The chief characteristic of poets is their amazing _command_ of words.
This is not a mere matter of vocabulary, though it is significant
that Shakespeare’s vocabulary is the richest and most varied that any
Englishman has ever used. It is not the quantity of words a writer
has at his disposal, but the way in which he disposes them that gives
him his rank as a poet. His sense of how they modify one another, how
their separate effects in the mind combine, how they fit into the whole
response, is what matters. As a rule the poet is not conscious of the
reasons why just these words and no others best serve. They fall into
their place without his conscious control, and a feeling of rightness,
of inevitability is commonly his sole conscious ground for his
certainty that he has ordered them aright. It would as a rule be idle
to ask him why he used a particular rhythm or a particular epithet. He
might give reasons, but they would probably be mere rationalizations
having nothing to do with the matter. For the choice of the rhythm or
the epithet was not an intellectual matter (though it may be capable of
an intellectual justification), but was due to an instinctive impulse
seeking to confirm itself, or to order itself with its fellows.
It is very important to realize how deep are the motives which govern
the poet’s use of words. No study of other poets which is not an
impassioned study will help him. He can learn much from other poets,
but only by letting them influence him deeply, not by any superficial
examination of their ‘style.’ For the motives which shape a poem spring
from the root of the mind. The poet’s style is the direct outcome of
the way in which his interests are organized. That amazing capacity of
his for ordering speech is only a part of a more amazing capacity for
ordering his experience.
This is the explanation of the fact that poetry cannot be written by
cunning and study, by craft and contrivance. To a superficial glance
the productions of the mere scholar, steeped in the poetry of the past
and animated by intense emulation and a passionate desire to place
himself among the poets will often look extraordinarily like poetry.
His words may seem as subtly and delicately ordered as words can be,
his epithets as happy, his transitions as daring, his simplicity as
perfect. By every intellectual test he may succeed. But unless the
ordering of the words sprang, not from knowledge of the technique of
poetry added to a desire to write some, but from an actual supreme
ordering of _experience_, a closer approach to his work will betray
it. Characteristically its rhythm will give it away. For rhythm is no
matter of tricks with syllables, but directly reflects personality.
It is not separable from the words to which it belongs. Moving rhythm
in poetry arises only from genuinely stirred impulses, and is a more
subtle index than any other to the order of the interests.
Poetry, in other words, cannot be imitated; it cannot be faked so
as to baffle the only test that ought ever to be applied. It is
unfortunately true that this test is often very difficult to apply.
And it is sometimes hard to know whether the test has or has not been
applied. For the test is this--that only genuine poetry will give to
the reader who approaches it in the proper manner a response which is
as passionate, noble and serene as the experience of the poet, the
master of speech, because he is the master of experience itself. But
it is easy to read carelessly and shallowly, and easy to mistake for
the response something which does not properly belong to it at all. By
careless reading we miss what is in the poem. And in some states of
mind, for example, when intoxicated, the silliest doggerel may seem
sublime. What happened was not due to the doggerel but to the drink.
With these general considerations in mind we may turn now from the
question--What can the dawning science of psychology tell us about
poetry?--to the allied questions--How is science in general, and the
new outlook upon the world which it induces, already affecting poetry,
and to what extent may science make obsolete the poetry of the past? To
answer these questions we need to sketch some of the changes which have
recently come about in our world-picture, and to consider anew what it
is that we demand from poetry.