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_.