS


Aristotle's best known contribution to literary criticism is his
statement that tragedy has the effect of a catharsis upon the reader and
helps him to discharge emotions of pity and fear that overburden him. We
have considerably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under
tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose or verse, in
dialogue or narrative. We believe that perusing literature in general
relieves the reader of all nerve-racking emotions and produces a
homeopathic effect upon him by the aesthetic voicing of his unconscious
feelings.

Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, _Literary Criticism in the
Renaissance_, gives us a good survey of several Italian commentators who
correctly interpreted Aristotle's view of the purgation of the emotions
of fear and pity as aesthetic, and not ethical. The first of these
critics was Robortelli (1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him,
while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to
pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the
purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity
and fear, holding men in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These
men anticipated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth century, who
destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that Aristotle had in mind the moral
purification and reformation of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously
thought that this was Aristotle's meaning.

Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have read these
Italians when he gave us his correct interpretation of the passage in
the preface to _Samson Agonistes_. Milton properly understood
Aristotle's meaning of the function of tragedy. It was to "temper and
reduce them (the passions) to just measure with a kind of delight,
stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated."

We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's view of the function
of tragedy from a passage in his _Politics_. He was thinking of the
relief the spectators' surcharged emotions obtained by witnessing
similar emotions expressed. His real meaning was perceived by Henri Weil
and Jacob Bernays, two great Jewish classical scholars of Germany.
Bernays states moreover in his work,[180:A] first published in 1857,
that any literary work telling of unhappy events has a homeopathic
effect on the reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually
suffer, the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within us.
Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his _History of Aesthetics_,
believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to
admit that even _Vanity Fair_ and _Cousin Bette_ would come within the
definition of tragedy developed by Bernays; for the reader finds his own
emotions expressed in these works no less than in Sophocles and obtains
relief when he reads them. Bosanquet further admits that any serious and
even formless portrayal of life may be placed within Bernays's theory
adding, "It may indeed be admitted to be a development inherent in
Aristotle's theory."

Aristotle perceived that the spectator of tragedy was putting himself in
the place of the characters, living their lives emotionally and
sympathizing with them. Since the novel or lyric poem depicts human
sorrow, and the reader is purged by reading these literary forms, just
like the spectator of tragedy, all literature has the effect of an
aesthetic catharsis upon the reader.

The novels of Thackeray and Balzac are poetry in parts and the emotional
influence in reading them is the same as in seeing a tragic verse-play
acted. Bosanquet, however, does not fully accept Aristotle's theory as
applied to tragic stories in prose because he regards poetical prose
rhetoric and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of tragedy the
entire episode in Hardy's _Return of the Native_, of the death of
Eustace's mother? Hardy's tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the
Greek playwrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements of poetic
tragedy in that the reader is purged and relieved of pity and fear and
kindred emotions. For tragedy is not to be found only in dialogues in
verse, but in narration and dialogue in prose, and its function is to
relieve us of any choking emotion, besides fear and pity.

Aristotle is the founder then of psychoanalytic interpretation of
literature and is a forerunner of Freud. He however refers only to the
catharsis upon the spectator, but not to that of the author's work upon
himself.

Every creator of tragedy in prose or verse, in fiction, essay or lyric
was first subject to repression and then ecstasy. We may say as
Nietzsche did, that tragic art is the reconciliation of Apollo and
Dionysius, of dreaming and emotional intoxication, and both these
conditions are, in Freud's words, due to repression.

But we have travelled far beyond Aristotle in our views of tragedy.
Freud has revolutionized the art of criticism and a disciple of his, F.
Wittels, in the _Tragische Motiv_, gave us an interpretation from the
psychoanalytic point of view of the nature and sufferings of tragic
characters. There is an abstract of the book by Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar
in the _American Journal of Psychology_ for April, 1912. Wittels shows
that the unconscious unethical desires break into consciousness and
cause tragedy. He points out that the Greeks were purified of pent up
emotions in the theater, and that they identified the demons of their
inner self in the actors. He also says that the Greek drama cannot any
longer talk as clearly to us as of old, for with our civilization we
have wandered away from the naïve Greek mind. The author emphasizes the
fact that unconscious causes make the writer compose his work, as well
as the fact that characters in history and literature acted from
unconscious causes. Thus suppressed erotic impulses influenced the
patriotism of Joan of Arc.

At all times, again, it was vaguely understood that dreams reveal the
unconscious, that poetry emanates from the dream state, that in fact
poems are even composed in dreams. Thus, the Bible itself is authority
for the fact that all the prophets received their messages in a dream or
vision. The Hebrew sages said that the dream was a fraction of prophecy,
the unripe fruit of prophecy.

One of the first critics who treated at length the question whether
poetry may actually be composed in dreams is the Hebrew poet and
critic Moses Ibn Ezra, who lived in Spain in the early part of the
twelfth century. The seventh chapter of his _Conversations and
Recollections_[182:A] deals with the subject. He was influenced by Arabs
who were absorbingly concerned with the interpretation of dreams. Ibn
Ezra thought that it was just in the sleeping state that the use of
thought and imagination was greatest, for then the soul loses
consciousness of things, the body and senses are at rest and only the
common sense, which the critic uses really as synonymous with the
unconscious, is active. He quotes a Hebrew philosopher to the effect
that the soul, when detached from the body, has finer perceptions than
when awake. This is in accordance with Aristotle who said that the soul
can discover hidden things when detached from the senses, when it is
pure. Ibn Ezra asserts that his Hebrew authority maintains that one may
compose verses in sleep, and he gives examples of his own.

Ibn Ezra believed that nightmares have some idea behind them, that an
interpreter of dreams whose reason is superior to that of the dreamer
can discover the idea, for dream interpretation is the science of hidden
things communicated by God. The poet also composes verses in dreams,
often because he does this in waking life, for many people carry on in
their dreams the occupations of their daily life. We all recall that we
read in our dreams, especially if we are lovers of reading. We do in our
dreams what we would like to do.

The Aristotelian medieval Hebrew philosophers, Isaac Israeli, Abraham
Ibn Daud, Moses Maimomides, and Levi ben Gerson also developed the idea
of the connection of prophecy with dreams.[183:A]

We know to-day that the poet creates a congenial surrounding for himself
out of his imagination. He is repelled by the sordidness of his
environment or the suffering he has had in life. He writes a poem like
_Epipsychidion_, to build himself a home where he has ideal love,
because he is not satisfied with his married life. He writes a prose
poem like _Dream Children_ where he sees himself wedded to his lost
love, with their children about him, because he is a bachelor who has
neither love nor children.

Poetry, like dreams, creates a state where unfulfilled unconscious
wishes are gratified. Poetry is the voice then of the unconscious. The
poem is usually a product of the day-dream, which is related to the
dream of sleep, for both species of dreams reveal the unconscious.
Poetry shows conflicts and makes adjustments to reality. Poetry is
aesthetic therapeutics.[184:A]

The dream poems of literature are so numerous that one is amazed that
the theory of poetry as a dream has not been more prominently discussed
by literary critics. In the middle ages many poems were cast in the form
of dreams. The allegory was generally a dream. Who can doubt that the
_Divine Comedy_ and _Pilgrim's Progress_, both in the form of dreams,
were attempts by the poets to adjust themselves to reality, to purge
themselves and relieve their unconscious?

Even those poets who are always hiding their souls and making inlays of
verbal mosaic reveal themselves. Their dabbling with trifles is
indicative of an inability or lack of courage to think and feel. They
thus make a disclosure more marked than if they had sung their private
thoughts openly.

Poetry is a psychological art rather than a plastic one. It deals with
the soul. Horace's statement that if the poet would make the reader weep
he must weep himself, is true. Yet we have often failed to recognize
that poetry is a genuine personal cry of a man who dreams. We have
confused poetry with prosody, instead of identifying it with the
unconscious.

The poem with the social message, the problem play for example, or the
novel with a purpose, also belongs to the literature of dreams. The poet
sees foul infections infiltrating society; he has often himself been a
victim of social abuses. He voices complaints about the unjust system
and its tyrannical sway. He shows himself and others suffering in its
coils. He dreams a vision of a more beautiful and just system of society
where neither he nor others are consumed in vexation. He states
ecstatically the ideas that come to him as he condemns; he entertains
and expresses views whose adoption would enable man to reconstruct
society on a better plan.

His intellect is colored by his inability to adjust himself socially.
His dreams give him ideas. He does not have to become a reformer, but he
recognizes social wrongs resulting from custom or stupidity or downright
wickedness. Personal repression and dreaming produce not only love
poems, but poems containing utopias of society, plans for improvement.

I have fully stated in my _The Erotic Motive in Literature_ the
psychoanalytical view of poetry which regards it as the poet's creation
of a world in accordance with his fancy to compensate himself for his
repressions. Thus the poet relieves himself of emotions that were
bursting within him and cures himself of incipient neurosis. I have
shown that the view was not wholly originated by Freud, but stated by
various English critics like Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb and Kingsley.
There are several other Englishmen who held the view, namely Shakespeare
and Bacon. Havelock Ellis, however, was the first writer in England to
develop the idea that artistic creation is a sublimation of sex
repression. (See his essay on Casanova in _Affirmations_, published
before Freud's book on dreams.)

Poets like Burns, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe and Ibsen
have told us that they wrote to relieve themselves of their pent up
passions. Further, Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, Daudet, Holmes, Lowell,
Poe and Hearn have left us written evidence of their belief that poetry
emanates from the unconscious. It remained, however, for Freud to have
the courage to identify the unconscious chiefly with sex repression and
symbolic speech.

The first English poet who claimed to allow his unconscious self
deliberately to dictate his poems, was James John Garth Wilkinson.
Havelock Ellis has recently called attention to him. In his
_Improvisations from the Spirit_ (1857) Wilkinson wrote down in rhymed
verse the first impressions of a chosen theme. He depended chiefly on
inspiration. His book was praised by Dante G. Rossetti, and forms the
subject of an essay by the poet James Thomson, called "A Strange Book"
in _Biographical and Critical Studies_. Emerson had also praised this
physician, who was an authority on Blake and Swedenborg. Wilkinson
claims to have written in what we would call the Freudian method of
drawing on his unconscious. He considers reason and will secondary
powers in the process. The poems resemble Blake's (even in their
obscurity). Thomson rightly distinguishes Wilkinson from fraudulent
spiritualists.

Wilkinson's poems, however, do not make good the claim to be absolutely
unconscious art. If he had not told us that he improvised we would never
have doubted that these poems were composed like all other poems, with
some labor. We cannot believe that Wilkinson did not have to seek
rhymes. He may have taken the first rhyme that came to his head but he
had also to consider his metre. Again, no art dispenses altogether with
the poet's use of artistic judgment, no matter how much an improvisation
that art is. I do not believe that even Coleridge's famous _Kubla Khan_
was actually composed in a dream, but that it was merely suggested by a
dream.[187:A] He fashioned the form consciously, that is the rhyme and
metre. The substance of the poem is, however, always from the
unconscious. Thomson considers Wilkinson's belief in the divine
inspiration of his poem a delusion. Wilkinson's art is not utterly
unconscious, for there is no uncensored idea therein, which is bound to
be occasionally, in some dreams out of many, of the most virtuous man.
This commendable feature shows Wilkinson exercised judgment, and this
was a conscious artistic process.

Improvisation is one of the features that characterized Persian and
Arabic poetry. It is easier there than in English because of the
facility for rhyme in these languages, and because the improvisers
usually composed in rhymed prose and were not hampered by metre. The
test of the great poet often was his ability to compose a poem on the
spur of the moment. Seemingly fabulous, yet apparently true stories of
improvisation feats by Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised
in different metres, the Arabic poets in competition would compose
alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes the poet would improvise
a short poem on the basis of any opening verse given to him. We remember
the story of Harun al Rashid who recited a line to Abu Nuwas who
composed a poem for him. The _Arabian Nights_ is full of improvised
poems. Arabic critics always dealt with improvisation as a feature of
verse making, and this is an argument to those who maintain that Arabic
poetry was conscious art and artificial. It was the ecstasy that
unconsciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought.

I would like, however, to make special reference to two Englishmen, John
Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very little read, who left critical
works expounding poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view. Keble was
Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the author of a most widely read
Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the eighteen-thirties,
in Latin. These were published in 1844 under the title of _De Poeticae
vi Medica_. They were translated into English for the first time a few
years ago. They have been praised by Cardinal Newman, Justice Coleridge,
Gladstone and Saintsbury. Dean Church called them the most original and
memorable lectures on poetry that had ever been delivered at Oxford.

Keble defined poetry as "a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man,
which gives healing relief to secret mental emotions, and yet without
detriment to modest reserve, and yet, while giving scope to enthusiasm,
rules it with order and due control." He traces the origin of poetry to
the desire for personal relief of pent up emotions in the individual and
argues that this is the natural conclusion from his definition. He
divided poets into two classes--primary and secondary. In the first
class he put those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for
relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In the second class
he put imitators of the first and all others. He had been meditating
over these views for some time, and they also appear in some of the
essays which were collected after his death under the title of
_Occasional Papers and Reviews_. In fact, in one of these essays he used
the Freudian word "repression," in referring to the creation of poetry.

Keble's views are so sound and clear that one marvels they were not
taken up before Freud. It is true one will find much that is obsolete in
his lectures; one will be amused by his Toryism, his over-emphasis on
the religious side of poetry, his academic and classic standards. He
however recognized that poetry was a sublimation of the poet's
surcharged emotions and that the poet healed himself, therapeutically
treating himself by writing. He was really developing at length
Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy as purging the audience of pity
and fear. Aristotle was referring however to the aesthetic purgation of
the feelings of the audience; Keble, like Freud later, had in mind the
poet's relief to himself. Poetry ministers however to the overburdened
mind both of the poet and the reader. Both are relieved in finding
expression for ideas and emotions that are troubling them.

It was no doubt Keble's religious nature that made him perceive this
important fact. He noted that the psalmists in the Bible sang to relieve
themselves of their griefs and he saw that prayer had a psychoanalytic
effect on people. Poetry is then the emotional expression of an
overcharged heart. But this does not necessarily mean overcharged with
grief. For it expresses people who are overflowing with joy or any
emotion. It covers what Nietzsche called ecstasy, and especially the
ecstasy of love or sexual excitement. It covers the desire for beauty
which, as Nietzsche again saw, possessed a sexual contagion in it. The
happy poet in love desires to give vent to his emotions by some form of
expression, whether his love is satisfied or not. And those who seek the
origin of poetry in religion must remember the close affiliations that
anthropologists have found between love and religion.

Keble perceived that the greatness of poetry lay in its genuineness and
seriousness, and that it was not merely a metrical plaything. He
perceived that it revealed the poet himself and that its mission was
high.

One must also admire his broadmindedness in treating Lucretius, whom, in
spite of his atheistic views, Keble places among the primary poets. The
modern reader might resent the placing of Sophocles and Theocritus
among the secondary poets; nor does every personal poet belong to the
primary class, for minor poets are often personal. Poets must, to be in
the first class, voice a very compelling emotion based on a very
profound idea. Burns and Heine, Shelley and Byron, Goethe and Ibsen,
Balzac and Tolstoy are primary poets, not only because they are personal
but because they are intellectual.

Keble anticipated the greatest of modern theories about the nature of
art, poetry and literature. He saw that art was not play, as Schiller
and Spenser believed, but an expression necessary to relieve both poet
and reader. Its origin is not in play but in the desire to heal oneself
and create a reality out of a dream. Poetry is an attempt to unburden
oneself and adjust oneself to reality, which it does by complaint or by
building a dream castle.

But its sources are always repressions of emotions, which in many cases
have become unconscious. The best exposition of the imagination from
this point of view is by E. S. Dallas, who published _The Gay Science_,
in two volumes, in 1866. He was a successful book reviewer and had also
written a book on _Poetics_, which David Masson reviewed. In chapters in
his greater book, on "The Imagination," "The Hidden Soul," "The Play of
Thought" and "The Secrecy of Art," he anticipated many of the modern
discoveries of art in connection with the unconscious. He saw that man
leads a hidden inner life of which he is unaware and that this life
appears in his art. You will find more on the nature of imagination and
poetry in Dallas's book than in many of the works on taste that have
survived. He carried Keble's ideas to much further conclusions and saw
that man unburdens not only his conscious emotions, but even those of
which he is unconscious.

Dallas's four chapters at the end of his first volume form one of the
most striking contributions to the nature of poetry and imagination that
have ever been penned in English. He finds imagination but another name
for the automatic action of the mind or any of its faculties. It is
unconscious memory, its logic is the logic of the hidden soul, it is
passion that works out of sight. Imagination is the unconscious. It
suggests not only the power of figuring to ourselves the shows of sense,
but also that of imagery or the comparison of shows. It does not differ
from reason, but shows the process of reason working automatically. It
is play of thought, it is hidden soul. It combines sensibility to
images, wandering of the mind, and finding of comparisons. Its function
is not different from reason, memory or feeling, but its peculiarity is
that its work is done in secret automatically or unconsciously.
Imagination not only builds images, but it creates types, it utters
ideas, it speaks a natural language, it voices emotions.

Even the old critic who separated verse poetry from prose literature as
a distinct branch of writing was always suspicious that he was in error,
for he knew both were the products of creative imagination. Of the
ancients, it was only Aristotle who, defining poetry as imitation, saw
that he must include prose that "imitated" in his definition of poetry.
The thing that counted was the imitation or imagination in determining
poetry and not metre.

As imagination creates the literature of ecstasy, the real subject of
this book has been the function of the imagination, but as the term,
like poetry, has been so much abused and misunderstood, the nature of
them both is studied by using other terms, like "ecstasy" and the
"unconscious."

I suppose that no word has been more used in connection with poetry
than the word imagination. And probably no word has been more vaguely
and diversely employed. Every one agrees that literature in general must
be the function of the imagination. Many people when they speak of
imagination really mean nothing more than the introduction of numerous
figures of speech; others confuse it with the sportive play of the
author with supernatural machinery in his work. To others imagination
suggests something that is opposed to the convictions of the intellect
and to the moral faculty. Even to-day many people do not know that
Aristotle used the term "imitation" and Bacon the word "feigning" where
we use the word "imagination." These older terms, in the course of
evolution in meaning which words undergo, are used by us no longer to
represent poetic creation, or imaginative work.

Every one quotes the famous lines of Shakespeare in the fifth act of the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, and many fail to see the exact meaning of the
master who had a true conception of the function of his art. First he
recognizes that the poet is "imagination all compact," and compares him
to the lunatic and the lover. Next he uses the word frenzy in speaking
of the poet's eye which rolls about and glances over the universe,
showing that he had the conception of the ecstatic element in the poet's
make-up and work. The poet gives shape to the forms of unknown things
bodied forth by imagination, he gives a local habitation and a name to
airy nothing. Shakespeare recognizes the fact that imagination is
related to the dream when he says that one of the tricks of imagination
is that if it apprehends a joy, it comprehends the bringer of that joy,
that is, it builds a dream castle where that joy is realized. His use of
the words "unknown things" in addition, as the substance of imagination,
shows that he understood that the realm of the unconscious was the
province of the imagination. Hazlitt and Lowell among modern critics
correctly understood Shakespeare's meaning of imagination as identical
with ecstasy.[193:A]

People to-day give vent to their emotions in prose conversation or in
writing prose letters to friends or relatives. Here we have the process
that led to the creation of poetry in earliest times. Poetry is the
result of ecstasy, the outpouring of the imagination, the expression of
the unconscious. If instead of having confused it with song and dancing
the critics would have taken it in its real significance as excited
speech, we would have had less misunderstanding about its nature. The
lover of to-day who tells his emotions to his love, or confides them to
a friend, the bereaved person who relates his grief at the death of a
loved one and tells of the virtues of the departed, are rude poets
expressing themselves in conversation in prose. When they take the pen
in hand and write a letter or keep a diary, they become poets no less
than the versifier who puts his feelings down in patterned speech.

The greatness of the letter or diary as a poem depends not only on the
craftsmanship, but on the substance, on the vividness or beauty or power
with which the emotion is depicted, on the degree of its capability of
moving others, and on the depth of the ideas therein. Similarly, the
person who is moved to prayer spontaneously by some religious experience
or private passion and utters his words in a natural manner or reduces
them to writing, is creating poetry. The writers to-day of letters and
diaries in prose are going through the same mechanism as all the
earliest poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming
artificial and are imitating other verse writers and obeying rules that
they studied.

We have long been familiar with the saying that every man is a poet,
though he does not write what is known as poetry. There is no psychical
difference between the average man and the great poet. They both are
subject to emotions, have imagination, and both express their emotions
in some manner. The only difference between the average man and the poet
is that the poet takes the average man's speech, elaborates it, and puts
it into shape so that it moves others.

Poetry is born in man's soul when his emotions are aroused, and no
emotions are aroused unless they are expressed in some way. Hence
Croce's view is correct that poetry is expression, if he means by
expression emotional and imaginative expression. People have too long
been under the impression that the poet was a different creature from
the rest of mankind, subject to a livelier imagination, or intenser
emotions. He is no different; on the contrary, there are many people who
never wrote a line who are more emotional and imaginative than many
poets. The process of the lover writing a letter involves the same
imaginative function as of the poet penning a love poem. The prose
expression of emotion is also poetry, but we have hitherto given the
name "poetry" only to the verse literary composition.

There is great unanimity of opinion as to the connection of literary
poetry in its origin with dance, music and song, an opinion that is
wrong nevertheless. In fact, most phases of poetry neither have nor ever
had anything in common with dancing or music or song.

Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or prose poets of the
nineteenth century has little relation to dancing, music or singing.
Take the Shakespearean plays, the tragedies of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_,
where we have philosophizing and descriptions of painful crises which
are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a great idea, nor dance
to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and Balzac are poets and yet they are
far away from dancing, singing or music. Though most good singers are
poets, one does not have to be a singer to be a poet. Then take great
impassioned oratory or beautiful emotional word painting in prose or
verse, or any idea bathed in feeling. They may all be poetry and need
not be--in fact, by their nature, are not--related to dance, music and
song.

An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, or a series
of impassioned ideas like Lucretius's _Nature of Things_, or a novel in
verse like _Aurora Leigh_ is not related to song, yet it is poetry in
parts. (This does not mean that poetry is not the soul of music or
dancing.)

There is nothing more amusing than to read the innumerable and
contradictory theories about the origin of poetry. Many believe that the
first poetry was pastoral poetry, since the shepherd's life was, after
hunting, the first occupation appropriate and conducive to composing
poetry. Scaliger, Fontenelle and Pope endorsed this view. Others believe
that the original poetry was written to express man's religious
emotions; his prayers and hymns to his gods are considered by many the
first poetry. Again the communistic needs of the clans are supposed to
have invited the poet to write. Celebration of tribal victories, praise
of heroes, incitement to martial courage and revenge, the virtues of the
clan, were supposed to be the first function of the poets. Epics and
ballads are cited in proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are
thought to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who were
also magicians and hurled them as potent forces against the enemy.
Thomas Peacock believed eulogies constituted the first poetry of the
human race. Then the proverb and parable have their devotees, as the
first imaginative representation of the common thinking of the earliest
people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to the use of verse
patterns. One could go on naming various theories that have been
advanced as to what kind of poetry is earliest; there is the poem which
designates the awakening of a moral conscience; there is the mythical
tale reciting the dream desires of the tribe; the song chanted at
various labors and toilings of the common people; the chorus which
served as an accompaniment to holiday celebrations and nature worship;
the chanting of the first cantors or priests and the responses of the
congregation; there are the ecstatic utterances of the earliest
prophets, soothsayers and magicians; the admonitions of counselors and
legislators; the personal grievances and complaints recited by those
seeking redress before the assembly or chief; marriage hymns, love poems
and elegies; all of these are separately cited as the original springs
from which later poetry developed.

The critics assume that man was originally possessed of one emotion
only, which he celebrated, or that only one feeling predominated to
which he gave vent. Now, as a matter of fact, early man was subject to
multifarious emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, in
speech, later writing them down in prose and finally in some verse
pattern. Some of these emotions were originally written down with rhythm
and repetition. There really was no state when poetry first began, for
the first spoken poetry is as early as human speech which has always
been used to express emotions.

Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission of spoken poetry.
We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has been handed down by
tradition and never been reduced to writing.

The mental process of composing poetry to-day is no different from what
it ever was. Different people express verbally the ranges of all the
emotions and several individuals give us the written expression of these
moods in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or reader. It
is true, in early times the religious and martial emotions were much
expressed, but this does not prove that religious or warlike feelings
alone gave rise to the art of poetry. Every emotion man felt gave rise
to the art of poetry. Poetry is the expression of all the emotions and
is born with speech and hence is universal expression and the most
ancient art we possess.

Poetry is, however, so often the expression of a personal complaint, the
expression of a repression, that we may say that its real origin to-day,
and at all times, is the prose elegy. The person who pours out his
griefs is psychologically the poet in action. Attempts have been made by
Greek scholars to show that both the epic and the drama had their origin
at public funerals where elegies were recited instead of at the
Dionysian rites. This is very plausible. The pang of death was one of
the causes that led to the creation of poetry, especially since early
man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and wild animals.
One should add that the pangs of the loss of one's mate, the grief
resulting from being worsted in the battle for the female, were other
contributing causes of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of
poetry was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament of some
kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry ever since. Grief is
the source of poetry. Note the number of wailing poems in Irish and
Scotch literature where the death of a husband in war, or the loss of
love, plays a part. Much Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegiac. The earliest
poems from Egypt, China, Japan contain laments. Savage literature is
full of them. The hymn is really a lament in the form of a plea. The
dirge, the threnody, the elegy, these constitute the bulk of much
poetry, ancient and modern. Burns's poems are chiefly dirges of some
kind. The dirge is most human and appealing to us. Some of the most
effective poetry in the Bible are the cries of David in the _Psalms_ and
the dirges in _Lamentations_.

The modern elegy whether in prose or verse, whether it laments death or
lost love, is the direct offspring of the earliest savage cry of grief.
The savage wailed in public as the poet does. Our novelists still do
unavoidably the same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the
death of Levin's brother in _Anna Karenina_ or _Ivan Ilyitch_, he was
actually bemoaning his own brother, whose death made a lasting
impression upon him.

Gummere thinks that the early poetry of man was communal and that modern
personal lyric poetry is a development from communal poetry. Surely
Professor Gummere was aware that among the religious and communal poetry
of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine elegy as _The
Wanderer_ and such a beautiful dream poem as _The Phoenix_. It is a
great mistake to think that personal poetry is of modern growth, dating
from Villon. It has been more developed in modern times. And then there
is much of the personal element in this so-called communal poetry. The
man who sang for his tribe in ancient times felt with his tribe, and
hence was both communal and personal.

The research into the origins of poetry can be made in the soul of any
writer to-day. The same psychological mechanisms that are at work in
the composition of his poem were at work in the production of the most
crude savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression leading to
the utterance of a complaint or the building of a dream-world. Keble was
one of the few critics who considered the personal complaint the chief
origin of poetry.

Schopenhauer defined poetry as one of the arts whose mission was to
reveal an idea in the Platonic sense, that is, the permanent essential
forms of the world and all its phenomena; art to him was a way of
looking at things independent of the principle of sufficient reason. In
accordance with his philosophy he regards ideas as the objectivity of
the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon the different grades of the
objectivation of the will as fixed. The result is that he considers the
peculiar end of all the fine arts "to elucidate the objectivation of
will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as
the dumb unconscious tendency of the mass in accordance with laws, and
yet already reveals a breach of the unity of will with itself in a
conflict between gravity and rigidity," while tragedy "presents to us at
the highest grades of the objectivation of will this very conflict with
itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness." (_World as Will and
Idea_, V. 1, p. 330.)

All this is saying in philosophical terms what we know has been the
mission of art, the portrayal of man defeated in his blind and impotent
desires. No one denies that poetry must and always will portray man in
such circumstances. Freud has restated the problem when he showed that
poets deal with their own repressions.

One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to
annihilate the will to live. He failed to see that much of this tragic
literature acts as a relief to us and makes us want to live all the
more.

Dr. Arthur H. Fairchild deserves credit for assigning high importance to
poetry when he says that it is a means of self-realization and is a
biological necessity. In his _The Making of Poetry_ he expresses what is
really the psychoanalytical theory which sees in poetry a means of
freeing oneself of complexes, a way of restoring oneself to a better
state of mind, a cure for incipient neurosis. When we are sad, the
reading of sad poetry relieves us. As Emerson said, "Poetry is the
effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." The
toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's _Germinal_ or
Hauptmann's _Weavers_, or Sinclair's _Jungle_, and his emotions are
discharged. It is true he may be driven to action, but the poet has
nothing to do with that. The lover, unhappy in his love, finds help in
hearing a poet express his own surcharged feelings resulting from love
troubles. The reader may by reading be prevented from going mad. The
great public which does not read good literature finds relief in plays,
moving pictures, magazine stories or newspapers, all of which, while it
is not generally good poetry, may have the effect of a catharsis on the
public's rudely developed aesthetic sense.

Mankind hungers for poetry. Those who are unable to appreciate it in
higher form, resort to imitations and substitutes, which express their
emotions and relieve them. He who can read and enjoy the great masters
of prose and verse, or appreciate good music and painting, does not have
to resort to the political meeting or religious revivals to have his
emotions played on. Athletic contests like baseball, football and prize
fights usually help people to express and relieve surcharged emotions.
The love for cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin in a
desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his
emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to
hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has a love for
emotional excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the best
kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, he is ignorant of
the simplest principles of literary art; he cannot read poetry, yet he
hungers for it. His dormant instincts will even seek satisfaction in
condemnation and persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot
express by reading.

The creation and reading of poetry in prose or verse is an achievement
common to man alone of the animals. He is not separated from them by
moral or intellectual faculties, for animals have these, but by his
faculty to create art and make others share enjoyment of them. It may be
that the spider and the bee derive aesthetic satisfaction from
contemplating the web or the hive they build, or the bird gets artistic
pleasure from the song it sings or hears, or any animal may win sympathy
from another by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and ideas
in words in an endurable work of art so as to relieve himself and move
others. What separates man from animals is not then religion--is not the
religion of a dog centered in his master as Anatole France has so
quaintly shown--but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by which I
mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, music, painting and
sculpture.

And a life devoted to poetry is the best life we can seek. Let a man
have his necessities satisfied, and there is no higher form of life than
to enjoy and if possible to create poetry. Poetry makes us want to live
and gives us zest in life. Life exists for sensations and we get our
sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment and creation of
poetry. The unlettered savage has his craving for poetry satisfied in
his dancing, and war cries, in religion and tribal customs. The child
has it satisfied in his toys and games. Adult man appeases his hunger
for poetry in diverse ways. Literature, art and music are so far the
highest forms of poetry we know, and in literature I include philosophy
or thought, in prose as well as verse.

Poetry acts as a necessary relief to us for emotions and ideas that seek
expression, and is hence more real than any other form of life.

Our views of poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view finds
confirmation even in the Bible. One of the leading prophets and the
leading psalmists has each told us in scorching words how he felt before
he created. Jeremiah says of God, "His word was in mine heart as a
burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I
could not stay," Ch. 20, v. 9. David also said, "My heart was hot within
me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue,"
Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made resolutions to keep
silent, but could not; their choked emotions burned like fire. Their
disturbed souls sought relief by expression. Thus the great prophecies
and psalms had a subjective origin and a homeopathic effect upon their
authors, and they have this effect on us to-day.


FOOTNOTES:

[180:A] _Zwei Abhandlungen uber d. Aristotleische Theorie d. Drama._

[182:A] This work has never been completely published. Dr. B. Halper, of
Dropsie College, Philadelphia, has promised us a complete translation
from the Arabic manuscript. There is a synopsis of it by Schreiner in
the _Revue des Etudes, Juives XXI, XXII_.

[183:A] See Isaac Husik's _Medieval Jewish Philosophy_.

[184:A] F. C. Prescott's _Dreams and Poetry_ is a magnificent essay on
the subject.

[187:A] I do not however agree with Bergson, who does not believe poetry
can be composed in dreams at all.

[193:A] "Poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for
those creations of the mind 'which ecstasy is very cunning in.'" Hazlitt
_On Poetry_. "The imaginative faculty (has) the capabilities of ecstasy
and possession." Lowell, "The Imagination." _The Function of the Poet._




CHAPTER XI

LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY


Oriental poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the Persians, is
notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy couched in intricate
conventional forms. The Oriental poems abound numerously in far-fetched
figures of speech, and are written in metres following definite laws and
are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued in every line in
poems of great length. In fact the greatest historian of the
Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective
discourse based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into verses
agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a
separate idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A poet was
supposed to get many thousands of verses by heart before practicing his
art. One of the chapters in Ibn Khaldun's famous _Prolegomena_[203:A] or
introduction to his history, _Book of Examples_, has a title stating
that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.

But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was taken for granted
that ecstasy was the main object of poetry. There is probably more
ecstasy in the poetry of the Arabs and Persians than in that of most
other nations, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds of
form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial forms did not
utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor Edgar G. Browne in his
scholarly _Literary History of Persia_ has devoted the first chapter of
the second volume to Persian metres and he calls attention to the
conventional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic poets who
were not without influence upon the Persians.

We today may accept the definition of poetry given in the _Four
Discourses_[204:A] (1162) of Nidhami I Arudi, for though he also
believed in the importance of the trappings of verse, he had ecstasy
primarily in mind. He defined poetry thus:

     Poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imaginary
     propositions, and adopts the deductions, with the result that
     he can make a little thing appear great and a great thing
     small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in
     the garb of good. By acting on the imagination, he excites the
     faculties of anger and concupiscence in such a way that by his
     suggestion men's temperaments become affected with exaltation
     or depression; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of
     great things in the order of the world.

What more effective definition could there be of the utilitarian power
of art to take man out of himself and exalt him into a state of
beneficial ecstasy?

Ibn Khaldun said:

     Poetry is, of all the forms of discourses, that which the
     Arabs regarded as the noblest; they also made it the
     depository of their knowledge and their history, the testimony
     which would attest their virtues and faults, the store-house
     in which were found the greater part of their scientific views
     and their maxims of wisdom. The poetic faculty was as much
     deeply rooted in them as in all the other faculties they
     possessed.

He continues, that they have handled poetry so well, that one could
deceive oneself and believe that this gift, which is really an acquired
art, was with them an innate one.

These remarkable words of Ibn Khaldun will help us to understand the
famous saying that poetry was the register of the Arabs. Never before
nor since has poetry been so interwoven with a nation's life. The
stories of the competitions for prizes for composing poetry, of the
happiness when a poet was born, of the importance assumed by the
discussion and recitation of poetry among all classes, read to us like
myths. Yet the fact that poetry should be part of the life of a
passionate people who lived in the desert, free and untrammeled, is not
strange. The Arabs themselves attribute also their great superiority in
poetry to the beauty of their language, especially as spoken by the
Bedouins in the desert. The great Arabian poet Abu Nuwas completed his
education by sojourning a year among the Bedouins.

Another factor enhancing their poetry and one not to be ignored is that
after 622 A.D. in post-Islamic times, poetry was rewarded by gifts.
Hence the eulogy grew into prominence and the poets were fabulously
rewarded for their poems. This, of course, led to fulsome and cringing
eulogies. The caliph was the patron. When Mohammed appeared it seemed
that poetry would die out, but it flourished more than ever. It was only
after the Abbasid caliphate was exterminated by the Mongol invasion
(1258 A.D.) that poetry declined in Arabia to such an extent that, as
Ibn Khaldun says, no prominent man would deign to devote himself to it.

Although the Arabs excelled in various kinds of poetry, we think of them
primarily as love poets.

The Arabs, as we gather from _The Arabian Nights_, were a people
especially devoted to tenderness in love. When the Arab was smitten with
love he was a helpless weeping child. There was one tribe, that of Azra,
wherein the victims were said to die of love. One poet said he knew of
thirty young men whom love sickness carried off. In answer to a reproach
for this weakness, one of the tribe replied: "You would not talk like
that if you had seen the great black eyes of our women darting fire from
beneath the veil of their long lashes, if you had seen them smile and
their death gleaming between their brown lips." (Stendhal: _On Love_, p.
218.)

Arabic poetry in the period before Islam between 500 A.D. and 622 A.D.
did not consist of pure eroticism. Satire, eulogy, elegy, revenge,
martial feeling, chiefly characterized it. Many poems were also devoted
to the praise of animals and the description of nature. The odes or
Qasidas, however, began with a love prelude, called nasib, in which the
poet dwelt on his love sorrows merely to win the hearts of his hearers
to his chief theme. One of the best of these is that in the ode of
Imru'ul Qays the first and greatest of the seven poets of the
_Muallaqat_.

Pure erotic poetry appeared after Islam with the luxury that spread with
the growth of wealth, but the nasib continued to be used, especially in
eulogies. The poets still wrote like the Pre-islamic poets instead of
celebrating Islam. The Umayyad Dynasty, which extended from 661 to 749
A.D., saw the birth of pure love poetry celebrated not as introductory
or episodic but purely for itself. The love story of one of the Arabian
erotic poets of the period, Majnun, was celebrated by the great Persian
poet, Nidhami, who flourished in the twelfth century. His _Laila_ and
_Majnun_ has been translated into English by Mr. Atkinson. The story was
retold by many Persian and Ottoman poets. Then there was Jamil, who was
the lover of Buthaina. These love poems by Majnun and Jamil were of
popular origin, and represented the spirit of the people. There were
many other love poets, while some did not devote themselves exclusively
to love.

The most celebrated, however, of the love poets was the handsome wealthy
Omar ibn Abi Rabia (643-719 A.D.). He was of the tribe of Koraish, the
same tribe to which Mohammed himself belonged. This tribe was famous for
many things, but not for poetry until Omar took away the reproach. His
poems were called a crime against God, yet a cousin of the prophet
memorized some of them. The fullest account of him in English and of his
love affairs, with translations from a few of his poems, appears in an
essay by William G. Palgrave in _Essays on Eastern Questions_. Omar was
united in marriage to his love Zeynab after a stormy courtship, opposed
by her people, but he had several love affairs. The best idea of the
sweetness and pathos of his love poetry is conveyed without further
comment by giving two translations made by Mr. Palgrave.

     Ah for the throes of a heart sorely wounded!
     Ah for the eyes that have smit me with madness!
     Gently she moved in the calmness of beauty,
     Moved as the bough to the light breeze of morning.
     Dazzled my eyes as they gazed, till before me
     All was a mist and confusion of figures.
     Ne'er had I sought her, and ne'er had she sought me;
     Fated the love, and the hour, and the meeting.
     There I beheld her as she and her damsels
     Paced 'twixt the temple and outer enclosure;
     Damsels the fairest, the loveliest, the gentlest,
     Passing like slow-wending heifers at evening;
     Ever surrounding with courtly observance
     Her whom they honor, the peerless of women.
     Then to a handmaid, the youngest, she whispered,
     "Omar is near: let us mar his devotions.
     Cross on his path that he needs may observe us;
     Give him a signal, my sister, demurely."
     "Signals I gave, but he marked not or heeded,"
     Answered the damsel, and hasted to meet me.
     Ah for that night by the vale of the sand-hills!
     Ah for the dawn when in silence we parted!
     He who the morn may awake to her kisses
     Drinks from the cup of the blessed in heaven.

     Ah! where have they made my dwelling? Far, how far, from her, the
               loved one,
     Since they drove me lone and parted to the sad sea-shore of Aden.
     Thou art mid the distant mountains; and to each, the loved and
               lover,
     Nought is left but sad remembrance, and a share of aching sorrow.
     Hadst thou seen thy lover weeping by the sand-hills of the ocean,
     Thou hadst deemed him struck by madness: was it madness? was it
               love?
     I may forget all else, but never shall I forget her as she stood,
     As I stood, that hour of parting; heart to heart in speechless
               anguish;
     Then she turned her to Thoreyya, to her sister, sadly weeping;
     Coursed the tears down cheek and bosom, till her passion found an
               utterance;
     "Tell him, sister, tell him; yet be not as one that chides or
               murmurs,
     Why so long thy distant tarrying on the unlovely shores of Yemen?
     Is it sated ease detains thee, or the quest of wealth that lures
               thee?
     Tell me what the price they paid thee, that from Mecca bought thy
               absence?"

I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by different
translators, prose renderings by McGuckin de Slane in Ibn Khallikan's
_Biographical Dictionary_ and by Terrick Hamilton in the _Romance of
Antar_, respectively, and a verse translation by Lyall.

The following poem (Ibn Khallikan, V. 2, p. 330) is attributed to Ibn
Alaamidi of the eleventh century:

     Admire that passionate lover! he recalls to mind the well
     protected park and sighs aloud; he hears the call of love and
     stops bewildered. The nightingales awaken the trouble of his
     heart, and his pains, now redoubled, drive all prudence from
     his mind. An ardent passion excites his complaints; sadness
     moves him to tears; his old affections awake, but these were
     never dormant. His friends say that his fortitude has failed;
     but the very mountain of Yalamlan would groan, or sink
     oppressed, under such a weight of love. Think not that
     compulsion will lead him to forget her; willingly he accepted
     the burden of love; how then could he cast it off against his
     will?

     --O Otba, faultless in thy charms! be indulgent, be kind, for
     thy lover's sickness has reached its height. By thee the
     willow of the hill was taught to wave its branches with grace,
     when thy form, robed in beauty, first appeared before it. Thou
     hast lent thy tender glances to the gazelles of the desert,
     and therefore the fairest object to be seen is the eye of the
     antelope. Sick with the pains of love, bereft of sleep and
     confounded, I should never have outlived my nights, unless
     revived by the appearance of thy favor, deceitful as it was.
     These four shall witness the sincerity of my attachment:
     tears, melancholy, a mind deranged, and care, my constant
     visitor; could Yazbul feel this last; it would become like
     as--Suha. Some reproach me for loving thee, but I am not to be
     reclaimed; others bid me forbear, but I heed them not. They
     tell thee that I desire thee for thy beauty; how very strange!
     and where is the beauty which is not an object of desire? For
     thee I am the most loving of lovers; none, I know, are like me
     (_in sincerity_) or like thee in beauty.

The next poem represents one of the many outbursts of Antar:

     O bird of the tamarisk! thou hast rendered my sorrows more
     poignant, thou hast redoubled my griefs. O bird of the
     tamarisk! if thou invokest an absent friend for whom thou art
     mourning, even then, O bird, is thy affliction like the
     distress I also feel? Augment my sorrows and my lamentations;
     aid me to weep till thou seest wonders from the discharge of
     my eyelids. Weep, too, from the excesses that I endure. Fear
     not--only guard the trees from the breath of my burning sighs.
     Quit me not till I die of love, the victim of passion of
     absence, and separation. Fly, perhaps in the Hijaz thou mayest
     see some one riding from Aalij to Nomani, wandering with a
     damsel, she traversing wilds, and drowned in tears, anxious
     for her native land. May God inspire thee, O dove! when thou
     truly sees her loaded camels. Announce my death. Say, thou
     hast left him stretched on the earth, and that his tears are
     exhausted, but that he weeps in blood. Should the breeze ask
     thee whence thou art, say, he is deprived of his heart and
     stupefied; he is in a strange land, weeping for our departure,
     for the God of heaven has struck him with affliction on
     account of his beloved; he is lying down like a tender bird,
     that vultures and eagles have bereft of its young, that
     grieves in unceasing plaints whilst its offspring are
     scattered over the plain and the desert!

This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unexcelled:

     _One Unnamed_

     Nay, ask on the sandy hill the ben-tree with spreading boughs that
           stands mid her sisters, if I greeted thy dwelling-place;
     And whether their shade looked down upon me at eventide as there in
           my grief I stood, and that for my portion chose:
     And whether, at dawn still there, mine eyelids a burthen bore of
           tears falling one by one, as pearls from a broken string.
     Yea, men long and yearn for Spring, the gladsome: but as for me--my
           longing and Spring art thou, my yearning to gain thy grace;
     And men dread the deadly Drought that slays them: but as for me--my
           Drought is to know thee gone, my life but a barren land!
     And sooth, if I suffer when thou greet'st me with words unkind, yet
           somewhat of joy it brings thou thinkest on me at all.
     So take thy delight that I stand serving with aching heart and eyes
           bathed in tears lest thou shouldst sunder thyself from me.

Arabic poetry may lack the light of intellectual outlook that we find in
our greatest English poets; it may be deficient in the intensity of
religious fervor characteristic of the medieval Hebrew poets; it may
fall short of the high mystic strain attained by the Persians, but in
the fervor depicting love of passion they have not been surpassed. The
greatest Persian lyric love poet, Hafiz, and the greatest Turkish lyric
love poet, Baqui, clearly were under their influence.

Arabic poetry then is probably richer in love ecstasy than that of any
nation. This is due to the fact that they are both a sensuous and at the
same time deeply religious people. They were strongly emotional,
extremely vindictive and extremely hospitable. They recorded their
emotions unabashed. They had the naïveté of the child and cried out
their slightest pain; they weep and bemoan constantly. Antar, one of the
poets of the _Muallaqat_ and the hero of the romance bearing his name,
is more of a child than Achilles. He is always sobbing and weeping
copiously; he is the prototype of the medieval knight who wept and
declaimed because of absence of his mistress, a feature of romance which
Cervantes ably ridiculed in _Don Quixote_.

Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, was one of the first to
point out the Arabic influence on chivalry and romanticism. The battle
as to the extent of Arabic influence has been waged ever since, with, I
believe, the victory to the Arabs. FitzMaurice Kelly, the historian of
Spanish Literature, emphasizing the Hebrew influence, has resented the
statement of the great Arabic influence, but Robert Briffault in _The
Making of Humanity_ has proved that this influence has been
underestimated rather than exaggerated.

The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both
sexes--women also were freer than in Post-islamic times--gave rise to
romantic love.

Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or
chivalrous phase, fashionable. True, this note existed very sparingly
among the Greeks and Romans in Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic
note was singularly absent from European literature in the early
medieval ages. Men loved then as they did before and after, but the
personal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme for
poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. Critics now admit
that intense love poetry of the Troubadours appearing like an oasis in
the barren literature of the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs,
the rhymes as well as the themes being taken from the east. The
troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and these two groups
remain among the best composers of love poetry Europe has had.

The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly
two centuries.[214:A]

The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence.
Cervantes attributed his _Don Quixote_ to a Moorish author because the
Moors wrote so many romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love
poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic spirit. Wyatt
and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English
literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry.
Similarly the Spanish _Cid_ shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic
invasion of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effectively
pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry than Sismondi in
his history of the literature of the South of Europe. He begins the work
with, after the introduction, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he
especially recognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the
chivalric attitude towards women came from the Arabs. The most
sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great influence of Mohammedan
influence upon Europe is in Samuel P. Scott's _History of the Moorish
Empire in Spain_.

It is said that even the French poem, the _Chanson de Roland_, shows
Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.

We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds together love
poems so remotely separated by time and place as those of the medieval
Persians, Arabs and Troubadours, and the modern English poets.

The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe,
especially in a few in his _West Eastern Divan_, influenced by his
studies of Oriental literature during the Napoleonic wars. He used his
own experiences with eastern names, but he never failed to produce
literature of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an influence on
Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea
of _Locksley Hall_ from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of
the _Muallaqat_; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his _Abt Vogler_;
George Meredith's _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was written to emulate the
_Arabian Nights_.

The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most famous elegies in
Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder
of her two brothers. There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in
the notes to his translation of Hariri's _Assemblies_ V. 1, pp. 387-391.
In fact the elegy is more common among early Pre-islamic poetry than the
love poem. The Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always
distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, certainly the
best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui on the great Sultan
Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb in _Ottoman Poetry_.

The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was
originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an outburst of emotion due to
repression. The cry of grief for the dead in battle; that is the note in
all early literature, Occidental and Oriental.

The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a definite utilitarian
purpose. In early times satire was one of the chief forms under which
lyric poetry appeared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and his
curses against them were supposed to be effective. He was a soothsayer,
a prophet, a magician. He voiced not only the communistic feeling of the
tribes, but his personal emotions. Even down to our day the public
demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in time of war.
Goethe was criticized for refusing to write against the French, for
example, but he explained later to Eckermann that he had no hatred
towards the French. In all wars there have been poets who have written
against the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an
inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the famous _Hymn of
Hate_ by Lissauer in the late world war.

Nothing in literature illustrates more the belief in the magical power
of poetry than the chapters in the _Book of Numbers_ dealing with the
effort of the Moabite King Balak to get Balaam to curse the children of
Israel. Balak believed that these curses would help him defeat the
Hebrews. But instead Balaam blessed them, unwillingly, saying that he
could but utter the words God put in his mouth, for the inspiration of
the poet came to him always from hidden forces. He reached to ecstasy
every time he spoke.

Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying ecstasy, with all
the stock themes of poetry, but especially with love.

The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and Pre-islamic Arabic
poetry have been touched upon by Dr. George A. Smith in his _The Early
Poetry of Israel_ and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to
his translation of Hariri's _Assemblies_. Participators in various
military events themselves composed the poems in which they told of
their exploits, as you may note by comparing the _Muallaqat_ with the
songs of Miriam and Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as
you may see by comparing descriptions from the _Psalms_ and _Job_ to
that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the _Muallaqat_. The poetry
of both nations was often nomadic, the product of the influences of the
desert. Both nations recorded personal emotions, springing from tribal
events.

There was also the same tendency in both nations to utter ecstatically
sententious and moral sayings. Though only one poem in the _Muallaqat_,
that by Zuhayr, really moralizes, the later Arabic poets always loved to
give vent to reflections, proverbs, words of wisdom. Two of the best
Arabic poems of the kind are the improvisations of the vagabond Abu Zayd
in the 11th and 50th Assembly of Hariri's _Assemblies_. Two finer poems
which moralize without losing their poetic quality can scarcely be found
in Arabic literature. Most of the reflective poetry of those two
pessimistic, skeptic poets Abu l'Atahiya and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are of
this kind. The ecstatic potentiality in reflection is seen in _Job_,
_Proverbs_ and _Ecclesiastes_.

The chief phase of Pre-islamic poetry that will not appeal to us is in
the great body of martial verse where love of robbery and bloodshed,
cruelty, revenge and hatred are fostered. The Bedouins gave us a
transcript of their life. They dwelt in their vices with frankness, but
they tried to make virtues out of them. We cannot blame them for not
having our ideals of peace and it is also doubtful if cruelties in their
warfare were greater than those in our own day.

The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting in a way that
even nauseates us. The martial spirit in the _Romance of Antar_ has made
it less popular with us than _The Arabian Nights_, for the former work
is an account of the fighting Arabs of the desert, and the latter deals
largely with the merchant Arabs of the city. Even the great and
beautiful _Song of Vengeance_ by the Arab Robin Hood, Ta abbata Sharran,
of which we have a second hand translation by Goethe, and fine verse
versions by R. A. Nicholson, _Literary History of the Arabs_ (pp.
98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of _Arabic Poetry_, is
very cruel.

Pre-islamic poetry reeks too much with the ecstasy of delight to shed
blood, in which tendency it of course differs little from the early
poetry of other nations. However, the remarkable thing is that the
hearts of these warriors possessed so many fine feelings. One of the
noblest descriptions of woman is by a companion of the brigand Sharran,
from the _Mufaddaliyyat_, a translation of which appears on pages 81-82
of Lyall's volume.

The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently translated and written
about in English is Pre-islamic poetry. In especial, the _Muallaqat_, or
the seven so-called suspended poems, has been translated several times.
Sir William Jones made the first translation in prose in the eighteenth
century. In modern times we have had several translations, one by
Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. There has been considerable support for the
critical view that these poems represent the highest achievement of
Arabic poetry, both among Arabs themselves and Aryan critics. Imru'ul
Qays, who flourished in the sixth century A.D., is the most famous of
the poets in the collection, and is regarded by many as the greatest
Arabian poet. R. A. Nicholson and Clement Huart have given accounts of
the _Muallaqat_ in their histories of Arabic Literature. Professor
Mackail has published in his Oxford Lectures an essay on these odes and
D. Nöldeke has given us a full study of them in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_. I shall not therefore dwell on them except to say that they
were collected in the eighth century by Hammad, and that most of these
poems deal with warriors rather than lovers, though they contain love
laments.

Nicholson and others regard the Abbasid period as the great era of
Arabic poets. This period extended from the accession of Saffah in 749
to the destruction of Bagdad by the Mongols in 1258. Abu Nuwas, Abu 'l
Atahiya, Mutanabbi and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are recognized by Nicholson
as the Gods of Arabian poetry, and we in our smug inordinate
satisfaction with Aryan poetry, have not even translated or paid
attention to them. Abu Nuwas, who flourished in the early part of the
ninth century, sang of love and wine and led a riotous and immoral
life, and is familiar to the reader of the _Arabian Nights_ as the
jester of Harun al Rashid. His _Divan_ is to be found in German but not
in English. Many consider him the greatest of the Arabian poets. Abu 'l
Atahiya is a pessimist and philosophical poet thinker. He was imprisoned
by Harun for having ceased writing love poetry because he was hopelessly
in love with a slave girl. He described common emotions and used simple
language instead of far-fetched conceits. Mutanabbi in the tenth century
was the most famous of all the Arabian poets, but he is criticized by
many for his rhetoric and ornament. He is the master of the grand style.
Then we have in the next century the great Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, who has
been called the predecessor of Omar Khayyam. Bauerlein and Rihani have
translated some of his verses into English, and Bauerlein has also
devoted a little volume to him in _The Wisdom of the East_ series. Abu
'l Ala is the most modern of the Arabian poets. He was a freethinker and
a pessimist and his _Luzumiyyat_ reads like a work of one of our
rational poets. It attacks all religion including Islam. His letters
have been translated into English by Professor Margoliouth.[218:A]

I have already several times mentioned the most famous Arabic work next
to the Koran, the _Maqamat_ or _Assemblies_, by Hariri (1054-1122). The
tales have been called immoral, but Abu Zayd interests us as Gil Blas
does. The work written in rhymed prose is most fascinating reading.
There is a complete translation of this by T. Chenery and F. Steingass,
1867-1898.

The _Arabian Nights_ is the best known Arabic production to English
speaking people and is full of poetry, not only in the interspersed
verses, but in the stories themselves.

The _Romance of Antar_, from which I quoted a poem, is said to have been
written by a poet and philologist in the reign of Harun al Rashid. The
work is long and a few abridged volumes were translated into English by
Terrick Hamilton in 1819 and 1820.

Then there is the great poet of Cordova, Ibn Zaydun of the eleventh
century, whose love for the princess Wallada has made him celebrated.
Here is a beautiful love poem translated by Nicholson, _Literary History
of the Arabs_, pp. 425-426:

     To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here;
     The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear.
     So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale,
     In pity of my grief it seems to fail.
     The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's
     Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls.
     Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime,
     When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time,
     We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue,
     That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew.
     Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep;
     They share my passion and with me they weep.
     Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright,
     Adding new lustre to Aurora's light;
     And waked by morning beams, yet languid still,
     The rival lotus doth his perfume spill.
     All stirs in me the memory of that fire
     Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire.
     Had death come ere we parted, it had been
     The best of all days in the world, I ween;
     And this poor heart, where thou art every thing,
     Would not be fluttering now on passion's wing.
     Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly,
     Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee!
     O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed
     A treasure! O thou dearest, queenliest!
     Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete
     And ran an equal race with eager feet.
     How true, how blameless was the love I bore,
     Thou hast forgotten; but I still adore!

Nor have I sounded the depth of Arabian poetry. Their greatest mystic
poet was Umar Ibn ul Farid, who flourished between 1181 and 1235, and
whose work is full of fervid and inspired poetry.

There is also Baha ad Din Zuhayr (d. 1258 A.D.), the love poet of Egypt,
whose complete poems have been translated into English by Edward H.
Palmer.

One of the great products of Arabic culture was its work in literary
criticism. While it is the fashion to-day to lay much stress on the
Italian and English studies of Aristotle's _Poetics_ in the Renaissance
and Elizabethan periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly
on poetry centuries before they read the _Poetics_. They made a
specialty of the literature called the Adab, or belles lettres made up
of criticism, quotation and rhetoric.

The criticism of poetry flourished among the Arabs in the ninth and
tenth centuries A.D. as a higher art than it did in the sixteenth
century among the Italians and English. Unfortunately none of these
works have been translated; there is not even a reference to their
influence in Saintsbury's _History of Criticism in Europe_. The Arabs
had so many poets even in Pre-islamic times in the sixth century that
interest in preserving this poetry gave rise later to anthologists who
made collections. These anthologists commented on the poetical work and
compared it with that of later periods, and with that of their
contemporaries.

Ibn Yunus in the early part of the tenth century translated Aristotle's
_Poetics_ into Arabic and the Europeans learned of Aristotle's work from
the Arabs several centuries later. But the best Arabic works on the art
of poetry had, however, already been produced, presenting original ideas
gleaned from the study of the great Arabian poets, and illustrated by
examples from them. The Arabic critics did not go to the Greek and Roman
poems (which they considered cold besides their own) as did the Italians
and English to study the nature of poetry. The Arabs studied Greek
science, medicine, and philosophy, but not Greek poetry. Books on
prosody and poetry appeared after the founding of the system of Arabic
meters by Khalil b. Ahmad in the eighth century. There were also the two
celebrated schools of grammarians at Basra and Kufa, soon to merge in
the school of Bagdad. Never before had the art of poetry and criticism
flourished so thrivingly and displayed a so generally high order as
among the Arabs in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. A
faint idea of the great number of Arabian grammarians, critics and poets
may be gleaned by perusing the biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan,
who flourished in the thirteenth century. This work, which contains only
a partial list, has been compared to the _Life of Johnson_, by Boswell
(Lucas called him a Bagdad Boswell), and to _Plutarch's Lives_.

While Europe was plunged in ignorance and barbarism, the great Arab
poets and critics were achieving work that belongs to the best; but
alas, the very names which rank so high among them are unknown to most
people. We let them slumber in the difficult Arabic. We translate the
Chinese and Japanese poems probably more out of faddish reasons than of
a true love of their poetry, but we ignore the Arabians.

The Arab example contradicts the famous platitude that great epochs of
creative literary work are not ages of literary criticism. It is just
the reverse. Good criticism is never so conspicuous as in ages of
poetry, for there is such interest in poetry as to provoke literary
discussion, then more so than ever. The best criticism of poetry
appeared in England in the great age of Wordsworth and Byron. The Arabic
grammarians and anthologists began their work about the middle of the
eighth century. Incredible stories are told of their feats of memory for
verse, in the art of improvisation, in skill in manipulating the
language. They regarded the letters of their alphabet as human beings,
just as the Hebrew Cabbalists treated their alphabetical letters as
angels.

To name even the most important of grammarians, anthologists,
philologists, critics of Arabia, is to call a long list. Even
historians, philosophers, scientists and theologians entered the field
of poetic criticism. Every one quoted the poets, consequently poetry was
bound up not only with criticism but with Arabic thought. One of the
most quoted Arabic critics is Ibn Rashiq, of the eleventh century, whose
_Umda_ or _Pillar of the Art of Poetry_ is mentioned often by Ibn
Khaldun, the historian. The latter also names four great Arabic writers
of Adab, Ibn Qutayba's _Accomplishments of the Secretary_ (Ibn Qutayba's
_Book of Poetry and Poets_ is more often cited by other writers than the
_Accomplishments of the Secretary_), Jahiz's _Book of Eloquence and
Exposition_, al Mubarrad's _Perfect_, all of the ninth century, and in
Spain Abu Ali al Qali's _Curious Notions_, of the tenth century, whose
_Book of Dictations_, however, is better known.

Among the writers on poetry in the manner of the Arabs was the Hebrew
poet and critic, Moses Ibn Ezra, author of the _Conversations and
Recollections_, which was the first study of the kind in Hebrew and the
first criticism of the poetry of the Bible from an aesthetic point of
view. Among Arab critics to whom he is indebted, besides the
aforementioned Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Rashiq, are the first book in Arabian
_Poetics_ proper, by the Caliph, Ibn ul Mutazz, of the latter part of
the ninth century, a work by Qudama, and _Ornaments of Conversation_, by
Al Hatimi, both of the tenth century.

There are many other works that were well known and often cited in
Arabic literary circles. I shall name only Tha'alibi (died 1037), whose
_Solitaire of Time_ had many continuations by later critics, and the
famous _Fihrist_ or _Index_ by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth
century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.

Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of Chaucer in the
thirteenth century, devoted a number of chapters to poetry in the
introduction to his famous history.

As a specimen of poetic criticism among the Arabs and as a corrective to
the general impression that ornament and not ecstasy counted in Arabic
poetry, I give the following English rendering from De Slane's French
translation of Khaldun's _Prolegomena_:

     One of the conditions imposed in the use of this art (of
     ornament) is that the embellishments appear in the piece quite
     naturally, without the author's labor in searching for them
     and without his being anxious about the effect that they
     should produce. If they present themselves naturally, there is
     nothing to object to them, for not being purposely introduced,
     they save the subject the fault of lapsing into barbarism; but
     when one imposes upon himself the task of painfully seeking
     these embellishments, he is led to neglect the principles
     which rule the combination of words, which are the foundation
     of the discourse; this injures the principles of clearness of
     expression and causes the distinctness and precision which
     ought to characterize the discourse, to disappear; nothing
     then remains but the embellishments. . . . Another condition
     which should be observed in regard to the science of ornaments
     is to make a rare use of it; that the poet apply it to two or
     three verses of a poem; that will suffice to give elegance
     and luster to the entire piece. The too frequent use of
     embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Rashiq and others have
     said. . . . All that we pointed out shows that the artificial
     discourse (or style), when one writes it laboriously and as a
     task, is inferior in merit to the natural discourse, for one
     neglects thereby too many fundamental principles of the art of
     speaking well. I leave it to good taste to judge thereof.

The Arabs then regarded poetry as ecstatic utterances emanating from the
unconscious, embodying an idea, and produced with little ornament. This
despite their belief that poetry must use the established forms of metre
and figures. It is unfortunate that even to the present day these old
forms are used, while Turkish literature has only very recently been
emancipated from them. Even Arabian political articles are to-day
written in rhymed prose. But as Chenery said, the history of rhymed
prose is the history of Arabic literature. Rhyme is natural to the
Arabic language, whereas it is really foreign to the English language.

If European civilization could free itself from the prejudices against
Semitic and Asiatic culture, and if the universities, instead of
studying minutely the barren medieval literature of Europe before the
Renaissance, would give fuller courses in the poetry of the Arabs,
Hebrews, Persians and Turks, the exchange would be salutary. The only
Asiatic literature that Europe made an attempt to study was that of the
Hindus, and, as has been suspected by many, this may have been done
chiefly out of Aryan vanity, to show that the earliest culture was not
Semitic but Aryan, and thus related to European culture. But the fact
remains that the poetry of these four nations mentioned is far superior
to that of medieval Europe. The two nations who were not Semitic, the
Persians and the Ottoman Turks, are almost wholly imbued with the
Semitic spirit. Persian poetry grew out of Arabic poetry, just as
Ottoman poetry developed from Persian poetry. There is nothing of the
Tartar spirit at all in Ottoman poetry, as Gibb has pointed out.

That poetry is subjective, lyric, ecstatic, is best seen in Oriental
poetry. It will repay the lover of literature to read such works as
Browne's _Literary History of Persia_, Gibb's _History of Ottoman
Poetry_, and Nicholson's _Literary History of the Arabs_. As for
Post-biblical poetry of the Hebrews, so rich in patriotic and moral
fervor, and in hymns and elegies, there are articles in the _Jewish
Encyclopedia_, chapters in Graetz's _History of the Jews_ and works on
various phases of it by numerous writers.

To the Oriental, poetry is ecstasy first and last, and this is all the
more remarkable since their poetry is so much more ornate, artificial,
figurative, and patterned than European poetry. It is sensuous,
passionate but not "simple." Its chief inferiority to European poetry,
however, springs from its lack in intellectual profundity, and its
severance (except in the Prophets of the Bible) from problems of social
justice.


FOOTNOTES:

[203:A] There is a French translation of the _Prolegomena_ by Mac Guckin
de Slane.

[204:A] Translated by Prof. Browne in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society_, 1899.

[214:A] See W. H. Schofield's _English Literature from the Roman
Conquest to Chaucer_, pp. 67-71.

[218:A] The best account and translations of Abu 'l Ala are in
Nicholson's _Studies in Islamic Poetry_, recently published.




CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION


I have not tried to present a theory of poetry, so much as to point out
certain features of a particular kind of writing which I have called the
literature of ecstasy. It has developed that I really used the word
ecstasy in the same sense that the other critics have employed the terms
unconscious, imagination, poetry. I think I have shown that the
literature of ecstasy even when in prose is synonymous with poetry as
understood by Shakespeare when he used "frenzy" and "things unknown" in
reference to the poet. I have also, I hope, pointed out that an ecstatic
presentation of intellectual and moral ideas results often in a great
poetic product.

I do not purpose to teach any one how to write poetry or the literature
of ecstasy. If my views have any value, it lies in helping us recognize
the literature of ecstasy. It is in aiding us to eliminate much trivial,
flimsy, unecstatic free verse and regular verse from the sphere of
poetry. It lies in inducing us to include much emotional prose as
poetry. Since men, however, entertain so many diverse views on life,
morals, and social justice, it can never be possible for critics to
agree as to which literature of ecstasy is the best, for its value is
affected by the question as to the truth of the ideals therein
maintained. Every one thinks that he can determine what are the merits
of a book. Those who have mastered the rules of prosody are certain that
they can judge the qualities of poetry. But only those critics can
recognize great poetry whose moral, intellectual and aesthetic faculties
are well balanced. It is true that the master of rules of prosody can
tell whether a verse poem follows the rules, he can perceive whether the
rhymes are false, whether the rhythm is regular, even whether the
figures are not far fetched and whether the diction is good; and a
commonplace mind may recognize the ordinary literature of ecstasy. But
the chief obstacle to recognizing poetry is that most people derive
their views as to what poetry is from rules formulated from the writings
of older poets. If the great poets of the world had never used a
patterned form, there would have been no text books welding poetry and
versification together. A great poet not only creates his own forms but
displays individuality in the choice of views and ideas. When he becomes
recognized, new rules are formulated from his work, and are even used as
a fetter to bind later poets and critics.

Anthologists have often been of great value in choosing for us the
literature of ecstasy as written by so-called minor and popular poets
who have taken no position in the history of the world's literature. A
poet, however, is not great because he has succeeded in producing a few
pieces that belong truly to the literature of ecstasy. Nor does a poet
who once held a high place in the list of poets and has subsequently
lost it by the vicissitudes of taste or circumstances or by the change
in ideas, cease being a poet to us if he has written poems that belong
to the literature of ecstasy. No one, for example, to-day regards Jean
Ingelow as a great poet, but the anthologists who select her _When
Sparrows Build_ or _High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_, justly
accept these poems as poetry. It will astonish many people who will take
the trouble to go through the work of some so-called minor poets, say
Philip Bourke Marston, to find gems here and there that properly are
part of the literature of ecstasy.

My theory, I hope, also helps us to determine when certain branches of
literature are poetry and when they are not. For example, there has
always been a dispute as to whether oratory, comedy and satire are
really poetry. There have been critics who would not admit that these
species of writing are properly poetry, even in verse; on the other
hand, other critics have asserted that they are poetry.

When, if ever, is oratory poetry? Whenever ecstasy and not rhetoric
characterizes it, when universal themes of permanent interest and not
arguments on a temporal political or economic question are its
substance, then oratory is poetry. A plea for adherence to the
principles of a political party, a speech about an economic problem, is
not as a rule poetry. But why are some of Moses's speeches and the
orations of the prophets poetry? Why is Mark Antony's verse funeral
oration on Cæsar, poetry? Surely not because of the verse? Why are some
of Bossuet's funeral orations, or Thucydides's speech in prose, poetry?
All of these orations belong to the domain of the literature of ecstasy,
and hence are poetry.

Nevertheless, oratory is usually hollow and bombastic. The orator makes
his appeal to men chiefly by rhetorical expression of commonplaces.
Eloquence and artifice count here more than thought or art. The less
intellect the audience has the better does the orator succeed. Hazlitt
saw the limitations of oratory. It is the unthinking man who is appealed
to by theatrical effects. The orator must be commonplace, he cannot
deliver profound views. Some of the great orations of the world's
literature that are poetry are those that were never really delivered
but composed by the historians, like the emotional speeches in
Thucydides and Tacitus. You can find poems in orations by Demosthenes
and Cicero also, but Fourth of July orations are seldom poetry. Nor is
the _Congressional Record_ an anthology of poetic masterpieces. In a
footnote in his book in aesthetics, _The Critique of Judgment_, Kant has
ably elucidated the situation.

     I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given me a pure
     gratification; whilst the reading of the best discourse,
     whether of a Roman orator or of a modern parliamentary speaker
     or of a preacher, has always been mingled with an unpleasant
     feeling of disapprobation, of a treacherous art, which means
     to move me in important matters like machines to a judgment
     that must lose all weight for them on quiet reflection.
     Readiness and accuracy in speaking (which taken together
     constitute rhetoric) belong to beautiful art; but the art of
     the orator, the art of availing one's self of the weaknesses
     of men for one's own design (whether these be well meant or
     even actually good, does not matter) is worthy of no respect.

We must not confuse eloquence with poetry, though there are numerous
prose pieces which though eloquent are yet poetry. Mere wordiness and
grandiloquence may sound like ecstasy yet lack that quality.

What can be said for famous passages like Burke's sympathetic outburst
for Marie Antoinette? I see no reason why we should not call this
poetry, though it is not poetry of a high order. The objection to it is
that the orator's emotion is misdirected; he wastes sympathy on a dead
queen who was at the head of a pernicious system, and ignores the
miseries of the thousands of poor Frenchmen. To that extent our
appreciation of it is limited. For even though Burke was right when he
lamented that the age of chivalry was gone, he did not state that the
time of exploitation of man was over, and the question of exploitation
is probably more important than that of chivalry.

There is affinity of oratory then to poetry, as it is calculated to
arouse the emotions of the audience. But the political oration is
usually not poetry, as it has a tendency to the ephemeral. No one will
deny, however, that there is genuine prose poetry in orations by
Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, Webster and Sumner.

What is true of the oration, is also true of the sermon. Sermons like
those of Jeremy Taylor and Sterne contain poetry; they have ecstasy.

There has also been considerable confusion as to how much poetry exists
in witty and humorous writings and in comedy. In other words, the
connection between poetry and tears is well established, but that
between poetry and laughter is vague. We may say that most of the
so-called humorous verse is not poetry at all, for the merely funny does
not merit the term poetry. Yet there is poetry in the humorous writings
of men like Mark Twain and O. Henry, on account of the ecstatic effect
upon the reader. In reading them one occasionally feels impelled to
tears, while moved to laughter. A mere witticism is not poetry, but it
may have certain qualities, such as a bit of wisdom conveying ecstasy,
which makes it poetry. The wit of Heine and Voltaire often belongs to
this class. When laughter is bound up with a profound idea or emotion,
the work expressing the laugh becomes poetry. However, laughter that
springs from seeing horse-play or the mere ludicrous, is not poetry. But
the portrayals of Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Parson Adams are poems.

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.

Closely akin to the comic genius is that of satire. Again satire is not
poetry, except when presenting ideas and evoking ecstasy. There used to
be a distinct form of verse poetry called the satire, but there is often
more or less satire in the works of novelists, prose dramatists and
essayists. We have as remnants of great ancient satire, poems by Horace
and Juvenal, tales by Apuleius and Petronius and the prose dialogues of
Lucian.

The great masters of satire in modern times have done their work in
prose and much of this is poetry. We think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire,
Anatole France and Samuel Butler. There is plenty of poetry in the
_Penguin Island_ and _Erewhon_, for example. Modern satire is prone to
be more poetical than the ancient verse satire, being free from
coarseness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Satire is not mere
ranting and cursing, but a keen and amusing way of showing forth human
follies. You find it in writers as different as Thackeray and Bernard
Shaw. Some of the satire in Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_ is
excellent poetry.

The highest form of satire in all the prose writers is poetry, as much
so as if put in the heroic couplets of Pope or the ottava rima of
Byron's _Vision of Last Judgment_.

Satire is poetry when it is universal. Much of the old Arabic poetry was
satire and yet genuine poetry. Pope's satires are poetry. Lafcadio Hearn
has said a few words on the subject that deserve quoting:

     It is not because the satires (of Pope) were true pictures or
     caricatures of any living person in particular, but because
     they were true pictures of general types of human weakness
     which have always existed, which exist to-day and which will
     exist to-morrow. (_Life and Literature_, p. 286.)

My theory of poetry as ecstasy also seeks to do away with the tendency
of criticism to identify poetry with the figure of speech or trope. Even
when it has lacked the quality which fills the reader with ecstasy, the
trope has been called poetry just because it was a trope. Imagery has
been confused with imagination, and many critics regard that as poetry
which makes the most frequent use of unusual figures of speech. As a
result, some of the figures of speech in poetry to-day are more
artificial even than those found in Oriental poetry. But no one can take
issue with the beautiful figures such as appear in the _Bible_ and in
Dante, in Shelley and Keats, of which the essence is a beautiful flight
of the imagination that fills us with ecstasy. But when freakish tropes
take the place of poetry then we ought to rebel. We like the figure of
speech introduced occasionally and naturally, and we don't want the
figure substituted for ideas and emotions.

One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on _The Science of
Poetry_, to identify poetry with the figure of speech. In spite of its
eccentricities, and its attempt at creation of new terms like
tro-tempotentry, the author recognizes that the critics confuse poetry
with metre, and that a prose writer like Robert Ingersoll was a poet.
Any one who had read Ingersoll's prose poems, and some of his orations
like the one on _Liberty in Literature_, will recognize this. The
mistake that Maxim makes is to call poetry defiantly a science, and then
to define it as an art in which figures of speech count most. To create
figures of speech is an art. Maxim's definition of poetry is "The
expression of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by artistic trope."
This definition covers much of ancient poetry, when man constantly used
tropes or figures of speech. It is also true that a vast body of the
world's poetry is full of tropes like metaphors and similes. In fact
even our free verse is full of them. But the figure of speech is only
one of the features that are often present in poetry, and we may and do
have the best poetry without it. Its frequent use has become a nuisance;
it often atones for lack of ideas, it is often a sign of insincerity in
the poet, and it occasionally bespeaks a raving imagination. The day of
tropes in poetry is, in spite of the Imagists, on the decline. You find
none of them in prose plays and very few in prose fiction. The trope was
an early adornment of poetry as rhythm was. It is not the essence of
poetry, though it often beautifies poetry.

The critics do not accept the book of Maxim's as a true statement of the
aims of poetry, but curiously enough they have always followed the views
in his book. They have confused tropes, or figures of speech, or imagery
with imagination. In the past the older critics fell into this error and
when they spoke of imagination they were really expatiating on imagery.

One of the best English critics on poetry, Leigh Hunt, sinned in this
direction. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge he made much of the distinction
between imagination and fancy. Wordsworth arranged his poems in an
edition of his works according to this distinction. Leigh Hunt got up an
anthology called _Imagination and Fancy_, in which he italicized the
imaginative and the fanciful passages, and to which he prefixed his
famous essay on "What is Poetry?" Here he gave his definitions of and
distinctions between imagination and fancy. Half the essay is devoted
really to identifying them with figures of speech. The only difference
between the two faculties was that fancy was a lighter play of the
imagination, a distinction really utterly trivial. His work was needed
at a time when the influence of Pope still ruled, and people could not
appreciate the rich figures in Shelley and Keats. Pater called attention
to the real distinction between imagination and fancy which is "between
higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of his
work, and in his concentration of himself upon his work." For all
purposes, however, fancy may be included under imagination. Imagery is
not always imaginative, for many figures of speech have no ecstatic
quality.

The English poets who were regarded as most gifted with the faculty of
imagination under the old definition were Milton and Spenser, chiefly
for their bold use of supernatural imagery. Homer and Dante were always
noted for their beautiful and effective similes, and they were also the
poets of the imagination _par excellence_. The confusion of imagery with
imagination resulted in giving figures of speech a significance in
determining the nature of poetry that it did not merit. Puttenham's book
in the Elizabethan Age, _The Arte of English Poesie_, was half employed
with ornament or various figures. Oriental poetry was especially
figurative; all Oriental books on rhetoric deal extensively with figures
of speech. In short it was taken for granted by all critics that poetry
was imagery or figures of speech, because poetry was a product of the
imagination, and imagination was confused with imagery. It is true that
it is the function of the imagination to compare, but that does not mean
that it is nothing more than metaphor or simile. The tropes were more
natural to early man who personified inanimate things and always saw
resemblances to draw from in nature. To-day the novelist or dramatist
introduces his metaphor or simile occasionally or naturally, as an
ornamental touch to convey his meaning better. Many modern versifiers
identify poetry with ornament and figures, and it is impossible for
them to write a poem without a succession of figures. The trope, like
the rhythm, is supposed to be poetry. Hunt's essay defines poetry as
imaginative passion in versification. He can conceive of no passion
being poetry unless presented in metre with figures of speech. His essay
is divided into two parts, the one dealing with imagination, or rather
imagery, the other with versification. Great critic that he was, he gave
us one of the weakest definitions of poetry we have.

Any one who has read _Tom Jones_ receives the impression that the long
similes Fielding introduced in the Homeric manner were written half in
jest of Homer, his master.

Yet the similes of the epic poets are poetry because they belong to the
literature of ecstasy. If the trope arouses our emotions it is poetry
not because it is an ornament but because it touches our unconscious
souls. How many tropes do you find in the prose plays of Ibsen or the
novels of Balzac? The ecstasy manages to get conveyed without their use.
It was the writers of the Romantic School who made the figure of speech
so prominent. These writers who sought that poetry become natural, did
much to make it artificial. The reason that such great poets as Keats
and Shelley are caviare to the public is that they are rich in tropes.
The eighteenth century poets were said to be destitute of imagination
chiefly because they did not make frequent use of the metaphor. The
sport of critics was to make fun of the peculiar figures of earlier
poets. We recall Johnson's dissecting (often with justice) of Cowley's
poems. The eighteenth century was right in one respect; in their extreme
unimaginativeness, they also avoided distorted imagery. Many nineteenth
century poets made it a rule never to call a thing by its proper name,
but by some epithet containing a metaphor. The practice is still
persisted in by many of our poets, and epithet-making is one of the
functions of many poets. Even prose writers like Carlyle were especially
noted for it, but his epithets were often truly poetry.

I do not think that poetry then should be exclusively identified with
tropes. Take a much-praised, in my opinion over-praised sonnet of Keats,
_On Reading Chapman's Homer_. The whole idea of this poem is in the
comparing his first discovery of Homer to the feelings of the man who
discovers a new planet, and to those of the discoverer of the Pacific
Ocean. (He confused Cortes with Balboa, but that is no matter.) Keats
conveys to us his idea by two similes. But can this poem compare with
such other sonnets of his where he lays bare his inmost emotions, where
the figures of speech are not the poems as here, but merely come in
incidentally; where he has a profound idea, emerging as the result of a
great passion?

A trope then is poetry only when arousing ecstasy; such poetry is not of
the highest order.

For many centuries also, that alone was considered imaginative
literature which introduced the supernatural or the allegory. Every
student is aware how much these two elements figure in medieval poetry.
All recipes for writing poems in those days contained provisions about
the use of the supernatural and allegory. It did not dawn on critics
that these could be dispensed with in a great poetical work. Cervantes
laughed away the use of the supernatural, while the eighteenth century
realistic novel did away with the use of allegory as a means of telling
a story. Nothing better than Poe's remarks has been said against the
allegory as a form of literary expression. Yet the artificial
supernatural agents of Ariosto and the bloodless types in the _Faerie
Queene_ were held to be the truest creations of imagination. The vicious
practices of great geniuses, often due to the examples of their age,
are instrumental in creating misunderstanding as to what poetry is, on
account of the inability of critics to praise them for their real
beauties. Often the passages that have been praised in Homer, Dante,
Virgil, Milton, Spenser, Ariosto, are not the ones where the ecstasy was
finest, but those where the "imaginative" powers of the poet were
thought to be the best seen, in the supernatural and allegorical
portions. Yet who can doubt that the greatness of Milton is more
apparent when he talks of his blindness than when he gives us the
description of Lucifer with the many artificial figures? Who prefers the
absurd descriptions of the monsters in Dante's _Inferno_ to the passages
where he touches on his own sorrows?

Another misapprehension about the nature of poetry lies in identifying
poetry with beauty. Poetry does not necessarily deal with the conception
of beauty as understood by the public or by the aestheticians, though
the describing of beautiful objects and scenes is often one of its most
important themes. Poetry is very little connected with the science of
aesthetics, for you may know all about the nature and laws of beauty,
the effect of beauty upon the nature of man, the cause of his love for
beauty, and yet you may not be able to make a great poem. Croce is as
much mistaken as the old aestheticians when he assumes one must study
the science of aesthetics to appreciate poetry.

Pater dealt a death blow to the theory that aesthetic, or the science of
abstract beauty, helps us to appreciate poetry. The critic who judges a
poem need know nothing about abstract beauty, or theories of aesthetic
emotion. There is little of value to be given us by the aesthetic
treatises to appreciate a play of Shakespeare or Ibsen or a novel of
Balzac or Dickens. Even poets like Goethe, Schiller and Lessing became
absorbed in aesthetical problems, but their novels, poems and plays were
written by putting out of mind metaphysical disquisitions. How are you
enabled to appreciate a poem by knowing Kant's erroneous theory that the
appreciation of beauty is impersonal and disinterested?

Pater in his _Renaissance_ took the position that poetry has a personal
message for us, an effect on us individually. We cannot learn this
effect by following metaphysical discourses on the relation of beauty to
truth or experience. In his _Appreciations_ in the essay on "Style"
Pater identifies beauty with expression, just as Croce did after him,
and Lessing and Winckelmann before him. "All beauty," wrote Pater, "is
in the long run only _fullness_ of truth, or what we call expression,
the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within." Here we have
Croce's conception of beauty, the word defined as it is being understood
to-day. It is in this sense only, the sense of the most adequate
expression of emotion, that the word beauty is the same as poetry, or
literature of ecstasy.

Formerly treatises were written about curved lines, elegant diction,
etc., on the theory that beauty was the subject of art. But a peasant's
description in slang of his emotions, an author's description of a
corpse that is rotting, or of a woman giving birth to a child, or of a
man going mad, or of a hideous degenerate crime, are also beautiful, for
since expression is beauty, the narration or description of the ugly is
a work of art. The word beauty in its popular sense no longer has
aesthetic significance. Even when it was really believed that art dealt
with beautiful objects and deeds, the aesthetician had to admit that
there was nothing beautiful in tragedies. Nor does beauty mean elegant
expression. Many stories and poems in slang and dialect belong to the
literature of beauty. The expression of emotions, the delineation of
ideas, the drawing of characters is beauty, if effectively done. The
reader need not have what the old aestheticians called "taste"; he must
only respond sympathetically to the ecstasy of the author.

I have made no attempt to set confines to poetry, for no two people will
ever agree as to whether a literary performance has sufficient ecstasy
or whether the ecstasy is of a high strain to entitle it to be called
poetry, but I believe all will agree that ecstasy is necessary.

I believe, however, that many authoritative works and essays on Poetry,
from Aristotle to our own day, are obsolete. I shall mention only
Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ which
has furnished modern critics with many of their ideas. The article is
beyond question one of the most interesting produced in England in many
years. Watts-Dunton has a true conception of poetry when he calls it the
product of inspiration or concrete and artistic expression of the human
mind in emotional language. He believes, however, versification is
necessary to all poetry. He also makes too much of the divisions of
poetry into the various orders, like epic, lyric, drama, an artificial
division adopted by all critics from Aristotle. Watts-Dunton's divisions
of poets into those with an absolute or personal vision and those with a
relative vision, is arbitrary and confused. All poets are personal, and
even when they depict other people's emotions objectively, the product
is personal because touched with the creator's personality. He is also
too much under the influence of Hegel's _Aesthetics_.

Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of impassioned prose or its
right to be called poetry. He once said to William Michael Rossetti
that the latter's reputation as a critic would soon vanish because of
his admiration for Whitman, whom he himself detested. He is blamed with
having done much to quench the poetic fire of Swinburne's muse, for
whose changed attitude towards Whitman he also was responsible. He had
no sympathy with the poetry that had a social message and he did not
understand its effect as a catharsis. Watts-Dunton cannot remain our
leading authority on poetry. His essay belongs to the extinct class of
_Ars Poetica_, with Boileau and Opitz.

Ecstasy is then the substance of poetry, and there are all kinds of
ecstasy, from a very exalted to a primitive order. It includes the
scientist's or philosopher's passion for knowledge, the idealist's
devotion to a cause. It comprehends the warrior's madness for battle,
the patriot's ardor to die for his country, and man's submission to his
God. Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved by reading a great
work of art. It sweeps every one who is in the throes of ambition. Those
who enjoy nature, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy.
Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or rejoicing in the
emergence of dear ones from illness or danger, those who take pride in
watching their children grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of
friendship, are all in ecstasy.

Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better things, every one
who fulminates against ugliness and wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are
you in a state of rapture because your love is returned, or in one of
despair, because it is denied?--you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding
over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of
grief?--you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a
bad sense. The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant
emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.

The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion with God, the lunatic
who thinks demons are prodding him, the spiritualist who imagines he
talks to his dead son, the child who is in communication with animals
and supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of ecstasy.

It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of ecstasy to
choose, what attitude to take towards it and in what words and form to
convey it.

The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware of the fact. For
the great bulk of the poetry read by the people is the prose fiction
that they find exciting and stimulating. This fiction is usually of a
very low order. Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple
and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situations in novels,
in the best passages of short stories. Prose poetry is the most
democratic and natural poetry, at least in form, and you can rely on the
public to appreciate some of it.

The poetry in Dickens is democratic poetry. The drawing of such
characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe Gargery, wherein he shows the
noble virtues residing in common people, is poetry that the public can
appreciate.

Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for when it deals with
ideas beyond the people, such as you find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it
does not succeed in evoking the intended response and sympathy from the
public, which rejects such ideas.

So when we hear people say that they do not care for poetry we see that
they mean they have an aversion to verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm.
But they will weep as they read of the death of Little Nell and be
moved by the sorrows of Anna Karenina, and be stirred by the tragedy of
_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. Like the gentleman in Molière's play who
spoke prose all his life without knowing it, these readers are fond of
poetry without being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature
appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is touched by the
ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or beautiful prose literature.
Here the poetic is divested of metaphors and rhythm and trappings and
verbal tricks; here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by
affectation.

You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in Burke's _Letter to a
Noble Lord_, where the great orator, desolate because of the loss of his
son and embittered by criticism for accepting a pension, bares the state
of his soul.

     The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old
     oaks which the late hurricane has scattered upon me. I am
     stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie
     prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet
     my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive
     myself if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse
     wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. . . .
     I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded
     me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as
     posterity are in the place of ancestors.

You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in his _Confessions_
his feelings as he lay on his mattress grave, no less than when you
peruse his love woes in verse.

     What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in
     the choicest wines and drunk from golden goblets, when I,
     myself, severed from all that makes life pleasant may only
     wet my lips with an insipid emotion? What does it avail me
     that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with
     laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged
     nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my
     actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of
     Shiraz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two
     thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the
     dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell,
     unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins.

When you read Hardy's _Return of the Native_ and reach the part where
Yeobright reproaches his wife Eustacia for causing the death of his
mother by closing the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover,
you are in the midst of poetry.

     Call her to mind--think of her--what goodness there was in
     her: it showed in every line of her face! . . . O! couldn't
     you see what was best for you, but you must bring a curse upon
     me, and agony and death upon her, by doing that cruel deed!
     . . . Eustacia, didn't any tender thought of your own mother
     lead you to think of being gentle to mine at such a time of
     weariness? Did not one grain of pity _enter_ your heart as she
     turned away?

If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following
passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume _Exotics
and Retrospectives_, you delight in poetry.

     And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature
     that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would
     seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical
     emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.

     Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have
     you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself
     exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of
     fire?--never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting,
     iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable
     touch?--never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor
     of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering of its
     dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly
     soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a
     hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like
     a ghost,--to scream around the peaks with it,--to sweep the
     face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the
     gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers,
     have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion,--no
     longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that
     mighty shout?

I should like to go on quoting passages from other books to show the
reader that if he likes them he is emphatically a lover of poetry. I
might have given one of the great prose poems in Nietzsche's _Thus Spake
Zarathustra_ or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's novel
_Salammbo_. I might have presented for the edification of the "hater" of
poetry the renowned description of the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay
on Leonardo da Vinci in _The Renaissance_. I could have added Carlyle's
reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from _Sartor Resartus_,
Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in _The Florentine Nights_,
George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his
book on _Shakespeare_, Dickens' description of the tower in _Chimes_, or
Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the _Wild Ass's Skin_.

That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any profound idea is
ecstatically or passionately stated. That is poetry where man gives
utterance to any sorrow or desolation, or where he shouts out his
gladness because he finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks
of the pains or thrills of love; when he shows compassion for the
miseries of his fellow-men. You find poetry wherever man is depicted in
a spirit of self-sacrifice for an idea or a person he loves; or where he
is shown pursuing an ideal or ambition. Heroism is poetry; philanthropy
is poetry; self-development is poetry. Pictures of striking scenes;
portrayals of interesting events; conflicts between duties; delineations
of tragic situations; tolerance for human frailties; anger at injustice,
admonition for follies, chidings or outbursts against stupidity; cries
of helplessness; all of these in artistic form become poems. Accounts of
cruelty, barbarism, madness, horror, wicked deeds or abnormal or
supernormal conduct, if well described become poetical, for poetry need
not point a conventional moral. Hence villainy, immorality, crime, may
be so artistically pictured that our emotions are worked upon and though
our moral sense is shocked we are held spellbound in witnessing these
malign forces in nature.

I plead then that ecstasy, and not rhythm, should characterize much of
our literature; and I seek to show that poetry is not a department of
literature but a spirit that permeates the best writing even in prose.
Our entire attitude in estimating what is poetry will be changed, for
the world's emotional prose literature will be taken into its domain.
And the importance of rhythm in making verse will be a thing of the past
and genuine emotion will receive its right name.

I also hope that a higher valuation will be given to literature which
shows an interest in the working classes and seeks social justice. I do
not, however, assert that the literature of pure rational propaganda
would become poetry, or that the writings of men who attach themselves
to certain political or economical theories would be great by virtue of
the adherence to a particular theory. But there is a tendency to decry a
writer when he shows an interest in social problems and tells the world
that something is rotten in Denmark.

There are occasionally great literary products that are to be found
often in radical and obscure papers that belong to the literature of the
ecstasy of social justice. These would have never been accepted by the
academic or capitalistic bourgeois press, any more than would some of
the older prophecies have been accepted had they been submitted as
unrequested contributions to our magazine editors. Many of those
compositions depend for literary value on universal feeling, and make no
appeal to party feeling or economical theory, and they can be
appreciated by people who seek poetry.

The reader will observe then that not all species of ecstasy belong to
the high order of literature. But the skill of the artist may elevate
the lower order of ecstasy to that of a higher plane, and the
amateurishness of the author may deflect what might be poetry of a
higher degree to that of a commonplace order. Stories of adventure,
abounding in false sentiment, misleading examples and unreal situations,
are hardly poetry or good literature of ecstasy. But Stevenson
transmutes such a tale into excellent poetry in _Treasure Island_. Those
who have read the pathological outbursts of religio-maniacs, rife in
outworn dogma, and seething with morbid emotions, will not maintain that
such productions are poetry of a high order, though the ecstatic element
is present in marked degree. Yet a St. Augustine occasionally makes good
poetry out of such material.

In general, that is not great poetry or literature of ecstasy which
appeals to the rude primitive emotions. When the purpose of a literary
work is to wean us from finer feelings, to make us sympathize with
cruelty, to paralyze the sympathetic emotions within us, and to kill all
feelings rooted in love, pity, service, justice and kindness, it is not
of a great order of poetry. Those works in whole or part that fan the
martial spirit within us, and take hold of us as with an hypnotic sway
of the hand, and make us seek to murder our fellow men, and to arouse
the lust for blood in us, cannot be great works. No literature that is
heartless or brutal, or confuses an appeal to the murderous instincts
with real love of country, or love of liberty, with self-sacrifice for
justice or loved ones, can be valuable to us either practically or
aesthetically. No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters
unreasonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful victories, or
crowns with the garland of a hero the mere warrior who is a warrior for
the pure delight of killing, is really of the higher type of literature
of ecstasy. It is this martial phase that makes most of the early
literature of all nations valuable only in parts; in those parts where
the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt with, and where
the more genial emotions are crystallized. So many theories of poetry
are futile, because they are based on studies primarily of the epic
poems of the nations, and it is these epic poems that mingle the most
impoverished and base poetry with that of a fine quality.

Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which
is purely tribal or clannish in feeling; nor when chauvinistic and full
of hatred for all other peoples. This does not mean that poetry must not
smack of the soil, and that it cannot preserve a sane patriotic and
national feeling, and worship a culture inherent in a people. But when
the ecstasy descends to the kind which kills individualism under the
pretense of encouraging it, when it is hostile to the stranger and the
original thinker, when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts
as regards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and pernicious.

Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which
in its mystic quality eludes all compromises with reason, and borders on
absurdity or is pathological. When poetry seeks salvation in apparent
madness, and attaches itself to faith in the impossible, and sees
distorted visions, and creates a maniac's world of unquestionably
inverted order of hell-fire and brimstone, and makes outrageous and
unjust demands on human nature it is of a low order. Nor is an
unwarranted asceticism in poetry calculated to raise its tone.

It is vain to enumerate the various ecstasies of a low order, that of
the literature which upholds different forms of wrong, as well as that
which is too much attached to the commonplace, nor is it necessary to
show that that poetry is not of a high order whose author goes into
ecstasies about nuances, indulges in inappropriate imagery, piles up
trite ideas in flowery diction, or gives continual iteration to the
least important of commonplace emotions.

What then is literature of a high order? What is this great form of art
that takes us out of ourselves because it has in it so much of
ourselves? What is this magical arrangement of words enshrining what
ideas and emotions that gives us a zest for life, that makes us drunk
with aesthetic pleasure? It includes many species, all, as Milton would
say, in a "strain of a higher mood." One of its greatest manifestations
is that in which the ecstasy for social justice and a high form of
idealism control the poet. We become carried away with his frenzy, for
it evokes the highest emotions in us; an undeviating and never swerving
enthusiasm for spreading right and happiness is an elevated form of
ecstasy. The grief of the oppressed and the poor goes to our own hearts,
and the calamities of the woe-begone become our own. We submerge our
personality in that of the human race, and the griefs of strangers lure
us to cry out for them.

But it should be remembered that literature never thus becomes a weapon
for reform or a piece of didacticism or propaganda. The emotion is the
thing. The practical work of relief of suffering is the function of the
reformer and not the poet. It is the poet's duty only to make a certain
form of ecstasy contagious. Practical results will follow as a matter of
course.

And then there is the ecstasy that revolves around a profound
philosophic insight, when the poet rids himself of prejudiced and barren
thinking and looks at the universe with awe and goes into rhapsodies
about its workings. And it takes a high order of intellect to sympathize
with the literature of ecstasy of this kind, that pierces into the soul
of the universe. The advanced ideas of the greatest poets are, however,
often such as only a few people have intellect enough to perceive, or
are such as can be grasped only when man throws aside all his
prejudices. And here the great philosopher, mathematician and scientist
come to the aid of the poet, who emotionalizes their greatest
discoveries. For reason must go hand in hand with ecstasy.

There is the ecstasy where men are shown in the helpless grasp of great
passions, and are in despair because of events beyond their control.
Such passions include grief of all kinds, whether brought about by death
or wrong or one's own folly. The depicting of great passion belongs to
the grand order of the literature of ecstasy even when the poet makes no
attempt to moralize from or sympathize with it. Crime and wickedness
may be masterfully described with no ethical intent, for we are
interested in the grand spectacle of a man whom the Gods have made mad,
for madness is potential in all of us.

There is the ecstasy of the lover in his rapture for his mistress, and
in his transformed nature. We are moved by the delicacy of his
sentiment, his chivalry, his sacrifice, we are overcome by his sorrows
and his misfortunes. There is the ecstasy of the love of nature where
the majesty of this universe is set out in its glory. There is the
ecstasy of the lover of beauty for its own sake, and of the artist in
the pursuit of his work, and of the reader and of him who listens to
music, of him who sees artistic pictures. There is the ecstasy of the
scientist in his pursuit of truth, and of the inventor in transforming
the face of the globe.

We cry out for ecstasy; it is the substance of our lives; even though,
often in our pursuit of pleasant ecstasy, we are launched into tragedy.
We are hungry for a happy life of the emotions. It is this which makes
lovers and friends and parents of us. It is this which makes us poets,
and it is the poet in ourselves that we always hunt out.

I hope our study has helped us to distinguish the higher from the lower
forms of ecstasy, to find poetry in prose, and to differentiate poetry
from verse, wherein there is no ecstasy but various conventions, like
inversion, poetic diction, rhyme, metre, figures of speech,
parallelisms, technique, and all forms of rhythm and repeats. That much
of the best of the world's poetry has made abundant use of these
mechanisms has led the critics to confuse poetry with its conventions.
But the ecstasy was forgotten, and the emotional and intellectual value
of the poem was overlooked. It was thought because the masters
subscribed slavishly to the conventions that they became poets because
of them, whereas they were poets first and last because of the ecstasy,
sometimes with the aid of the conventions and sometimes despite them.
That these mechanisms will always be used in some degree is certain, but
the most natural poetry will be that which uses them moderately,
irregularly and only when the emotions and the ideas naturally clothe
themselves in them.

Poetry and prose then are not contradictory, but prose becomes poetry
when the element of ecstasy is present. We use the word prosaic in a
sense, it is true, which means destitute of imagination or emotion; we
even call verse of this kind prosaic. But a work in prose may be
poetical, and one in verse be prosaic, and science, philosophy and
morality become poetry, though in the form of prose, when bathed in the
spirit of ecstasy. And the highest form of poetry is that wherein the
ecstasy springs from our nature's most human and most admirable side.

After having learned that poetry is more natural without metre or a
pattern, that it may be in prose with or without rhythm, that it may
have a social message, that it is the product of the unconscious, that
it is related to dreams in being an imaginary fulfilled wish of the
poet, that it acts as a relief to the writer and the reader, that it is
always personal and lyric, that it is synonymous with expression in the
poet's mind, that its chief characteristic is passion, imagination or
ecstasy, that its qualities are often enhanced rather than destroyed by
the presence of intellect or morality, that it is an emotional spirit
holding literature in suffusion instead of being a branch of literature,
we shall find that most of the old definitions of poetry exclude a great
deal of the world's best poetry, and include much that is not poetry.




INDEX OF AUTHORS


     Abu Ali al Qali, 222

     Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, 216, 217

     Abu 'l Atahiya, 216, 218

     Abu Nuwas, 205

     Abu Zayd, 215

     Ælfric, 108, 114

     Æschylus, 15, 27, 160

     Al Ghazzali, 34, 35

     Al Hatimi, 223

     Aldington, Richard, 122

     Ambros, Wilhelm A., 52

     Antar, 209, 211, 219

     Ari Frodi, 110

     Ariosto, 111, 238

     Aristotle, 15, 29, 42, 96, 136, 169, 179, 180, 191, 220

     Arnold, Matthew, 23, 49, 64, 118, 126, 129


     Bacon, Francis, 48, 53, 79, 135

     Baha Ad Din Zuhayr, 220

     Balzac, 49, 53, 57, 58, 59, 72, 87, 154, 165, 181, 190, 236, 245

     Baqui, 211, 214

     Baudelaire, Charles, 18, 89, 126, 138, 153

     Beaconsfield, Lord, 49, 88, 89

     Beckford, 213

     Benavente, Jacinto, 71

     Bergson, 30, 136

     Bernays, Jacob, 180

     Bielinski, 162

     Blake, William, 18, 44, 73, 118, 167, 186

     Bosanquet, 180, 181

     Bossuet, 87, 228

     Boswell, 221

     Bradley, A. C., 126

     Brandes, George, 72, 92, 131, 141, 142, 167, 245

     Breasted, James H., 99

     Briffault, Robert, 212

     Browne, Edgar G., 203, 204, 225

     Browne, Sir Thomas, 88

     Browning, Elizabeth B., 53, 61

     Browning, Robert, 18, 61, 86, 124, 134, 213

     Bryant, W. C., 50

     Buchanan, Robert, 143

     Bunyan, John, 20, 88

     Burke, Edmund, 49, 121, 229, 230

     Burns, Robert, 31, 69, 128, 154, 173, 185, 190, 198

     Butcher, S. H., 24, 42, 160

     Byron Lord, 18, 31, 61, 72, 86, 125, 154, 167, 173, 185, 190, 213,
         222


     Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 72, 134, 137, 148, 168, 169, 171

     Carpenter, Edward, 118

     Castelvetro, 43, 179

     Cervantes, 87, 154, 167, 211

     Chateaubriand, 49, 58, 87

     Chaucer, Geoffrey, 172

     Chekhov, Anton, 71, 122

     Cicero, 87, 89, 120, 229, 230

     Coleridge, S. T., 12, 47, 48, 49, 77, 78, 121, 173, 186, 234

     Conrad, 57, 71, 116

     Corneille, 87

     Cowper, William, 134

     Crane, Stephen, 118

     Croce, 15, 28, 81, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 239

     Crosby, Ernest, 118

     Dallas, E. S., 187, 191

     Dalman, G., 102

     Dante, 13, 47, 133, 141, 167, 233, 238

     D'Annunzio, 51

     Daudet, Alphonse, 186

     Davidson, Israel, 172

     De Musset, Alfred, 121, 154

     De Quincey, Thomas, 40, 88, 90, 117

     De Slane, MacGuckin, 203, 209, 223

     De Vigny, 166

     Democritus, 15

     Demosthenes, 24, 119, 229

     Descartes, 135

     Dickens, Charles, 53, 72, 84, 121, 154, 168, 169, 242

     Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 28, 119, 181

     Dobrolubov, 162

     Donne, 21

     Dostoievsky, 143, 154

     Doughty, 71

     Drummond, Henry, 88

     Dryden, John, 172

     Dumas, Alexander, 168

     Dunash ben Labrat, 104


     Eaton, Walter P., 116

     Eliot, George, 89, 121, 135

     Elliott, Ebenezer, 88

     Ellis, Havelock, 185, 186

     Emerson, R. W., 23, 53, 81, 92, 93, 94, 121, 186, 200

     Erasmus, 43

     Erskine, John, 117

     Euripides, 30


     Fairchild, A. H., 200

     Fénelon, 86, 161

     Fielding, 231, 236

     Flaubert, 138, 140, 165

     Flint, F. S., 122

     France, Anatole, 201, 232

     Freud, 15, 28, 135, 167, 181, 185, 189, 199

     Froude, 137

     Fuller, Thomas, 88


     Galsworthy, John, 71, 155

     Gautier, 138

     Gibbon, 137

     Giovanitti, Arthur, 158

     Goethe, 46, 71, 72, 118, 121, 131, 134, 148, 154, 167, 176, 185,
         190, 213, 214

     Goldberg, Isaac, 177

     Goldziher, 105

     Gorki, 156

     Gosse, Edmund, 64

     Graetz, 225

     Gray, Thomas, 19

     Guérin, 49

     Gummere, Professor, 44, 198

     Gurney, 62


     Ha Levi, Jehudah, 105, 172

     Hafiz, 154, 211

     Halper, B., 172, 182

     Hardy, Thomas, 53, 71, 121, 181, 244

     Hariri, 214, 215, 218

     Harper, G. M., 122

     Harte, Bret, 50, 130

     Hauptmann, 71, 155, 156, 200

     Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 50, 53, 92

     Hazlitt, 49, 77, 131, 185, 193

     Hearn, Lafcadio, 30, 46, 71, 72, 115, 140, 175, 232, 244

     Hegel, 122, 240

     Heine, Heinrich, 18, 31, 49, 70, 71, 118, 121, 154, 172, 190, 230,
         243, 245

     Henley, Walter, 118

     Henry, O., 130, 230

     Herodotus, 48

     Hewlett, Maurice, 71, 116

     Holmes, O. W., 50, 168, 186

     Homer, 13, 15, 62, 80, 82, 96, 137, 167, 236, 238

     Horace, 72, 128

     Hovey, Richard, 118

     Howells, W. D., 86, 144

     Hudson, W. H., 71

     Hugo, Victor, 58, 87, 140, 154

     Hume, 135, 170

     Huneker, 18

     Hunt, Leigh, 234


     Ibn Abi Rabia, Omar, 207

     Ibn Daud, Abraham, 183

     Ibn Ezra, Moses, 172, 182, 222

     Ibn Gebirol, Solomon, 172

     Ibn Ishaq, 223

     Ibn Khaldun, 203, 204, 205, 222, 223

     Ibn Khallikan, 209

     Ibn Pakuda, Bachya, 172

     Ibn Rashiq, 223

     Ibn ul Farid, Umar, 220

     Ibn ul Mutazz, 223

     Ibn Yunus, 220

     Ibn Zaydun, 219

     Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 38, 49, 71, 131, 132, 142, 150, 154, 166, 167,
         169, 185, 190, 242

     Imru'ul Qays, 206, 215, 217

     Ingelow, Jean, 227

     Israeli, Isaac, 183


     Jacob, Cary F., 46

     Jahiz, 222

     Jalalu 'l Din Rumi, 22

     Jannai, 104

     Johnson, Samuel, 113, 185


     Kant, 229

     Kaplan, Jacob H., 37

     Keats, John, 18, 128, 138, 154, 173, 233, 235

     Keble, John, 187-190

     Kelley, FitzMaurice, 212

     Kempis, Thomas à, 20

     Khalil, Ahmad, 221

     Khansa, 214

     Kingsley, Charles, 185

     Kipling, Rudyard, 50, 71

     König, 101, 102


     La Rochefoucauld, 167

     Lamb, Charles, 69, 185

     Landor, W. S., 81, 213

     Langdon, Professor, 100

     Langland, 158

     Lawrence, D. H., 71

     Le Sage, 87

     Lee, A. H. E., 23

     Leopardi, 143

     Lespinasse, Madame, 53

     Lessing, G. E., 62, 63, 179, 239

     Lewis, Sinclair, 232

     Lincoln, Abraham, 60

     Livy, 48, 120, 137

     Locke, John, 178

     Longfellow, H. W., 50, 126, 154, 170, 175, 176

     Lowell, J. R., 41, 176, 178, 186, 193

     Lowes, Professor, 63, 116

     Lowth, Bishop, 102

     Lucas, E. V., 221

     Lyly, John, 121


     Macaulay, T. B., 168

     Macdonald, Duncan B., 34

     Machen, Arthur, 23

     Macleod, Fiona, 116

     Maggi, 179

     Maimonides, Moses, 37

     Majnun, 206

     Malory, 55, 88

     Margoliouth, 218

     Marston, P. B., 227

     Marsyas, 26

     Masaryk, Thomas G., 162

     Masters, Ed. L., 116

     Maupassant, Guy de, 148

     Meredith, George, 116, 121, 135, 230

     Mihailovsky, 162

     Mill, J. S., 88, 178

     Mills, L. H., 106

     Milton, John, 13, 47, 48, 64, 88, 118, 120, 122, 141, 167, 178,
         180, 238

     Minturno, 179

     Mirabeau, 87

     Molière, 87, 154, 167

     Morley, John, 178

     Moore, George, 92

     Moore, Thomas, 48, 71, 213

     Moulton, R. G., 103

     Müller, Max, 106

     Murray, Gilbert, 30

     Murry, J. Middleton, 122


     Neilson, William A., 33

     Newbolt, Henry, 171

     Newton, Isaac, 40

     Nicholson, D. H. S., 23, 217, 219, 225

     Nidhami I Arudi, 204

     Nidhami, 206

     Nietzsche, 28, 30, 53, 81, 124, 154, 163, 168, 171, 181, 189, 242


     Omar Khayyam, 218

     Oppenheim, James, 158

     Ossian, 118


     Palgrave, W. G., 207

     Pascal, 20, 124

     Pater, Walter, 30, 45, 53, 72, 116, 117, 126, 239, 245

     Patterson, Professor, 45, 46, 117

     Perry, Bliss, 118

     Phelps, W. L., 21

     Pindar, 160

     Pisarev, 162

     Plato, 15, 24, 25, 26, 27, 48, 53, 96, 119, 122, 124, 133, 148, 160

     Plutarch, 48, 56, 121, 133, 137

     Poe, E. A., 18, 49, 50, 61, 72, 74, 92, 121, 131, 144, 161

     Pope, Alexander, 75, 133, 232

     Prescott, F. C., 184

     Prévost, 87

     Pythagoras, 133


     Qudama, 223

     Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 66, 67

     Quintilian, 120

     Qutayba, 222


     Riley, J. W., 170

     Roberts, W. Rhys, 119

     Robortelli, 179

     Rolland, 154

     Roosevelt, Theodore, 116

     Rossetti, Dante G., 186

     Rousseau, 53, 87, 134

     Ruskin, John, 38, 53, 72, 84, 112, 130, 154, 168, 169

     Russel, Bertrand, 136


     Saadyah, 104

     St. Augustine, 20, 53

     Saintsbury, George, 43, 44, 81, 220

     Sand, George, 87

     Sandburg, 116

     Savonarola, 43

     Schlegel, Frederick, 49

     Schofield, W. H., 214

     Schopenhauer, 53, 124, 135, 163, 199

     Scott, Samuel P., 213

     Scott, Sir Walter, 55, 121, 168

     Senancour, 49

     Shairp, J. C., 89

     Shakespeare, William, 13, 16, 56, 57, 69, 82, 83, 101, 112, 113,
         124, 134, 138, 148, 150, 154, 167, 168, 170, 177, 193, 226, 238

     Shaw, Bernard, 38, 112, 156, 167

     Shelley, P. B., 12, 18, 23, 32, 38, 48, 70, 72, 74, 121, 124, 128,
         133, 154, 167, 169, 173, 185, 186, 190, 233, 235

     Sidney, Sir Philip, 12, 48, 88, 119, 121

     Sinclair, Upton B., 155, 200

     Smith, Sir George A., 101, 215

     Smith, W. Robertson, 100

     Socrates, 26, 42

     Sophocles, 13, 80, 83, 160

     Southey, Robert, 213

     Spencer, Herbert, 135

     Spenser, Edmund, 13, 235, 238

     Speroni, 179

     Spingarn, 117, 132, 179

     Spinoza, 134, 135

     Stedman, E. C., 32, 58

     Stendhal, 57, 142, 206

     Stevenson, R. A. M., 138

     Stevenson, R. L., 247

     Strabo, 97

     Strindberg, 143

     Surrey, 213

     Swinburne, A. C., 18, 23, 73, 125, 138, 140, 154

     Symonds, J. A., 27, 69, 111, 125, 126

     Symons, Arthur, 63, 121, 138

     Synge, 71


     Tacitus, 137

     Taine, 170

     Taylor, Jeremy, 48, 178, 230

     Tchernishevski, 162

     Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 23, 154, 185

     Tha'alibi, 223

     Thackeray, W. M., 23, 121, 181

     Thompson, Francis, 72

     Thomson, James, 186

     Thucydides, 53, 119, 137, 228

     Tolstoy, 36, 53, 57, 140, 142, 190

     Traubel, Horace, 118, 158

     Tupper, Martin, 118

     Turgenev, 57

     Twain, Mark, 59, 230


     Untermeyer, Louis, 118, 158


     Van Teslaar, J. S., 182

     Varchi, 179

     Verhaeren, 155

     Verlaine, 31, 72, 154

     Véron, Eugene, 87

     Vettori, 179

     Virgil, 57, 62, 148

     Voltaire, 230


     Warton, Thomas, 211

     Watts-Dunton, 240

     Weil, Henri, 180

     Whistler, 138

     Whitman, Walt, 12, 15, 23, 31, 44, 45, 63, 65, 79, 114, 116, 118,
         124, 142, 154, 164, 175, 178

     Wilde, Oscar, 53, 138, 167

     Wilkinson, J. G., 186, 187

     Wittels, F., 181

     Woodberry, Professor, 31, 132

     Wordsworth, William, 12, 15, 18, 23, 31, 45, 49, 51, 52, 60, 65,
         77, 78, 112, 121, 124, 146, 164, 173, 185, 222, 234

     Wulfstan 108, 109

     Wyatt, 213


     Xenophon, 48


     Yeats, William Butler, 71, 165


     Zoroaster, 107

     Zola, Emil, 142, 155, 156, 165, 167, 200

     Zuhayr, 215




INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS


     Adam Bede, 44

     Advancement of Learning, 79

     Æneid, 53, 54, 57, 111

     Æsthetics, 87

     Albion's England, 85

     Arabia Deserta, 71

     Arabian Nights, 187, 205, 213, 218

     Arcadia, 121

     Areopagitica, 122, 178

     Ars Poetica, 241

     Art of Writing, 66

     Aspects of Poetry, 89

     Assemblies (or Maqamat), 214, 215, 218

     Atala, 87

     Aucassin and Nicolette, 86

     Aurora Leigh, 61

     Avesta, 105, 106

     Avowals, 92

     Aylmer's Field, 44


     Ballad of Mary the Mother, 143

     Bedouins, 18

     Beginnings of Poetry, 44

     Beowulf, 103, 109

     Bible, 14, 44, 102, 103, 118, 160, 177, 202, 215, 222, 233

     Birth of Tragedy, 30

     Botanical Garden, 85

     Boundaries of Music and Poetry, 52

     Brand, 59

     Brushwood Boy, 50


     Canterbury Tales, 55

     Chanting the Square Deific, 23

     Chapbook, 88

     Cherry Orchard, 122

     Christmas Carol, 168

     City of Dreams, The, 143

     Confessions, 53

     Confessions of an Opium Eater, 40

     Conservator, 118

     Convention and Revolt in Poetry, 63

     Corn Law Rhymes, 88

     Cousin Pons, 59

     Creative Criticism, 117

     Critique of Judgment, 229

     Cypress Grove, 109


     David Copperfield, 54

     Dawn, 155

     Decameron, 49

     Defense of Poetry, 74

     Deserted Village, 49

     Devil's Case, 143

     Dialogues on Eloquence, 86

     Divine Comedy, 60, 184

     Doll's House, 132

     Don Juan, 61, 86, 125

     Don Quixote, 39, 49, 169, 211, 212

     Dream Fugue, 57

     Dreams and Poetry, 184


     Early Poetry of Israel, 101, 215

     Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 19

     Eleonora, 50

     English Literature from Roman Conquest to Chaucer, 212

     Enoch Arden, 44

     Epipsychidion, 165, 183

     Erewhon, 232

     Erotic Motive in Literature, 185

     Essay on Man, 122

     Essays in Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis, 107

     Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 125

     Essentials of Poetry, 33

     Ethics, 134

     Eugénie Grandet, 59

     Euphues, 121

     Excursion, 60

     Exotics and Retrospectives, 115, 244


     Fall of the House of Usher, 144

     Fathers and Sons, 57

     Fingal, 58

     First Four Books of Civil War, 85

     Foundations and Nature of Verse, 46

     French Revolution, 53, 137

     Function of the Poet, 41

     Fuzzy Wuzzy, 50


     Gathas, 107

     Genesis, Book of, 64

     Genius of Christianity, 87

     Georgics, 62, 148

     Germinal, 155, 200

     Ghosts, 59

     Gilgash, 100

     Gorboduc, 112

     Great Expectations, 124

     Greek Poets, 69

     Guide to the Perplexed, 37

     Gulliver's Travels, 71


     Hacuzari, 105

     Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, 24

     Haunted Mind, 50

     Heart of Midlothian, 55

     Heathen Chinee, 50

     Hertha, 23, 125

     Hieroglyphics, 23

     History as Literature, 116

     History of Criticism in Europe, 43, 220

     History of English Literature, 170

     History of English Poetry, 89

     History of English Prose Rhythm, 43

     History of English Rhythms, 108

     History of the Jews, 225

     History of Moorish Empire in Spain, 213

     House of Gentlefolk, 57

     Huckleberry Finn, 59

     Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 23


     Idylls of the King, 55

     Iliad, 97, 105

     Inspiration of Poetry, 31

     Ion, 25

     Irrational Knot, 167


     Jewish Encyclopedia, 225

     Julius Cæsar, 56

     Jungle, 155, 200


     Kalevala, 103

     Kinds of Poetry, 117

     Koran, 218

     Kubla Khan, 186


     La Mare au Diable, 87

     Lady of the Lake, 55

     Laila and Majnun, 206

     Laocoon, 62

     L'Avare, 87

     Le Chartreuse de Parme, 57

     Le Debâcle, 57

     Leaves of Grass, 65, 80, 124, 159, 178

     Lectures on Art, 130

     Lectures on Sacred Poetry of Hebrews, 102

     Les Martyrs, 58

     Les Misérables, 58

     Letters to French Academy, 86

     Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, 57

     Life of Johnson, 221

     Life of Roscommon, 113

     Lily and the Bee, 118

     Lily of the Valley, 59

     Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 179

     Literary History of the Arabs, 219

     Literary History of Persia, 203, 225

     Literary Study of Bible, 103

     Lives of the Saints, 108, 114

     Locksley Hall, 213

     Logic, 136

     L'Oiseau, 87

     Lorna Doone, 70

     Lost Illusions, 59

     Louis Lambert, 59

     Luzumiyyat, 218

     Lyrical Ballads, 65


     Macbeth, 56

     Madame Bovary, 140

     Mademoiselle de Maupin, 138

     Main Currents of the Nineteenth Century, 92

     Main Street, 232

     Making of Humanity, 212

     Making of Poetry, 200

     Manon Lescaut, 87

     Maqamat, 218

     Martyrs, 87

     Master Builder, 58

     Michael, 51

     Modern Painters, 53

     Mr. Sludge, "the Medium," 125

     Muallaqat, 105, 206, 211, 213, 215


     Nature of Poetry, 32

     Nether World, 155

     New Era in American Poetry, 161

     New Rome, 143

     Nibelungen Lied, 102, 154

     Nigger of the Narcissus, 57

     Njala, 110

     Notre Dame de Paris, 58


     Odyssey, 97

     On Literary Composition, 119

     On the Sublime, 15, 128, 160

     Optimos, 118

     Orlando Furioso, 60

     Otherworld, 122

     Ottoman Poetry, 214, 225

     Outcast, 143

     Outcasts of Poker Flat, 50

     Oxford Book of English Verse, 66

     Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 75, 126


     Panegyrics, 119

     Paradise Lost, 68

     Paradise Regained, 67

     Path of the Rainbow, 98

     Paul and Virginia, 87

     Peer Gynt, 59, 164, 174

     Peloponnesian War, 53, 137

     Penguin Island, 232

     Père Goriot, 57

     Phaedrus, 26, 53, 122

     Pickwick Papers, 23

     Pierre and Jean, 148

     Piers Plowman, 158

     Pilgrim's Progress, 49, 184

     Poetic Principle, 74, 144

     Poetics, 42, 43, 136, 220

     Poetry and Its Varieties, 88

     Poetry and Religion, 39

     Politics, 180

     Poly Olbion, 85

     Pompanilla, 89

     Pontica, 85

     Possessed, 122

     Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature, 172

     Power of Sound, 62

     Principia, 40

     Principles of Psychology, 135

     Progress of Poesie, 19

     Prolegomena, 203

     Prophetic Books, 44

     Psalms, 20, 64, 100, 171, 215

     Psychology of Prophecy, 37


     Qasidas, 206


     Rabbi Ben Ezra, 23, 57

     Raven, 61

     Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, 99

     Renaissance, 53, 116

     Republic, 26, 53, 122, 160

     Revivifying of the Sciences of the Faith, 34

     Revolt of Islam, 86, 125

     Richard Feverel, 54

     Rigveda, 105, 106, 107

     Ring and the Book, 61, 86, 122

     Robinson Crusoe, 49, 71

     Romance of the Rose, 158

     Rudin, 57


     Sagas, 98, 109, 110

     Sanskrit Literature, 106

     Scarlet Letter, 53

     Science of Poetry, 233

     Silas Marner, 44

     Sister Carrie, 83

     Solitaire of Time, 223

     Song of the Harper, 99

     Song of Myself, 176

     Songs Before Sunrise, 140

     Spanish-American Literature, Studies in, 177

     Specimens of English Prose Style, 92

     Spirit of Russia, 162

     Spoon River Anthology, 69, 116

     Strife, 155

     Studies in Islamic Poetry, 218

     Sunken Bell, 174

     Symposium, 26, 53


     Táin Bó Cualnge, 108

     Tales from Shakespeare, 69

     Tales of a Wayside Inn, 50

     Télémaque, 86

     Tempest, 134

     Ten o'Clock Lecture, 138

     Ten Thousand a Year, 118

     Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 122

     Text Book of Irish Literature, 108

     Theoria Sacra, 48

     Thus Spake Zarathustra, 245

     Tom Jones, 236

     Tragische Motiv, 181

     Treasure Island, 247

     Tristram Shandy, 49

     Triumph of Death, 51


     Uncle Tom's Cabin, 70

     Upanishads, 22


     Vanity Fair, 23, 65, 180

     Vedas, 22, 105

     Velasquez, 138

     Vicar of Wakefield, 49


     Wandering Jew, 143

     War and Peace, 57

     Weavers, 155, 200

     What is Art? 140

     Wild Ass's Skin, 59

     Wild Duck, 58

     Wilhelm Meister, 49

     Wooing of Our Lord, 109

     World as Will and Idea, 53




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:


The initials A.D. are unspaced in the original. The initials B. C. have
been changed to B.C. to match.

The word "Phoenix" has an oe ligature in the original.

The following spelling variations occur in the text. The names appear as
in the original.

     Abu l'Atahiya         Abu l' Atihiya
     Aelfric               Ælfric
     Aeneid                Æneid
     Jehudah HaLevi        Jehudah Ha Levi
     Mac Guckin de Slane   MacGuckin de Slane   McGuckin de Slane

The following corrections have been made to the text:

     Page 19: the assumption that all the intellectual[original has
     intellecual]

     Page 29: "[quotation mark missing in original]All kinds of
     ecstasy, however differently

     Page 40: literature of power in his opinion[original has
     opinon] is permanent

     Page 43: restated by the Italian critic Castelvetro[original
     has Castelevetro]

     Page 57: Balzac's novel Père[original has Pére] Goriot

     Page 65: one in prose of Eloise's[original has Eloises's]

     Page 88: under the title _Poetry and Its Varieties_[original
     has Varities]

     Page 95: sown with stars, wherever[original has where-ever
     hyphenated across lines]

     Page 97: pre-Socratic philosophers[original has philsophers]
     like Parmenides

     Page 108: article on Irish Literature in the
     _Britannica_[original has Brittanica]

     Page 109: says Gosse in his article in the
     _Britannica_[original has Brittanica]

     Page 120: in this care, have time for better
     things."[quotation mark missing in original]

     Page 122: _New Study of English Poetry_ by Henry
     Newbolt[original has Newboldt]

     Page 130: he is more advanced than[original has that] we are

     Page 136: others were also absorbed as[original has a] to the
     difference

     Page 138: preface to his Mademoiselle[original has
     Madamoiselle] de Maupin

     Page 146: former is not wholly intuitive[original has
     intuitve]

     Page 168: Shelley, Nietzsche[original has Nietsche], and
     Butler

     Page 178: in the sense of recording his own
     individuality[original has individualty]

     Page 185: See his essay on Casanova[original has Cananova] in
     _Affirmations_

     Page 185: Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe[original has
     Gothe] and Ibsen

     Page 186: Wilkinson did not have to seek rhymes[original has
     ryhmes]

     Page 209: is[original has ii] attributed to Ibn Alaamidi

     Page 238: theories of aesthetic[original has esthetic] emotion

     Page 253: Abu Ali[original has ali] al Qali, 222

     Page 253: Baqui,[comma missing in original] 211, 214

     Page 253: Bossuet[original has Bossnet], 87, 228

     Page 253: Castelvetro[original has Castelevetro], 43, 179

     Page 253: Coleridge, S. T., 12, 47, 48, 49, 77, 78, 121,[comma
     missing in original] 173

     Page 253: Croce, 15, 28, 81, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149,
     150[original has 50], 239

     Page 254: Elliot[original has Elliott], Ebenezer, 88

     Page 254: Erasmus,[comma missing in original] 43

     Page 255: Ibn Khallikan[original has Khallikans], 209

     Page 255: Imru'ul[original has Imru 'ul] Qays, 206, 215,
     217[original has 218]

     Page 255: Khalil,[comma missing in original] Ahmad, 221

     Page 255: Neilson, William[original has Willian] A., 33

     Page 255: Newbolt[original has Newboldt], Henry, 171

     Page 255: Nidhami[original has Nidham] I Arudi, 204

     Page 256: Nietzsche, 28, 30, 53, 81, 124, 154, 163,
     168[original has 166], 171, 181, 189, 242

     Page 256: Senancour[original has Sénancour], 49

     Page 257: Tha'alibi[original has Tha 'alibi], 223

     Page 257: Untermeyer[original has Untermyer], Louis, 118, 158

     Page 257: Yeats, William Butler, 71, 165[original has
     extraneous comma]

     Page 259: Areopagitica[original has Aeropagitica], 122, 178

     Page 260: Eugénie[original has Eugéne] Grandet, 59

     Page 260: History of English Poetry,[comma missing in
     original] 89

     Page 260: Julius Cæsar[original has Caesar], 56

     Page 260: Laocoon[original has Laocoön], 62

     Page 260: Les Misérables[original has Miserables], 58

     Page 261: Mademoiselle[original has Madamoiselle] de Maupin,
     138

     Page 261: Mr. Sludge, "the Medium,"[original has quotation
     marks around the entire title] 125

     Page 261: Nibelungen[original has Niebelungen] Lied, 102, 154

     Page 262: Télémaque[original has Télemaque], 86

     Page 263: Peloponnesian[original has Peloponessian] War, 53,
     137

     [52:A] Wilhelm[original has Wilhem] A. Ambros

     [193:A] _The Function of the Poet._[original has extraneous
     quotation mark]

The index entry for Mark Twain was alphabetized under "Mark". Entry has
been moved to its proper place.

In the two Indexes, several page number references are incorrect in the
original. The following table shows the page number references in the
original and the corrected page references. The changes have been made
in the Indexes.

                           Incorrect        Correct
                              page            page
     Index Entry           references      references

     Aristotle              193, 221        191, 220
     Arnold, Matthew        117             118
     Bacon, Francis         52              --
     Burke, Edmund          120             121
     Butcher, S. H.         159             160
     Cicero                 119             120
     De Quincey, Thomas     87              88
     Eaton, Walter P.       115             116
     Hegel                  121             122
     Henley, Walter         117             118
     Homer                  93              96
     Ibsen, Henrik          48              49
     Keats, John            247             --
     Milton, John           49, 236         48, 238
     Morley, John           168             178
     Moore, Thomas          49              48
     Nicholson, D. H. S.    218             217
     Nietzsche              166             168
     Plato                  49, 52, 132     48, --, 133
     Pope, Alexander        7               75
     Saintsbury, George     221             220
     Schofield, W. H.       212             214
     Shelley, P. B.         29              --
     Spenser, Edmund        236             235
     Swinburne, A. C.       29              23
     Wordsworth, William    29, 30          --, 31
     Wulfstan               107, 108        108, 109

     Beowulf                108             109
     Birth of Tragedy       29              30
     Brand                  60              59
     Defense of Poetry      73              74
     Master Builder         59              58
     Poetics                221             220
     Wild Duck              59              58





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