For instance, they are practically unanimous in accepting Aristotle's
contention that it is not the metrical form that makes the poem.
"Verse," says Sidney, "is an ornament and no cause to poetry, since
there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and
now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of
poets." Wordsworth apologizes for using the word "Poetry" as
synonymous with metrical composition. "Much confusion," he says, "has
been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and
Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of
Fact or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre: nor is
this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because lines and passages of
metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely
possible to avoid them, even were it desirable." And Shelley--"It is
by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to
this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be
observed.... The distinction between poets and prose writers is a
vulgar error." Shelley goes on to instance Plato and Bacon as true
poets, though they wrote in prose. "The popular division into prose
and verse," he repeats, "is inadmissible in accurate philosophy."
Its philosophic function.
Then again, upon what Wordsworth calls "the more philosophical
distinction" between Poetry and Matter of Fact--quoting, of course,
the famous +"Philosophôteron kai spoudaioteron"+ passage in the
_Poetics_--it is wonderful with what hearty consent our poets pounce
upon this passage, and paraphrase it, and expand it, as the great
justification of their art: which indeed it is. Sidney gives the
passage at length. Wordsworth writes, "Aristotle, I have been told,
hath said that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writings: it is
so." Coleridge quotes Sir John Davies, who wrote of Poesy (surely with
an eye on the _Poetics_):
"From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.
"Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds."
And Shelley has a remarkable paraphrase, ending, "The story of
particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that
which is distorted."
In fine, this book goes far to prove of poetry, as it has been proved
over and over again of other arts, that it is the men big enough to
break the rules who accept and observe them most cheerfully.