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.