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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Literature of Ecstasy
+
+Author: Albert Mordell
+
+Release Date: February 14, 2011 [EBook #35279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 Phœnix_. 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 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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Literature of Ecstasy
+
+Author: Albert Mordell
+
+Release Date: February 14, 2011 [EBook #35279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS 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
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+
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+
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY ***
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Literature of Ecstasy
+
+Author: Albert Mordell
+
+Release Date: February 14, 2011 [EBook #35279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS 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.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<p>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. Ellipses match the
+original. A complete <a href="#TN">list</a> of corrections follows the text.
+Other notes also follow the text.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page v --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h1 style="text-align: left;">THE LITERATURE<br />
+OF ECSTASY</h1>
+
+
+<p class="p3" style="text-align: left;">BY</p>
+
+<h2 style="text-align: left;">ALBERT MORDELL</h2>
+<p style="text-align: left; font-weight: bold;">Author of:<br />
+The Erotic Motive in Literature<br />
+Dante and Other Waning Classics<br />
+The Shifting of Literary Values</p>
+
+<p class="biggap">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">BONI and LIVERIGHT</span></h3>
+<h4>Publishers&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;New York</h4>
+
+
+<p class="biggap">&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page vi --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span></p>
+<p class="p4">THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+<p class="p4"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1921, By<br />
+Boni &amp; Liveright, Inc.</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+<p class="p4"><i>Printed in the United States of America</i></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page vii --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="Table of Contents" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" border="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright" colspan="2" style="font-size: 70%;">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER III. ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_42">42</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER IV. PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER V. PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER VI. BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER VII. MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER VIII. POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang" style="padding-right: 2em;">CHAPTER IX. HIGH FORM OF POETRY ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF ADVANCED SOCIAL IDEALS</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang"><!-- Page viii --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>
+CHAPTER X. LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER XI. LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_203">203</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlefthang">CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION</td>
+  <td class="tdrightbot"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 9 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+<h1>THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>INTRODUCTION</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 10 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="FNanchor_10-A_1" id="FNanchor_10-A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_10-A_1" class="fnanchor">[10-A]</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 <!-- Page 11 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This work becomes thus a treatise on poetics, and will present a new
+definition of poetry which will include all emotional prose writing.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>idea</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 12 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 13 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 14 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With theories of poetry being a product of the <!-- Page 15 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>On the Sublime</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the
+prose form of poetry, but with poetry as <!-- Page 16 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>a psychological process, as a
+social force and as a philosophical expression.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I recognize, then, as great poetry, all writings in which metaphysical
+or scientific truth and the spirit of social <!-- Page 17 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10-A_1" id="Footnote_10-A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10-A_1"><span class="label">[10-A]</span></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.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 18 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY</h3>
+
+
+<p>"The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy," says Huneker in his
+essay "Anarchs and Ecstasy" in <i>Bedouins</i>, "is bestowed upon few. Keats
+had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the
+austere Wordsworth<a name="FNanchor_18-A_2" id="FNanchor_18-A_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_18-A_2" class="fnanchor">[18-A]</a>&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."</p>
+
+<p>Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means <i>to make stand out</i>;
+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 <!-- Page 19 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>condition of
+ecstasy to which I refer is that mentioned by the poet Gray, in his
+famous <i>Elegy</i>, when he speaks of one of the dead who might have "waked
+to ecstasy the living lyre." He again uses the word in his <i>Progress of
+Poesie</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 20 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 21 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>trance, and speak out
+of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body.<a name="FNanchor_21-A_3" id="FNanchor_21-A_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_21-A_3" class="fnanchor">[21-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism <!-- Page 22 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is also much that is modern in the Pre-buddhistic <i>Vedas</i> and
+<i>Upanishads</i>, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the pantheistic
+character of the ideas and the universality of the emotions.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 23 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Hymn to Intellectual Beauty</i>, Browning's <i>Rabbi Ben Ezra</i>,
+Whitman's <i>Chanting the Square Deific</i> and Swinburne's <i>Hertha</i> are
+great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the <i>Oxford Book
+of Mystical Verse</i>, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.</p>
+
+<p>Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book,
+<i>Hieroglyphics</i>, 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, <i>Pickwick Papers</i>, where
+there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in <i>Vanity Fair</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 24 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted
+piece of ecstatical writing.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Harvard Lectures on
+Greek Subjects</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 25 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>a notion. It
+exhibits the critical faculty as a great underlying element in the
+creative faculty."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Ion</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <!-- Page 26 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The expressions referring to being out of the mind and senses
+must not be taken literally.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A remark of Socrates in the <i>Phaedrus</i> 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&mdash;he, I say, and his poetry are not
+admitted."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Republic</i>, the <i>Phaedrus</i> and <i>Symposium</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Symposium</i>, 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For my heart leaps within me fore than that of any Corybantian
+reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear <!-- Page 27 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Symonds tells us that Æschylus was the great example of unconscious art
+among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of
+poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 28 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 29 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+"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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Bacchae</i>. 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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 30 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the
+twelfth section of <i>The Birth of Tragedy</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his <i>Greek
+Studies</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth <!-- Page 31 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his <i>Inspiration of
+Poetry</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>But emotions described by the poet affect people <!-- Page 32 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>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?</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Nature of Poetry</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"our sweetest
+songs are those that told the saddest thought."</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 33 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In Professor William A. Neilson's <i>Essentials of Poetry</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We should be on our guard, however, in regarding sentimentalism as
+poetry. The public loves cheap popular <!-- Page 34 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Ecstasy was the keynote of Oriental poetry. We are fortunate in having a
+translation in the <i>Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society</i> 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 <i>Re-vivifying of the Sciences
+of the Faith</i>. 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 <i>Koran</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>His main contribution, however, to the philosophy of <!-- Page 35 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 36 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 37 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>prophets was no
+different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times.
+Moses Maimonides in his <i>Guide to the Perplexed</i> analyzes the ecstatic
+state of prophecy and his analysis may be applied to any high form of
+poetic inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>The Psychology of Prophecy</i> by Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan, Philadelphia 1908,
+(Julius H. Greenstone) who says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Ecstasy is usually the spring whence all the
+other prophetic streams flow.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 38 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 39 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>of experience and destiny, as the greatest
+poet. (See <i>Poetry and Religion.</i>)</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_39-A_4" id="FNanchor_39-A_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_39-A_4" class="fnanchor">[39-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Don Quixote</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 40 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Confessions of an Opium Eater</i>,
+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 <i>Principia</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There remains a distinction between power and ecstasy. <!-- Page 41 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Literature of ecstasy is always poetry, literature of power is not,
+being rather the equivalent of <i>belles lettres</i>, reaching the heights of
+poetry only at times.</p>
+
+<p>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: <i>The Function of the Poet.</i> "The Imagination." P. 70.)</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18-A_2" id="Footnote_18-A_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18-A_2"><span class="label">[18-A]</span></a> I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth
+missed ecstasy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21-A_3" id="Footnote_21-A_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21-A_3"><span class="label">[21-A]</span></a> This is the idea in Donne's poem, <i>The Ecstasy</i>.
+Professor William Lyon Phelps in the preface to his <i>The Advance of
+English Poetry in the Twentieth Century</i> claims that the influence of
+Donne has never been greater than at present.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_39-A_4" id="Footnote_39-A_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39-A_4"><span class="label">[39-A]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hebrew poetry is<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Ecstasy affords<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The occasion and expediency determines the form.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="author"><span class="smcap">Marianne Moore</span> in <i>Others</i> (1916).</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 42 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 <i>Poetics</i> 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 <i>Poetics</i> is worth quoting entire for it
+contains the nucleus of all arguments for prose poetry. I quote from S.
+H. Butcher's translation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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, <i>as if it
+were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that
+entitles them all indiscriminately to the name</i>.<a name="FNanchor_42-A_5" id="FNanchor_42-A_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_42-A_5" class="fnanchor">[42-A]</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 <!-- Page 43 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>Chaeremon did in his <i>Centaur</i>, which is a medley
+composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under
+the general term poet.</p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Poetics</i> (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.</p>
+
+<p>George Saintsbury in his scholarly and fascinating <i>History of Criticism
+in Europe</i> 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 <i>De Vulgari Eloquentia</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Professor Saintsbury has given us in his <i>History of English Prose
+Rhythm</i> 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 <!-- Page 44 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>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 <i>Prophetic Books</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Beginnings of Poetry</i> 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 <i>Aylmer's Field</i>
+or <i>Enoch Arden</i> from grave novels not in verse like <i>Silas Marner</i> and
+<i>Adam Bede</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 45 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 46 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>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 <i>Foundations
+and Nature of Verse</i>. 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&mdash;(after all, in spite of Dr. Patterson, there is unrhythmical
+prose).</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The first question the reader will now ask is: "Well, what then
+constitutes the difference between prose and <!-- Page 47 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 48 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The
+writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the <i>Theoria Sacra</i> of Burnet,
+furnish undeniable proof that poetry of the highest kind may last
+without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a
+poem."</p>
+
+<p>"There are also prose poets," said Emerson in his essay on "Poetry and
+Imagination" in <i>Letters and Social Aims</i>. "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 <!-- Page 49 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of
+<i>Tristram Shandy</i> a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a
+poet more because of the <i>Vicar of Wakefield</i> than the <i>Deserted
+Village</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry
+without absolutely being poetry, instancing <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>,
+<i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, and the <i>Decameron</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Heine spoke of <i>Don Quixote</i> as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called
+<i>Wilhelm Meister</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>in toto</i>. 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 <!-- Page 50 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>rhythm and this is not a sufficient
+line of demarcation as to what constitutes poetry and what does not.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Eleonora</i> with its description of the Valley
+of Many Colored Grass and Hawthorne's <i>Haunted Mind</i> 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 <i>Brushwood Boy</i> or Bret
+Harte's <i>Outcasts of Poker Flat</i> is as poetical, I believe, as any tale
+in Longfellow's <i>Tales of a Wayside Inn</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Heathen Chinee</i> and <i>Fuzzy Wuzzy</i>
+with the title "poems."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 51 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>I quote from Wordsworth's
+<i>Michael</i>, one of the finest things in English literature, yet
+unpoetical in the first part:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His bodily frame had been from youth to age<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And watchful more than ordinary men.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Triumph of Death</i> and describes the music in Wagner's
+"Tristan and Isolde":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>I shall show more fully that our definitions of what is poetry and what
+is a poem have been faulty. The error <!-- Page 52 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>is so perceptible that it is
+surprising that so few critics have detected it. Meanwhile I will give
+my definitions:</p>
+
+<p><i>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.<a name="FNanchor_52-A_6" id="FNanchor_52-A_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_52-A_6" class="fnanchor">[52-A]</a> Its most natural language is prose
+or free verse.</i> Let us have no more such classification of literature as
+fiction, drama, essay, criticism, <i>poetry</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>We are now in a position to define what a poem is. <!-- Page 53 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>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. <i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>Poems may therefore be found in imaginative philosophical works like
+Plato's <i>Symposium</i>, <i>Phaedrus</i>, <i>Republic</i> and other dialogues, Bacon's
+<i>Essays</i>, Schopenhauer's <i>World as Will and Idea</i>, Nietzsche's <i>Thus
+Spake Zarathustra</i>, Emerson's <i>Essays</i>, in critical works like Pater's
+<i>Renaissance</i>, Ruskin's <i>Modern Painters</i>, Wilde's <i>Intentions</i>, in
+histories like Thucydides's <i>Peloponnesian War</i> and Carlyle's <i>French
+Revolution</i>, in autobiographies like St. Augustine's <i>Confessions</i> and
+Rousseau's <i>Confessions</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the best poetry is found in the world's prose fiction. For
+example, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> has as good poetry in it as the <i>Aeneid</i>.
+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 <!-- Page 54 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>describes
+how Arthur Dimmesdale gets up in the pulpit and confesses to the
+congregation his part in Hester Prynne's guilt. The <i>Aeneid</i> is really a
+novel in verse.</p>
+
+<p>We are not often moved by metrical writing as we are by the last part of
+the chapter in <i>David Copperfield</i> 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 <i>The Ordeal of
+Richard Feverel</i>, only as poetry. This is how the passage, which being
+rhythmical besides, begins:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 55 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I hence fail to see why the <i>Idylls of the King</i> should be alone called
+poems and not also parts of Malory's <i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, 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
+<i>Tales</i> of La Fontaine and Chaucer's <i>Canterbury Tales</i> 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 <i>The Heart of Midlothian</i>, contains as much, if not more,
+poetry than some of his novels in verse like the <i>Lady of the Lake</i>?
+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 <i>Quarterly Review</i>
+referred to Scott's novels as poems.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 56 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+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 <i>Julius Cæsar</i> 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 <i>Julius Cæsar</i>
+contains poetry, as it certainly does in abundance, then surely those
+lives of Plutarch which were followed by Shakespeare must also possess
+it.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Macbeth</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>One may ask various questions of the critic who clings <!-- Page 57 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>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 <i>Nigger of
+the Narcissus</i> not be called a poem, when you designate by this word
+Virgil's famous description in dactylic hexameters in the first book of
+the <i>Aeneid</i>? 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 <i>Père Goriot</i> is any the less poetical
+than that of Shakespeare's verse play <i>King Lear</i>. Why is the succession
+of ideas in Browning's <i>Rabbi Ben Ezra</i> called poetry and not, let us
+say, Emerson's essay on <i>Self-Reliance</i>? Why call the descriptions of
+battles by Homer poems, but not those of Stendhal or Tolstoy or Zola in
+<i>Le Chartreuse de Parme</i> or <i>War and Peace</i> or <i>Le Debâcle</i>? And how can
+you on any pretence refuse to include in the category of poetry De
+Quincey's famous prose poems <i>The Dream Fugue</i> and <i>Levana and Our
+Ladies of Sorrow</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Senilia</i>. The reader may recall the love scene in <i>The House of
+Gentlefolk</i> and the concluding chapters of <i>Rudin</i> and <i>Fathers and
+Sons</i>, which are all prose poems. Gorki has written some exquisite prose
+poems. One of <!-- Page 58 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>them, <i>The March of Man</i>, is one of the most beautiful
+poems ever written. (Translated in <i>The Cosmopolitan</i> for July, 1905.)</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Les
+Misérables</i> or <i>Notre Dame de Paris</i>? 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 <i>Fingal</i> and <i>Les Martyrs</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Wild
+Duck</i> or <i>The Master Builder</i> as he is in <i>Peer Gynt</i> <!-- Page 59 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>or <i>Brand</i>. The
+scenes of Oswald losing his mind at the end of <i>Ghosts</i> or of Ella
+Rentheim rebuking <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i> 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 <i>Eugénie Grandet</i> is surely poetry.
+Balzac regarded his stories <i>Louis Lambert</i>, <i>Séraphita</i> and <i>The Lily
+of the Valley</i> as poems. Inflated as they occasionally are, they are
+suffused with poetical qualities. One could go on selecting poems from
+<i>Cousin Pons</i>, <i>The Wild Ass's Skin</i>, <i>Lost Illusions</i>, etc. Balzac and
+Ibsen are poets and any definition of poetry that would exclude them as
+such is faulty.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>go</i> to hell." The few pages telling of the
+reflections and memories which led to this decision are certainly
+poetry.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. <!-- Page 60 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>I'd see him
+standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I
+could go on sleeping; .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and would always call me honey, and
+pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how
+good he always was.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Iliad</i> 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 <i>Excursion</i>, for
+example, so they could glean the poems of prose literature.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Iliad</i>, the <i>Divine Comedy</i> and <i>Orlando Furioso</i>.
+In modern <!-- Page 61 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>times Byron's <i>Don Juan</i>, Browning's <i>Ring and the Book</i> and
+Mrs. Browning's <i>Aurora Leigh</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Raven</i> 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, <!-- Page 62 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>lyric
+or sonnet. The important thing is that the poet record the sentiments
+instantly, avoiding preliminaries.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gurney in his <i>The Power of Sound</i> 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 <i>Laocoon</i> 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 <i>Georgics</i> he
+describes a cow fit for breeding.</p>
+
+<p>This is then the singular and most remarkable fact about the <i>Laocoon</i>
+that the author includes all vivid emotional narrative prose under the
+term poetry, which he <!-- Page 63 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Convention and Revolt in Poetry</i>,
+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, <!-- Page 64 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Encyclopedia
+Britannica</i>, tells us of one Azzi who in 1700 put the book of <i>Genesis</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Genesis</i>, 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:</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 65 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p><div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Lyrical Ballads</i> and <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. As a matter of fact, Whitman
+used paragraphs from his critical essays, word for word, in <i>Leaves of
+Grass</i>, but arranged in free verse form.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Vanity Fair</i>, 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.
+<!-- Page 66 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Oxford Book of English Verse</i>. But one is grieved
+that one must differ with him when it comes to literary criticism. In
+his book on the <i>Art of Writing</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 67 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+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 <i>Paradise Regained</i>, describing
+Christ's ascent up a hill, and gives us a prose paraphrase of them. Here
+are the lines as Milton wrote them:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Up to a hill anon his steps he reared<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From whose high top to ken the prospect round,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here is Quiller-Couch's prose rendering:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from
+its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation&mdash;a
+herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see
+nothing of the sort.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 68 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Let me take a concrete instance. The following passage from <i>Paradise
+Lost</i> is considered, no doubt justly, poetry, because of the idea, the
+emotion and the rhythm (academically speaking):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What though the field be lost?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All is not lost; the unconquerable will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And study of revenge, immortal hate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And courage never to submit or yield,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And what is else not to be overcome.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Let us paraphrase this passage and try to retain the idea, the emotion
+and a prose rhythm by just changing a few words.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 69 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Is there any poetry in Lamb's <i>Tales from Shakespeare</i>? 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 <i>Greek
+Poets</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Leaves of Grass</i>
+be called poetry; yet that is what it turns out to be.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Spoon River Anthology</i> 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 <!-- Page 70 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>newspaper story. On the contrary, it would have been poetry had
+it appeared as prose in a newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> and <i>Lorna Doone</i> is reading
+poetry, albeit not of the highest order.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <!-- Page 71 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Arabia Deserta</i> is full of poetry.</p>
+
+<p><i>Robinson Crusoe</i> and <i>Gulliver's Travels</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 72 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>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?</p>
+
+<p>And I find much poetry, especially in letters, memoirs and biographies.
+I find poems in biographies like Bisland's <i>Hearn</i>, Meynell's <i>Francis
+Thompson</i>, Woodberry's <i>Poe</i>, Lawton's <i>Balzac</i>. 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 <i>Byron</i>, Dowden's <i>Shelley</i>,
+Forster's <i>Dickens</i>, Cooke's <i>Ruskin</i>, Bielschowsky's <i>Goethe</i>, Froude's
+<i>Carlyle</i>, etc., to name just the lives of some literary men.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 73 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>essays of poets very often in
+spite of the popular tradition that poets are not good prose writers.</p>
+
+<p>I give two examples. The first is from Swinburne's book on Blake:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>The second is from James Thomson's essay on Shelley:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <!-- Page 74 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Defense of Poetry</i>, 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 <i>The Poetic Principle</i> are poetry. The
+critics here were poets in their prose criticism, no less than in their
+rhymed lyrics.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 75 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>must be employed by a poet. Professor Mackail in his <i>Oxford
+Lectures on Poetry</i> 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 <i>ad nauseam</i> like the words of a child learning how to talk.
+(!)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 76 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42-A_5" id="Footnote_42-A_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42-A_5"><span class="label">[42-A]</span></a> The italics are mine.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52-A_6" id="Footnote_52-A_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52-A_6"><span class="label">[52-A]</span></a> "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all
+knowledge." Wordsworth. "The atmosphere wherein all the arts exist is
+poetry." Wilhelm A. Ambros: <i>The Boundaries of Music and Poetry</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 77 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 78 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>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 <i>Encyclopedia Britannica</i> 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 <i>Biographia Literaria</i>. He
+did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre
+and&mdash;except in some ballads&mdash;a diction that was even literary.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Wanderings of Cain</i>
+and some of his essays are prose poetry. Coleridge also devoted an
+entire chapter in his <i>Biographia Literaria</i> 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 <!-- Page 79 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>"As to the accents of words," says Bacon, in his <i>Advancement of
+Learning</i>, 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."</p>
+
+<p>This passage is the first attack in English on metre.</p>
+
+<p>It was Whitman who gave the death blow to metre. He <!-- Page 80 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>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 <i>Leaves of Grass</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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, &amp;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 <i>Poetry</i> (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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 81 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>described, and similar
+descriptions of emotions are to be found in our fiction and prose plays.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Posnett in his <i>Comparative Literature</i> protested long before
+Croce against these artificial divisions in poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is the voice of excited man; it is as Baumgarten said&mdash;"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 <i>in view of poetry</i>." 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <!-- Page 82 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 83 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>the chief feature, the drama becomes poetry in those parts
+where the action and emotion are concentrated.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>dramatis personæ</i>. 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 <i>Sister Carrie</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Our great poets do not owe their greatness to the use <!-- Page 84 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The following letter is poetry:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;you help me to live&mdash;I am better and lighter since I have
+drawn near to you even on this paper&mdash;already I am better and
+lighter. And now I am going to dream of you .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. to meet you on
+some mystical landing place .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. in order to be quite well
+to-morrow. Oh&mdash;we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing
+grieves us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we
+are touched in <i>ourselves</i> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. in the apple of our eye .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. in
+the quick of our heart .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. in <i>what</i> you are and <i>where</i> you
+are .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. my own dearest beloved! So you need not be <!-- Page 85 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>afraid for
+<i>me</i>. We all look to our own, as I to <i>you</i>; 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&mdash;not of you
+perhaps, certainly you are better than I in all things. Best
+in the world you are&mdash;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.)</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Pontica</i>,
+Valerius Flaccus's <i>Argonautica</i>, Statius's <i>Thebais</i>, and Lucan's
+<i>Pharsalia</i>. 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 <i>Albion's England</i>, Drayton's <i>Poly Olbion</i>, or
+Daniel's <i>First Four Books of the Civil War</i>. And Darwin's versified
+<i>Botanical Garden</i> has been a standing joke.</p>
+
+<p>It is remarkable how past usages in literature influence us. The
+examples of Lucretius versifying philosophy in his <i>Nature of Things</i>,
+and that of Horace writing literary criticism in verse in his <i>Art of
+Poetry</i>, have been fruitful of mischief. Even much of the lengthy works
+of Shelley, <!-- Page 86 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>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 <i>Ring and the Book</i>, <i>Don Juan</i> and the
+<i>Revolt of Islam</i> remains when these works are translated into the prose
+of another language.</p>
+
+<p>The French have perfected the art of poetical prose,<a name="FNanchor_86-A_7" id="FNanchor_86-A_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_86-A_7" class="fnanchor">[86-A]</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.</p>
+
+<p>Fénelon was one of the first moderns who attacked verse. In two critical
+works, <i>Dialogues on Eloquence</i> and <i>Letters to the French Academy</i>
+(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, <i>Télémaque</i>. But prose
+poetry existed in France before him, in old romances like the story of
+<i>Aucassin and <!-- Page 87 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>Nicolette</i> and in Bossuet's funeral orations. His example
+was followed by Sainte Pierre, in <i>Paul and Virginia</i>, by Prévost in
+<i>Manon Lescaut</i>, by Rousseau and especially by Chateaubriand in <i>Atala</i>,
+<i>The Genius of Christianity</i> and <i>The Martyrs</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Shakespeare</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Eugene Véron, the great French critic, author of a valuable work on
+<i>Æsthetics</i> (fortunately translated into English), also takes a broad
+conception of the term poetry. He says that it would be absurd to deny
+Molière's <i>L'Avare</i> 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 <i>Paul and
+Virginia</i>, <i>La Mare au Diable</i>, or <i>L'Oiseau</i> (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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 88 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+I do not wish to go into the prose poetry written by other nations, for
+every literature is full of it.</p>
+
+<p>There is a growing tendency in England to encourage prose poetry.<a name="FNanchor_88-A_8" id="FNanchor_88-A_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_88-A_8" class="fnanchor">[88-A]</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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Poetry and Its Varieties</i>, Mill gives us
+his definition of poetry. Guided by a statement of the author of the
+<i>Corn Law Rhymes</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>An idea emotionally treated becomes poetry whether in prose or verse,
+whether rhythmical or not. Mill understood <!-- Page 89 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Prose poetry was consciously written by Lord Beaconsfield, who tells us
+in the early preface to his novel, <i>Alroy</i>, 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 <i>Pompanilla</i>, we have prose poems. He
+often became bombastic, but he was a poet, nevertheless.</p>
+
+<p>Later English critics have returned to the subject of prose poetry.</p>
+
+<p>In his <i>Aspects of Poetry</i> 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
+<i>History of English Poetry</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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, <!-- Page 90 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>was made by David Masson in an essay on <i>Prose
+and Verse: De Quincey</i>, 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 <i>Poetics</i>, called <i>Theories of Poetry</i>.
+Both of Masson's essays are to be found in his <i>Wordsworth, Shelley,
+Keats and Other Essays</i>. 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, <i>Causes
+That Have Hindered the Reformation in England</i>, 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 <i>Christ and
+the Universe</i> is highly regarded by him as prose poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Leaves of Grass</i> appeared,
+and before the vogue of free verse.</p>
+
+<p>Yet his viewpoint was severely criticized by a scholar like John Earle,
+whose <i>English Prose</i> contains an attack on prose poetry. Earle says
+that prose poetry is found chiefly in ages of literary decadence like
+the Latin <!-- Page 91 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>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 <i>Arcadia</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and this is how prose poetry got into disrepute&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But as Pater says&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <!-- Page 92 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>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?"</p>
+
+<p>Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his
+<i>Avowals</i> 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 <i>is</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Main
+Currents</i>. 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 <i>Specimens of
+English Prose Style</i>, Wilson's <i>The Fairy's Funeral</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 93 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>The Hawthorne passage is as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).&mdash;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Here I
+sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days
+gone by.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Here I have written many tales,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;not,
+indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a
+still, small voice,&mdash;and forth I went, but found nothing in
+the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till
+now.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so
+many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never
+break <!-- Page 94 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I used to think I could imagine all passions,
+all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little
+did I know!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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,&mdash;till the heart be touched.
+That touch creates us,&mdash;then we begin to be,&mdash;thereby we are
+beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p></div>
+
+<p>And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <!-- Page 95 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>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,&mdash;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.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86-A_7" id="Footnote_86-A_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86-A_7"><span class="label">[86-A]</span></a> See the selections in <i>Pastels in Prose</i> (1890), and the
+sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88-A_8" id="Footnote_88-A_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88-A_8"><span class="label">[88-A]</span></a> See <i>The Chapbook</i>, April, 1921, London. <i>Poetry in
+Prose</i>, Three Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard
+Aldington.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 96 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 <i>Beowulf</i> before King Alfred.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Geography</i>. 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Prose discourse&mdash;I mean artistic prose&mdash;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, <!-- Page 97 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>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.
+<i>Geography</i>, 1. 2. 6.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Strabo was led to his error by the fact that the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Musæus, one of the earliest legendary poets, antedating Homer, was said
+to have composed prose.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 98 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>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 <i>Sagas</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The
+Path of the Rainbow</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 99 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. James H. Breasted, speaking of the Pyramid Texts, in his <i>Religion
+and Thought in Ancient Egypt</i>, 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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>All the poems of the Egyptians were written simply in rough, irregular
+lines of rhythmical prose. Read the famous <i>Song of the Harper</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 100 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The epic of <i>Gilgash</i>, 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&mdash;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.<a name="FNanchor_100-A_9" id="FNanchor_100-A_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_100-A_9" class="fnanchor">[100-A]</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&mdash;the thought carrying
+itself along beyond the strict boundaries of metrical division."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of the Old
+Testament," posthumously collected in <i>Lectures and Essays</i>, 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 <!-- Page 101 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Early Poetry of Israel</i>, 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 <!-- Page 102 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>arrangement of accents with occasional symmetry was the rule.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Nibelungen Lied</i>. It is the rhythm of all early poetry, the Egyptian
+and Babylonian.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We may then conclude that rhythm is never regular in the poetry of the
+Bible.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But what about the parallelism? Does this make the Bible verse? Bishop
+Lowth, in his <i>Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews</i>, 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 <!-- Page 103 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>poetry,
+while many poems exist in which these are not used. Dr. Edward König, in
+his article on Hebrew Poetry in the <i>Jewish Encyclopedia</i>, concludes
+that the poets of the Bible were not bound by parallelism, often setting
+it aside and not using it.</p>
+
+<p>In his account of <i>The Literary Study of the Bible</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is parallelism in all poetry, in <i>Beowulf</i> and the <i>Kalevala</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 104 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 105 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>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, <i>Hacuzari</i>,<a name="FNanchor_105-A_10" id="FNanchor_105-A_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_105-A_10" class="fnanchor">[105-A]</a> that these foreign Arabian influences should
+prevail among the Hebrew poets.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly metrical, and forms
+the transition to the artificial Arabic meters.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of the
+<i>Muallaqat</i>, 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 <i>Iliad</i>. They are written in
+perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj is older than these.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Rigveda</i> of India and the <i>Avesta</i> of
+Iran.</p>
+
+<p>Two-fifths of the hymns of the <i>Rigveda</i> are composed in a metre called
+trishtubh, the most frequent measure in the <i>Veda</i>. It is made up of
+stanzas of four lines, each of <!-- Page 106 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>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 <i>Hymn to Dawn</i>, in
+MacDonnels' <i>Sanskrit Literature</i> (P. 83):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Darkness has gone away and light is coming.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We have arrived where men prolong existence.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Rigvedas</i> are fixed by some scholars at 1500 B.C.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to the <i>Avesta</i> 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 <i>Gathas</i>, 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 <i>Rigvedas</i>, also has the same number
+of syllables. The third of the five <i>Gathas</i> uses the trishtubh or most
+frequent metre of the <i>Veda</i>, four lines of eleven syllables, but
+without restrictions as to quantity of final vowels.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 107 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>translation of the <i>Gathas</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>A study of the five "metres" of the five <i>Gathas</i> appears in Martin
+Haug's <i>Essays in the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the
+Parsis</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Gathas</i> were written about the fourteenth century B.C. by Zoroaster
+and hence are not much later than the <i>Rigvedas</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Rigvedas</i> and <i>Gathas</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 108 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>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 <i>Táin Bó
+Cualnge</i>. According to Edmund C. Quiggin's article on Irish Literature
+in the <i>Britannica</i>, 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 <i>Iliad</i> was originally told in
+prose (and probably written in prose) while the verse versions are the
+latest we have of the story.</p>
+
+<p>Eleanor Hull, in <i>A Text Book of Irish Literature</i>, also says in Vol. 1,
+p. 95, that there are few verse poems in the earlier <i>Táin Bó Cualnge</i>,
+most of the poetry being usually in declamatory prose style known as
+rosg, while in the later version long verse poems are frequent.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lives of the Saints</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Edwin Guest, in his <i>History of English Rhythms</i>, 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
+<!-- Page 109 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>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, <i>The Wooing of Our
+Lord</i>, of the thirteenth century, does not differ much from Anglo-Saxon
+verse.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest Teutonic poetry was emotional prose, and only later did
+definite rules bind it. The author of <i>Beowulf</i>, 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 <i>Britannica</i> 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 <i>Sermon to the English</i>
+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 <i>The Cypress Grove</i> (1623), an ecstatic prose poem against
+death.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the <i>Sagas</i>, 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 <!-- Page 110 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>the <i>Sagas</i> 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 <i>Greater
+Sagas</i> is the <i>Njala</i> written about the middle of the thirteenth century
+and celebrating events of the beginning of the eleventh century.</p>
+
+<p>Earlier Icelandic verse poetry did exist, but it does not belong to
+Iceland proper. The great strength of real Iceland poetry was in the
+<i>Sagas</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100-A_9" id="Footnote_100-A_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100-A_9"><span class="label">[100-A]</span></a> "The Religious Poetry of Babylonia." <i>Presbyterian
+Review</i>, 1888, p. 76.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105-A_10" id="Footnote_105-A_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105-A_10"><span class="label">[105-A]</span></a> There is an English translation of this work.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 111 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 <i>Æneid</i>,
+imported it from the Italians. It was called by the Italians <i>versi
+sciolti</i>, "untied or free verse." It was, then, the old classical
+measure with more freedom.</p>
+
+<p>In his essay, <i>Blank Verse</i>, 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 <i>Æneid</i>, and
+<!-- Page 112 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>Sackville's and Norton's play, <i>Gorboduc</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The lovers of blank verse imagine, however, that its beauty is partly
+derived from the existence of a pause at <!-- Page 113 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Life
+of Roscommon</i>, 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 <!-- Page 114 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In its present form in English it dates from Aelfric's <i>Lives of the
+Saints</i>, about 1000 A.D.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>vers libre</i> 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 <!-- Page 115 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>ecstasy or emotion,
+what impassioned ideas there are in the work.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Exotics and
+Retrospectives</i>. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit
+of life in the past.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ancient her beauty<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As the heart of man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet ever waxing fairer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forever remaining young.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mortals wither in time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As leaves in the frost of autumn;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But time only brightens the glow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the bloom of her endless youth.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All men have loved her<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But none shall touch with his lips<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Even the hem of her garment.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 116 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> for October,
+1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a
+passage from Pater's <i>Renaissance</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, but there is hardly
+any of it in Masters's poems in the <i>Spoon River Anthology</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The following passage from Roosevelt's essay on <i>History as Literature</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<!-- Page 117 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were the present .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust ages ago;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces, its caravans shall move;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean with their lonely prows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the course of time.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That never have they been reached<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the sons and daughters of men.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the love and the beauty of women.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Dr. Andrews in his <i>Writing and Reading of Verse</i> 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.<a name="FNanchor_117-A_11" id="FNanchor_117-A_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_117-A_11" class="fnanchor">[117-A]</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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Leaves of
+Grass</i> one of <!-- Page 118 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>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 <i>Towards Democracy</i> in
+1883. In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse vogue
+started, had been writing in his <i>The Conservator</i> free verse poems. No
+one paid attention to these even when some of them were collected in
+<i>Optimos</i> 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
+<i>New Era in American Poetry</i>. Most of the contemporary free verse poets
+began writing simultaneously.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>The Lily and the Bee</i> by Warren, the author of <i>Ten
+Thousand a Year</i>, 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 <!-- Page 119 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>Pindaric Ode founded by Cowley in
+the middle of the seventeenth century.<a name="FNanchor_119-A_12" id="FNanchor_119-A_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_119-A_12" class="fnanchor">[119-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>Dionysius of Halicarnassus was one of the few ancient critics who
+brought the boundaries of prose and poetry close. His work <i>On Literary
+Composition</i> 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 <i>Rhetoric</i> 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 <i>Panegyrics</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 120 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 121 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>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 <i>Euphues</i> and Sidney's <i>Arcadia</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 122 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>New Study of English Poetry</i> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <i>Republic</i>, or Milton's
+<i>Areopagitica</i>, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely
+the colloquial prose of Tchekov's <i>Cherry Orchard</i> has as good
+claim to be called poetry as <i>The Essay on Man</i>, <i>Tess of the
+D'Urbervilles</i> as <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, <i>The Possessed</i> as
+<i>Phedre</i>. 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 <i>aspects of Literature</i>.<a name="FNanchor_122-A_13" id="FNanchor_122-A_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_122-A_13" class="fnanchor">[122-A]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117-A_11" id="Footnote_117-A_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117-A_11"><span class="label">[117-A]</span></a> Spingarn's <i>Creative Criticism</i> and Erskine's <i>The
+Kinds of Poetry</i>, two excellent brochures in æsthetic criticism, take a
+similar view point.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119-A_12" id="Footnote_119-A_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119-A_12"><span class="label">[119-A]</span></a> For a history of French free verse see <i>Mercure De
+France</i>, March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by Édouard
+Dujardin.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122-A_13" id="Footnote_122-A_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122-A_13"><span class="label">[122-A]</span></a> Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor
+George M. Harper in the preface to his <i>John Morley and Other Essays</i>,
+in Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," <i>The Dial</i>, August, 1920,
+and the preface to F. S. Flint's <i>Otherworld</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 123 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 124 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>famous passages in <i>Leaves of Grass</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be poetry. The theme of
+<i>Great Expectations</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 125 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Mr. Sludge, "The
+Medium,"</i> in blank verse, Byron proved a good critic of society in <i>Don
+Juan</i>, in Ottava Rima metre, Shelley preached moral reforms in the
+<i>Revolt of Islam</i>, in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of
+the nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their authors, are
+Swinburne's <i>Hertha</i>, and Browning's <i>Rabbi Ben Ezra</i>, and they are both
+ecstatically didactic.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>John Addington Symonds has in his <i>Essays Speculative and Suggestive</i>
+taken two of the most famous dicta in English literature regarding the
+function of poetry in <!-- Page 126 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Psalm of Life</i> and <i>Excelsior</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>In his <i>Oxford Lectures on Poetry</i> in the essay on "Poetry for Poetry's
+Sake," Professor A. C. Bradley <!-- Page 127 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 128 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>On the
+Sublime</i> 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. <!-- Page 129 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 130 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>There must also be more or less sympathy with the poet's viewpoint. "All
+right human song," says Ruskin in his <i>Lectures on Art</i>, "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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 131 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 132 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>is so intensely striking that we
+charitably overlook faults of morality and intellect.</p>
+
+<p>As Professor Woodberry says in his <i>A New Defense of Poetry</i> in <i>The
+Heart of Man</i>: "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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Ghosts</i>. 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 <i>Doll's House</i>. 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
+<!-- Page 133 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary
+excellence of his work.<a name="FNanchor_133-A_14" id="FNanchor_133-A_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_133-A_14" class="fnanchor">[133-A]</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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 134 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Ethics</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Among the most famous philosophical passages of Shakespeare is the one
+in <i>The Tempest</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 135 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. (<i>Principles of Psychology</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 136 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Poetics</i>,
+except for a few vital passages, has done more mischief in literary
+criticism than his <i>Logic</i> has done in philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 137 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Peloponnesian War</i> and Carlyle's <i>French
+Revolution</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, and all great
+historians.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133-A_14" id="Footnote_133-A_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133-A_14"><span class="label">[133-A]</span></a> "Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic
+nihilism.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The values of literature are in the last resort moral.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more
+strenuous liberty prevails."&mdash;J. Middleton Murry.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 138 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION</h3>
+
+
+<p>The first lengthy formulation of the theory of art for art's sake was
+made, I believe, by Gautier in the preface to his <i>Mademoiselle de
+Maupin</i>, 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 <i>Shakespeare</i>
+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 <i>William Blake</i>. 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 <i>Dignity of
+Technique</i> in R. A. M. Stevenson's <i>Velasquez</i>, and especially
+Whistler's <i>Ten o'Clock Lecture</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 139 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>life
+and the analysis of emotions. Its use was certainly an undemocratic
+phase of art.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 140 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>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 <i>Madame Bovary</i> and
+Swinburne's <i>Songs Before Sunrise</i> were not art for art's sake. <i>The
+Ballad of Reading Gaol</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Tolstoy wrote most bitterly against the idea, and we may say that from
+the time of the appearance of his <i>What is Art?</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Still, art for art's sake is a good theory to be invoked against the
+extreme didactic-minded one who thinks <!-- Page 141 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 142 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 143 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>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 <i>Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt</i>, 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 <i>The City of Dreams</i>,
+<i>The Wandering Jew</i>, <i>The Ballad of Mary the Mother</i>, <i>The Outcast</i>,
+<i>The Devil's Case</i>, and <i>The New Rome</i>. Lecky called <i>The City of
+Dreams</i> the modern <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 144 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>(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 <i>Fall of the House of
+Usher</i>. Poe's stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data.
+None of them, except <i>William Wilson</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspiration from Poe's
+essay on the <i>Poetic Principle</i>, sadly misunderstand their critic.
+Except in two poems written as metrical and musical experiments, <i>The
+Bells</i> and <i>Ulalume</i>, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in
+verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, <i>Shadow</i>, <i>Silence</i>, <i>The
+Colloquy of Monos and Una</i>, <i>The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion</i>,
+<i>The Power of Words</i>, and <i>Eureka</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 145 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>and emotions, without being compelled to draw a moral
+conclusion therefrom.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 146 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>is intellectual
+working in Hamlet and intuitive expression in a dialogue of Plato. The
+former is not wholly intuitive nor the latter wholly intellectual.</p>
+
+<p>This is Croce's great fault&mdash;that he tries to rid poetry of what he
+calls any suggestion of intellectualism.<a name="FNanchor_146-A_15" id="FNanchor_146-A_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_146-A_15" class="fnanchor">[146-A]</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,&mdash;that poetry deals not with ideas but with intuitive
+feeling.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 147 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;intuition&mdash;to one branch of human endeavor&mdash;art; and
+another kind of expression&mdash;true concepts&mdash;to another branch of human
+endeavor,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 148 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Georgics</i> but he gave
+us a book in farming instead. Plato sought to be a philosopher in his
+<i>Banquet</i> but he wrote a poem also.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Pierre and Jean</i>.
+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 <!-- Page 149 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be repeated then too often that poetry is not <!-- Page 150 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 151 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;if they had
+craftsmanship,&mdash;then we would call them artists.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146-A_15" id="Footnote_146-A_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146-A_15"><span class="label">[146-A]</span></a> Wordsworth was on better ground when he said, "Our
+continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our
+thoughts." <i>Preface to Lyrical Ballads</i> (1800).</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 152 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>HIGH FORM OF POETRY ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF ADVANCED SOCIAL IDEALS</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 153 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>We want the progressive poet, and not the eternal harper on the
+commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 154 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>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 <i>Beowulf</i>, or the <i>Nibelungen Lied</i>.
+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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 155 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+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 <i>Strife</i>, Hauptmann's <i>Weavers</i>, Verhaeren's <i>Dawn</i>,
+Sinclair's <i>Jungle</i>, Zola's <i>Germinal</i>, Gissing's <i>Nether World</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 156 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>people because they are followers of different customs.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 157 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 158 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Romance of the Rose</i> and in Langland's
+<i>Piers Plowman</i>, respectively, to give some expression to the feelings
+of the masses.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson said, "There is no subject that does not belong to him (the
+poet),&mdash;politics, economics, manufactures and stock brokerage; as much
+as sunsets and <!-- Page 159 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>souls; only these things, placed in their order, are
+poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lectures and Essays</i>, gave vent to many
+remarkable ideas on the subject of poetry. The following passage was
+written three years before the <i>Leaves of Grass</i>, and sums up Whitman's
+ideas, and is worthy of quotation to-day for its timeliness:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;from men who will dare to live a brave and true  life;&mdash;&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 160 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The only exception of a work treating of poetry in connection with
+social justice is Plato's <i>Republic</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The first critic who pointed out the connection between poetry and
+social conditions was the author of <i>On the Sublime</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 161 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>"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." <i>Isaiah</i> (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." <i>Jeremiah</i> (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." <i>Amos</i> (Ch. 5, v. 23-24).</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The New Era in American Poetry</i>. 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 <i>Raven</i>, 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 <!-- Page 162 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>of poets without a message like Frost and
+Robinson. In fact Untermeyer ignores quite a number of Revolutionary
+poets.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Spirit of Russia</i> 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. <!-- Page 163 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few <!-- Page 164 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>When Ibsen said in reply to the critic who would not allow <i>Peer Gynt</i>
+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 <!-- Page 165 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Yeats in his essay "What is Popular Poetry" in the <i>Ideas of Good and
+Evil</i>, said that poetry of a very high order, like the <i>Epipsychidion</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <!-- Page 166 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Brond</i> and <i>Wild Duck</i> 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
+<!-- Page 167 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw in his preface to a new edition of
+his novel <i>The Irrational Knot</i> 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 <i>Hamlet</i>. From prefaces in other books of his we know he
+would include men like Blake, Shelley, <!-- Page 168 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>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
+<i>Christmas Carol</i> 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 <i>Eugénie Grandet</i> 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
+<!-- Page 169 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Don Quixote</i>, 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 <!-- Page 170 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>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 <i>History of English Literature</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Aesthetics and criticism have tended to place little aesthetic value on
+the literature of ideas. A passage from Hume's <i>Essays</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 171 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>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 <i>Wilhelm Meister</i> that are superior as
+literature to emotional scenes in <i>Faust</i> as literature.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Newbolt finds that the reason so much religious poetry is futile is
+because it is remote from earth. But he finds in the <i>Psalms</i> 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 <!-- Page 172 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_172-A_16" id="FNanchor_172-A_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_172-A_16" class="fnanchor">[172-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>Heine in his poem on <i>Jehuda Ben Halevi</i> 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 <i>Ode to Zion</i>, or Bachya Ibn
+Pakuda's <i>My Soul</i>. There are able prose translations of these in B.
+Halper's <i>Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. An Anthology</i>, Vol. II.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 173 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 174 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Peer Gynt</i>
+and <i>The Sunken Bell</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 175 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Evangeline</i>, presents an idea against war as in <i>The
+Arsenal at Springfield</i>, or draws on his personal life in such fine
+lyrics as <i>My Lost Youth</i>, <i>The Bridge</i>, <i>The Day is Done</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 176 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence to-day is outside
+the scope of this volume.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Song of Myself</i> 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 <i>Out
+of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking</i> is not an American but a human note.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Kavanagh</i> and collected in <i>The Round Table</i>, and another
+in review of Piatt's poems, collected in <i>The Function of the Poet</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely national poetry.
+True, there are national traits and <!-- Page 177 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>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 <i>Old
+Testament</i> 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, <i>Studies in
+Spanish-American Literature</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The literature of a country however should be <!-- Page 178 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>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
+<i>Leaves of Grass</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;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&mdash;to them it is confided, and they must sustain it.
+Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade
+it.</p></div>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Democracy</i>, 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 <i>Areopagitica</i>, Locke's
+<i>Letters on Toleration</i>, Jeremy Taylor's <i>Discourse of the Liberty of
+Prophesying</i>, Mill's <i>Liberty</i> and Morley's <i>Compromise</i>. 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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172-A_16" id="Footnote_172-A_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172-A_16"><span class="label">[172-A]</span></a> The greatest authority in America on medieval Hebrew
+poetry is Prof. Israel Davidson of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New
+York City.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 179 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, <i>Literary Criticism in the
+Renaissance</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 180 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+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 <i>Samson Agonistes</i>. 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."</p>
+
+<p>We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's view of the function
+of tragedy from a passage in his <i>Politics</i>. 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,<a name="FNanchor_180-A_17" id="FNanchor_180-A_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_180-A_17" class="fnanchor">[180-A]</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 <i>History of Aesthetics</i>,
+believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to
+admit that even <i>Vanity Fair</i> and <i>Cousin Bette</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 181 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Return of the Native</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Tragische Motiv</i>, gave us an interpretation from the
+psychoanalytic point of view of the nature and sufferings of tragic
+characters. <!-- Page 182 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>There is an abstract of the book by Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar
+in the <i>American Journal of Psychology</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Conversations and
+Recollections</i><a name="FNanchor_182-A_18" id="FNanchor_182-A_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_182-A_18" class="fnanchor">[182-A]</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 <!-- Page 183 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_183-A_19" id="FNanchor_183-A_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_183-A_19" class="fnanchor">[183-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Epipsychidion</i>, 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 <i>Dream Children</i> where he sees himself wedded <!-- Page 184 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>to his lost
+love, with their children about him, because he is a bachelor who has
+neither love nor children.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_184-A_20" id="FNanchor_184-A_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_184-A_20" class="fnanchor">[184-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Divine Comedy</i> and <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, both in the form of dreams,
+were attempts by the poets to adjust themselves to reality, to purge
+themselves and relieve their unconscious?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The poem with the social message, the problem play for <!-- Page 185 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I have fully stated in my <i>The Erotic Motive in Literature</i> 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 <i>Affirmations</i>, published
+before Freud's book on dreams.)</p>
+
+<p>Poets like Burns, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe and Ibsen
+have told us that they wrote to <!-- Page 186 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Improvisations from the Spirit</i> (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 <i>Biographical and Critical Studies</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Kubla Khan</i>
+was actually composed in a dream, but that <!-- Page 187 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>it was merely suggested by a
+dream.<a name="FNanchor_187-A_21" id="FNanchor_187-A_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_187-A_21" class="fnanchor">[187-A]</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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Arabian Nights</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>I would like, however, to make special reference to two Englishmen, John
+Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very <!-- Page 188 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>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 <i>De Poeticae vi Medica</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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
+<i>Occasional Papers and Reviews</i>. In fact, in one of these essays he used
+the Freudian word "repression," in referring to the creation of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 189 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 190 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Gay Science</i>,
+in two volumes, in 1866. He was a successful book reviewer and had also
+written a book on <i>Poetics</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 191 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>I suppose that no word has been more used in connection <!-- Page 192 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Every one quotes the famous lines of Shakespeare in the fifth act of the
+<i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, 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 <!-- Page 193 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>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.<a name="FNanchor_193-A_22" id="FNanchor_193-A_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_193-A_22" class="fnanchor">[193-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 194 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming
+artificial and are imitating other verse writers and obeying rules that
+they studied.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or prose poets of the
+nineteenth century has little relation to <!-- Page 195 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>dancing, music or singing.
+Take the Shakespearean plays, the tragedies of <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>King Lear</i>,
+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&mdash;in fact, by their nature, are not&mdash;related to dance, music and
+song.</p>
+
+<p>An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's <i>Prelude</i>, or a series
+of impassioned ideas like Lucretius's <i>Nature of Things</i>, or a novel in
+verse like <i>Aurora Leigh</i> 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.)</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 196 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission <!-- Page 197 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>of spoken poetry.
+We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has been handed down by
+tradition and never been reduced to writing.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 198 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>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 <i>Psalms</i> and
+the dirges in <i>Lamentations</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Anna Karenina</i> or <i>Ivan Ilyitch</i>, he was
+actually bemoaning his own brother, whose death made a lasting
+impression upon him.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The
+Wanderer</i> and such a beautiful dream poem as <i>The Phœnix</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>The research into the origins of poetry can be made in the soul of any
+writer to-day. The same psychological <!-- Page 199 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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." (<i>World as Will and
+Idea</i>, V. 1, p. 330.)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to
+annihilate the will to live. He failed to see <!-- Page 200 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>that much of this tragic
+literature acts as a relief to us and makes us want to live all the
+more.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Making of Poetry</i> 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 <i>Germinal</i> or
+Hauptmann's <i>Weavers</i>, or Sinclair's <i>Jungle</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 201 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;is not the
+religion of a dog centered in his master as Anatole France has so
+quaintly shown&mdash;but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by which I
+mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, music, painting and
+sculpture.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 202 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180-A_17" id="Footnote_180-A_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180-A_17"><span class="label">[180-A]</span></a> <i>Zwei Abhandlungen uber d. Aristotleische Theorie d.
+Drama.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182-A_18" id="Footnote_182-A_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182-A_18"><span class="label">[182-A]</span></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 <i>Revue des Etudes, Juives XXI, XXII</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183-A_19" id="Footnote_183-A_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183-A_19"><span class="label">[183-A]</span></a> See Isaac Husik's <i>Medieval Jewish Philosophy</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184-A_20" id="Footnote_184-A_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184-A_20"><span class="label">[184-A]</span></a> F. C. Prescott's <i>Dreams and Poetry</i> is a magnificent
+essay on the subject.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187-A_21" id="Footnote_187-A_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187-A_21"><span class="label">[187-A]</span></a> I do not however agree with Bergson, who does not
+believe poetry can be composed in dreams at all.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193-A_22" id="Footnote_193-A_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193-A_22"><span class="label">[193-A]</span></a> "Poetry is the most emphatical language that can be
+found for those creations of the mind 'which ecstasy is very cunning
+in.'" Hazlitt <i>On Poetry</i>. "The imaginative faculty (has) the
+capabilities of ecstasy and possession." Lowell, "The Imagination." <i>The
+Function of the Poet.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 203 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 <i>Prolegomena</i><a name="FNanchor_203-A_23" id="FNanchor_203-A_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_203-A_23" class="fnanchor">[203-A]</a> or
+introduction to his history, <i>Book of Examples</i>, has a title stating
+that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Literary History of <!-- Page 204 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>Persia</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>We today may accept the definition of poetry given in the <i>Four
+Discourses</i><a name="FNanchor_204-A_24" id="FNanchor_204-A_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_204-A_24" class="fnanchor">[204-A]</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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>Ibn Khaldun said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>He continues, that they have handled poetry so well, that one could
+deceive oneself and believe that this gift, <!-- Page 205 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>which is really an acquired
+art, was with them an innate one.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Arabs excelled in various kinds of poetry, we think of them
+primarily as love poets.</p>
+
+<p>The Arabs, as we gather from <i>The Arabian Nights</i>, <!-- Page 206 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>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: <i>On Love</i>, p.
+218.)</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Muallaqat</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Laila</i> and
+<i>Majnun</i> 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 <!-- Page 207 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Essays on Eastern Questions</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah for the throes of a heart sorely wounded!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah for the eyes that have smit me with madness!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gently she moved in the calmness of beauty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Moved as the bough to the light breeze of morning.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dazzled my eyes as they gazed, till before me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All was a mist and confusion of figures.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne'er had I sought her, and ne'er had she sought me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fated the love, and the hour, and the meeting.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There I beheld her as she and her damsels<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paced 'twixt the temple and outer enclosure;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Damsels the fairest, the loveliest, the gentlest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Passing like slow-wending heifers at evening;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ever surrounding with courtly observance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her whom they honor, the peerless of women.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then to a handmaid, the youngest, she whispered,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Omar is near: let us mar his devotions.<br /></span>
+<!-- Page 208 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Cross on his path that he needs may observe us;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Give him a signal, my sister, demurely."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Signals I gave, but he marked not or heeded,"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Answered the damsel, and hasted to meet me.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah for that night by the vale of the sand-hills!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah for the dawn when in silence we parted!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He who the morn may awake to her kisses<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drinks from the cup of the blessed in heaven.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah! where have they made my dwelling? Far, how far, from her, the loved one,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since they drove me lone and parted to the sad sea-shore of Aden.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou art mid the distant mountains; and to each, the loved and lover,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nought is left but sad remembrance, and a share of aching sorrow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hadst thou seen thy lover weeping by the sand-hills of the ocean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou hadst deemed him struck by madness: was it madness? was it love?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I may forget all else, but never shall I forget her as she stood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As I stood, that hour of parting; heart to heart in speechless anguish;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then she turned her to Thoreyya, to her sister, sadly weeping;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Coursed the tears down cheek and bosom, till her passion found an utterance;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Tell him, sister, tell him; yet be not as one that chides or murmurs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why so long thy distant tarrying on the unlovely shores of Yemen?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is it sated ease detains thee, or the quest of wealth that lures thee?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tell me what the price they paid thee, that from Mecca bought thy absence?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by different
+translators, prose renderings by McGuckin de <!-- Page 209 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>Slane in Ibn Khallikan's
+<i>Biographical Dictionary</i> and by Terrick Hamilton in the <i>Romance of
+Antar</i>, respectively, and a verse translation by Lyall.</p>
+
+<p>The following poem (Ibn Khallikan, V. 2, p. 330) is attributed to Ibn
+Alaamidi of the eleventh century:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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?</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;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
+(<i>in sincerity</i>) or like thee in beauty.</p></div>
+
+<p>The next poem represents one of the many outbursts of Antar:</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 210 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;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!</p></div>
+
+<p>This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unexcelled:</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>One Unnamed</i></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nay, ask on the sandy hill the ben-tree with spreading boughs that stands mid her sisters, if I greeted thy dwelling-place;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whether their shade looked down upon me at eventide as there in my grief I stood, and that for my portion chose:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whether, at dawn still there, mine eyelids a burthen bore of tears falling one by one, as pearls from a broken string.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yea, men long and yearn for Spring, the gladsome: but as for me&mdash;my longing and Spring art thou, my yearning to gain thy grace;<br /></span>
+<!-- Page 211 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">And men dread the deadly Drought that slays them: but as for me&mdash;my Drought is to know thee gone, my life but a barren land!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">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.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So take thy delight that I stand serving with aching heart and eyes bathed in tears lest thou shouldst sunder thyself from me.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Muallaqat</i> 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 <i>Don Quixote</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 212 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>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 <i>The
+Making of Humanity</i> has proved that this influence has been
+underestimated rather than exaggerated.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both
+sexes&mdash;women also were freer than in Post-islamic times&mdash;gave rise to
+romantic love.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly
+two centuries.<a name="FNanchor_214-A_25" id="FNanchor_214-A_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_214-A_25" class="fnanchor">[214-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence.
+Cervantes attributed his <i>Don Quixote</i> 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 <!-- Page 213 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>spirit. Wyatt
+and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English
+literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry.
+Similarly the Spanish <i>Cid</i> 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 <i>History of the Moorish
+Empire in Spain</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that even the French poem, the <i>Chanson de Roland</i>, shows
+Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe,
+especially in a few in his <i>West Eastern Divan</i>, 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 <i>Locksley Hall</i> from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of
+the <i>Muallaqat</i>; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his <i>Abt Vogler</i>;
+George Meredith's <i>The Shaving of Shagpat</i> was written to emulate the
+<i>Arabian Nights</i>.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 214 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+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 <i>Assemblies</i> 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 <i>Ottoman Poetry</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Hymn of
+Hate</i> by Lissauer in the late world war.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing in literature illustrates more the belief in the <!-- Page 215 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>magical power
+of poetry than the chapters in the <i>Book of Numbers</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying ecstasy, with all
+the stock themes of poetry, but especially with love.</p>
+
+<p>The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and Pre-islamic Arabic
+poetry have been touched upon by Dr. George A. Smith in his <i>The Early
+Poetry of Israel</i> and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to
+his translation of Hariri's <i>Assemblies</i>. Participators in various
+military events themselves composed the poems in which they told of
+their exploits, as you may note by comparing the <i>Muallaqat</i> with the
+songs of Miriam and Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as
+you may see by comparing descriptions from the <i>Psalms</i> and <i>Job</i> to
+that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the <i>Muallaqat</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>There was also the same tendency in both nations to utter ecstatically
+sententious and moral sayings. Though only one poem in the <i>Muallaqat</i>,
+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 <!-- Page 216 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>of Hariri's <i>Assemblies</i>. 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 <i>Job</i>,
+<i>Proverbs</i> and <i>Ecclesiastes</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting in a way that
+even nauseates us. The martial spirit in the <i>Romance of Antar</i> has made
+it less popular with us than <i>The Arabian Nights</i>, 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 <i>Song of Vengeance</i> 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, <i>Literary History of the Arabs</i> (pp.
+98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of <i>Arabic Poetry</i>, is
+very cruel.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 217 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>Sharran,
+from the <i>Mufaddaliyyat</i>, a translation of which appears on pages 81-82
+of Lyall's volume.</p>
+
+<p>The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently translated and written
+about in English is Pre-islamic poetry. In especial, the <i>Muallaqat</i>, 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 <i>Muallaqat</i> 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 <i>Encyclopedia
+Britannica</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 218 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>immoral
+life, and is familiar to the reader of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> as the
+jester of Harun al Rashid. His <i>Divan</i> 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 <i>The Wisdom of the East</i> series. Abu
+'l Ala is the most modern of the Arabian poets. He was a freethinker and
+a pessimist and his <i>Luzumiyyat</i> 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.<a name="FNanchor_218-A_26" id="FNanchor_218-A_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_218-A_26" class="fnanchor">[218-A]</a></p>
+
+<p>I have already several times mentioned the most famous Arabic work next
+to the Koran, the <i>Maqamat</i> or <i>Assemblies</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Arabian Nights</i> is the best known Arabic production to English
+speaking people and is full of poetry, <!-- Page 219 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>not only in the interspersed
+verses, but in the stories themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Romance of Antar</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Literary History
+of the Arabs</i>, pp. 425-426:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In pity of my grief it seems to fail.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They share my passion and with me they weep.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Adding new lustre to Aurora's light;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And waked by morning beams, yet languid still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rival lotus doth his perfume spill.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All stirs in me the memory of that fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had death come ere we parted, it had been<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The best of all days in the world, I ween;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And this poor heart, where thou art every thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would not be fluttering now on passion's wing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A treasure! O thou dearest, queenliest!<br /></span>
+<!-- Page 220 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ran an equal race with eager feet.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How true, how blameless was the love I bore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou hast forgotten; but I still adore!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Poetics</i> in the Renaissance
+and Elizabethan periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly
+on poetry centuries before they read the <i>Poetics</i>. They made a
+specialty of the literature called the Adab, or belles lettres made up
+of criticism, quotation and rhetoric.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>History of Criticism in Europe</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Ibn Yunus in the early part of the tenth century translated Aristotle's
+<i>Poetics</i> into Arabic and the Europeans learned of Aristotle's work from
+the Arabs several <!-- Page 221 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>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 <i>Life of Johnson</i>, by Boswell
+(Lucas called him a Bagdad Boswell), and to <i>Plutarch's Lives</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 222 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Umda</i> or <i>Pillar of the Art of Poetry</i> is mentioned often by Ibn
+Khaldun, the historian. The latter also names four great Arabic writers
+of Adab, Ibn Qutayba's <i>Accomplishments of the Secretary</i> (Ibn Qutayba's
+<i>Book of Poetry and Poets</i> is more often cited by other writers than the
+<i>Accomplishments of the Secretary</i>), Jahiz's <i>Book of Eloquence and
+Exposition</i>, al Mubarrad's <i>Perfect</i>, all of the ninth century, and in
+Spain Abu Ali al Qali's <i>Curious Notions</i>, of the tenth century, whose
+<i>Book of Dictations</i>, however, is better known.</p>
+
+<p>Among the writers on poetry in the manner of the Arabs was the Hebrew
+poet and critic, Moses Ibn Ezra, author of the <i>Conversations and
+Recollections</i>, 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, <!-- Page 223 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>besides the
+aforementioned Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Rashiq, are the first book in Arabian
+<i>Poetics</i> proper, by the Caliph, Ibn ul Mutazz, of the latter part of
+the ninth century, a work by Qudama, and <i>Ornaments of Conversation</i>, by
+Al Hatimi, both of the tenth century.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Solitaire of Time</i> had many continuations by later critics, and the
+famous <i>Fihrist</i> or <i>Index</i> by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth
+century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Prolegomena</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Another condition
+which should be observed in regard to the science <!-- Page 224 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 225 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Literary History of Persia</i>, Gibb's <i>History of Ottoman
+Poetry</i>, and Nicholson's <i>Literary History of the Arabs</i>. 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 <i>Jewish
+Encyclopedia</i>, chapters in Graetz's <i>History of the Jews</i> and works on
+various phases of it by numerous writers.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203-A_23" id="Footnote_203-A_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_203-A_23"><span class="label">[203-A]</span></a> There is a French translation of the <i>Prolegomena</i> by
+Mac Guckin de Slane.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204-A_24" id="Footnote_204-A_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_204-A_24"><span class="label">[204-A]</span></a> Translated by Prof. Browne in the <i>Journal of the Royal
+Asiatic Society</i>, 1899.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214-A_25" id="Footnote_214-A_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_214-A_25"><span class="label">[214-A]</span></a> See W. H. Schofield's <i>English Literature from the
+Roman Conquest to Chaucer</i>, pp. 67-71.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_218-A_26" id="Footnote_218-A_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_218-A_26"><span class="label">[218-A]</span></a> The best account and translations of Abu 'l Ala are in
+Nicholson's <i>Studies in Islamic Poetry</i>, recently published.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 226 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>CONCLUSION</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 227 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>When
+Sparrows Build</i> or <i>High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 228 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 229 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>by Demosthenes
+and Cicero also, but Fourth of July orations are seldom poetry. Nor is
+the <i>Congressional Record</i> an anthology of poetic masterpieces. In a
+footnote in his book in aesthetics, <i>The Critique of Judgment</i>, Kant has
+ably elucidated the situation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 230 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>the question of exploitation
+is probably more important than that of chivalry.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 231 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;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.</p></div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 232 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Penguin Island</i> and <i>Erewhon</i>, 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 <i>Main Street</i> is
+excellent poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Vision of Last Judgment</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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. (<i>Life and Literature</i>, p. 286.)</p></div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 233 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+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 <i>Bible</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on <i>The Science of
+Poetry</i>, 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 <i>Liberty in Literature</i>, 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
+<!-- Page 234 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Imagination and Fancy</i>, 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 <!-- Page 235 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>par excellence</i>. 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, <i>The Arte of English Poesie</i>, 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
+<!-- Page 236 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who has read <i>Tom Jones</i> receives the impression that the long
+similes Fielding introduced in the Homeric manner were written half in
+jest of Homer, his master.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 237 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<i>On Reading Chapman's Homer</i>. 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?</p>
+
+<p>A trope then is poetry only when arousing ecstasy; such poetry is not of
+the highest order.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Faerie
+Queene</i> were held to be the truest creations of imagination. The vicious
+practices of great <!-- Page 238 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>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 <i>Inferno</i> to the passages
+where he touches on his own sorrows?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 239 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>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?</p>
+
+<p>Pater in his <i>Renaissance</i> 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 <i>Appreciations</i> 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 <i>fullness</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 240 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Encyclopedia Britannica</i> 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 <i>Aesthetics</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of impassioned prose or its
+right to be called poetry. He once <!-- Page 241 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>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
+<i>Ars Poetica</i>, with Boileau and Opitz.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?&mdash;you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding
+over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of
+grief?&mdash;you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a
+bad sense. <!-- Page 242 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant
+emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 243 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>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
+<i>Tess of the D'Urbervilles</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in Burke's <i>Letter to a
+Noble Lord</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p></div>
+
+<p>You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in his <i>Confessions</i>
+his feelings as he lay on his mattress grave, no less than when you
+peruse his love woes in verse.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <!-- Page 244 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>When you read Hardy's <i>Return of the Native</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Call her to mind&mdash;think of her&mdash;what goodness there was in
+her: it showed in every line of her face!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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 <i>enter</i> your heart as she
+turned away?</p></div>
+
+<p>If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following
+passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume <i>Exotics
+and Retrospectives</i>, you delight in poetry.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature
+that spring from the deepest sources of our being .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. would
+seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical
+emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.</p>
+
+<p>Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have
+you never, when looking at some great burning, <!-- Page 245 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>found yourself
+exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of
+fire?&mdash;never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting,
+iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable
+touch?&mdash;never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor
+of its phantasmagories,&mdash;the ravening and bickering of its
+dragons,&mdash;the monstrosity of its archings,&mdash;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,&mdash;to scream around the peaks with it,&mdash;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,&mdash;no
+longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that
+mighty shout?</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Thus Spake
+Zarathustra</i> or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's novel
+<i>Salammbo</i>. 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 <i>The Renaissance</i>. I could have added Carlyle's
+reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from <i>Sartor Resartus</i>,
+Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in <i>The Florentine Nights</i>,
+George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his
+book on <i>Shakespeare</i>, Dickens' description of the tower in <i>Chimes</i>, or
+Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the <i>Wild Ass's Skin</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 246 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 247 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Treasure Island</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 248 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <!-- Page 249 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts
+as regards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and pernicious.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 250 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 251 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 252 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 253 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INDEX OF AUTHORS</h2>
+
+
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Abu Ali al Qali, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+  <li>Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+  <li>Abu 'l Atahiya, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Abu Nuwas, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+  <li>Abu Zayd, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ælfric, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+  <li>Æschylus, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Al Ghazzali, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a></li>
+
+  <li>Al Hatimi, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Aldington, Richard, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ambros, Wilhelm A., <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+  <li>Antar, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ari Frodi, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ariosto, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+  <li>Aristotle, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Bacon, Francis, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+  <li>Baha Ad Din Zuhayr, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>Balzac, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+
+  <li>Baqui, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+  <li>Baudelaire, Charles, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+
+  <li>Beaconsfield, Lord, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+  <li>Beckford, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Benavente, Jacinto, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bergson, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bernays, Jacob, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bielinski, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li>Blake, William, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bosanquet, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bossuet, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>
+
+  <li>Boswell, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bradley, A. C., <a href="#Page_126">126</a></li>
+
+  <li>Brandes, George, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+
+  <li>Breasted, James H., <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li>
+
+  <li>Briffault, Robert, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+  <li>Browne, Edgar G., <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>Browne, Sir Thomas, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Browning, Elizabeth B., <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+
+  <li>Browning, Robert, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bryant, W. C., <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>Buchanan, Robert, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bunyan, John, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Burke, Edmund, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+  <li>Butcher, S. H., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Byron Lord, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+
+  <li>Carpenter, Edward, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Castelvetro, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Cervantes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+  <li>Chateaubriand, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Chaucer, Geoffrey, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>Chekhov, Anton, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Cicero, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>Coleridge, S. T., <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li>
+
+  <li>Conrad, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Corneille, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Cowper, William, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+  <li>Crane, Stephen, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Croce, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+
+  <li>Crosby, Ernest, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 254 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>Dallas, E. S., <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dalman, G., <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dante, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+  <li>D'Annunzio, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+
+  <li>Daudet, Alphonse, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>Davidson, Israel, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>De Musset, Alfred, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>De Quincey, Thomas, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+  <li>De Slane, MacGuckin, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>De Vigny, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+  <li>Democritus, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+
+  <li>Demosthenes, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a></li>
+
+  <li>Descartes, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dionysius of Halicarnassus, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dobrolubov, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li>Donne, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dostoievsky, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>Doughty, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>Drummond, Henry, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dryden, John, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dumas, Alexander, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dunash ben Labrat, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Eaton, Walter P., <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Eliot, George, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+  <li>Elliot, Ebenezer, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ellis, Havelock, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>Emerson, R. W., <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Erasmus, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+
+  <li>Erskine, John, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+  <li>Euripides, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Fairchild, A. H., <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Fénelon, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+  <li>Fielding, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+  <li>Flaubert, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+
+  <li>Flint, F. S., <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>France, Anatole, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+  <li>Freud, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+
+  <li>Froude, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Fuller, Thomas, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Galsworthy, John, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gautier, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gibbon, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Giovanitti, Arthur, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>Goethe, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+  <li>Goldberg, Isaac, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+  <li>Goldziher, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gorki, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gosse, Edmund, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+  <li>Graetz, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gray, Thomas, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+  <li>Guérin, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gummere, Professor, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gurney, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Ha Levi, Jehudah, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hafiz, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+  <li>Halper, B., <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hardy, Thomas, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hariri, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Harper, G. M., <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Harte, Bret, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hauptmann, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hawthorne, Nathaniel, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hazlitt, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hearn, Lafcadio, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hegel, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+  <li>Heine, Heinrich, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+
+  <li>Henley, Walter, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Henry, O., <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>Herodotus, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hewlett, Maurice, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Holmes, O. W., <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>Homer, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+  <li>Horace, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hovey, Richard, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Howells, W. D., <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hudson, W. H., <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hume, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+  <li>Huneker, <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Abi Rabia, Omar, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Daud, Abraham, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Ezra, Moses, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 255 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>Ibn Gebirol, Solomon, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Ishaq, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Khaldun, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Khallikan, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Pakuda, Bachya, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Rashiq, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn ul Farid, Umar, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn ul Mutazz, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Yunus, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibn Zaydun, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ibsen, Henrik, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+  <li>Imru'ul Qays, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ingelow, Jean, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li>
+
+  <li>Israeli, Isaac, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Jacob, Cary F., <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+  <li>Jahiz, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+  <li>Jalalu 'l Din Rumi, <a href="#Page_22">22</a></li>
+
+  <li>Jannai, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+  <li>Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Kant, <a href="#Page_229">229</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kaplan, Jacob H., <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+  <li>Keats, John, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+  <li>Keble, John, <a href="#Page_187">187-190</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kelley, FitzMaurice, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kempis, Thomas à, <a href="#Page_20">20</a></li>
+
+  <li>Khalil, Ahmad, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+  <li>Khansa, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kingsley, Charles, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>König, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>La Rochefoucauld, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+  <li>Landor, W. S., <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Langdon, Professor, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+  <li>Langland, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lawrence, D. H., <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>Le Sage, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lee, A. H. E., <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+  <li>Leopardi, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lespinasse, Madame, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lessing, G. E., <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lewis, Sinclair, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lincoln, Abraham, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+  <li>Livy, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Locke, John, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+  <li>Longfellow, H. W., <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lowell, J. R., <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lowes, Professor, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lowth, Bishop, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lucas, E. V., <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lyly, John, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Macaulay, T. B., <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+
+  <li>Macdonald, Duncan B., <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+
+  <li>Machen, Arthur, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+  <li>Macleod, Fiona, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Maggi, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Maimonides, Moses, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+  <li>Majnun, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+  <li>Malory, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Margoliouth, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Marston, P. B., <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li>
+
+  <li>Marsyas, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></li>
+
+  <li>Masaryk, Thomas G., <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li>Masters, Ed. L., <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Maupassant, Guy de, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+  <li>Meredith, George, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>Mihailovsky, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li>Mill, J. S., <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+  <li>Mills, L. H., <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+  <li>Milton, John, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+  <li>Minturno, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Mirabeau, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Molière, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+  <li>Morley, John, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+  <li>Moore, George, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+  <li>Moore, Thomas, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Moulton, R. G., <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+
+  <li>Müller, Max, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+  <li>Murray, Gilbert, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+
+  <li>Murry, J. Middleton, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Neilson, William A., <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+  <li>Newbolt, Henry, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+
+  <li>Newton, Isaac, <a href="#Page_40">40</a></li>
+
+  <li>Nicholson, D. H. S., <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>Nidhami I Arudi, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+
+  <li>Nidhami, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 256 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>Nietzsche, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Omar Khayyam, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Oppenheim, James, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ossian, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Palgrave, W. G., <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pascal, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pater, Walter, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+
+  <li>Patterson, Professor, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+  <li>Perry, Bliss, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Phelps, W. L., <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pindar, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pisarev, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li>Plato, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Plutarch, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Poe, E. A., <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pope, Alexander, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+  <li>Prescott, F. C., <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+  <li>Prévost, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pythagoras, <a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Qudama, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+
+  <li>Quintilian, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+
+  <li>Qutayba, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Riley, J. W., <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+  <li>Roberts, W. Rhys, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+  <li>Robortelli, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Rolland, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Rossetti, Dante G., <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>Rousseau, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+  <li>Russel, Bertrand, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Saadyah, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+  <li>St. Augustine, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+  <li>Saintsbury, George, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sand, George, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sandburg, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Savonarola, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+
+  <li>Schlegel, Frederick, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Schofield, W. H., <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+  <li>Schopenhauer, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+
+  <li>Scott, Samuel P., <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+
+  <li>Senancour, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Shairp, J. C., <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+  <li>Shakespeare, William, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+  <li>Shaw, Bernard, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+  <li>Shelley, P. B., <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sidney, Sir Philip, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sinclair, Upton B., <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Smith, Sir George A., <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+  <li>Smith, W. Robertson, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+  <li>Socrates, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sophocles, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Southey, Robert, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spenser, Edmund, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+  <li>Speroni, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spingarn, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spinoza, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+  <li>Stedman, E. C., <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>Stendhal, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+  <li>Stevenson, R. A. M., <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Stevenson, R. L., <a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+
+  <li>Strabo, <a href="#Page_97">97</a></li>
+
+  <li>Strindberg, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Surrey, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Swinburne, A. C., <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>Symonds, J. A., <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a></li>
+
+  <li>Symons, Arthur, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Synge, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Tacitus, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Taine, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+  <li>Taylor, Jeremy, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tchernishevski, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 257 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>Tennyson, Alfred, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tha'alibi, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Thackeray, W. M., <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+  <li>Thompson, Francis, <a href="#Page_72">72</a></li>
+
+  <li>Thomson, James, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>Thucydides, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tolstoy, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+
+  <li>Traubel, Horace, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tupper, Martin, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Turgenev, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Twain, Mark, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Untermeyer, Louis, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Van Teslaar, J. S., <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+  <li>Varchi, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Verhaeren, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+  <li>Verlaine, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>Véron, Eugene, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Vettori, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li>Virgil, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+  <li>Voltaire, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Warton, Thomas, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+  <li>Watts-Dunton, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+  <li>Weil, Henri, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+  <li>Whistler, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wilde, Oscar, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wilkinson, J. G., <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wittels, F., <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+  <li>Woodberry, Professor, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wordsworth, William, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wulfstan <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wyatt, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Xenophon, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Yeats, William Butler, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Zoroaster, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li>
+
+  <li>Zola, Emil, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Zuhayr, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p><!-- Page 258 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><!-- Page 259 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS</h2>
+
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Adam Bede, <a href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+
+  <li>Advancement of Learning, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+
+  <li>Æneid, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+
+  <li>Æsthetics, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Albion's England, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+  <li>Arabia Deserta, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>Arabian Nights, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Arcadia, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+  <li>Areopagitica, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ars Poetica, <a href="#Page_241">241</a></li>
+
+  <li>Art of Writing, <a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+
+  <li>Aspects of Poetry, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+  <li>Assemblies (or Maqamat), <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Atala, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Aucassin and Nicolette, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+  <li>Aurora Leigh, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+
+  <li>Avesta, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+  <li>Avowals, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+  <li>Aylmer's Field, <a href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Ballad of Mary the Mother, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bedouins, <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+
+  <li>Beginnings of Poetry, <a href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+
+  <li>Beowulf, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+  <li>Bible, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a></li>
+
+  <li>Birth of Tragedy, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+
+  <li>Botanical Garden, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+  <li>Boundaries of Music and Poetry, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+  <li>Brand, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Brushwood Boy, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Canterbury Tales, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+  <li>Chanting the Square Deific, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+  <li>Chapbook, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Cherry Orchard, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Christmas Carol, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+
+  <li>City of Dreams, The, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Confessions, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+  <li>Confessions of an Opium Eater, <a href="#Page_40">40</a></li>
+
+  <li>Conservator, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Convention and Revolt in Poetry, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+
+  <li>Corn Law Rhymes, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Cousin Pons, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Creative Criticism, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+  <li>Critique of Judgment, <a href="#Page_229">229</a></li>
+
+  <li>Cypress Grove, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>David Copperfield, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dawn, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+  <li>Decameron, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Defense of Poetry, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+  <li>Deserted Village, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Devil's Case, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dialogues on Eloquence, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+  <li>Divine Comedy, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+  <li>Doll's House, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+  <li>Don Juan, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+
+  <li>Don Quixote, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dream Fugue, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Dreams and Poetry, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Early Poetry of Israel, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+  <li>Elegy in a Country Churchyard, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+  <li>Eleonora, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>English Literature from Roman Conquest to Chaucer, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+  <li>Enoch Arden, <a href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+
+  <li>Epipsychidion, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+
+  <li>Erewhon, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+  <li>Erotic Motive in Literature, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+  <li>Essay on Man, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 260 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>Essays in Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li>
+
+  <li>Essays Speculative and Suggestive, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+
+  <li>Essentials of Poetry, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ethics, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+  <li>Eugénie Grandet, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Euphues, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+  <li>Excursion, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+  <li>Exotics and Retrospectives, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Fall of the House of Usher, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+  <li>Fathers and Sons, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Fingal, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>First Four Books of Civil War, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+  <li>Foundations and Nature of Verse, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+  <li>French Revolution, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Function of the Poet, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+
+  <li>Fuzzy Wuzzy, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Gathas, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li>
+
+  <li>Genesis, Book of, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+  <li>Genius of Christianity, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Georgics, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+  <li>Germinal, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ghosts, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gilgash, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gorboduc, <a href="#Page_112">112</a></li>
+
+  <li>Great Expectations, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+  <li>Greek Poets, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+  <li>Guide to the Perplexed, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+  <li>Gulliver's Travels, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Hacuzari, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+
+  <li>Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, <a href="#Page_24">24</a></li>
+
+  <li>Haunted Mind, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>Heart of Midlothian, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+  <li>Heathen Chinee, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hertha, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hieroglyphics, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+  <li>History as Literature, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of Criticism in Europe, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of English Literature, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of English Poetry, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of English Prose Rhythm, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of English Rhythms, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of the Jews, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>History of Moorish Empire in Spain, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>House of Gentlefolk, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Huckleberry Finn, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Idylls of the King, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+  <li>Iliad, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+
+  <li>Inspiration of Poetry, <a href="#Page_31">31</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ion, <a href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+
+  <li>Irrational Knot, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Jewish Encyclopedia, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>Julius Cæsar, <a href="#Page_56">56</a></li>
+
+  <li>Jungle, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Kalevala, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kinds of Poetry, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+  <li>Koran, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Kubla Khan, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>La Mare au Diable, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lady of the Lake, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+  <li>Laila and Majnun, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+  <li>Laocoon, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+
+  <li>L'Avare, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Le Chartreuse de Parme, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Le Debâcle, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Leaves of Grass, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lectures on Art, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lectures on Sacred Poetry of Hebrews, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+  <li>Les Martyrs, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>Les Misérables, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>Letters to French Academy, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+  <li>Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Life of Johnson, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+  <li>Life of Roscommon, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lily and the Bee, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lily of the Valley, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 261 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>Literary History of the Arabs, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+  <li>Literary History of Persia, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>Literary Study of Bible, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lives of the Saints, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+  <li>Locksley Hall, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+  <li>Logic, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+  <li>L'Oiseau, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lorna Doone, <a href="#Page_70">70</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lost Illusions, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Louis Lambert, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Luzumiyyat, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Lyrical Ballads, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Macbeth, <a href="#Page_56">56</a></li>
+
+  <li>Madame Bovary, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+  <li>Mademoiselle de Maupin, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Main Currents of the Nineteenth Century, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+  <li>Main Street, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+  <li>Making of Humanity, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+  <li>Making of Poetry, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>Manon Lescaut, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Maqamat, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Martyrs, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Master Builder, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>Michael, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+
+  <li>Modern Painters, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+  <li>Mr. Sludge, "the Medium," <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+
+  <li>Muallaqat, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Nature of Poetry, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+
+  <li>Nether World, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+  <li>New Era in American Poetry, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+  <li>New Rome, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Nibelungen Lied, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+  <li>Nigger of the Narcissus, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Njala, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+
+  <li>Notre Dame de Paris, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Odyssey, <a href="#Page_97">97</a></li>
+
+  <li>On Literary Composition, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+  <li>On the Sublime, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Optimos, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Orlando Furioso, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+  <li>Otherworld, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ottoman Poetry, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+  <li>Outcast, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>Outcasts of Poker Flat, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>Oxford Book of English Verse, <a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+
+  <li>Oxford Lectures on Poetry, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Panegyrics, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+  <li>Paradise Lost, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li>
+
+  <li>Paradise Regained, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+
+  <li>Path of the Rainbow, <a href="#Page_98">98</a></li>
+
+  <li>Paul and Virginia, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+  <li>Peer Gynt, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+  <li>Peloponnesian War, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+  <li>Penguin Island, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+  <li>Père Goriot, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Phaedrus, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pickwick Papers, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pierre and Jean, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+  <li>Piers Plowman, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pilgrim's Progress, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+  <li>Poetic Principle, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+  <li>Poetics, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+  <li>Poetry and Its Varieties, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+  <li>Poetry and Religion, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+  <li>Politics, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+  <li>Poly Olbion, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pompanilla, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+  <li>Pontica, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+  <li>Possessed, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+  <li>Power of Sound, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+
+  <li>Principia, <a href="#Page_40">40</a></li>
+
+  <li>Principles of Psychology, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+  <li>Progress of Poesie, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+  <li>Prolegomena, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+  <li>Prophetic Books, <a href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+
+  <li>Psalms, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+  <li>Psychology of Prophecy, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Qasidas, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Rabbi Ben Ezra, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Raven, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+
+  <li>Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li>
+
+  <li>Renaissance, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Republic, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+  <li>Revivifying of the Sciences of the Faith, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+
+  <li>Revolt of Islam, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+
+  <li><!-- Page 262 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>Richard Feverel, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+  <li>Rigveda, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ring and the Book, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Robinson Crusoe, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+  <li>Romance of the Rose, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+  <li>Rudin, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Sagas, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sanskrit Literature, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+  <li>Scarlet Letter, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+  <li>Science of Poetry, <a href="#Page_233">233</a></li>
+
+  <li>Silas Marner, <a href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sister Carrie, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+
+  <li>Solitaire of Time, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+  <li>Song of the Harper, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li>
+
+  <li>Song of Myself, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+  <li>Songs Before Sunrise, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spanish-American Literature, Studies in, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+  <li>Specimens of English Prose Style, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spirit of Russia, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+  <li>Spoon River Anthology, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+  <li>Strife, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+  <li>Studies in Islamic Poetry, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+  <li>Sunken Bell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+  <li>Symposium, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Táin Bó Cualnge, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tales from Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tales of a Wayside Inn, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+  <li>Télémaque, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tempest, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ten o'Clock Lecture, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Ten Thousand a Year, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tess of the D'Urbervilles, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+  <li>Text Book of Irish Literature, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+
+  <li>Theoria Sacra, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+
+  <li>Thus Spake Zarathustra, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tom Jones, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tragische Motiv, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+  <li>Treasure Island, <a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+
+  <li>Tristram Shandy, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Triumph of Death, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Uncle Tom's Cabin, <a href="#Page_70">70</a></li>
+
+  <li>Upanishads, <a href="#Page_22">22</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Vanity Fair, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+  <li>Vedas, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+
+  <li>Velasquez, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+  <li>Vicar of Wakefield, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>&nbsp;</li>
+
+  <li>Wandering Jew, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+  <li>War and Peace, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+  <li>Weavers, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+  <li>What is Art? <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wild Ass's Skin, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wild Duck, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wilhelm Meister, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></li>
+
+  <li>Wooing of Our Lord, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+  <li>World as Will and Idea, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="notebox">
+<h2><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:</h2>
+
+<p>Page 258 is blank in the original.</p>
+
+<p>The initials A.D. are unspaced in the original. The initials B. C. have
+been changed to B.C. to match.</p>
+
+<p>The following spelling variations occur in the text. The names appear as
+in the original.</p>
+
+<table summary="spelling variants" style="margin-left: 10%;" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" border="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Abu l'Atahiya</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">Abu l' Atihiya</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Aeneid</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">Æneid</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Aelfric</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">Ælfric</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Chekhov</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">Tchekov</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Jehudah HaLevi</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">Jehudah Ha Levi</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleftpad">Mac Guckin de Slane</td>
+  <td class="tdleftpad">MacGuckin de Slane</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">McGuckin de Slane</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The following corrections have been made to the text:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>Page 19: the assumption that all the intellectual[original has
+intellecual]</p>
+
+<p>Page 29: "[quotation mark missing in original]All kinds of
+ecstasy, however differently</p>
+
+<p>Page 40: literature of power in his opinion[original has
+opinon] is permanent</p>
+
+<p>Page 43: restated by the Italian critic Castelvetro[original
+has Castelevetro]</p>
+
+<p>Page 57: Balzac's novel Père[original has Pére] Goriot</p>
+
+<p>Page 65: one in prose of Eloise's[original has Eloises's]</p>
+
+<p>Page 88: under the title <i>Poetry and Its Varieties</i>[original
+has Varities]</p>
+
+<p>Page 95: sown with stars, wherever[original has where-ever
+hyphenated across lines]</p>
+
+<p>Page 97: pre-Socratic philosophers[original has philsophers]
+like Parmenides</p>
+
+<p>Page 108: article on Irish Literature in the
+<i>Britannica</i>[original has Brittanica]</p>
+
+<p>Page 109: says Gosse in his article in the
+<i>Britannica</i>[original has Brittanica]</p>
+
+<p>Page 120: in this care, have time for better
+things."[quotation mark missing in original]</p>
+
+<p>Page 122: <i>New Study of English Poetry</i> by Henry
+Newbolt[original has Newboldt]</p>
+
+<p>Page 130: he is more advanced than[original has that] we are</p>
+
+<p>Page 136: others were also absorbed as[original has a] to the
+difference</p>
+
+<p>Page 138: preface to his Mademoiselle[original has
+Madamoiselle] de Maupin</p>
+
+<p>Page 146: former is not wholly intuitive[original has
+intuitve]</p>
+
+<p>Page 168: Shelley, Nietzsche[original has Nietsche], and
+Butler</p>
+
+<p>Page 178: in the sense of recording his own
+individuality[original has individualty]</p>
+
+<p>Page 185: See his essay on Casanova[original has Cananova] in
+<i>Affirmations</i></p>
+
+<p>Page 185: Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe[original has
+Gothe] and Ibsen</p>
+
+<p>Page 186: Wilkinson did not have to seek rhymes[original has
+ryhmes]</p>
+
+<p>Page 209: is[original has ii] attributed to Ibn Alaamidi</p>
+
+<p>Page 238: theories of aesthetic[original has esthetic] emotion</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: Abu Ali[original has ali] al Qali, 222</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: Baqui,[comma missing in original] 211, 214</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: Bossuet[original has Bossnet], 87, 228</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: Castelvetro[original has Castelevetro], 43, 179</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: Coleridge, S. T., 12, 47, 48, 49, 77, 78, 121,[comma
+missing in original] 173</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: Croce, 15, 28, 81, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149,
+150[original has 50], 239</p>
+
+<p>Page 254: Elliot[original has Elliott], Ebenezer, 88</p>
+
+<p>Page 254: Erasmus,[comma missing in original] 43</p>
+
+<p>Page 255: Ibn Khallikan[original has Khallikans], 209</p>
+
+<p>Page 255: Imru'ul[original has Imru 'ul] Qays, 206, 215,
+217[original has 218]</p>
+
+<p>Page 255: Khalil,[comma missing in original] Ahmad, 221</p>
+
+<p>Page 255: Neilson, William[original has Willian] A., 33</p>
+
+<p>Page 255: Newbolt[original has Newboldt], Henry, 171</p>
+
+<p>Page 255: Nidhami[original has Nidham] I Arudi, 204</p>
+
+<p>Page 256: Nietzsche, 28, 30, 53, 81, 124, 154, 163,
+168[original has 166], 171, 181, 189, 242</p>
+
+<p>Page 256: Senancour[original has Sénancour], 49</p>
+
+<p>Page 257: Tha'alibi[original has Tha 'alibi], 223</p>
+
+<p>Page 257: Untermeyer[original has Untermyer], Louis, 118, 158</p>
+
+<p>Page 257: Yeats, William Butler, 71, 165[original has
+extraneous comma]</p>
+
+<p>Page 259: Areopagitica[original has Aeropagitica], 122, 178</p>
+
+<p>Page 260: Eugénie[original has Eugéne] Grandet, 59</p>
+
+<p>Page 260: History of English Poetry,[comma missing in
+original] 89</p>
+
+<p>Page 260: Julius Cæsar[original has Caesar], 56</p>
+
+<p>Page 260: Laocoon[original has Laocoön], 62</p>
+
+<p>Page 260: Les Misérables[original has Miserables], 58</p>
+
+<p>Page 261: Mademoiselle[original has Madamoiselle] de Maupin,
+138</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sludge, "the Medium,"[original has quotation marks around the entire
+title] 125</p>
+
+<p>Page 261: Nibelungen[original has Niebelungen] Lied, 102, 154</p>
+
+<p>Page 262: Télémaque[original has Télemaque], 86</p>
+
+<p>Page 263: Peloponnesian[original has Peloponessian] War, 53,
+137</p>
+
+<p>[52:A] Wilhelm[original has Wilhem] A. Ambros</p>
+
+<p>[193:A] <i>The Function of the Poet.</i>[original has extraneous
+quotation mark]</p></div>
+
+<p>The index entry for Mark Twain was alphabetized under "Mark". Entry has
+been moved to its proper place.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<table summary="Page number corrections made in Index" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" border="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdctrbot">Index Entry</td>
+  <td class="tdcenter">Incorrect<br />
+      page<br />
+      references</td>
+  <td class="tdcenter">Correct<br />
+      page<br />
+      references</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Aristotle</td>
+  <td class="tdright">193, 221</td>
+  <td class="tdright">191, 220</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Arnold, Matthew</td>
+  <td class="tdright">117</td>
+  <td class="tdright">118</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Bacon, Francis</td>
+  <td class="tdright">52</td>
+  <td class="tdright">&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Burke, Edmund</td>
+  <td class="tdright">120</td>
+  <td class="tdright">121</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Butcher, S. H.</td>
+  <td class="tdright">159</td>
+  <td class="tdright">160</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Cicero</td>
+  <td class="tdright">119</td>
+  <td class="tdright">120</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">De Quincey, Thomas</td>
+  <td class="tdright">87</td>
+  <td class="tdright">88</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Eaton, Walter P.</td>
+  <td class="tdright">115</td>
+  <td class="tdright">116</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Hegel</td>
+  <td class="tdright">121</td>
+  <td class="tdright">122</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Henley, Walter</td>
+  <td class="tdright">117</td>
+  <td class="tdright">118</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Homer</td>
+  <td class="tdright">93</td>
+  <td class="tdright">96</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Ibsen, Henrik</td>
+  <td class="tdright">48</td>
+  <td class="tdright">49</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Keats, John</td>
+  <td class="tdright">247</td>
+  <td class="tdright">&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Milton, John</td>
+  <td class="tdright">49, 236</td>
+  <td class="tdright">48, 238</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Morley, John</td>
+  <td class="tdright">168</td>
+  <td class="tdright">178</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Moore, Thomas</td>
+  <td class="tdright">49</td>
+  <td class="tdright">48</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Nicholson, D. H. S.</td>
+  <td class="tdright">218</td>
+  <td class="tdright">217</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Nietzsche</td>
+  <td class="tdright">166</td>
+  <td class="tdright">168</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Plato</td>
+  <td class="tdright" style="padding-left: 2em;">49, 52, 132</td>
+  <td class="tdright" style="padding-left: 2em;">48, &mdash;, 133</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Pope, Alexander</td>
+  <td class="tdright">7</td>
+  <td class="tdright">75</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Saintsbury, George</td>
+  <td class="tdright">221</td>
+  <td class="tdright">220</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Schofield, W. H.</td>
+  <td class="tdright">212</td>
+  <td class="tdright">214</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Shelley, P. B.</td>
+  <td class="tdright">29</td>
+  <td class="tdright">&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Spenser, Edmund</td>
+  <td class="tdright">236</td>
+  <td class="tdright">235</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Swinburne, A. C.</td>
+  <td class="tdright">29</td>
+  <td class="tdright">23</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Wordsworth, William</td>
+  <td class="tdright">29, 30</td>
+  <td class="tdright">&mdash;, 31</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Wulfstan</td>
+  <td class="tdright">107, 108</td>
+  <td class="tdright">108, 109</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Beowulf</td>
+  <td class="tdright">108</td>
+  <td class="tdright">109</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Birth of Tragedy</td>
+  <td class="tdright">29</td>
+  <td class="tdright">30</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Brand</td>
+  <td class="tdright">60</td>
+  <td class="tdright">59</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Defense of Poetry</td>
+  <td class="tdright">73</td>
+  <td class="tdright">74</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Master Builder</td>
+  <td class="tdright">59</td>
+  <td class="tdright">58</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Poetics</td>
+  <td class="tdright">221</td>
+  <td class="tdright">220</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">Wild Duck</td>
+  <td class="tdright">59</td>
+  <td class="tdright">58</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Literature of Ecstasy
+
+Author: Albert Mordell
+
+Release Date: February 14, 2011 [EBook #35279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 AEschylus 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 AEschylus 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 a 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, AEschylus 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 AEschylus was the great example of unconscious art
+among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of
+poetry.
+
+AEschylus'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 AEschylus'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 Guerin 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 Caesar_ is found in every detail in
+Plutarch's Lives of Caesar, 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 Caesar_
+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 _Pere 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 Debacle_? 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
+Miserables_ 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 _Eugenie Grandet_ is surely poetry.
+Balzac regarded his stories _Louis Lambert_, _Seraphita_ 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 Merimee 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 personae_. 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.
+
+Fenelon 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
+Fenelon wanted to abolish verse altogether in French poetry. Fenelon
+also wrote a novel in prose poetry in 1699, _Telemaque_. 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 Prevost in
+_Manon Lescaut_, by Rousseau and especially by Chateaubriand in _Atala_,
+_The Genius of Christianity_ and _The Martyrs_. Unfortunately, Fenelon
+insisted in introducing the cliches 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 Veron, the great French critic, author of a valuable work on
+_AEsthetics_ (fortunately translated into English), also takes a broad
+conception of the term poetry. He says that it would be absurd to deny
+Moliere'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 role 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 role 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 AEschylus 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 cliches of verse in prose, but
+to-day we object to all cliches.
+
+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.
+
+Musaeus, 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. Koenig 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 Koenig 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 Koenig, 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 Mueller 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 _Tain Bo
+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 _Tain Bo 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. AElfric, 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 _AEneid_,
+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 _AEneid_, 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 aesthetic criticism, take a similar
+view point.
+
+[119:A] For a history of French free verse see _Mercure De France_,
+March 15, 1921. Premiers Poetes Du Vers Libre by Edouard 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 Bjoernson 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, Moliere 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. AEschylus 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).
+
+Fenelon 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 AEschylus 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, Moliere, 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 _Eugenie 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, cliches 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 cliches 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 cliches 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 naive 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 naivete 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. Noeldeke 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 Caesar, 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, Moliere, 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 Moliere'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
+
+     AElfric, 108, 114
+
+     AEschylus, 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
+
+     Fenelon, 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
+
+     Guerin, 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 a, 20
+
+     Khalil, Ahmad, 221
+
+     Khansa, 214
+
+     Kingsley, Charles, 185
+
+     Kipling, Rudyard, 50, 71
+
+     Koenig, 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
+
+     Moliere, 87, 154, 167
+
+     Morley, John, 178
+
+     Moore, George, 92
+
+     Moore, Thomas, 48, 71, 213
+
+     Moulton, R. G., 103
+
+     Mueller, 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
+
+     Prevost, 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
+
+     Veron, 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
+
+     AEneid, 53, 54, 57, 111
+
+     AEsthetics, 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
+
+     Eugenie 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 Caesar, 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 Debacle, 57
+
+     Leaves of Grass, 65, 80, 124, 159, 178
+
+     Lectures on Art, 130
+
+     Lectures on Sacred Poetry of Hebrews, 102
+
+     Les Martyrs, 58
+
+     Les Miserables, 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
+
+     Pere 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
+
+
+     Tain Bo Cualnge, 108
+
+     Tales from Shakespeare, 69
+
+     Tales of a Wayside Inn, 50
+
+     Telemaque, 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               AElfric
+     Aeneid                AEneid
+     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 Pere[original has Pere] 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 Senancour], 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: Eugenie[original has Eugene] Grandet, 59
+
+     Page 260: History of English Poetry,[comma missing in
+     original] 89
+
+     Page 260: Julius Caesar[original has Caesar], 56
+
+     Page 260: Laocoon[original has Laocooen], 62
+
+     Page 260: Les Miserables[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: Telemaque[original has Telemaque], 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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell
+
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