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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.