CONCLUSION
I have not tried to present a theory of poetry, so much as to point out
certain features of a particular kind of writing which I have called the
literature of ecstasy. It has developed that I really used the word
ecstasy in the same sense that the other critics have employed the terms
unconscious, imagination, poetry. I think I have shown that the
literature of ecstasy even when in prose is synonymous with poetry as
understood by Shakespeare when he used "frenzy" and "things unknown" in
reference to the poet. I have also, I hope, pointed out that an ecstatic
presentation of intellectual and moral ideas results often in a great
poetic product.
I do not purpose to teach any one how to write poetry or the literature
of ecstasy. If my views have any value, it lies in helping us recognize
the literature of ecstasy. It is in aiding us to eliminate much trivial,
flimsy, unecstatic free verse and regular verse from the sphere of
poetry. It lies in inducing us to include much emotional prose as
poetry. Since men, however, entertain so many diverse views on life,
morals, and social justice, it can never be possible for critics to
agree as to which literature of ecstasy is the best, for its value is
affected by the question as to the truth of the ideals therein
maintained. Every one thinks that he can determine what are the merits
of a book. Those who have mastered the rules of prosody are certain that
they can judge the qualities of poetry. But only those critics can
recognize great poetry whose moral, intellectual and aesthetic faculties
are well balanced. It is true that the master of rules of prosody can
tell whether a verse poem follows the rules, he can perceive whether the
rhymes are false, whether the rhythm is regular, even whether the
figures are not far fetched and whether the diction is good; and a
commonplace mind may recognize the ordinary literature of ecstasy. But
the chief obstacle to recognizing poetry is that most people derive
their views as to what poetry is from rules formulated from the writings
of older poets. If the great poets of the world had never used a
patterned form, there would have been no text books welding poetry and
versification together. A great poet not only creates his own forms but
displays individuality in the choice of views and ideas. When he becomes
recognized, new rules are formulated from his work, and are even used as
a fetter to bind later poets and critics.
Anthologists have often been of great value in choosing for us the
literature of ecstasy as written by so-called minor and popular poets
who have taken no position in the history of the world's literature. A
poet, however, is not great because he has succeeded in producing a few
pieces that belong truly to the literature of ecstasy. Nor does a poet
who once held a high place in the list of poets and has subsequently
lost it by the vicissitudes of taste or circumstances or by the change
in ideas, cease being a poet to us if he has written poems that belong
to the literature of ecstasy. No one, for example, to-day regards Jean
Ingelow as a great poet, but the anthologists who select her _When
Sparrows Build_ or _High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_, justly
accept these poems as poetry. It will astonish many people who will take
the trouble to go through the work of some so-called minor poets, say
Philip Bourke Marston, to find gems here and there that properly are
part of the literature of ecstasy.
My theory, I hope, also helps us to determine when certain branches of
literature are poetry and when they are not. For example, there has
always been a dispute as to whether oratory, comedy and satire are
really poetry. There have been critics who would not admit that these
species of writing are properly poetry, even in verse; on the other
hand, other critics have asserted that they are poetry.
When, if ever, is oratory poetry? Whenever ecstasy and not rhetoric
characterizes it, when universal themes of permanent interest and not
arguments on a temporal political or economic question are its
substance, then oratory is poetry. A plea for adherence to the
principles of a political party, a speech about an economic problem, is
not as a rule poetry. But why are some of Moses's speeches and the
orations of the prophets poetry? Why is Mark Antony's verse funeral
oration on Cæsar, poetry? Surely not because of the verse? Why are some
of Bossuet's funeral orations, or Thucydides's speech in prose, poetry?
All of these orations belong to the domain of the literature of ecstasy,
and hence are poetry.
Nevertheless, oratory is usually hollow and bombastic. The orator makes
his appeal to men chiefly by rhetorical expression of commonplaces.
Eloquence and artifice count here more than thought or art. The less
intellect the audience has the better does the orator succeed. Hazlitt
saw the limitations of oratory. It is the unthinking man who is appealed
to by theatrical effects. The orator must be commonplace, he cannot
deliver profound views. Some of the great orations of the world's
literature that are poetry are those that were never really delivered
but composed by the historians, like the emotional speeches in
Thucydides and Tacitus. You can find poems in orations by Demosthenes
and Cicero also, but Fourth of July orations are seldom poetry. Nor is
the _Congressional Record_ an anthology of poetic masterpieces. In a
footnote in his book in aesthetics, _The Critique of Judgment_, Kant has
ably elucidated the situation.
I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given me a pure
gratification; whilst the reading of the best discourse,
whether of a Roman orator or of a modern parliamentary speaker
or of a preacher, has always been mingled with an unpleasant
feeling of disapprobation, of a treacherous art, which means
to move me in important matters like machines to a judgment
that must lose all weight for them on quiet reflection.
Readiness and accuracy in speaking (which taken together
constitute rhetoric) belong to beautiful art; but the art of
the orator, the art of availing one's self of the weaknesses
of men for one's own design (whether these be well meant or
even actually good, does not matter) is worthy of no respect.
We must not confuse eloquence with poetry, though there are numerous
prose pieces which though eloquent are yet poetry. Mere wordiness and
grandiloquence may sound like ecstasy yet lack that quality.
What can be said for famous passages like Burke's sympathetic outburst
for Marie Antoinette? I see no reason why we should not call this
poetry, though it is not poetry of a high order. The objection to it is
that the orator's emotion is misdirected; he wastes sympathy on a dead
queen who was at the head of a pernicious system, and ignores the
miseries of the thousands of poor Frenchmen. To that extent our
appreciation of it is limited. For even though Burke was right when he
lamented that the age of chivalry was gone, he did not state that the
time of exploitation of man was over, and the question of exploitation
is probably more important than that of chivalry.
There is affinity of oratory then to poetry, as it is calculated to
arouse the emotions of the audience. But the political oration is
usually not poetry, as it has a tendency to the ephemeral. No one will
deny, however, that there is genuine prose poetry in orations by
Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, Webster and Sumner.
What is true of the oration, is also true of the sermon. Sermons like
those of Jeremy Taylor and Sterne contain poetry; they have ecstasy.
There has also been considerable confusion as to how much poetry exists
in witty and humorous writings and in comedy. In other words, the
connection between poetry and tears is well established, but that
between poetry and laughter is vague. We may say that most of the
so-called humorous verse is not poetry at all, for the merely funny does
not merit the term poetry. Yet there is poetry in the humorous writings
of men like Mark Twain and O. Henry, on account of the ecstatic effect
upon the reader. In reading them one occasionally feels impelled to
tears, while moved to laughter. A mere witticism is not poetry, but it
may have certain qualities, such as a bit of wisdom conveying ecstasy,
which makes it poetry. The wit of Heine and Voltaire often belongs to
this class. When laughter is bound up with a profound idea or emotion,
the work expressing the laugh becomes poetry. However, laughter that
springs from seeing horse-play or the mere ludicrous, is not poetry. But
the portrayals of Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Parson Adams are poems.
Meredith has presented the case of the comic spirit better than any one
else. He says: "The comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest song
fully poetic," and he shows how this spirit enters the work of
Menander, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Terence, Rabelais, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, the Restoration Comedians, Pope, Molière, Fielding, Smollett.
These men were all poets; that is, they gave us poems here and there in
their work. Meredith might have added Dickens's and his own work among
comic works that contain poetry. The writers of comedy deal with
feelings and emotions; most of them were men of intellect and deep
feeling.
In a passage that is itself a poem, Meredith describes the Comic spirit,
which he recognized as allied to poetry. And this in part is his
delineation of it:
It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of the faun
lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle
wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped
like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that
flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The
laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the
smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental
richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one
of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and
having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any
fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract
it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and
wherever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected,
pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic,
fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or
hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into
vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning
shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at
variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but
perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another;
whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in
humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the
bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast
an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
Closely akin to the comic genius is that of satire. Again satire is not
poetry, except when presenting ideas and evoking ecstasy. There used to
be a distinct form of verse poetry called the satire, but there is often
more or less satire in the works of novelists, prose dramatists and
essayists. We have as remnants of great ancient satire, poems by Horace
and Juvenal, tales by Apuleius and Petronius and the prose dialogues of
Lucian.
The great masters of satire in modern times have done their work in
prose and much of this is poetry. We think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire,
Anatole France and Samuel Butler. There is plenty of poetry in the
_Penguin Island_ and _Erewhon_, for example. Modern satire is prone to
be more poetical than the ancient verse satire, being free from
coarseness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Satire is not mere
ranting and cursing, but a keen and amusing way of showing forth human
follies. You find it in writers as different as Thackeray and Bernard
Shaw. Some of the satire in Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_ is
excellent poetry.
The highest form of satire in all the prose writers is poetry, as much
so as if put in the heroic couplets of Pope or the ottava rima of
Byron's _Vision of Last Judgment_.
Satire is poetry when it is universal. Much of the old Arabic poetry was
satire and yet genuine poetry. Pope's satires are poetry. Lafcadio Hearn
has said a few words on the subject that deserve quoting:
It is not because the satires (of Pope) were true pictures or
caricatures of any living person in particular, but because
they were true pictures of general types of human weakness
which have always existed, which exist to-day and which will
exist to-morrow. (_Life and Literature_, p. 286.)
My theory of poetry as ecstasy also seeks to do away with the tendency
of criticism to identify poetry with the figure of speech or trope. Even
when it has lacked the quality which fills the reader with ecstasy, the
trope has been called poetry just because it was a trope. Imagery has
been confused with imagination, and many critics regard that as poetry
which makes the most frequent use of unusual figures of speech. As a
result, some of the figures of speech in poetry to-day are more
artificial even than those found in Oriental poetry. But no one can take
issue with the beautiful figures such as appear in the _Bible_ and in
Dante, in Shelley and Keats, of which the essence is a beautiful flight
of the imagination that fills us with ecstasy. But when freakish tropes
take the place of poetry then we ought to rebel. We like the figure of
speech introduced occasionally and naturally, and we don't want the
figure substituted for ideas and emotions.
One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on _The Science of
Poetry_, to identify poetry with the figure of speech. In spite of its
eccentricities, and its attempt at creation of new terms like
tro-tempotentry, the author recognizes that the critics confuse poetry
with metre, and that a prose writer like Robert Ingersoll was a poet.
Any one who had read Ingersoll's prose poems, and some of his orations
like the one on _Liberty in Literature_, will recognize this. The
mistake that Maxim makes is to call poetry defiantly a science, and then
to define it as an art in which figures of speech count most. To create
figures of speech is an art. Maxim's definition of poetry is "The
expression of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by artistic trope."
This definition covers much of ancient poetry, when man constantly used
tropes or figures of speech. It is also true that a vast body of the
world's poetry is full of tropes like metaphors and similes. In fact
even our free verse is full of them. But the figure of speech is only
one of the features that are often present in poetry, and we may and do
have the best poetry without it. Its frequent use has become a nuisance;
it often atones for lack of ideas, it is often a sign of insincerity in
the poet, and it occasionally bespeaks a raving imagination. The day of
tropes in poetry is, in spite of the Imagists, on the decline. You find
none of them in prose plays and very few in prose fiction. The trope was
an early adornment of poetry as rhythm was. It is not the essence of
poetry, though it often beautifies poetry.
The critics do not accept the book of Maxim's as a true statement of the
aims of poetry, but curiously enough they have always followed the views
in his book. They have confused tropes, or figures of speech, or imagery
with imagination. In the past the older critics fell into this error and
when they spoke of imagination they were really expatiating on imagery.
One of the best English critics on poetry, Leigh Hunt, sinned in this
direction. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge he made much of the distinction
between imagination and fancy. Wordsworth arranged his poems in an
edition of his works according to this distinction. Leigh Hunt got up an
anthology called _Imagination and Fancy_, in which he italicized the
imaginative and the fanciful passages, and to which he prefixed his
famous essay on "What is Poetry?" Here he gave his definitions of and
distinctions between imagination and fancy. Half the essay is devoted
really to identifying them with figures of speech. The only difference
between the two faculties was that fancy was a lighter play of the
imagination, a distinction really utterly trivial. His work was needed
at a time when the influence of Pope still ruled, and people could not
appreciate the rich figures in Shelley and Keats. Pater called attention
to the real distinction between imagination and fancy which is "between
higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of his
work, and in his concentration of himself upon his work." For all
purposes, however, fancy may be included under imagination. Imagery is
not always imaginative, for many figures of speech have no ecstatic
quality.
The English poets who were regarded as most gifted with the faculty of
imagination under the old definition were Milton and Spenser, chiefly
for their bold use of supernatural imagery. Homer and Dante were always
noted for their beautiful and effective similes, and they were also the
poets of the imagination _par excellence_. The confusion of imagery with
imagination resulted in giving figures of speech a significance in
determining the nature of poetry that it did not merit. Puttenham's book
in the Elizabethan Age, _The Arte of English Poesie_, was half employed
with ornament or various figures. Oriental poetry was especially
figurative; all Oriental books on rhetoric deal extensively with figures
of speech. In short it was taken for granted by all critics that poetry
was imagery or figures of speech, because poetry was a product of the
imagination, and imagination was confused with imagery. It is true that
it is the function of the imagination to compare, but that does not mean
that it is nothing more than metaphor or simile. The tropes were more
natural to early man who personified inanimate things and always saw
resemblances to draw from in nature. To-day the novelist or dramatist
introduces his metaphor or simile occasionally or naturally, as an
ornamental touch to convey his meaning better. Many modern versifiers
identify poetry with ornament and figures, and it is impossible for
them to write a poem without a succession of figures. The trope, like
the rhythm, is supposed to be poetry. Hunt's essay defines poetry as
imaginative passion in versification. He can conceive of no passion
being poetry unless presented in metre with figures of speech. His essay
is divided into two parts, the one dealing with imagination, or rather
imagery, the other with versification. Great critic that he was, he gave
us one of the weakest definitions of poetry we have.
Any one who has read _Tom Jones_ receives the impression that the long
similes Fielding introduced in the Homeric manner were written half in
jest of Homer, his master.
Yet the similes of the epic poets are poetry because they belong to the
literature of ecstasy. If the trope arouses our emotions it is poetry
not because it is an ornament but because it touches our unconscious
souls. How many tropes do you find in the prose plays of Ibsen or the
novels of Balzac? The ecstasy manages to get conveyed without their use.
It was the writers of the Romantic School who made the figure of speech
so prominent. These writers who sought that poetry become natural, did
much to make it artificial. The reason that such great poets as Keats
and Shelley are caviare to the public is that they are rich in tropes.
The eighteenth century poets were said to be destitute of imagination
chiefly because they did not make frequent use of the metaphor. The
sport of critics was to make fun of the peculiar figures of earlier
poets. We recall Johnson's dissecting (often with justice) of Cowley's
poems. The eighteenth century was right in one respect; in their extreme
unimaginativeness, they also avoided distorted imagery. Many nineteenth
century poets made it a rule never to call a thing by its proper name,
but by some epithet containing a metaphor. The practice is still
persisted in by many of our poets, and epithet-making is one of the
functions of many poets. Even prose writers like Carlyle were especially
noted for it, but his epithets were often truly poetry.
I do not think that poetry then should be exclusively identified with
tropes. Take a much-praised, in my opinion over-praised sonnet of Keats,
_On Reading Chapman's Homer_. The whole idea of this poem is in the
comparing his first discovery of Homer to the feelings of the man who
discovers a new planet, and to those of the discoverer of the Pacific
Ocean. (He confused Cortes with Balboa, but that is no matter.) Keats
conveys to us his idea by two similes. But can this poem compare with
such other sonnets of his where he lays bare his inmost emotions, where
the figures of speech are not the poems as here, but merely come in
incidentally; where he has a profound idea, emerging as the result of a
great passion?
A trope then is poetry only when arousing ecstasy; such poetry is not of
the highest order.
For many centuries also, that alone was considered imaginative
literature which introduced the supernatural or the allegory. Every
student is aware how much these two elements figure in medieval poetry.
All recipes for writing poems in those days contained provisions about
the use of the supernatural and allegory. It did not dawn on critics
that these could be dispensed with in a great poetical work. Cervantes
laughed away the use of the supernatural, while the eighteenth century
realistic novel did away with the use of allegory as a means of telling
a story. Nothing better than Poe's remarks has been said against the
allegory as a form of literary expression. Yet the artificial
supernatural agents of Ariosto and the bloodless types in the _Faerie
Queene_ were held to be the truest creations of imagination. The vicious
practices of great geniuses, often due to the examples of their age,
are instrumental in creating misunderstanding as to what poetry is, on
account of the inability of critics to praise them for their real
beauties. Often the passages that have been praised in Homer, Dante,
Virgil, Milton, Spenser, Ariosto, are not the ones where the ecstasy was
finest, but those where the "imaginative" powers of the poet were
thought to be the best seen, in the supernatural and allegorical
portions. Yet who can doubt that the greatness of Milton is more
apparent when he talks of his blindness than when he gives us the
description of Lucifer with the many artificial figures? Who prefers the
absurd descriptions of the monsters in Dante's _Inferno_ to the passages
where he touches on his own sorrows?
Another misapprehension about the nature of poetry lies in identifying
poetry with beauty. Poetry does not necessarily deal with the conception
of beauty as understood by the public or by the aestheticians, though
the describing of beautiful objects and scenes is often one of its most
important themes. Poetry is very little connected with the science of
aesthetics, for you may know all about the nature and laws of beauty,
the effect of beauty upon the nature of man, the cause of his love for
beauty, and yet you may not be able to make a great poem. Croce is as
much mistaken as the old aestheticians when he assumes one must study
the science of aesthetics to appreciate poetry.
Pater dealt a death blow to the theory that aesthetic, or the science of
abstract beauty, helps us to appreciate poetry. The critic who judges a
poem need know nothing about abstract beauty, or theories of aesthetic
emotion. There is little of value to be given us by the aesthetic
treatises to appreciate a play of Shakespeare or Ibsen or a novel of
Balzac or Dickens. Even poets like Goethe, Schiller and Lessing became
absorbed in aesthetical problems, but their novels, poems and plays were
written by putting out of mind metaphysical disquisitions. How are you
enabled to appreciate a poem by knowing Kant's erroneous theory that the
appreciation of beauty is impersonal and disinterested?
Pater in his _Renaissance_ took the position that poetry has a personal
message for us, an effect on us individually. We cannot learn this
effect by following metaphysical discourses on the relation of beauty to
truth or experience. In his _Appreciations_ in the essay on "Style"
Pater identifies beauty with expression, just as Croce did after him,
and Lessing and Winckelmann before him. "All beauty," wrote Pater, "is
in the long run only _fullness_ of truth, or what we call expression,
the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within." Here we have
Croce's conception of beauty, the word defined as it is being understood
to-day. It is in this sense only, the sense of the most adequate
expression of emotion, that the word beauty is the same as poetry, or
literature of ecstasy.
Formerly treatises were written about curved lines, elegant diction,
etc., on the theory that beauty was the subject of art. But a peasant's
description in slang of his emotions, an author's description of a
corpse that is rotting, or of a woman giving birth to a child, or of a
man going mad, or of a hideous degenerate crime, are also beautiful, for
since expression is beauty, the narration or description of the ugly is
a work of art. The word beauty in its popular sense no longer has
aesthetic significance. Even when it was really believed that art dealt
with beautiful objects and deeds, the aesthetician had to admit that
there was nothing beautiful in tragedies. Nor does beauty mean elegant
expression. Many stories and poems in slang and dialect belong to the
literature of beauty. The expression of emotions, the delineation of
ideas, the drawing of characters is beauty, if effectively done. The
reader need not have what the old aestheticians called "taste"; he must
only respond sympathetically to the ecstasy of the author.
I have made no attempt to set confines to poetry, for no two people will
ever agree as to whether a literary performance has sufficient ecstasy
or whether the ecstasy is of a high strain to entitle it to be called
poetry, but I believe all will agree that ecstasy is necessary.
I believe, however, that many authoritative works and essays on Poetry,
from Aristotle to our own day, are obsolete. I shall mention only
Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ which
has furnished modern critics with many of their ideas. The article is
beyond question one of the most interesting produced in England in many
years. Watts-Dunton has a true conception of poetry when he calls it the
product of inspiration or concrete and artistic expression of the human
mind in emotional language. He believes, however, versification is
necessary to all poetry. He also makes too much of the divisions of
poetry into the various orders, like epic, lyric, drama, an artificial
division adopted by all critics from Aristotle. Watts-Dunton's divisions
of poets into those with an absolute or personal vision and those with a
relative vision, is arbitrary and confused. All poets are personal, and
even when they depict other people's emotions objectively, the product
is personal because touched with the creator's personality. He is also
too much under the influence of Hegel's _Aesthetics_.
Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of impassioned prose or its
right to be called poetry. He once said to William Michael Rossetti
that the latter's reputation as a critic would soon vanish because of
his admiration for Whitman, whom he himself detested. He is blamed with
having done much to quench the poetic fire of Swinburne's muse, for
whose changed attitude towards Whitman he also was responsible. He had
no sympathy with the poetry that had a social message and he did not
understand its effect as a catharsis. Watts-Dunton cannot remain our
leading authority on poetry. His essay belongs to the extinct class of
_Ars Poetica_, with Boileau and Opitz.
Ecstasy is then the substance of poetry, and there are all kinds of
ecstasy, from a very exalted to a primitive order. It includes the
scientist's or philosopher's passion for knowledge, the idealist's
devotion to a cause. It comprehends the warrior's madness for battle,
the patriot's ardor to die for his country, and man's submission to his
God. Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved by reading a great
work of art. It sweeps every one who is in the throes of ambition. Those
who enjoy nature, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy.
Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or rejoicing in the
emergence of dear ones from illness or danger, those who take pride in
watching their children grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of
friendship, are all in ecstasy.
Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better things, every one
who fulminates against ugliness and wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are
you in a state of rapture because your love is returned, or in one of
despair, because it is denied?--you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding
over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of
grief?--you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a
bad sense. The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant
emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.
The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion with God, the lunatic
who thinks demons are prodding him, the spiritualist who imagines he
talks to his dead son, the child who is in communication with animals
and supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of ecstasy.
It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of ecstasy to
choose, what attitude to take towards it and in what words and form to
convey it.
The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware of the fact. For
the great bulk of the poetry read by the people is the prose fiction
that they find exciting and stimulating. This fiction is usually of a
very low order. Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple
and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situations in novels,
in the best passages of short stories. Prose poetry is the most
democratic and natural poetry, at least in form, and you can rely on the
public to appreciate some of it.
The poetry in Dickens is democratic poetry. The drawing of such
characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe Gargery, wherein he shows the
noble virtues residing in common people, is poetry that the public can
appreciate.
Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for when it deals with
ideas beyond the people, such as you find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it
does not succeed in evoking the intended response and sympathy from the
public, which rejects such ideas.
So when we hear people say that they do not care for poetry we see that
they mean they have an aversion to verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm.
But they will weep as they read of the death of Little Nell and be
moved by the sorrows of Anna Karenina, and be stirred by the tragedy of
_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. Like the gentleman in Molière's play who
spoke prose all his life without knowing it, these readers are fond of
poetry without being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature
appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is touched by the
ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or beautiful prose literature.
Here the poetic is divested of metaphors and rhythm and trappings and
verbal tricks; here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by
affectation.
You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in Burke's _Letter to a
Noble Lord_, where the great orator, desolate because of the loss of his
son and embittered by criticism for accepting a pension, bares the state
of his soul.
The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old
oaks which the late hurricane has scattered upon me. I am
stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie
prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet
my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive
myself if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse
wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. . . .
I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded
me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as
posterity are in the place of ancestors.
You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in his _Confessions_
his feelings as he lay on his mattress grave, no less than when you
peruse his love woes in verse.
What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in
the choicest wines and drunk from golden goblets, when I,
myself, severed from all that makes life pleasant may only
wet my lips with an insipid emotion? What does it avail me
that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with
laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged
nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my
actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of
Shiraz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two
thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the
dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell,
unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins.
When you read Hardy's _Return of the Native_ and reach the part where
Yeobright reproaches his wife Eustacia for causing the death of his
mother by closing the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover,
you are in the midst of poetry.
Call her to mind--think of her--what goodness there was in
her: it showed in every line of her face! . . . O! couldn't
you see what was best for you, but you must bring a curse upon
me, and agony and death upon her, by doing that cruel deed!
. . . Eustacia, didn't any tender thought of your own mother
lead you to think of being gentle to mine at such a time of
weariness? Did not one grain of pity _enter_ your heart as she
turned away?
If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following
passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume _Exotics
and Retrospectives_, you delight in poetry.
And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature
that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would
seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical
emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.
Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have
you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself
exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of
fire?--never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting,
iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable
touch?--never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor
of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering of its
dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly
soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a
hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like
a ghost,--to scream around the peaks with it,--to sweep the
face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the
gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers,
have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion,--no
longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that
mighty shout?
I should like to go on quoting passages from other books to show the
reader that if he likes them he is emphatically a lover of poetry. I
might have given one of the great prose poems in Nietzsche's _Thus Spake
Zarathustra_ or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's novel
_Salammbo_. I might have presented for the edification of the "hater" of
poetry the renowned description of the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay
on Leonardo da Vinci in _The Renaissance_. I could have added Carlyle's
reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from _Sartor Resartus_,
Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in _The Florentine Nights_,
George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his
book on _Shakespeare_, Dickens' description of the tower in _Chimes_, or
Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the _Wild Ass's Skin_.
That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any profound idea is
ecstatically or passionately stated. That is poetry where man gives
utterance to any sorrow or desolation, or where he shouts out his
gladness because he finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks
of the pains or thrills of love; when he shows compassion for the
miseries of his fellow-men. You find poetry wherever man is depicted in
a spirit of self-sacrifice for an idea or a person he loves; or where he
is shown pursuing an ideal or ambition. Heroism is poetry; philanthropy
is poetry; self-development is poetry. Pictures of striking scenes;
portrayals of interesting events; conflicts between duties; delineations
of tragic situations; tolerance for human frailties; anger at injustice,
admonition for follies, chidings or outbursts against stupidity; cries
of helplessness; all of these in artistic form become poems. Accounts of
cruelty, barbarism, madness, horror, wicked deeds or abnormal or
supernormal conduct, if well described become poetical, for poetry need
not point a conventional moral. Hence villainy, immorality, crime, may
be so artistically pictured that our emotions are worked upon and though
our moral sense is shocked we are held spellbound in witnessing these
malign forces in nature.
I plead then that ecstasy, and not rhythm, should characterize much of
our literature; and I seek to show that poetry is not a department of
literature but a spirit that permeates the best writing even in prose.
Our entire attitude in estimating what is poetry will be changed, for
the world's emotional prose literature will be taken into its domain.
And the importance of rhythm in making verse will be a thing of the past
and genuine emotion will receive its right name.
I also hope that a higher valuation will be given to literature which
shows an interest in the working classes and seeks social justice. I do
not, however, assert that the literature of pure rational propaganda
would become poetry, or that the writings of men who attach themselves
to certain political or economical theories would be great by virtue of
the adherence to a particular theory. But there is a tendency to decry a
writer when he shows an interest in social problems and tells the world
that something is rotten in Denmark.
There are occasionally great literary products that are to be found
often in radical and obscure papers that belong to the literature of the
ecstasy of social justice. These would have never been accepted by the
academic or capitalistic bourgeois press, any more than would some of
the older prophecies have been accepted had they been submitted as
unrequested contributions to our magazine editors. Many of those
compositions depend for literary value on universal feeling, and make no
appeal to party feeling or economical theory, and they can be
appreciated by people who seek poetry.
The reader will observe then that not all species of ecstasy belong to
the high order of literature. But the skill of the artist may elevate
the lower order of ecstasy to that of a higher plane, and the
amateurishness of the author may deflect what might be poetry of a
higher degree to that of a commonplace order. Stories of adventure,
abounding in false sentiment, misleading examples and unreal situations,
are hardly poetry or good literature of ecstasy. But Stevenson
transmutes such a tale into excellent poetry in _Treasure Island_. Those
who have read the pathological outbursts of religio-maniacs, rife in
outworn dogma, and seething with morbid emotions, will not maintain that
such productions are poetry of a high order, though the ecstatic element
is present in marked degree. Yet a St. Augustine occasionally makes good
poetry out of such material.
In general, that is not great poetry or literature of ecstasy which
appeals to the rude primitive emotions. When the purpose of a literary
work is to wean us from finer feelings, to make us sympathize with
cruelty, to paralyze the sympathetic emotions within us, and to kill all
feelings rooted in love, pity, service, justice and kindness, it is not
of a great order of poetry. Those works in whole or part that fan the
martial spirit within us, and take hold of us as with an hypnotic sway
of the hand, and make us seek to murder our fellow men, and to arouse
the lust for blood in us, cannot be great works. No literature that is
heartless or brutal, or confuses an appeal to the murderous instincts
with real love of country, or love of liberty, with self-sacrifice for
justice or loved ones, can be valuable to us either practically or
aesthetically. No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters
unreasonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful victories, or
crowns with the garland of a hero the mere warrior who is a warrior for
the pure delight of killing, is really of the higher type of literature
of ecstasy. It is this martial phase that makes most of the early
literature of all nations valuable only in parts; in those parts where
the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt with, and where
the more genial emotions are crystallized. So many theories of poetry
are futile, because they are based on studies primarily of the epic
poems of the nations, and it is these epic poems that mingle the most
impoverished and base poetry with that of a fine quality.
Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which
is purely tribal or clannish in feeling; nor when chauvinistic and full
of hatred for all other peoples. This does not mean that poetry must not
smack of the soil, and that it cannot preserve a sane patriotic and
national feeling, and worship a culture inherent in a people. But when
the ecstasy descends to the kind which kills individualism under the
pretense of encouraging it, when it is hostile to the stranger and the
original thinker, when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts
as regards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and pernicious.
Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which
in its mystic quality eludes all compromises with reason, and borders on
absurdity or is pathological. When poetry seeks salvation in apparent
madness, and attaches itself to faith in the impossible, and sees
distorted visions, and creates a maniac's world of unquestionably
inverted order of hell-fire and brimstone, and makes outrageous and
unjust demands on human nature it is of a low order. Nor is an
unwarranted asceticism in poetry calculated to raise its tone.
It is vain to enumerate the various ecstasies of a low order, that of
the literature which upholds different forms of wrong, as well as that
which is too much attached to the commonplace, nor is it necessary to
show that that poetry is not of a high order whose author goes into
ecstasies about nuances, indulges in inappropriate imagery, piles up
trite ideas in flowery diction, or gives continual iteration to the
least important of commonplace emotions.
What then is literature of a high order? What is this great form of art
that takes us out of ourselves because it has in it so much of
ourselves? What is this magical arrangement of words enshrining what
ideas and emotions that gives us a zest for life, that makes us drunk
with aesthetic pleasure? It includes many species, all, as Milton would
say, in a "strain of a higher mood." One of its greatest manifestations
is that in which the ecstasy for social justice and a high form of
idealism control the poet. We become carried away with his frenzy, for
it evokes the highest emotions in us; an undeviating and never swerving
enthusiasm for spreading right and happiness is an elevated form of
ecstasy. The grief of the oppressed and the poor goes to our own hearts,
and the calamities of the woe-begone become our own. We submerge our
personality in that of the human race, and the griefs of strangers lure
us to cry out for them.
But it should be remembered that literature never thus becomes a weapon
for reform or a piece of didacticism or propaganda. The emotion is the
thing. The practical work of relief of suffering is the function of the
reformer and not the poet. It is the poet's duty only to make a certain
form of ecstasy contagious. Practical results will follow as a matter of
course.
And then there is the ecstasy that revolves around a profound
philosophic insight, when the poet rids himself of prejudiced and barren
thinking and looks at the universe with awe and goes into rhapsodies
about its workings. And it takes a high order of intellect to sympathize
with the literature of ecstasy of this kind, that pierces into the soul
of the universe. The advanced ideas of the greatest poets are, however,
often such as only a few people have intellect enough to perceive, or
are such as can be grasped only when man throws aside all his
prejudices. And here the great philosopher, mathematician and scientist
come to the aid of the poet, who emotionalizes their greatest
discoveries. For reason must go hand in hand with ecstasy.
There is the ecstasy where men are shown in the helpless grasp of great
passions, and are in despair because of events beyond their control.
Such passions include grief of all kinds, whether brought about by death
or wrong or one's own folly. The depicting of great passion belongs to
the grand order of the literature of ecstasy even when the poet makes no
attempt to moralize from or sympathize with it. Crime and wickedness
may be masterfully described with no ethical intent, for we are
interested in the grand spectacle of a man whom the Gods have made mad,
for madness is potential in all of us.
There is the ecstasy of the lover in his rapture for his mistress, and
in his transformed nature. We are moved by the delicacy of his
sentiment, his chivalry, his sacrifice, we are overcome by his sorrows
and his misfortunes. There is the ecstasy of the love of nature where
the majesty of this universe is set out in its glory. There is the
ecstasy of the lover of beauty for its own sake, and of the artist in
the pursuit of his work, and of the reader and of him who listens to
music, of him who sees artistic pictures. There is the ecstasy of the
scientist in his pursuit of truth, and of the inventor in transforming
the face of the globe.
We cry out for ecstasy; it is the substance of our lives; even though,
often in our pursuit of pleasant ecstasy, we are launched into tragedy.
We are hungry for a happy life of the emotions. It is this which makes
lovers and friends and parents of us. It is this which makes us poets,
and it is the poet in ourselves that we always hunt out.
I hope our study has helped us to distinguish the higher from the lower
forms of ecstasy, to find poetry in prose, and to differentiate poetry
from verse, wherein there is no ecstasy but various conventions, like
inversion, poetic diction, rhyme, metre, figures of speech,
parallelisms, technique, and all forms of rhythm and repeats. That much
of the best of the world's poetry has made abundant use of these
mechanisms has led the critics to confuse poetry with its conventions.
But the ecstasy was forgotten, and the emotional and intellectual value
of the poem was overlooked. It was thought because the masters
subscribed slavishly to the conventions that they became poets because
of them, whereas they were poets first and last because of the ecstasy,
sometimes with the aid of the conventions and sometimes despite them.
That these mechanisms will always be used in some degree is certain, but
the most natural poetry will be that which uses them moderately,
irregularly and only when the emotions and the ideas naturally clothe
themselves in them.
Poetry and prose then are not contradictory, but prose becomes poetry
when the element of ecstasy is present. We use the word prosaic in a
sense, it is true, which means destitute of imagination or emotion; we
even call verse of this kind prosaic. But a work in prose may be
poetical, and one in verse be prosaic, and science, philosophy and
morality become poetry, though in the form of prose, when bathed in the
spirit of ecstasy. And the highest form of poetry is that wherein the
ecstasy springs from our nature's most human and most admirable side.
After having learned that poetry is more natural without metre or a
pattern, that it may be in prose with or without rhythm, that it may
have a social message, that it is the product of the unconscious, that
it is related to dreams in being an imaginary fulfilled wish of the
poet, that it acts as a relief to the writer and the reader, that it is
always personal and lyric, that it is synonymous with expression in the
poet's mind, that its chief characteristic is passion, imagination or
ecstasy, that its qualities are often enhanced rather than destroyed by
the presence of intellect or morality, that it is an emotional spirit
holding literature in suffusion instead of being a branch of literature,
we shall find that most of the old definitions of poetry exclude a great
deal of the world's best poetry, and include much that is not poetry.
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Abu Ali al Qali, 222
Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, 216, 217
Abu 'l Atahiya, 216, 218
Abu Nuwas, 205
Abu Zayd, 215
Ælfric, 108, 114
Æschylus, 15, 27, 160
Al Ghazzali, 34, 35
Al Hatimi, 223
Aldington, Richard, 122
Ambros, Wilhelm A., 52
Antar, 209, 211, 219
Ari Frodi, 110
Ariosto, 111, 238
Aristotle, 15, 29, 42, 96, 136, 169, 179, 180, 191, 220
Arnold, Matthew, 23, 49, 64, 118, 126, 129
Bacon, Francis, 48, 53, 79, 135
Baha Ad Din Zuhayr, 220
Balzac, 49, 53, 57, 58, 59, 72, 87, 154, 165, 181, 190, 236, 245
Baqui, 211, 214
Baudelaire, Charles, 18, 89, 126, 138, 153
Beaconsfield, Lord, 49, 88, 89
Beckford, 213
Benavente, Jacinto, 71
Bergson, 30, 136
Bernays, Jacob, 180
Bielinski, 162
Blake, William, 18, 44, 73, 118, 167, 186
Bosanquet, 180, 181
Bossuet, 87, 228
Boswell, 221
Bradley, A. C., 126
Brandes, George, 72, 92, 131, 141, 142, 167, 245
Breasted, James H., 99
Briffault, Robert, 212
Browne, Edgar G., 203, 204, 225
Browne, Sir Thomas, 88
Browning, Elizabeth B., 53, 61
Browning, Robert, 18, 61, 86, 124, 134, 213
Bryant, W. C., 50
Buchanan, Robert, 143
Bunyan, John, 20, 88
Burke, Edmund, 49, 121, 229, 230
Burns, Robert, 31, 69, 128, 154, 173, 185, 190, 198
Butcher, S. H., 24, 42, 160
Byron Lord, 18, 31, 61, 72, 86, 125, 154, 167, 173, 185, 190, 213,
222
Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 72, 134, 137, 148, 168, 169, 171
Carpenter, Edward, 118
Castelvetro, 43, 179
Cervantes, 87, 154, 167, 211
Chateaubriand, 49, 58, 87
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 172
Chekhov, Anton, 71, 122
Cicero, 87, 89, 120, 229, 230
Coleridge, S. T., 12, 47, 48, 49, 77, 78, 121, 173, 186, 234
Conrad, 57, 71, 116
Corneille, 87
Cowper, William, 134
Crane, Stephen, 118
Croce, 15, 28, 81, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 239
Crosby, Ernest, 118
Dallas, E. S., 187, 191
Dalman, G., 102
Dante, 13, 47, 133, 141, 167, 233, 238
D'Annunzio, 51
Daudet, Alphonse, 186
Davidson, Israel, 172
De Musset, Alfred, 121, 154
De Quincey, Thomas, 40, 88, 90, 117
De Slane, MacGuckin, 203, 209, 223
De Vigny, 166
Democritus, 15
Demosthenes, 24, 119, 229
Descartes, 135
Dickens, Charles, 53, 72, 84, 121, 154, 168, 169, 242
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 28, 119, 181
Dobrolubov, 162
Donne, 21
Dostoievsky, 143, 154
Doughty, 71
Drummond, Henry, 88
Dryden, John, 172
Dumas, Alexander, 168
Dunash ben Labrat, 104
Eaton, Walter P., 116
Eliot, George, 89, 121, 135
Elliott, Ebenezer, 88
Ellis, Havelock, 185, 186
Emerson, R. W., 23, 53, 81, 92, 93, 94, 121, 186, 200
Erasmus, 43
Erskine, John, 117
Euripides, 30
Fairchild, A. H., 200
Fénelon, 86, 161
Fielding, 231, 236
Flaubert, 138, 140, 165
Flint, F. S., 122
France, Anatole, 201, 232
Freud, 15, 28, 135, 167, 181, 185, 189, 199
Froude, 137
Fuller, Thomas, 88
Galsworthy, John, 71, 155
Gautier, 138
Gibbon, 137
Giovanitti, Arthur, 158
Goethe, 46, 71, 72, 118, 121, 131, 134, 148, 154, 167, 176, 185,
190, 213, 214
Goldberg, Isaac, 177
Goldziher, 105
Gorki, 156
Gosse, Edmund, 64
Graetz, 225
Gray, Thomas, 19
Guérin, 49
Gummere, Professor, 44, 198
Gurney, 62
Ha Levi, Jehudah, 105, 172
Hafiz, 154, 211
Halper, B., 172, 182
Hardy, Thomas, 53, 71, 121, 181, 244
Hariri, 214, 215, 218
Harper, G. M., 122
Harte, Bret, 50, 130
Hauptmann, 71, 155, 156, 200
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 50, 53, 92
Hazlitt, 49, 77, 131, 185, 193
Hearn, Lafcadio, 30, 46, 71, 72, 115, 140, 175, 232, 244
Hegel, 122, 240
Heine, Heinrich, 18, 31, 49, 70, 71, 118, 121, 154, 172, 190, 230,
243, 245
Henley, Walter, 118
Henry, O., 130, 230
Herodotus, 48
Hewlett, Maurice, 71, 116
Holmes, O. W., 50, 168, 186
Homer, 13, 15, 62, 80, 82, 96, 137, 167, 236, 238
Horace, 72, 128
Hovey, Richard, 118
Howells, W. D., 86, 144
Hudson, W. H., 71
Hugo, Victor, 58, 87, 140, 154
Hume, 135, 170
Huneker, 18
Hunt, Leigh, 234
Ibn Abi Rabia, Omar, 207
Ibn Daud, Abraham, 183
Ibn Ezra, Moses, 172, 182, 222
Ibn Gebirol, Solomon, 172
Ibn Ishaq, 223
Ibn Khaldun, 203, 204, 205, 222, 223
Ibn Khallikan, 209
Ibn Pakuda, Bachya, 172
Ibn Rashiq, 223
Ibn ul Farid, Umar, 220
Ibn ul Mutazz, 223
Ibn Yunus, 220
Ibn Zaydun, 219
Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 38, 49, 71, 131, 132, 142, 150, 154, 166, 167,
169, 185, 190, 242
Imru'ul Qays, 206, 215, 217
Ingelow, Jean, 227
Israeli, Isaac, 183
Jacob, Cary F., 46
Jahiz, 222
Jalalu 'l Din Rumi, 22
Jannai, 104
Johnson, Samuel, 113, 185
Kant, 229
Kaplan, Jacob H., 37
Keats, John, 18, 128, 138, 154, 173, 233, 235
Keble, John, 187-190
Kelley, FitzMaurice, 212
Kempis, Thomas à, 20
Khalil, Ahmad, 221
Khansa, 214
Kingsley, Charles, 185
Kipling, Rudyard, 50, 71
König, 101, 102
La Rochefoucauld, 167
Lamb, Charles, 69, 185
Landor, W. S., 81, 213
Langdon, Professor, 100
Langland, 158
Lawrence, D. H., 71
Le Sage, 87
Lee, A. H. E., 23
Leopardi, 143
Lespinasse, Madame, 53
Lessing, G. E., 62, 63, 179, 239
Lewis, Sinclair, 232
Lincoln, Abraham, 60
Livy, 48, 120, 137
Locke, John, 178
Longfellow, H. W., 50, 126, 154, 170, 175, 176
Lowell, J. R., 41, 176, 178, 186, 193
Lowes, Professor, 63, 116
Lowth, Bishop, 102
Lucas, E. V., 221
Lyly, John, 121
Macaulay, T. B., 168
Macdonald, Duncan B., 34
Machen, Arthur, 23
Macleod, Fiona, 116
Maggi, 179
Maimonides, Moses, 37
Majnun, 206
Malory, 55, 88
Margoliouth, 218
Marston, P. B., 227
Marsyas, 26
Masaryk, Thomas G., 162
Masters, Ed. L., 116
Maupassant, Guy de, 148
Meredith, George, 116, 121, 135, 230
Mihailovsky, 162
Mill, J. S., 88, 178
Mills, L. H., 106
Milton, John, 13, 47, 48, 64, 88, 118, 120, 122, 141, 167, 178,
180, 238
Minturno, 179
Mirabeau, 87
Molière, 87, 154, 167
Morley, John, 178
Moore, George, 92
Moore, Thomas, 48, 71, 213
Moulton, R. G., 103
Müller, Max, 106
Murray, Gilbert, 30
Murry, J. Middleton, 122
Neilson, William A., 33
Newbolt, Henry, 171
Newton, Isaac, 40
Nicholson, D. H. S., 23, 217, 219, 225
Nidhami I Arudi, 204
Nidhami, 206
Nietzsche, 28, 30, 53, 81, 124, 154, 163, 168, 171, 181, 189, 242
Omar Khayyam, 218
Oppenheim, James, 158
Ossian, 118
Palgrave, W. G., 207
Pascal, 20, 124
Pater, Walter, 30, 45, 53, 72, 116, 117, 126, 239, 245
Patterson, Professor, 45, 46, 117
Perry, Bliss, 118
Phelps, W. L., 21
Pindar, 160
Pisarev, 162
Plato, 15, 24, 25, 26, 27, 48, 53, 96, 119, 122, 124, 133, 148, 160
Plutarch, 48, 56, 121, 133, 137
Poe, E. A., 18, 49, 50, 61, 72, 74, 92, 121, 131, 144, 161
Pope, Alexander, 75, 133, 232
Prescott, F. C., 184
Prévost, 87
Pythagoras, 133
Qudama, 223
Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 66, 67
Quintilian, 120
Qutayba, 222
Riley, J. W., 170
Roberts, W. Rhys, 119
Robortelli, 179
Rolland, 154
Roosevelt, Theodore, 116
Rossetti, Dante G., 186
Rousseau, 53, 87, 134
Ruskin, John, 38, 53, 72, 84, 112, 130, 154, 168, 169
Russel, Bertrand, 136
Saadyah, 104
St. Augustine, 20, 53
Saintsbury, George, 43, 44, 81, 220
Sand, George, 87
Sandburg, 116
Savonarola, 43
Schlegel, Frederick, 49
Schofield, W. H., 214
Schopenhauer, 53, 124, 135, 163, 199
Scott, Samuel P., 213
Scott, Sir Walter, 55, 121, 168
Senancour, 49
Shairp, J. C., 89
Shakespeare, William, 13, 16, 56, 57, 69, 82, 83, 101, 112, 113,
124, 134, 138, 148, 150, 154, 167, 168, 170, 177, 193, 226, 238
Shaw, Bernard, 38, 112, 156, 167
Shelley, P. B., 12, 18, 23, 32, 38, 48, 70, 72, 74, 121, 124, 128,
133, 154, 167, 169, 173, 185, 186, 190, 233, 235
Sidney, Sir Philip, 12, 48, 88, 119, 121
Sinclair, Upton B., 155, 200
Smith, Sir George A., 101, 215
Smith, W. Robertson, 100
Socrates, 26, 42
Sophocles, 13, 80, 83, 160
Southey, Robert, 213
Spencer, Herbert, 135
Spenser, Edmund, 13, 235, 238
Speroni, 179
Spingarn, 117, 132, 179
Spinoza, 134, 135
Stedman, E. C., 32, 58
Stendhal, 57, 142, 206
Stevenson, R. A. M., 138
Stevenson, R. L., 247
Strabo, 97
Strindberg, 143
Surrey, 213
Swinburne, A. C., 18, 23, 73, 125, 138, 140, 154
Symonds, J. A., 27, 69, 111, 125, 126
Symons, Arthur, 63, 121, 138
Synge, 71
Tacitus, 137
Taine, 170
Taylor, Jeremy, 48, 178, 230
Tchernishevski, 162
Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 23, 154, 185
Tha'alibi, 223
Thackeray, W. M., 23, 121, 181
Thompson, Francis, 72
Thomson, James, 186
Thucydides, 53, 119, 137, 228
Tolstoy, 36, 53, 57, 140, 142, 190
Traubel, Horace, 118, 158
Tupper, Martin, 118
Turgenev, 57
Twain, Mark, 59, 230
Untermeyer, Louis, 118, 158
Van Teslaar, J. S., 182
Varchi, 179
Verhaeren, 155
Verlaine, 31, 72, 154
Véron, Eugene, 87
Vettori, 179
Virgil, 57, 62, 148
Voltaire, 230
Warton, Thomas, 211
Watts-Dunton, 240
Weil, Henri, 180
Whistler, 138
Whitman, Walt, 12, 15, 23, 31, 44, 45, 63, 65, 79, 114, 116, 118,
124, 142, 154, 164, 175, 178
Wilde, Oscar, 53, 138, 167
Wilkinson, J. G., 186, 187
Wittels, F., 181
Woodberry, Professor, 31, 132
Wordsworth, William, 12, 15, 18, 23, 31, 45, 49, 51, 52, 60, 65,
77, 78, 112, 121, 124, 146, 164, 173, 185, 222, 234
Wulfstan 108, 109
Wyatt, 213
Xenophon, 48
Yeats, William Butler, 71, 165
Zoroaster, 107
Zola, Emil, 142, 155, 156, 165, 167, 200
Zuhayr, 215
INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS
Adam Bede, 44
Advancement of Learning, 79
Æneid, 53, 54, 57, 111
Æsthetics, 87
Albion's England, 85
Arabia Deserta, 71
Arabian Nights, 187, 205, 213, 218
Arcadia, 121
Areopagitica, 122, 178
Ars Poetica, 241
Art of Writing, 66
Aspects of Poetry, 89
Assemblies (or Maqamat), 214, 215, 218
Atala, 87
Aucassin and Nicolette, 86
Aurora Leigh, 61
Avesta, 105, 106
Avowals, 92
Aylmer's Field, 44
Ballad of Mary the Mother, 143
Bedouins, 18
Beginnings of Poetry, 44
Beowulf, 103, 109
Bible, 14, 44, 102, 103, 118, 160, 177, 202, 215, 222, 233
Birth of Tragedy, 30
Botanical Garden, 85
Boundaries of Music and Poetry, 52
Brand, 59
Brushwood Boy, 50
Canterbury Tales, 55
Chanting the Square Deific, 23
Chapbook, 88
Cherry Orchard, 122
Christmas Carol, 168
City of Dreams, The, 143
Confessions, 53
Confessions of an Opium Eater, 40
Conservator, 118
Convention and Revolt in Poetry, 63
Corn Law Rhymes, 88
Cousin Pons, 59
Creative Criticism, 117
Critique of Judgment, 229
Cypress Grove, 109
David Copperfield, 54
Dawn, 155
Decameron, 49
Defense of Poetry, 74
Deserted Village, 49
Devil's Case, 143
Dialogues on Eloquence, 86
Divine Comedy, 60, 184
Doll's House, 132
Don Juan, 61, 86, 125
Don Quixote, 39, 49, 169, 211, 212
Dream Fugue, 57
Dreams and Poetry, 184
Early Poetry of Israel, 101, 215
Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 19
Eleonora, 50
English Literature from Roman Conquest to Chaucer, 212
Enoch Arden, 44
Epipsychidion, 165, 183
Erewhon, 232
Erotic Motive in Literature, 185
Essay on Man, 122
Essays in Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis, 107
Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 125
Essentials of Poetry, 33
Ethics, 134
Eugénie Grandet, 59
Euphues, 121
Excursion, 60
Exotics and Retrospectives, 115, 244
Fall of the House of Usher, 144
Fathers and Sons, 57
Fingal, 58
First Four Books of Civil War, 85
Foundations and Nature of Verse, 46
French Revolution, 53, 137
Function of the Poet, 41
Fuzzy Wuzzy, 50
Gathas, 107
Genesis, Book of, 64
Genius of Christianity, 87
Georgics, 62, 148
Germinal, 155, 200
Ghosts, 59
Gilgash, 100
Gorboduc, 112
Great Expectations, 124
Greek Poets, 69
Guide to the Perplexed, 37
Gulliver's Travels, 71
Hacuzari, 105
Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, 24
Haunted Mind, 50
Heart of Midlothian, 55
Heathen Chinee, 50
Hertha, 23, 125
Hieroglyphics, 23
History as Literature, 116
History of Criticism in Europe, 43, 220
History of English Literature, 170
History of English Poetry, 89
History of English Prose Rhythm, 43
History of English Rhythms, 108
History of the Jews, 225
History of Moorish Empire in Spain, 213
House of Gentlefolk, 57
Huckleberry Finn, 59
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 23
Idylls of the King, 55
Iliad, 97, 105
Inspiration of Poetry, 31
Ion, 25
Irrational Knot, 167
Jewish Encyclopedia, 225
Julius Cæsar, 56
Jungle, 155, 200
Kalevala, 103
Kinds of Poetry, 117
Koran, 218
Kubla Khan, 186
La Mare au Diable, 87
Lady of the Lake, 55
Laila and Majnun, 206
Laocoon, 62
L'Avare, 87
Le Chartreuse de Parme, 57
Le Debâcle, 57
Leaves of Grass, 65, 80, 124, 159, 178
Lectures on Art, 130
Lectures on Sacred Poetry of Hebrews, 102
Les Martyrs, 58
Les Misérables, 58
Letters to French Academy, 86
Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, 57
Life of Johnson, 221
Life of Roscommon, 113
Lily and the Bee, 118
Lily of the Valley, 59
Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 179
Literary History of the Arabs, 219
Literary History of Persia, 203, 225
Literary Study of Bible, 103
Lives of the Saints, 108, 114
Locksley Hall, 213
Logic, 136
L'Oiseau, 87
Lorna Doone, 70
Lost Illusions, 59
Louis Lambert, 59
Luzumiyyat, 218
Lyrical Ballads, 65
Macbeth, 56
Madame Bovary, 140
Mademoiselle de Maupin, 138
Main Currents of the Nineteenth Century, 92
Main Street, 232
Making of Humanity, 212
Making of Poetry, 200
Manon Lescaut, 87
Maqamat, 218
Martyrs, 87
Master Builder, 58
Michael, 51
Modern Painters, 53
Mr. Sludge, "the Medium," 125
Muallaqat, 105, 206, 211, 213, 215
Nature of Poetry, 32
Nether World, 155
New Era in American Poetry, 161
New Rome, 143
Nibelungen Lied, 102, 154
Nigger of the Narcissus, 57
Njala, 110
Notre Dame de Paris, 58
Odyssey, 97
On Literary Composition, 119
On the Sublime, 15, 128, 160
Optimos, 118
Orlando Furioso, 60
Otherworld, 122
Ottoman Poetry, 214, 225
Outcast, 143
Outcasts of Poker Flat, 50
Oxford Book of English Verse, 66
Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 75, 126
Panegyrics, 119
Paradise Lost, 68
Paradise Regained, 67
Path of the Rainbow, 98
Paul and Virginia, 87
Peer Gynt, 59, 164, 174
Peloponnesian War, 53, 137
Penguin Island, 232
Père Goriot, 57
Phaedrus, 26, 53, 122
Pickwick Papers, 23
Pierre and Jean, 148
Piers Plowman, 158
Pilgrim's Progress, 49, 184
Poetic Principle, 74, 144
Poetics, 42, 43, 136, 220
Poetry and Its Varieties, 88
Poetry and Religion, 39
Politics, 180
Poly Olbion, 85
Pompanilla, 89
Pontica, 85
Possessed, 122
Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature, 172
Power of Sound, 62
Principia, 40
Principles of Psychology, 135
Progress of Poesie, 19
Prolegomena, 203
Prophetic Books, 44
Psalms, 20, 64, 100, 171, 215
Psychology of Prophecy, 37
Qasidas, 206
Rabbi Ben Ezra, 23, 57
Raven, 61
Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, 99
Renaissance, 53, 116
Republic, 26, 53, 122, 160
Revivifying of the Sciences of the Faith, 34
Revolt of Islam, 86, 125
Richard Feverel, 54
Rigveda, 105, 106, 107
Ring and the Book, 61, 86, 122
Robinson Crusoe, 49, 71
Romance of the Rose, 158
Rudin, 57
Sagas, 98, 109, 110
Sanskrit Literature, 106
Scarlet Letter, 53
Science of Poetry, 233
Silas Marner, 44
Sister Carrie, 83
Solitaire of Time, 223
Song of the Harper, 99
Song of Myself, 176
Songs Before Sunrise, 140
Spanish-American Literature, Studies in, 177
Specimens of English Prose Style, 92
Spirit of Russia, 162
Spoon River Anthology, 69, 116
Strife, 155
Studies in Islamic Poetry, 218
Sunken Bell, 174
Symposium, 26, 53
Táin Bó Cualnge, 108
Tales from Shakespeare, 69
Tales of a Wayside Inn, 50
Télémaque, 86
Tempest, 134
Ten o'Clock Lecture, 138
Ten Thousand a Year, 118
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 122
Text Book of Irish Literature, 108
Theoria Sacra, 48
Thus Spake Zarathustra, 245
Tom Jones, 236
Tragische Motiv, 181
Treasure Island, 247
Tristram Shandy, 49
Triumph of Death, 51
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 70
Upanishads, 22
Vanity Fair, 23, 65, 180
Vedas, 22, 105
Velasquez, 138
Vicar of Wakefield, 49
Wandering Jew, 143
War and Peace, 57
Weavers, 155, 200
What is Art? 140
Wild Ass's Skin, 59
Wild Duck, 58
Wilhelm Meister, 49
Wooing of Our Lord, 109
World as Will and Idea, 53
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
The initials A.D. are unspaced in the original. The initials B. C. have
been changed to B.C. to match.
The word "Phoenix" has an oe ligature in the original.
The following spelling variations occur in the text. The names appear as
in the original.
Abu l'Atahiya Abu l' Atihiya
Aelfric Ælfric
Aeneid Æneid
Jehudah HaLevi Jehudah Ha Levi
Mac Guckin de Slane MacGuckin de Slane McGuckin de Slane
The following corrections have been made to the text:
Page 19: the assumption that all the intellectual[original has
intellecual]
Page 29: "[quotation mark missing in original]All kinds of
ecstasy, however differently
Page 40: literature of power in his opinion[original has
opinon] is permanent
Page 43: restated by the Italian critic Castelvetro[original
has Castelevetro]
Page 57: Balzac's novel Père[original has Pére] Goriot
Page 65: one in prose of Eloise's[original has Eloises's]
Page 88: under the title _Poetry and Its Varieties_[original
has Varities]
Page 95: sown with stars, wherever[original has where-ever
hyphenated across lines]
Page 97: pre-Socratic philosophers[original has philsophers]
like Parmenides
Page 108: article on Irish Literature in the
_Britannica_[original has Brittanica]
Page 109: says Gosse in his article in the
_Britannica_[original has Brittanica]
Page 120: in this care, have time for better
things."[quotation mark missing in original]
Page 122: _New Study of English Poetry_ by Henry
Newbolt[original has Newboldt]
Page 130: he is more advanced than[original has that] we are
Page 136: others were also absorbed as[original has a] to the
difference
Page 138: preface to his Mademoiselle[original has
Madamoiselle] de Maupin
Page 146: former is not wholly intuitive[original has
intuitve]
Page 168: Shelley, Nietzsche[original has Nietsche], and
Butler
Page 178: in the sense of recording his own
individuality[original has individualty]
Page 185: See his essay on Casanova[original has Cananova] in
_Affirmations_
Page 185: Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe[original has
Gothe] and Ibsen
Page 186: Wilkinson did not have to seek rhymes[original has
ryhmes]
Page 209: is[original has ii] attributed to Ibn Alaamidi
Page 238: theories of aesthetic[original has esthetic] emotion
Page 253: Abu Ali[original has ali] al Qali, 222
Page 253: Baqui,[comma missing in original] 211, 214
Page 253: Bossuet[original has Bossnet], 87, 228
Page 253: Castelvetro[original has Castelevetro], 43, 179
Page 253: Coleridge, S. T., 12, 47, 48, 49, 77, 78, 121,[comma
missing in original] 173
Page 253: Croce, 15, 28, 81, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149,
150[original has 50], 239
Page 254: Elliot[original has Elliott], Ebenezer, 88
Page 254: Erasmus,[comma missing in original] 43
Page 255: Ibn Khallikan[original has Khallikans], 209
Page 255: Imru'ul[original has Imru 'ul] Qays, 206, 215,
217[original has 218]
Page 255: Khalil,[comma missing in original] Ahmad, 221
Page 255: Neilson, William[original has Willian] A., 33
Page 255: Newbolt[original has Newboldt], Henry, 171
Page 255: Nidhami[original has Nidham] I Arudi, 204
Page 256: Nietzsche, 28, 30, 53, 81, 124, 154, 163,
168[original has 166], 171, 181, 189, 242
Page 256: Senancour[original has Sénancour], 49
Page 257: Tha'alibi[original has Tha 'alibi], 223
Page 257: Untermeyer[original has Untermyer], Louis, 118, 158
Page 257: Yeats, William Butler, 71, 165[original has
extraneous comma]
Page 259: Areopagitica[original has Aeropagitica], 122, 178
Page 260: Eugénie[original has Eugéne] Grandet, 59
Page 260: History of English Poetry,[comma missing in
original] 89
Page 260: Julius Cæsar[original has Caesar], 56
Page 260: Laocoon[original has Laocoön], 62
Page 260: Les Misérables[original has Miserables], 58
Page 261: Mademoiselle[original has Madamoiselle] de Maupin,
138
Page 261: Mr. Sludge, "the Medium,"[original has quotation
marks around the entire title] 125
Page 261: Nibelungen[original has Niebelungen] Lied, 102, 154
Page 262: Télémaque[original has Télemaque], 86
Page 263: Peloponnesian[original has Peloponessian] War, 53,
137
[52:A] Wilhelm[original has Wilhem] A. Ambros
[193:A] _The Function of the Poet._[original has extraneous
quotation mark]
The index entry for Mark Twain was alphabetized under "Mark". Entry has
been moved to its proper place.
In the two Indexes, several page number references are incorrect in the
original. The following table shows the page number references in the
original and the corrected page references. The changes have been made
in the Indexes.
Incorrect Correct
page page
Index Entry references references
Aristotle 193, 221 191, 220
Arnold, Matthew 117 118
Bacon, Francis 52 --
Burke, Edmund 120 121
Butcher, S. H. 159 160
Cicero 119 120
De Quincey, Thomas 87 88
Eaton, Walter P. 115 116
Hegel 121 122
Henley, Walter 117 118
Homer 93 96
Ibsen, Henrik 48 49
Keats, John 247 --
Milton, John 49, 236 48, 238
Morley, John 168 178
Moore, Thomas 49 48
Nicholson, D. H. S. 218 217
Nietzsche 166 168
Plato 49, 52, 132 48, --, 133
Pope, Alexander 7 75
Saintsbury, George 221 220
Schofield, W. H. 212 214
Shelley, P. B. 29 --
Spenser, Edmund 236 235
Swinburne, A. C. 29 23
Wordsworth, William 29, 30 --, 31
Wulfstan 107, 108 108, 109
Beowulf 108 109
Birth of Tragedy 29 30
Brand 60 59
Defense of Poetry 73 74
Master Builder 59 58
Poetics 221 220
Wild Duck 59 58
End of Project Gutenberg's The Literature of Ecstasy, by Albert Mordell