Transcriber's Notes: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original except in the Index where the spelling has been changed to match the spelling in the body of the text. Ellipses match the original. A complete [list] of corrections follows the text. Other notes also follow the text.

THE LITERATURE
OF ECSTASY

BY

ALBERT MORDELL

Author of:
The Erotic Motive in Literature
Dante and Other Waning Classics
The Shifting of Literary Values

BONI and LIVERIGHT

Publishers New York

THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY

Copyright, 1921, By
Boni & Liveright, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

From time immemorial it has been assumed that poetry is something which is caviare to the general public. A "poem" even to-day is supposed to be a literary composition that is in artificial language arranged in a metrical pattern, often conveying a trite idea or enshrining an ineffective image. Thousands of volumes and essays have been written on poetry, and instead of fathoming a true conception of its nature, they have dealt with the trappings and garments which clothe it; these indeed have often been confused with poetry itself. As a result, there has grown around the pathway leading to poetry an endless maze of shrubbery. The reader who has no knowledge of rules and laws relating to verse, who is ignorant of technical requirements and established uses, labors under the delusion that he does not like poetry. Though he reads many works in prose that stir a deep emotional appeal within him, he does not regard himself as one of those lovers who haunt the foot of Parnassus Hill.

I wish in this volume to present a conception of poetry freed from academic and conventional standards. I wish to restore to the term poetry its primary and fundamental significance as a verbal composition in which the predominating feature is ecstasy. Poetry is an emotional

atmosphere that pervades all literature in its finest parts; it characterizes any purely personal expression of the creative imagination. As the reader perceives, my definition of poetry includes prose literature in which ecstasy is present. I do not think of poetry as a branch of literature couched in a metrical form, following regular rules of rhythm, diction, figures of speech or rhyme. My conception of poetry then, is not that of a department of literature which is opposed to prose, but of an emotional spirit hovering over any kind of writing, whether in verse or prose, which conveys ecstasy.

I shall try to show especially that the prose literature of ecstasy fulfils all the intrinsic conditions which have been associated with poetry. I shall consider the question of how much, or rather how little, the element of rhythm or any other pattern is essential in determining the nature of poetry. In fact, I shall even maintain that prose irregularly rhythmical or even unrhythmical,[10-A] just as the exigencies of the emotion require, is the natural language of the emotions, that it was so at the very beginnings of literary history, and has in fact never ceased being used as such a vehicle. I shall further take the position that the set forms of verse which have grown up among all nations as a vesture for emotional writing, have been more or less pervaded with artificiality. The final judgment as to the nature of poetry resides in the appeal to the emotions. The test of poetry is not in the form which the writer uses, or in compliance with rules of prosody, but in the soul of the reader or hearer. If two emotional passages, one in a set pattern and one in

prose have the same effect upon the responsive mechanism of the human soul, if they both arouse ecstasy, it matters not if you refuse to call the prose passage poetry; its effect is however that of poetry. It stirs and moves you to rapture, it is a product of the author's unconscious, it speaks from soul to soul, it is beautiful in its expressiveness, it has a rhythm of its own. I shall not be concerned if you refuse to call this emotional prose passage poetry, but it does belong to the literature of ecstasy, and ecstasy was and is the first condition of poetic composition. The poetry in verse is but part of the literature of ecstasy.

I shall hence deal in this volume largely with emotional or impassioned prose; for it belongs to the literature of ecstasy, although it is often termed poetic prose, or sometimes disparagingly, prose poetry. Under this term I shall include not only the so-called "fine writing" but emotional passages in the language of the average man, dialogues from prose dramas, novels and short stories, and I shall also regard criticism, essays and works on science and philosophy highly charged with feeling as part of the province of the literature of ecstasy.

This work becomes thus a treatise on poetics, and will present a new definition of poetry which will include all emotional prose writing.

A very important phase of the subject will take in the connection between poetry or the literature of ecstasy, and various spheres of human thought, such as ethical and social questions. The idea will be shown to be an important factor in the literature of ecstasy, for ecstasy does not preclude the intellectual and moral activities. The notion of art for art's sake thus assumes a rather trivial aspect. Any idea whether scientific or philosophic, moral or social, if ecstatically presented, becomes itself literature of ecstasy, or poetry.

Should the reader conclude to accept the prose literature of ecstasy as poetry, he will find there was much poetry in the world's prose literature that he has never recognized as such. He will also be compelled to admit that much of what has been called poetry, because written in verse, does not properly belong to poetry, as not being of the literature of ecstasy. He will also see that the artificial classifications of the different kinds of poetry, such as epic, dramatic, pastoral, satirical, the ode, the sonnet, the ballad, the didactic poem, the idyl, the elegy, etc., were based on fallacies and were confusing and erroneous. There is only one species of poetry, the utterance of the ecstatic state, and this is always personal, whether in verse or prose, and hence, has a lyrical quality. If the poet gives the utterances of other people in ecstatic states, these also are lyrics. Hence every composition whether in verse or prose, that records ecstasy here and there, is lyrical in those parts where the ecstasy is depicted.

The distinction between prose and verse will be more clearly defined, if we refer to the poetry that is written in both these forms as poetry in verse, and poetry in prose.

Sidney, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Whitman, all of whom, besides being great poets themselves, were probably the greatest critics of poetry in the English language, took cognizance of the fact that the great emotional prose writers of the world were poets. But most of the critics have resented this attitude and have gone on in the unjust classifications that recognize as a poet the petty rhymster, who is often barren of both emotions and ideas. They also deny the glorious epithet of poet to many great prose masters of the delineation of human passions.

The question of free verse, naturally will come in for consideration. I shall show that it is really rhythmical prose arranged so as to call attention to the rhythms. I believe, however, that the free verse writers have a right to make such linear arrangement. The bulk of the poetry of the future may very likely be written in free verse forms, or in prose. If much of the free verse of to-day fails in being poetry, it is not because of the form, but because there is no ecstasy in it, or in the poet's soul. Most of the poetry of the Bible is really in free verse; it is poetry, however, not because of the free verse, but because it presents universal phases of human ecstasy.

I have expressly ignored most of the great authors who wrote epics and dramas in verse, and also most of the great English verse poets, for I wish to arrive at a conception of poetry chiefly from prose examples. Most critics have assumed that they could never learn what poetry was unless they gave examples from men like Homer and Shakespeare, Sophocles and Dante, Spenser and Milton. I rarely quote from them, not because I do not recognize the greatest poetry in these authors, but because I wish to show that one may arrive at a true conception of the nature of poetry by illustrations from prose writers of ecstatic literature alone.

Although I feel that the artificial verse forms hamper instead of beautify the expression of the poet's emotions, I do not think that such forms ever will be, nor need be utterly abandoned. Man will always love a ringing, rhyming ballad or song.

I have devoted a chapter to the poetry of the most poetical nation, the Arabs; their poets produced the anomaly of utilizing the most artificial metres, and yet never lost sight of the fact that ecstasy was the very life of the poem. Probably no poets in the world have

produced such exquisite love poetry as the Arabs; they have also had great influence on modern European poetry, for it is being recognized that modern romantic fiction, especially in its employment of the tenderness of the love sentiment as a frequent theme, was transplanted from them.

Poetry is the soul of literature, and we should cease limiting the term to rhythmical or patterned productions, and apply it to emotional writing in general. No term for the word poet in any language that I am acquainted with includes in its etymological significance the idea of rhythm or metrical pattern. The Hebrew word for poet is one who utters prophecies or parables; the Greek word signifies a "maker"; the Latin word "seer," the Arabian word "one who knows." Critics of the Bible have especially recognized that the chief characteristic of both the true and the false prophet (Nabi) was the ecstatic state; the Bible itself is of course authority for this fact. The inferior prophet was one, however, in whom the ecstatic state was hypnotically produced, in whom the rational and moral faculties were suspended; the great prophets were those in whom a powerful sense of social justice was illuminated by the ecstatic state; hence the prophecies of the Bible are not orations wherein rhetoric is a factor, but genuine literature of ecstasy, or poetry in rhythmical prose, using parallelism.

I need not continue to give analyses of the Greek "poetes," the Latin "vates," or the Arabian "shair," for it has been usually conceded that these words all refer in their primary significance to the imaginative work, or ecstatic state of the author, and not to the mere dabbler in verse forms.

With theories of poetry being a product of the

unconscious, as developed by Freud and his disciples, or as being expression as advanced by Croce, my task does not become so utterly devoid of reason as may appear at first sight. One must not forget that the critics of poetry have formed their conceptions of poetry by deducing rules from the verse poems of the world's literature. Instead of looking ahead, they have always looked back. Whenever a new great poet appeared, like Wordsworth, Whitman or Ibsen for instance, they had to modify their theories, and to revise their books on poetics and rhetoric. If the productions of Homer and Æschylus had been entirely different, we no doubt would have had other conceptions of poetry prevailing. Yet it is only by mere accident that Homer dealt with gods, wars, mythical events and employed dactylic hexameter. It is again also by pure chance that Æschylus used various metres, made Prometheus and the Furies living beings, was sponsor for a philosophy of divine punishment and often indulged in artificial diction. Had these poets written novels instead, conveying just as much genius and ecstasy as they did in their verse works, the critics of poetry would have deduced an entirely different conception of it.

To Democritus belongs the honor of having first recognized among the Greeks that ecstasy is the condition of the poet. To Plato goes the distinction for having fully developed this theory. Aristotle accepted also the view that poetry is ecstasy. The author of the ancient treatise On the Sublime perceived that the characteristic of poetic genius is in the arousing of the ecstatic state. He says, in a passage which deserves citation: "For it is not to persuasion (i. e., rhetoric) but to ecstasy that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer."

But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the prose form of poetry, but with poetry as

a psychological process, as a social force and as a philosophical expression.

Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and synonymous terms for the primary source of poetry. They are the fruitage of the turmoil of the soul, due to the apparently forgotten memories in us of the emotional lives in all our ancestors. They represent also the impassioned activities of our logical and rational faculties, the sum of the views of life of the past. They emanate from the dream life of man, whether this occurs in the waking or sleeping state. They are the workings of the force we call inspiration.

My view of poetry as emotional prose literature enables me, I hope, to eliminate many of the so-called conflicts between poetry and philosophy and between poetry and morals. Philosophical and moral essays become poetry in those parts lit up by ecstasy or emotion. If philosophy deals with rare and profound truths in regard to the universe, if morals treat of the noblest relations between man and man, then I know of no higher form of poetry than a philosophical truth, or a moral or social conception, when ecstatically stated; I can think of no higher literature of ecstasy than the imaginative utterance of great intellectual conceptions or impassioned expression of the love of justice. Shakespeare's line, "We are but such stuff as dreams are made of," is but a metaphysical theory emotionally put; Isaiah's rebuke to the corrupt rich is but a didactic saw, ecstatically delivered. Poetry finds its best material in metaphysical and ethical truths emotionally presented. Lofty ideas, however, and not commonplace deductions or conclusions are the best material for poetry.

I recognize, then, as great poetry, all writings in which metaphysical or scientific truth and the spirit of social

service are ecstatically formulated in prose, though I make no terms with dry didactic works that pretend to be poetry. I see the workings of the intellect in a product of the imagination and I try to show that logic and morality have not been so hostile to the poetic faculty as they have been usually deemed. At the same time I find that all poetry is a product or expression of the unconscious.

This is, then, not a book to teach the writing of poetry, but a study of the poetic faculty in literature, not in rhetorical terms, but by an appeal to the emotional life of the reader. It aims to point out the best examples of the literature of ecstasy (or poetry) whether in verse or prose. It shows that poetry is the very life of man's soul, that he has always loved it, that he has in lieu of gratification of a good and true poetic faculty often spent himself in cultivating substitutes for it. What a superficial assumption that because people do not like verse or read verse (especially trivial, lifeless, unhuman verse) they therefore do not care for poetry! Furthermore, I try to relate the poet's own literary revelation back to himself, just as the poet sought to reveal his soul to the reader.

FOOTNOTES:

[10-A] All prose has rhythm. I use the word "unrhythmical" merely to designate such prose where the rhythm is not marked. There is no sharp dividing line between rhythmical and unrhythmical prose.

CHAPTER II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY

"The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy," says Huneker in his essay "Anarchs and Ecstasy" in Bedouins, "is bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth[18-A]—who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson and Browning, only in occasional exaltation. Like the cold devils of Felicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy. . . . William Blake and his figures, rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy."

Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means to make stand out; the mind makes sensible things stand out because it is concentrated on particular emotions, and on the ideas associated with and springing from these emotions. We must not make the mistake of thinking that ecstasy has nothing to do with thought. On the contrary, it is too much occupied with thought. It in fact represents a form of monomania connected with a certain idea. It is a rapturous state in which the person is governed by preoccupation with a definite viewpoint. The poetic

condition of ecstasy to which I refer is that mentioned by the poet Gray, in his famous Elegy, when he speaks of one of the dead who might have "waked to ecstasy the living lyre." He again uses the word in his Progress of Poesie, when he speaks of Milton, who rode "upon the seraph wings of ecstasy." Undoubtedly Gray understood by ecstasy the poetic emotion primarily. In fact, any emotion that grips a man strongly may be called ecstasy. Great grief or joy, pleasure or pain, passion or tragedy, enthusiasm for an idea or a cause, are all ecstatic conditions. The passion for social justice, an intense love for humanity, devotion to art, beauty, knowledge, the emotions of a happy or an unhappy lover, all constitute important subjects in the literature of ecstasy.

But the ecstasy must be a universal and secular ecstasy. There are two kinds of ecstasies which though universal may manifest themselves in such primitive forms as to appear only to limited circles. I refer to the ecstasy of chauvinism, or fanatical, local, unjust patriotism, and to the ecstasy of the pathologically religious victim whose views border on hallucination. For example, if a man goes into extreme rhapsodies about his particular race or country, and vituperates the people of other races or countries, and justifies tyrannical measures towards them; if, furthermore, he writes under the assumption that all the intellectual and moral virtues reside in his people,—in short, if he is purely clannish one can scarcely expect his literary product to appeal to other people than his own. Again, if we hear or read the outburst of a devotee of a particular religious sect, and we find that we can agree with him in none of the views or dogmas he entertains; if, moreover, we observe there is something also anti-human in the attitude that he takes towards life, we are revolted by his passionate outpourings.

Though every nation and every religion is and should be to some extent clannish and sectarian, still no literature that is purely so can have a universal appeal. Hence, morbidly mystical poems, celebrating union with an anthropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of conquest and imperialism, poems seething with hatred for people of other races or religions, poems poisoned by hatred for humanity, are all examples of the literature of ecstasy of a low order.

On the contrary, however, the literature of ecstasy may be both religious and patriotic, and still appeal to the world at large. I suppose the best illustration of such kind of literature is the psalms in the Old Testament. They strike a universal note and move Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, free thinkers alike. The ecstasy here does not depend upon the author's attachment to a dogma, but springs most frequently from a love of righteousness and humanity; hence the emotional appeal of the poet touches even those who are not deists. There are also fine touches and poignant prayers here and there that move even the non-Christian in some of the works of St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal and Bunyan.

We are not concerned here with the idea of ecstasy as a state that is supposed to give us glimpses of the deity, nor with any attempt to purify us by divesting our soul from the imperfect body and liberating it from the frailties of the flesh. On the contrary, ecstasy is nothing more than accumulated ordinary emotions and it speaks not only with the body, but with all the memories of the body. It makes use in its communications to us of those very physical infirmities that mystics assume it shuns, those residing in the body as a medium. Ecstasy employs the mind, and thus depends on the brain, the nerves, the physical senses, which are unconsciously active even in a

trance, and speak out of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body.[21-A]

Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of poetry is not the same as that known to mysticism. However, the ecstasy in both springs from the unconscious and is the fruit of an emotional soul because of inherited memories of past emotions. In the ecstasy of the mystic, which is usually what is called "religious experience," there is really little application of the reason. It is even often pathological and is both the product and the cause of a belief in absurd dogmas. It is often merely a sublimated passion for morality, or the result, as Freudians have shown, of a hysterical attachment to parents, or the idealization of a father. It is often a sublimated sex love due to repression. Every one has been struck with the sensuous images in the conceptions of the mystics. Broadly speaking, mysticism seeks a condition of being united to a personal God who is supposed to exist outside of nature; it craves to partake of His holiness, and to cultivate purity and be rid of the earthy. He who rejects belief in an anthropomorphic God or to the mystics' particular religions can have little of the mystics' feelings. He does not enter into sympathy with their ideas, and this militates against the university of mystic poetry. The ecstasy does not "catch." Most of the mystic poetry of the world, especially that centering around asceticism and dogma, has importance only for the believer in the mystic's philosophy. Very little of it has literary value, although it often is presented in an emotional and effective manner.

But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism

that is universal and modern, and will appeal to all in spite of their religious beliefs. When the poet recognizing God in nature seeks to identify himself with nature by love and admiration for her, by a passion for a life that is in accordance with her commands, his poetry embodying such ecstasy is universal and is lifted into a high plane. It becomes a sort of ecstatic statement of pantheistic philosophy that even the believer may accept. That is why the Persian poet, Jalalu 'l-Din Rumi, for example, appeals to us and why his works are of such high order.

Sufism or Persian mysticism began in asceticism and ended in pantheism. It became a desire of a union with nature. In fact, it was an ecstatic state of love for man, nature, God. It had its roots however in physical love, and a story is told of a man who, wanting to become a Sufi, was told first to love some woman. Some critics even declare that many of the Persian love poems are really mystical poems, and though this is only partly true, it is certain that the Persian mystical poems are really love poems.

The mystic poems of the later Mohammedan Sufis are in fact anti-Mohammedan, and yet by a curious paradox they become after much controversy acceptable to the Church.

There is also much that is modern in the Pre-buddhistic Vedas and Upanishads, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the pantheistic character of the ideas and the universality of the emotions.

The ecstasy of the pantheistic mystic is a secular feeling that we all experience, and is the substance of literature in prose and verse. We have much modern mystical poetry that has a universal appeal; it is also pantheistic in character and shows the poet's desire for union not with an anthropomorphic God, but with nature whom he recognizes

as his God. The best illustration of it is the famous passage in Wordsworth's lines composed above Tintern Abbey, in which he tells us he hears in nature "the still, sad music of humanity." The entire passage is great poetry, not because of the blank verse but because of the mystical pantheistic ecstasy.

Sane mystical poetry may then be of a very high order. You will find examples of it in Blake, Emerson, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, Whitman's Chanting the Square Deific and Swinburne's Hertha are great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.

Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book, Hieroglyphics, where he touched the borders of the truth of the distinction between the literature of ecstasy and general literature, but he introduced too many unbalanced views about literature being unrelated to life. He was also thinking too exclusively of that religious ecstasy that is found in the Catholic Church only. He also took as his model for an example of ecstasy, Pickwick Papers, where there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in Vanity Fair where there is much. He also, strange to relate, found no ecstasy in Meredith or the later Hardy novels, and in no intellectual productions marked with liberal thought except those of Rabelais. He showed no insight into the real greatness of literature, because of his narrow conception of ecstasy.

Ecstasy in the broad sense is any excited condition of the emotions. Besides the meaning the word has in a narrow mystic and a medical sense, with neither of which significances are we here concerned, it is understood generally as referring to any condition where man is

overpowered by his feelings. It is this condition which makes the poet write, and the reader is brought into a similar state with the poet by reading the poems. Hence when the prose writer describes his ecstatic state, or draws people into such a state, he is also a poet. The critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when ecstatical, are therefore poetry.

It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted piece of ecstatical writing.

Many people are under the impression that when we speak of ecstasy we mean a state where reason is utterly dethroned. Yet the Greeks, who make inspiration the source of art, never let the passions so rule that utter chaos resulted in the poet's creation. In Greek literature we have a blending of reason and ecstasy. Professor Butcher has pointed out in his excellent essay on "Art and Inspiration," in his Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, the potency of reason in Greek poetry. The ideas of the Greek writers were emotionalized, and there were ideas in their emotional products. Demosthenes was like Plato, a passionate thinker; Pindar, Æschylus and Sophocles were reasoning poets.

The Greeks used the word ecstasy in a modern secular sense rather than in a spiritual or pathological one. It was the unconscious memory of the poet coming to the fore and utilizing the intellect to pour light on the soul. It was not the mystic's ecstasy where irrational conclusions were arrived at because of some abnormality in the seer. The poet was always a critic and a philosopher who tamed his wildest thoughts. "Moderns are prone," says Butcher, "to believe that the action of poetic genius abdicates its rights and descends to the lower level of talent when it begins to reason. Greek literature decisively refutes such

a notion. It exhibits the critical faculty as a great underlying element in the creative faculty."

Greek poetry then is the portrayal of reasoning passion, using at the same time a conscious technique. It was the outpouring of the personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It represented the breaking forth of the unconscious into expression, controlled by a censorship on the part of the poet.

Plato's idea about poetry being a form of madness may, however, still be accepted, when we understand by madness the being imbued with one's emotions in a manner not depriving the poet of his intellectual powers. Poetry is only the result of inspiration, if by this term we mean that rationalized emotions have so accumulated as suddenly to seek expression. Every poet, in prose or verse, writes from the unconscious and he usually gets lost in his own characters or speaks directly in his own person. The writer, however, is not mad, nor is his art allied to madness. He is usually too sane, using his judgment at the same time that his emotions are aroused. So we can still subscribe to Plato's idea of unconscious art, put in the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue Ion:

All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed; like the Corybantian revellers in their dances, who are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains, yet who, when falling under the power of music and metre are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in possession of their mind. And the soul of the lyric poets does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from the honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they are like bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is

a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.

The expressions referring to being out of the mind and senses must not be taken literally.

As long as we bear in mind that Plato's idea of madness is merely the concentration on one topic, his idea of poetry is true.

A remark of Socrates in the Phaedrus should be well pondered by disciples of art for art's sake. "He who having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted."

Plato himself was one of the finest of ancient poets, in spite of the fact that he wanted to exclude poets from his ideal commonwealth. Some of the finest prose poems and allegories of ancient literature are found in his Republic, the Phaedrus and Symposium. Most of these are known to us, and need no mention. When Plato speaks of love, he does so as a poet, and the passages on the subject in the last two named dialogues are full of poetry.

I wish to give, besides the above passage, as an illustration of Plato's own prose poetry, part of a speech by Alcibiades. It is at the conclusion of the Symposium, and is part of Alcibiades's tribute to Socrates and his speeches. Socrates, himself, thinks the speech is delivered to create trouble between him and Agathon, of whom Alcibiades is jealous. The speech is ruined also by a reference at length to a phase of Greek life which is repulsive to us. After likening Socrates to Silenus and to Marsyas, Alcibiades continues in the following prose poem:

For my heart leaps within me fore than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear

them. And I observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me to such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit); and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him and fly as from the voice of the siren my fate would be like that of others—he would transfix me, and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be more sorry than glad, if he were to die; so that I am at my wit's end.

Symonds tells us that Æschylus was the great example of unconscious art among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of poetry.

Æschylus's creation Cassandra is a good illustration of a character in an ecstatic state. Cassandra is both prophetess and poetess, and her cries move us to this day, when much of Æschylus's moral and religious philosophy bores and irritates us. She is the incarnation of woman suffering. She was ravished at Troy by Ajax and was given to Agamemnon as prisoner of war, she the princess, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She had lost most of the members of her family and now anticipated great trouble

for Agamemnon whose wife Claetemnestrae was unfaithful to him. She also foresaw her own death at the queen's hands, but it was her punishment that her prophecies would not be heeded. She is partly mad, but hers is the poetic frenzy, tempered by logic. Her most meaningless ravings are full of meaning. They are poetry not because of the metre in which they are rendered, but because of the rational ecstasy. This ecstasy remains intact even in the English prose translation.

Nietzsche divided art into Apollonian and Dionysian. He found that the Dionysian state depended on emotional or orgiastic intoxication. He perceived that the ecstasy in this state was largely of a sexual character. As he boldly put it, "The desire for art and beauty is an indirect longing for the ecstasy of sexual desire, which gets communicated to the brain." This is the thesis that Freud developed. Croce, who has, however, something of the metaphysician and mystic in him, is not in sympathy with this view, for he ridicules the idea that the genesis of aesthetism lies in the desire of the male for the female. Yet he agrees with Freud in the conception that art is a means of curing oneself of sexual neurosis. "By elaborating his impressions," says Croce, "man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes them from him and makes himself their superior. The liberating and purifying function of art is another aspect and another formula of its character and activity. Activity is the deliverer, just because it drives away passivity."

Finely put, indeed, are the words of Nietzsche's views on ecstasy. "To the existence of art, to the existence of any aesthetic activity or perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is indispensable, namely ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the sensitiveness of the whole mechanism; until this takes place art is not realized.

"All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, possess this power; above all the ecstasy of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of ecstasy."

Plato, it will be recalled, compared the state of the poet to that of the reveller in the Bacchanalian rites. The favorable side of the worship of Dionysius or the Bacchic revels has been shown by Euripides in his play the Bacchae. He shows how King Pentheus was torn to pieces in mistake by his own mother for his hostility to the bacchic rites. Bacchus himself is the hero of the play. As the chorus says, Bacchus is innately modest and modest women will not be corrupted at the revels. Who is not moved by the song of the Chorus? "Would that I could go to Cyprus, the island of Venus, where the lovers dwell, soothing the minds of mortals, and to Paphos, which the waters of a foreign river flowing with an hundred mouths fertilize without rain—and to the land of Pieria, where is the beautiful seat of the Muses, the holy hill of Olympus. Lead me thither, O Bromius, Bromius, O master thou of Bacchanals. There are the Graces and there is Love and there is it lawful for the Bacchae to celebrate their orgies."

The ecstasy of the revellers at the rites was poetic ecstasy, for it was an unconscious or conscious erotic nature manifesting itself in the form of a religious rite. Bacchus, aside from being god of wine, was the symbol of productiveness and was accompanied by Priapus, and the phallus was carried about. He was youthful and his symbols were animals like the goat, ass, bull, tiger, lion, all of which had erotic significance. The ecstatic rites with which he was worshipped were introduced from Thrace.

Aristotle attributes the origin of tragedy to the use of the dithyramb of the revellers, and comedy to the phallic songs sung by them. The point is that love frenzy leads

to poetry, and we have an illustration of it in the connection between the Bacchic rites and poetry, between love and art. The rites degenerated under the Romans and were soon suppressed by law.

Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the twelfth section of The Birth of Tragedy. It is the old story of the battle between the emotions and reason, the instinct and the intellect, problems which men as different as Hearn, Bergson, Nietzsche, Pater and Freud solved by seeking liberties for the instinct. Pentheus, who represents reason, is the enemy of Bacchus, but fascinated by him, loses his life; reason leads to death when it makes no concession to the instincts. The play was a protest by Euripides against his own moralizing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and Tiresius is, in the words of Nietzsche, that we must display a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of the emotional forces. Don't trifle with poetry and the ecstasies that produce it.

The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his Greek Studies, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.

The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love, for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different nations.

True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth

and Whitman, dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.

And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.

Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always will be with us, and probably more so in prose than in verse. We want literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame Lespinasse, or in the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, or in the verse of Hafiz, Burns, Shelley, Browning, Heine or Verlaine.

Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his Inspiration of Poetry for a return of poetry to poetic madness. Emotion is the chief and most important element of poetry. "Emotion" as Woodberry says, "is the condition of their (the poets') existence; passion is the element of their being." When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any emotion in which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine, Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial event important poetry.

But emotions described by the poet affect people

differently. I may find great emotion in reading about a man who sacrifices himself for a great and unpopular idea, but others may not be interested in that man or his idea and hence will not be moved by the work. Such a work is poetry to me and like minded readers. Further, differences of intellectual outlook on the part of the readers count in determining poetry. Socrates, Buddha, Bruno and Galileo are poetic figures to us to-day; they have been enshrined in poetry and history and we accept many of their ideas. But to their contemporaries who rejected them they were not poetic figures. Who knows but that there are figures to-day we scoff at who may have a halo of poetry in history?

A distinct but by no means essential quality of the literature of ecstasy is that of pain. There is more pain depicted in the world's literature than pleasure. In his The Nature of Poetry, Edmund Clarence Stedman speaks of a certain sadness or melancholy in the poetry of the nineteenth century but he might have said this was true of the poetry of any century. Most poetry is sad, for life often is, and the poet is naturally interested in and pays most attention to the painful emotions that trouble him. Tragedy and elegy (and the term elegy was used by the Romans not only to bemoan the dead, but to deplore sad love affairs) are predominant in all literature, prose and verse.

We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read by us because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the substance of poetry and in the public mind there has always been an association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said—"our sweetest songs are those that told the saddest thought."

It is assumed that Christianity made poetry sad but this is not so, for there is sad poetry in the Old Testament and among the Romans and the Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is intertwined with human nerves. The most frequent note in poetry is wailing and lamentation, self-pity and passionate rebuke.

In Professor William A. Neilson's Essentials of Poetry, there is an interesting chapter on sentimentalism in poetry, in which the author dwells on the sentimentalism in the poetry of the English Romantic School. He defines it as the cultivation of an emotion for the sake of the thrill. Most certainly there can be no great poetry where the sentimentalism is forced, where it becomes ridiculous, where it bubbles over and becomes monotonous. Sentimentalism often characterizes popular poetry and if the public is likely to err in judging poetry it is particularly likely to confuse sentimentalism with normal human emotions. Yet it is hard often to draw the line between sham emotions and genuine sentiment.

The poet is bound to be always sentimental to an extent because he must wear his heart on his sleeve. No one need be ashamed of unadulterated emotions, for life is made up of them.

Besides, nationalities differ. The Irish, the Jews and the Russians, for example, do not consider their own poems sentimental because these are genuine records of actual feelings characteristic of sentimental peoples; to be sure, such expressed emotions may appear as sentimental to the rest of the world. Many think that the emotion of pity, and also sympathy for the criminal that we find in Russian novels is rather sentimental and nauseating, but it is genuine Russian emotion.

We should be on our guard, however, in regarding sentimentalism as poetry. The public loves cheap popular

songs and mushy lachrymose verses. The many poems, stories and plays about "mother," "baby," "the flag," "home," "our country," etc., are often drivelling sentimentalism and not poetry.

Ecstasy was the keynote of Oriental poetry. We are fortunate in having a translation in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1901 and 1902 by Duncan B. Macdonald, of a book on the laws of music and singing of ecstasy from Al Ghazzali's work on the Re-vivifying of the Sciences of the Faith. Ghazzali (1060-1111) was the greatest apologist for Islam and is known as "The Proof of Islam." He was held to be the only man who was worthy of being a prophet, next to Mohammed himself. He unfortunately dealt the death blow to Mohammedan philosophy and Averroes wrote against him. But no one among Arabs had as grand a conception of ecstasy in connection with poetry as he did. He was influenced by the Persian Sufis and defined ecstasy in a very modern manner. We may dispense with his mystic conception of it and pay attention only to his definition of it in its relation to poetry. Great admirer as he was of the Koran he recognized that poetry is more in accord with human nature than that work, and he quotes an authority to the effect that our being constituted of fanciful desires makes us more moved by poets than by the word of God. He finds various reasons for the power of poetry over us, the principal one being its quality of ecstasy. He sees that poetry has a mission in conveying ecstasy; that one of its uses is to arouse us to lamentation, to joy, to love, to courage and to religion. He analyzes the tender longing caused by love poetry, though, good Moslem that he was, he is always discriminating between poetry that arouses a lawful love, and that which has mere lust as its object.

His main contribution, however, to the philosophy of

ecstasy is his recognition of its identity with the unconscious. He quotes some one to the effect that music and singing do not produce in the heart what is not in it but stir up what exists there. Ecstasy to him is the result of hearing and of understanding what is heard and applying it to an idea which occurs to the hearer. It is a condition produced in the hearer's soul due to knowledge or emotion, and the condition is varied. The following passage is especially worthy of quotation: "As for the states, how many a man gets so far as to perceive in his heart, on some occasion which may appear in it, a contraction or an expansion, yet he does not know its cause! And a man sometimes thinks about a thing, and it makes an impression on his soul. Then he forgets the cause, but the impression remains upon his soul, and he feels it. And, sometimes, the condition which he feels is a joy which arose in his soul on his thinking about a cause which produces joy; or it may have been a sorrow; then he who was thinking about it forgets it, but feels in the impression its consequence. And sometimes that condition is a strong condition which a word expressing joy or sorrow does not indicate clearly and for which he cannot come upon a suitable expression for what was intended."

Al Ghazzali gives then, as the essence of ecstasy, its unconscious nature. Ecstasy is related to longing for something unknown. All people experience in their hearts states demanding things unknown to them. He compares the situation to that of the innocent and ignorant youth in puberty who is in a state unexplained to him. Al Ghazzali is one of the first of modern critics to formulate the theory of ecstasy as the end of poetry, and his argument explains the vogue of love and mystic poetry. He recurs, it is true, to the influence of metre in poetry in inducing ecstasy, but he is always thinking of the ecstasy of love

of man and God as the element of poetry, and in this he is a predecessor of Tolstoy. He also gives rules as to one's behavior in the ecstatic state and does not sanction undue madness.

A much higher form of the literature of ecstasy than the product of the immoral rites of Dionysus or the mystic poetry of Persia is the prophecy as it was known and delivered among the ancient Hebrews. Indeed, prophecy is the ideal form of the literature of ecstasy and represents the zenith of its achievement. It is the emotional verbal utterance of the unconscious of the poet, who is usually in a state of ecstasy, and who, as passages in the Bible testify, receives his message in a vision or dream. The act of prophesying was even contagious. The early prophets were like dancing dervishes in their prophesying and influenced others to do as they did. We recall how Saul stripped himself naked. The Hebrew word prophecy means utterance and the idea of foretelling the future was incidental to it. If the idea of futurity emanated from prophets, it was such insight as any gifted person may experience when he notes certain facts from which he can predict inevitable results. But the ecstatic state was always associated with the idea of prophecy, the only person, according to the account of the Bible, exempt from this state being Moses. The prophetic state was not allied to divination but resulted from moral and aesthetic inspiration such as we find in modern poets. When the Bible says, God spoke to the prophet, or the hand of God touched him, it means that the prophet was in a state of ecstasy due to a highly developed moral and social viewpoint. The true prophet's ecstasy was not accompanied by immorality or superduced by drugs or physical abuse. Music, however, was at one time used to produce the prophetic state. The aesthetic mechanism of the ancient

prophets was no different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times. Moses Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed analyzes the ecstatic state of prophecy and his analysis may be applied to any high form of poetic inspiration.

Prophecy was, according to Maimonides, an emanation sent forth to man's rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty; it consisted in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty; the logical and imaginative faculties had to be balanced in the prophet; he overflowed with the frenzy of ecstasy to help his fellow-men and could not rest even at risk of personal suffering; he had courage and intuition; he reserved his message in a dream or a vision.

The psychology of the prophetic inspiration has been studied by many of the higher critics of the Bible. One of the best books on the subject is The Psychology of Prophecy by Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan, Philadelphia 1908, (Julius H. Greenstone) who says:

The ecstasy of the wild and mad kind was seen only in the early days of Hebrew prophecy, when wine and dance and music and other external means were used for bringing about this state, but the subdued elevated ecstasy due to religious temperament and patriotic fervor, due to constant and profound contemplation, was certainly the characteristic of the later prophets. . . . Ecstasy is usually the spring whence all the other prophetic streams flow.

While the Greeks mingled reason with inspiration to produce poetry, the prophets went further, and interpenetrated their ecstasy with a high sense of social justice. An ecstatic state, with a keen intellect, a high moral outlook, and a noble social ideal characterized the prophet. His state of ecstasy was due to this highly developed

social conscience. He was not so much concerned with religious rites as with the decline of the nation's ideals of justice. The prophet of that day fulminated against the economic evils of society. He was possessed of an exalted type of aesthetic soul, the ecstasy to social justice. No literature gives us such types of men who rebuke unjust kings as we find in the stories of Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, Jeremiah and Hezekiah. No literature shows us such courageous types as Amos and Isaiah. They were not flatterers, these men who risked their lives in shouting back to eastern autocratic monarchs their iniquities. They did not say what society or public opinion wanted them to say but what they felt was their duty. They overflowed not with the immoral and insane ecstasy of the rites of Dionysius, but the ecstasy of the man who loves his neighbor as himself, of the man who would not have the rich crush the poor, of the man who sought kindness for the stranger, the oppressed, the widow, the fatherless.

And the prophets, in spite of their virulency, produced the highest forms of artistic beauty. Not all the revolutions of opinions and changes in religious beliefs have made them obsolete. Shaw once said, substitute the word ideals for the word idols, in the Bible, and you have messages that are still true.

So the prophets instead of being miracle performers, foretellers of the future, preachers of theology, are really poets of ecstasy, with a social message revealed in a dream. The old word of God, in the form of a high social ideal, to-day is still making prophets. Shelley, Ibsen and Ruskin have done work that is akin to the prophets of old; they have given us works of art inspired by a state of ecstasy springing from the possession of social ideals. Santayana rightly regards the prophet, one who portrays the ideals

of experience and destiny, as the greatest poet. (See Poetry and Religion.)

Nor did the prophets of old sing their messages in artificial form. They did not count their syllables and give us metre, though they indulged in parallelisms. They wrote in rhythmical prose.[39-A]

The prophets had a true conception of what constituted a high form of poetry, an ecstatic production in prose with a social ideal behind it. Ecstasy was the first condition of their poetry but it was not pathological as with monks who tortured their bodies, or decadent poets who resorted to drugs.

If there is a high form of the literature of ecstasy it surely is that in which the ecstasy of humanitarianism is described. It is that which shows a man with a highly developed sense of social justice, who is making sacrifices because he observes the misery of many due to the privileged few. Don Quixote is one of the greatest poems because the knight wants to help mankind, even though he is insane and never recks his own bruises, but persists and is laughed at by all.

In speaking of the literature of ecstasy, something should be said about De Quincey's famous distinction of the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. He defined the former as that which teaches and the latter as that which moves. In the literature of power he included also that which taught by means of passions, desires and emotions and that which had its field of action in relation to the great moral capacities of man. The literature of power, according to De Quincey, includes that

which appeals to the reason and understanding through the affections. It restores "to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution." De Quincey included under the literature of power, prose as well as verse, fairy tales and romances as well as tragedies and epic poems.

The question is, what relation is there between De Quincey's idea of the literature of power and that of the literature of ecstasy. Of course he included under the literature of power his masterly prose poems; also all his imaginative writings. Now, the Confessions of an Opium Eater, for instance, belongs only in parts to the literature of ecstasy, noticeably in the dream phantasies. By the literature of power De Quincey meant all literature except science. The only illustration of the literature of knowledge he gives is Newton's Principia, and the marked characteristics he finds in this as in all literature of knowledge is that it may be and usually is superseded by later discoveries. The literature of power in his opinion is permanent; this statement is not true when we think of the many imaginative works of the past that have no longer any message or appeal to us.

The point is that De Quincey's literature of power includes not only poetry in verse and prose, but the entire field of general literature which hovers on poetry, or in which the poetry is diffused so that we call it prose literature. The literature of ecstasy then is the more emotional literature of power, that section of it where the ecstasy is concentrated. It would include chiefly the impassioned prose and prose phantasies of De Quincey's own work.

De Quincey was no art-for-art's-sake man, and he recognized the importance of the rational and the moral element in the sphere of the literature of power.

There remains a distinction between power and ecstasy.

De Quincey does not identify power with ecstasy (a term he does not even use) even though he demands a moving effect in the literature of power. He does not contend that the emotion should be concentrated and hold complete sway over the author. His literature of power would include, for example, all good novels or histories in their entirety. To us only those portions of such novels and histories where the passion is concentrated belong to the literature of ecstasy or poetry.

Literature of ecstasy is always poetry, literature of power is not, being rather the equivalent of belles lettres, reaching the heights of poetry only at times.

The literature of ecstasy is all writing, in verse or prose, wherever an emotional atmosphere hovers, where a feeling is concentrated, and hence it is really poetry. Poetry is the language of ecstasy and ecstasy is that possessive faculty of the imagination capable "of projecting itself into the very consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the tone, the color and the temperature thereof." (James Russell Lowell: The Function of the Poet. "The Imagination." P. 70.)

FOOTNOTES:

[18-A] I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth missed ecstasy.

[21-A] This is the idea in Donne's poem, The Ecstasy. Professor William Lyon Phelps in the preface to his The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century claims that the influence of Donne has never been greater than at present.

[39-A]

"Hebrew poetry is
Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.
'Ecstasy affords
The occasion and expediency determines the form.'"

Marianne Moore in Others (1916).

CHAPTER III

ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY

Aristotle was the first critic who placed little stress on the importance of metre in poetry. If the critics had followed him, instead of merely referring to his Poetics and trying to discover the "borderland between prose and poetry," there probably would have been little confusion as to what is poetry. He saw there was poetry in the prose mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and in the dialogues of Socrates, though these were not classified as poetry. Incidentally he found little poetry in Empedocles, who in spite of his metre was primarily a physicist. The passage from the Poetics is worth quoting entire for it contains the nucleus of all arguments for prose poetry. I quote from S. H. Butcher's translation:

For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegaic, or any similar metre. People, do, indeed, add the word "make" or "poet" to the name of the metre, and speak of elegaic poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name.[42-A] Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as

Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet.

He also says: "The Poet or maker should be the maker of plots rather than of verse; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates is actions."

Aristotle's idea that metre is an unessential element in determining poetry has never really taken root in literary criticism. It was voiced by men like Erasmus and Savonarola, and was again restated by the Italian critic Castelvetro, who in his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics (1570) said that verse is not the essence of poetry, that it does not distinguish it but clothes it, and that therefore matter and not metre is the test of poetry. He believes like Aristotle, that metre aids poetry, but that the imitation or creation itself determines it.

George Saintsbury in his scholarly and fascinating History of Criticism in Europe cannot forgive Aristotle for this "pestilent heresy," as he calls it. He severely berates Wordsworth and Coleridge for having supported it. He attacks all the critics who countenance it. He adulates Dante's treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia as an antidote to the heresy, because Dante wants the rhythm (as well as the diction) of poetry to be different from that of prose.

But we are learning to-day that metre is not only an unnecessary element in poetry, but often an artificial, hampering encumbrance, frequently vitiating the poetical quality of a poem.

Yet Professor Saintsbury has given us in his History of English Prose Rhythm some of the finest emotional and rhythmical passages from English prose writers. He chose the selections primarily for their rhythm and not for their emotional qualities, yet most of the passages are

poems. His book practically convinces one that nearly all the great English writers of prose wrote not only rhythmical prose, but emotional or ecstatic prose, or poetry. Professor Saintsbury finds the essence of prose rhythm, in variety and divergence, and he divides prose into three kinds, according to the rhythm. These are hybrid verse-prose, pure highly rhythmed prose, and prose in general. In the first class he includes much of the Bible, especially where the parallelisms are present, Anglo Saxon poetry, Ossian, Blake's Prophetic Books and Walt Whitman. He no doubt would include free verse here. But this so-called "hybrid verse prose" is really highly rhythmed prose generally arranged in verse form. There is no real distinction between the two forms.

Poetry in prose, however, does not depend on the rhythm. The only effect on the reader of reading the chapter on "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry" in Professor Gummere's book The Beginnings of Poetry is to convince him that the learning amassed there does not prove the professor's thesis. For example Gummere cites Bagehot's statement, "the exact line which separates grave novels in verse like Aylmer's Field or Enoch Arden from grave novels not in verse like Silas Marner and Adam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence," and thus comments: "Adam Bede remains prose, and Enoch Arden is commonly set down as poetry and there an end." This impatient remark does not do away with the fact that the story of Hetty's troubles after she had met Arthur Dimmesdale, and the scene of the interview with her in prison by Dinah Morris are two examples that fulfill every definition of poetry, even to irregular rhythm. Some of the free verse poets have given us compositions made up of the outbursts of people in distress, with their story in simple language like Hetty Sorrel's tale.

My contention then is that what decides whether a composition is poetry is not the rhythm but the ecstasy. The academic critics have found an argument for rhythm in the fact that when a man is moved, the expression of his emotions tends towards rhythmical language. This is certainly very often true, but the rhythmical character of language in these cases is entirely different from that in verse, for in verse you have a patterned regular rhythm obeying an artificial law of accents, a continued series of rise and ebb of the voice that must not break down for hundreds and even thousands of monotonous lines. In the rhythm of the natural language of emotion you have no rules or fetters on how the accents should be distributed. You have rhythmical and unrhythmical lines, regular and irregular arrangements of accents, all thrown together. No pattern is present, and no uniformity or similarity of any kind is kept up. This is the language of poetic prose.

If I say that rhythm is not necessary in poetry, I merely mean that no patterned or strong rhythm is necessary, for all prose is more or less irregularly rhythmical. Often the prose rhythm is more marked than the rhythm of metre, as you may find out by comparing passages from Whitman or Pater with let us say some of the blank verse of Wordsworth. Professor Patterson claimed that all prose has rhythm, and he called prose "syncopated rhythm." He rightly pointed out that passages of prose have a rhythm which in nowise differs from the rhythm of free verse. He refuses to regard free verse, as some seek to do, as a third medium for poetic expression. He shows that the arrangement of free verse into irregular lines merely calls attention to the rhythms. All prose may be arranged as free verse and all free verse as prose. Since such is the case, all literature of

ecstasy in prose has rhythm besides ecstasy and should certainly be called poetry. Dr. Patterson made one error, however, to which Dr. Cary F. Jacob calls attention in her Foundations and Nature of Verse. Prose may have rhythm but it has no continuity of progress in the rhythms, which must eventually break down; it has no intention of continuous rhythmic flow. But poetry, I urge, may exist in prose without a continuity of progress of rhythms or even without rhythm at all—(after all, in spite of Dr. Patterson, there is unrhythmical prose).

The view that rhythm is vital to poetry is fallacious. Accentuation at unequal intervals of time no more creates or heightens poetic fervor than, as was formerly supposed, measured stress on syllables did so. If the prime motive of an unrhythmical prose work, in whole or part, is the communication of an emotion or the ecstatic treatment of an idea, that production is emphatically a poem; or at least some portions of it are separately entitled to that name. If you deny it you will be compelled to maintain that the able unrhythmical prose translations we have of the Greek and Latin poets contain no poetry. In fact the best way to judge if a composition in verse is poetry is, as Goethe and Hearn said, to translate it into the prose of another language; if poetic emotions are not then revealed, rest assured that they were never present in the original work. When the rhyme, metre and rhythm have been abstracted and the poetic fire still glows almost undiminished, we have the best proof, first that its existence did not depend upon the use of verbal measures and sounds, and secondly, that the poetry is not lost even when transferred into the prose of another tongue.

The first question the reader will now ask is: "Well, what then constitutes the difference between prose and

poetry if you take away the distinguishing feature of rhythm?" And some misguided critics assert that the term prose poetry is a hybrid and a contradiction in terms. The embarrassment of the former and the misconception of the latter will disappear if they remember that the opposite of prose is not poetry, but verse or metre. As Coleridge said, science is the proper antithesis of poetry. An unemotional presentation of dull facts is, however, the real antithesis.

Poetry is absolutely independent of any adornment it may be given, such as rhyme, metre, or, as I am especially trying to show, rhythm; even though it is true that emotional language may tend to become rhythmical. Verse is simply an ordering of words so that the modulation by the voice especially attracts the ear by the regularity of stress. We have stories, dramas and essays in different measures of verse just as we have them in prose. Description, narration, exposition, even argument and exclamation, appear in verse as well as in prose. There are, as it has always been recognized, innumerable products in verse that from the nature of their contents are destitute of the attributes of poetry. Humorous and didactic efforts, mere jokes or commonplace sermons, do not become poetical because they are put in metre or rhythm. Abstract philosophy, concrete science and barren theology remain arid and unemotional discourses even in the epics of Dante and Milton. A bare and not particularly interesting statement of facts or a procession of dull and platitudinous ideas is, even in verse, anything but poetry. In the range of the world's metrical writings the poems are few and far between.

On the other hand, it has always been recognized that there were prose compositions that partook of the nature of poetry or were replete with poetical parts. It was difficult

to classify this literature, for the extreme beauty and emotion which pervaded it lifted it above ordinary prose and yet because of the absence of measure it was not classified as poetry. The first English critic who perceived that the authors of such work were really poets and should be designated by their appropriate name was Sir Philip Sidney. He showed that verse was but an ornament and did not make poetry, and that there were many poets, among whom he named Xenophon, who never versified. Shelley, however, has given the widest vogue to the feeling that the distinction between poets and prose writers was a vulgar error. He maintained that philosophers like Bacon and Plato, historians like Herodotus, Plutarch and Livy, authors of revolutions in opinion such as Jesus and Rousseau, were poets.

Coleridge held that the object of poetry was to communicate pleasure, and remarked: "But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romance. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. . . . The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet, furnish undeniable proof that poetry of the highest kind may last without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem."

"There are also prose poets," said Emerson in his essay on "Poetry and Imagination" in Letters and Social Aims. "Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had

the magnanimity to say, 'If Burke and Bacon were not poets (measured lines not being necessary to constitute one), he did not know what poetry meant.' And every good reader will easily recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets."

Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of Tristram Shandy a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a poet more because of the Vicar of Wakefield than the Deserted Village.

Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry without absolutely being poetry, instancing Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and the Decameron.

Heine spoke of Don Quixote as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called Wilhelm Meister poetry. Brandes regards Lord Beaconsfield a poet. Matthew Arnold characterized Chateaubriand, Senancour and Guérin poets. Balzac considered himself a poet and Ibsen in mentioning his prose dramas often used the word "poems."

The habit of calling productions in metre or rhythm poetry has been so strongly ingrained in us that we denominate every lengthy performance in verse a poem in toto. Before Poe, Coleridge said that "a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry." Poe gave us the reasons for this proposition and demonstrated to us that a long epic poem is but a series of short poems connected by uninspired passages in metre. The same thing may be said of literary verse performances of moderate length. To those who object to using the word "poem" in connection with any prose composition one may reply that these, like verse productions, are also often made up of poetical parts here and there; they simply lack regular

rhythm and this is not a sufficient line of demarcation as to what constitutes poetry and what does not.

There are many short stories in verse which are known as poems while there are many poetical tales and sketches in prose which no one finds to be poetry, although they often contain more of it than many specimens in measure. I think Poe's Eleonora with its description of the Valley of Many Colored Grass and Hawthorne's Haunted Mind are greater poems, though in prose, than most of Holmes' and Bryant's verse poems are. I see no reason why we should not designate as poetry, prose tales where ecstasy and emotion predominate. Kipling's Brushwood Boy or Bret Harte's Outcasts of Poker Flat is as poetical, I believe, as any tale in Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. The same laws of emotional appeal are working in the one as in the other; a similar artistic stamp is printed on all these stories. In fact, Longfellow's tales are inferior in the quality and quantity of poetry to the stories specified. His compositions could easily be arranged in prose and the stories of Kipling or Harte could be transposed into metrical verse. The transfer would not affect the poetry in either of them.

It is a confused system of literary classification which does not permit calling these tales of Harte and Kipling poetry, but crowns the same writers' doggerel verses like The Heathen Chinee and Fuzzy Wuzzy with the title "poems."

To bring sharply before the reader's mind the idea that a piece in verse is often not poetry and that a prose passage frequently is a poem, I will quote at random two passages.

One is from a work that is rich with poetry and written by one of England's greatest poets and yet the particular section, though in metre, is but a dry statement of facts.

I quote from Wordsworth's Michael, one of the finest things in English literature, yet unpoetical in the first part:

Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.

Here are unpoetical lines which might have been written in prose, but Wordsworth had to give us some preliminary information so that we could follow his story. Incidentally, he has the reputation for having much prosy material in the body of his work.

The other passage I quote is purposely a translation from a foreign novel and yet it has not lost any of its poetry. The paragraph, of which I give part, is a poem and part of a larger one in prose. It is from D'Annunzio's Triumph of Death and describes the music in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde":

And in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed. The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more restless poignant anxiety passed over all the instruments and expressed a continual and ever vain effort to attain the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every grasp, although it shone ever so near, etc.

I shall show more fully that our definitions of what is poetry and what is a poem have been faulty. The error

is so perceptible that it is surprising that so few critics have detected it. Meanwhile I will give my definitions:

Poetry is not a department of literature in the sense that the novel or the essay or the drama is, but is an atmosphere which bathes literature whenever ecstasy and emotion are present. It is not a distinct division of art as literature, music or painting is, for poetry is the very essence of all these arts whether it is transmitted by words, sounds or colors. It is the ecstatic emotional spirit which pervades all good literature (or any of the arts) whether in verse or prose, in their finest parts. It is an aesthetic quality which gives tone to a literary work or any portion or portions of it. It may exist without figures of speech, rhyme, metre or rhythm.[52-A] Its most natural language is prose or free verse. Let us have no more such classification of literature as fiction, drama, essay, criticism, poetry, etc. There is fiction in verse and there is prose fiction; there are verse dramas and prose plays, etc., and any of these may be steeped in poetry. However, the customary lyric verse may be comprised under the heading of poetry not because of the measure, but on account of the poetic emotion that usually characterizes it. Let us also not speak of the arts like music, painting, sculpture and poetry when instead of the last we mean literature, for poetry is a quality of all the arts including literature. Poetry is the spirit of ecstasy and emotion which pervades the arts like music, painting, sculpture and literature, and hence it may be found in every branch of literature whether in verse or prose, like the drama, fiction and the essay.

We are now in a position to define what a poem is.

Critics are agreed that it must consist of the artistic expression of words which arouse the reader's emotion, but they have insisted that these words be rhythmically arranged. I think if the latter limitation is withdrawn, all our confusion as to what is a poem will disappear. A poem is any literary composition, whether in verse or prose, which as a whole is an imaginative creation, a vehicle of emotion, an expression of ecstasy; or that portion or every portion of such a composition where the emotion or ecstasy has been concentrated. It does not follow that the work as a whole is necessarily poetry. Its most natural language is prose or free verse.

Poems may therefore be found in imaginative philosophical works like Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic and other dialogues, Bacon's Essays, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Emerson's Essays, in critical works like Pater's Renaissance, Ruskin's Modern Painters, Wilde's Intentions, in histories like Thucydides's Peloponnesian War and Carlyle's French Revolution, in autobiographies like St. Augustine's Confessions and Rousseau's Confessions, in letters like Madame Lespinasse's and Mrs. Browning's, in diaries like those of Amiel, in novels by Balzac, Dickens, Hawthorne, Hardy, Tolstoy, etc.

Some of the best poetry is found in the world's prose fiction. For example, The Scarlet Letter has as good poetry in it as the Aeneid. Like the old epic, it is made up of great poems connected by extended portions that belongs to general literature, sections that have not enough emotion to be regarded as poetry nor are yet arid or passionless enough to be termed science. But the story of Hester Prynne is poetry as truly as the tale of Dido, and undoubtedly you cannot refuse the appellation poetry to the chapter in Hawthorne's novel which

describes how Arthur Dimmesdale gets up in the pulpit and confesses to the congregation his part in Hester Prynne's guilt. The Aeneid is really a novel in verse.

We are not often moved by metrical writing as we are by the last part of the chapter in David Copperfield entitled, "A Greater Loss," where we see the agonizing grief of the elder Pegotty and of Ham over the elopement of Emily, Ham's betrothed. You recall the love scene telling of the meeting of Richard and Lucy in Meredith's novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, only as poetry. This is how the passage, which being rhythmical besides, begins:

Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters.

The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and the planes and the beeches lucid green, and the pine stems redder gold; leaving the brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded barks, where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline, and the bramble shoots wander amid moist rich herbage, etc.

If the sphere of poetry has thus been widened to include many compositions in prose formerly excluded, it has, on the other hand, been narrowed by omitting much in verse that was formerly admitted into the domain of the Muses. I refer especially to the whole body of unecstatic philosophical, scientific and theological discourses in verse which usurp a name not belonging to them; I refer to much descriptive and narrative verse that lacks the poetic glow; I would exclude nearly all of the so-called "light," "occasional" and "humorous" verse. Winnow the voluminous verse writers and but a modicum of poetry remains.

Critics as a rule agree that neither rhythm nor metre makes a literary performance poetical if the author's soul does not enter into the work, but they refuse to countenance the corollary that when unrhythmical prose is used as a medium for the singer's poetical sentiments the result should also be called poetry. It is an easy matter to arrange any fine poetical prose in blank verse or irregular rhythmical lines. Just a few slight verbal changes are necessary. The new product then fulfills the conditions of the old theory which demands metre or rhythm. Does it become poetry because of these unimportant changes? No, these do not work so miraculous an effect upon the writing. It acquires no higher qualities than it had before in prose.

I hence fail to see why the Idylls of the King should be alone called poems and not also parts of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which Tennyson paraphrased in blank verse. Malory has, however, been deemed a poet by some critics and any one who will read the lament over the death of Sir Lancelot will not begrudge the author that title. One admits that the Tales of La Fontaine and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are very rich in poetry, but why say that the original prose stories which these poets often re-tell in verse (undoubtedly improving them by their own genius) are not? And who will deny the statement that the best of Scott's novels, say The Heart of Midlothian, contains as much, if not more, poetry than some of his novels in verse like the Lady of the Lake? Even in his day the reviewers saw that there was no difference between Scott's verse and prose stories as far as the quality of the poetry was concerned; indeed they saw that there was more of the divine afflatus in the latter than there was in the former. In fact the Quarterly Review referred to Scott's novels as poems.

One may even say that the great Shakespeare found in the dramas, tales and chronicles that were his sources some of the poetry we note in his plays. Especially is this true in regard to his use of Plutarch. Brandes has pointed out that Julius Cæsar is found in every detail in Plutarch's Lives of Cæsar, Brutus and Mark Anthony. The dramatist followed the biographer point for point, repeating word for word passages of North's translation, accepting the characters as they stood there and repeating all the leading incidents. If Julius Cæsar contains poetry, as it certainly does in abundance, then surely those lives of Plutarch which were followed by Shakespeare must also possess it.

Nor can I understand why the parts of Shakespeare's plays which are in prose and are often superior to many portions in blank verse should also not be called poetry. Take the first scene of the fifth act of Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth is walking in her sleep. The entire section, though prose, is one of the most poetic pieces in the entire drama. If the passage had been written in blank verse it could not have been improved. The poetry is there in the scene itself and not in any possible metre. Other lines might be cited, like Hamlet's remarks to Guildenstern, who tried to pry out his secret and play upon him as upon a pipe; or his reflections on what a wonderful piece of work was man; or his comments over Yorick's skull. All these selections are in impassioned prose and are as much entitled to the rank of poetry as are most of the blank verse of the drama. Hamlet's advice to the players though art criticism, and prose, is so lit up with poetic glamor that it deserves the name poetry more than the metrical version of some of the moral commonplaces in the play.

One may ask various questions of the critic who clings

to the old definition that metre or rhythm must accompany poetry. Why should Conrad's supreme poetic description of a storm at sea in his Nigger of the Narcissus not be called a poem, when you designate by this word Virgil's famous description in dactylic hexameters in the first book of the Aeneid? Powerful and deservedly renowned as the Virgil passage is, I venture to say that it does not as a poem rank higher than some of Conrad's descriptions. One would wish to be informed where the story of ingratitude in Balzac's novel Père Goriot is any the less poetical than that of Shakespeare's verse play King Lear. Why is the succession of ideas in Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra called poetry and not, let us say, Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance? Why call the descriptions of battles by Homer poems, but not those of Stendhal or Tolstoy or Zola in Le Chartreuse de Parme or War and Peace or Le Debâcle? And how can you on any pretence refuse to include in the category of poetry De Quincey's famous prose poems The Dream Fugue and Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow?

Since the critics would not admit that any unrhythmical prose is poetry, it is little wonder that Baudelaire founded as a distinct and conscious form the composition he called "poem in prose." We are told by his translator, Mr. Sturm, that he had dreamed in his days of ambition "of a miracle of poetical prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme." He understood and proved that rhythm was not necessary to poetry. He derived the idea of this separate form from Poe and Bertrand. He has been followed by Turgenev, who left us some prose poems which he called Senilia. The reader may recall the love scene in The House of Gentlefolk and the concluding chapters of Rudin and Fathers and Sons, which are all prose poems. Gorki has written some exquisite prose poems. One of

them, The March of Man, is one of the most beautiful poems ever written. (Translated in The Cosmopolitan for July, 1905.)

Really, every great literary man is a poet, for he is constantly occupied with ecstasy and human emotions. Do you think Hugo was a poet only when he chanted in verse and ceased being one when he wrote Les Misérables or Notre Dame de Paris? It is not necessary to use the old poetical machinery of rhythm, or metaphors or similes, or apostrophe or personification or any other figure of speech; one may dispense with allusions to mythology or the use of any but current expressions and idioms; one may write almost as one talks; and poetry may nevertheless be produced. When Macpherson in the eighteenth century and Chateaubriand in the early part of the nineteenth century gave us in imitation of the old epics the long prose poems Fingal and Les Martyrs, respectively, they sinned artistically only because they were imitators and were stilted and rhetorical. These books contain excellent poetry in prose; we to-day can scarcely imagine the vogue they had. Had they been more natural they would still be read.

I believe the application of the theory of poetry I advocate would work many changes in literary values. Who can doubt that Ibsen and Balzac are greater poets than John Hay or Edmund Clarence Stedman, both of whom have respectable rank elsewhere, the former as a statesman and the latter as a critic? Yet our system of literary classification stamps these two as poets because of a few popular and able lyrics in verse, while Ibsen and Balzac, who wrote in prose, are not even considered poets, according to academic standards. It is true Ibsen also wrote some lyrics and a few plays in verse, but he is as much a poet in The Wild Duck or The Master Builder as he is in Peer Gynt

or Brand. The scenes of Oswald losing his mind at the end of Ghosts or of Ella Rentheim rebuking John Gabriel Borkman for his desertion of her are magnificent poems. As for the poems of Balzac they are too numerous to mention. The picture of the miser in Eugénie Grandet is surely poetry. Balzac regarded his stories Louis Lambert, Séraphita and The Lily of the Valley as poems. Inflated as they occasionally are, they are suffused with poetical qualities. One could go on selecting poems from Cousin Pons, The Wild Ass's Skin, Lost Illusions, etc. Balzac and Ibsen are poets and any definition of poetry that would exclude them as such is faulty.

Under the new method of distinguishing poets that I seek to promulgate, many writers will be admitted as such whom the world never dreamt of as seers. It might astonish some people if I make a claim for Mark Twain as a poet. But who that has read Huckleberry Finn and recalls the description of the sunrise on the Mississippi, given in the nineteenth chapter, will be prone to exclude our greatest imaginative and philosophical humorist from the ranks of Apollo's servants?

To convince the skeptical, I quote from the famous passage where Huck fearing he would go to hell if he freed a "nigger" slave, determines to disclose Jim's whereabouts and writes a note to that effect. We all recall his mental struggles, how he finally tore the letter, with the words "All right, I'll go to hell." The few pages telling of the reflections and memories which led to this decision are certainly poetry.

I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. . . .

I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; . . . and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was.

Our definition allows us to include the author of the few lines beginning "With malice towards none, with charity towards all" as a poet. Indeed, I have been anticipated in the claim that Lincoln was a poet, as the Gettysburg speech has been on several occasions called a poem.

It may be asserted that it is rather difficult to differentiate the poetical portions of a prose work from the rest. This same problem confronts us in verse. Who can point out exactly which lines in the Iliad are poetry? The fact is that there are passages in both prose and metrical literature that we unhesitatingly call poems because they instantly transform us. Just as you never doubted that the speeches of Andromache are poetical and that the catalogue of the ships is not, so you will find it no problem to discard the tedious descriptions in Balzac as unpoetical while you accept the emotional sections as poems. Just as critics have selected the poems from lengthy metrical works, choosing the story of Margaret from Wordsworth's Excursion, for example, so they could glean the poems of prose literature.

One objection raised to the use of prose as a poetical vehicle is its tendency to diffusiveness. It is claimed that here there are always temptations to digress and become trivial; hence we get the interminable novels and stupendous treatises which as a rule we do not have in verse. But one may grow verbose and expatiate too much in metre as well: the matter rests entirely with the author. Note how ponderous are some of the old epics, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy and Orlando Furioso. In modern

times Byron's Don Juan, Browning's Ring and the Book and Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh are examples of lengthy stories in verse. All of these books are more voluminous than the prose plays, essays, short stories, and novelettes to which we are accustomed. The prose poet may weed out the trifling incidents and expunge the redundant from his composition as easily as the verse writer. Wordy insignificant passages in a literary product are the outcome, not of a particular rhythmical arrangement, such as prose or verse, but of a want of artistic feeling, to which even great geniuses are at times subject. It does not follow that a powerful description or an emotional idea or an impassioned state of mind need tend to diffusiveness if written in prose. The poet who has learned self-restraint in composing does not lose his sense of proportion even when writing in prose.

Nor need we prefer the verse form to prose, because, as it is alleged, a metrical poem gives us the maximum poetry in the fewest words. It is true we get an immediate thrill out of a rhymed lyric or sonnet, while we often have to read a few chapters in a novel to get a similar sensation. Nevertheless this is not because the lyric or sonnet is in verse and the novel in prose. It was the intention of the verse poet to captivate us instantly in these forms. Translate the sonnet or lyric into the prose of another language and the excitement seizes us just as quickly. Poe's Raven is known to French readers chiefly in a literal prose translation. They respond to it as quickly as we do, though they have to forego the rhyme and the metre. The writer of unrhythmical prose may concentrate any emotions in a short space if he wishes to do so. Many brief prose poems in literature are dynamos of emotion. Ecstasy can be concentrated in a short prose poem as readily as in a verse,

lyric or sonnet. The important thing is that the poet record the sentiments instantly, avoiding preliminaries.

Yet the bulk of the prose we have will not become poetry because of the new outlook I suggest. It is after all only at times that we can single out poems in them. Most prose works of merit fall short of being poetry as a whole or in parts. The ecstasy or emotion is often not concentrated in any particular part of the work. The facts, notions or ideas are not emotionally presented. Yet the volume is literature, and is more akin to poetry than to science. But it is no discredit to a book because it is just literature and not poetry.

Gurney in his The Power of Sound calls attention to the fact that when Lessing defined the limits between the plastic arts and poetry, he made no distinction between verse and prose in his conception of poetry. Whatever Lessing says about poetry in the Laocoon applies equally well to prose. True, he uses Homer as an illustration, but he could just as well have used a modern novel, for the question of metre is never raised in determining the province of poetry, which he differentiates from that of painting. The only place he mentions the prose writer is in the seventeenth section, where he says that the prose writer usually aims only after intelligibility and clarity, while the poet seeks also to be vivid. He does not say that the prose writer may not also be a poet if he is vivid. In fact this is the very inference. He states also that the verse writer who aims at producing no illusion but addresses the understanding is not a poet, instancing Virgil when in the Georgics he describes a cow fit for breeding.

This is then the singular and most remarkable fact about the Laocoon that the author includes all vivid emotional narrative prose under the term poetry, which he

distinguishes from painting. It is easy to see that his famous distinction, that objects side by side in space or bodies with their visible properties are the fit subjects for painting, while actions or objects which succeed each other in time are the peculiar subjects of poetry, is really also a distinction between the plastic arts and the prose novel or short story. Painting, according to Lessing, was descriptive, poetry was narrative. Now narrative properly is the object of the novel. It is true Lessing defined poetry in a limited manner, as if it were only narrative literature; but we are grateful to him for implying that vivid prose narrative is poetry, and that poetry extends beyond metrical compositions.

It is commonly said that an emotional piece of prose writing is not poetry, but the raw material for poetry. Even Arthur Symons calls such warning only poetical substance. One critic has even designated it as a sort of bastard writing that is neither prose nor poetry. In fact rhythmical emotional prose has been a thorn in the academic critic's side. He has become more confused than ever since the vogue of free verse, some of which though really prose is beyond question poetry. He no longer refuses the title of poet to Whitman and he shrinks from denying that the best free verse is poetry. He feels vaguely that since prose is also often rhythmical, the old definition of poetry as an emotional piece of rhythmical writing is faulty, for it must include also emotional rhythmical prose, and he objects to this inclusion. Professor Lowes, who, in his Convention and Revolt in Poetry, recognizes the similarity between the rhythm of free verse and that of prose, unsuccessfully solves the problem by saying that poetry is used in a loose as well as in a more rigid sense and that free verse is an artistic medium of not fully developed possibilities. He,

like most critics, falls into the error of saying that we cannot include prose whenever we speak of poetry. Still we must be grateful to Lowes for his liberal attitude towards new verse forms.

Critics who say that emotional prose should be metrical to be called poetry remind us of the paraphrasers of a few centuries ago who put the Psalms into rhyme. They did not make them poetry, they usually robbed them of it, and spoiled their effect. Even Milton succumbed to the vice. And Gosse, in his article on "Lyrical Poetry" in the Encyclopedia Britannica, tells us of one Azzi who in 1700 put the book of Genesis into sonnets. Emotional prose, rhythmical or not, is poetry. No one to-day thinks of employing Matthew Arnold's touchstone theory of poetry whereby we are to have a few metrical lines of some great poets to apply as a test as to what is poetry.

It is really strange that with the English prose Bible before them, critics should have insisted on the metrical element in poetry. And one must add that parallelisms are not the fundamental features of poetry. The poetry of Isaiah and David would have been poetry without a single parallelism. But we need not go to the prophets or the Psalms, where we have parallelism, for poetry in the Bible: we have it in the narrative portions, in the stories of Ruth and Joseph. Who does not feel the poetical emotions surge through him as he comes to the forty-fifth chapter of Genesis, where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers? Fearing they will be dismayed because they sold him, he assures them that their criminal deed was just what has enabled him to become a ruler and save them from starvation. A poet was he who wrote this chapter beginning with the lines:

Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all that stood by him; and he cried, "Cause every man to go out from me." And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brethren, etc.

We must always remember that the emotional appeal whether in prose or verse is the same to us. We do not get one kind of ecstasy by reading poetical prose and another kind by reading verse. Our inner soul is stirred, our aesthetic faculties are touched in the same way if we read a beautiful love letter like one in prose of Eloise's, or a love poem in verse. And it may be said here that no poet has improved upon those prose epistles by changing them into metrical form. An idea colored with emotion and a beautiful description give us the same effects in prose as they do in verse. The test of poetry is in our own souls.

We can find poetry in the most unexpected places, and the reader who wants to look for it will be able to see that poets like Wordsworth and Whitman were poets in their prose critical prefaces as well as in the Lyrical Ballads and Leaves of Grass. As a matter of fact, Whitman used paragraphs from his critical essays, word for word, in Leaves of Grass, but arranged in free verse form.

It is true that at times the poetry cannot be distilled, as it were, from the body of a prose work; a particular passage cannot be lifted up and called poetry, though it be such (dependent, however, on what goes before and after). For example, every reader is thrilled with emotion when he comes to the conclusion of the chapter in Vanity Fair, where Amelia Sedley is praying for George Osborne, who was lying dead on his face with a bullet through his heart. This line is poetry, but only by reason of our taking it into consideration with earlier parts of the novel. It could not be published alone, for it would be meaningless.

But the same is true of poetry in verse. When Horatio says of Hamlet "now cracks a noble heart," and hopes that flights of angels will sing him to his rest, the passage is effective only because we have lived with Hamlet and felt with him and admired him. Printed alone the words would mean little. The poetry of a great novel, like that of a verse play, is not always in isolated passages, but in the entire novel or play from which it cannot be extracted by quotation.

All lovers of poetry cannot help being indebted to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who showed he knew what constitutes poetry when he composed the famous Oxford Book of English Verse. But one is grieved that one must differ with him when it comes to literary criticism. In his book on the Art of Writing there is a chapter called "On the Difference Between Verse and Prose" which justifies inversion of the natural order of words in verse and affirms that this inversion (of course along with metre and rhyme at will) is the difference between verse and prose. He uses the old illustration that rhyme, metre and inversion help the memory, and that since the first poets sang their poems to the harp, and music and emotion were introduced, everything is changed down to the natural order of the words.

Now, aside from the fact that not all of the earliest emotional compositions were sung to the harp, it is admitted on all sides that poetry is no longer written primarily to be sung to the harp. Hence there is no further necessity for this inversion of words. The natural order of prose should be retained in emotional writing, with occasional deviations. But most certainly this inversion does not constitute the difference between poetry and non-poetry even if it often does make verse different from prose.

Sir Arthur gives us a few lines of Milton in the inverse order in which they were written and says they are verse with the accent of poetry. He then rewrites them in prose order. The inference is that they no longer have that accent of poetry. They are not poetry in the prose version, however, because they were not poetry in the original verse order. He takes four lines from the second book of Paradise Regained, describing Christ's ascent up a hill, and gives us a prose paraphrase of them. Here are the lines as Milton wrote them:

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

Here is Quiller-Couch's prose rendering:

Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation—a herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see nothing of the sort.

This prose paraphrase really proves that the original had no touch of poetry. Because the passage as written in metre uses poetic diction like "anon," and "ken," employs inversion like "steps he reared," "none he saw," it is assumed that the passage must be poetry, but it is not, for it lacks ecstasy. It is merely one of the prosaic passages in a composition that contains poems, and is needed to bridge over the poems.

A prose paraphrase or explanation of a verse poem is always interesting in helping us understand the nature of poetry. For example, Hearn, a poet himself, took up many English poems and paraphrased and explained them to his Japanese students. Some of his paraphrases are

actually greater poems than the originals. Most of the great poems in literature have been analyzed or paraphrased by biographers and commentators. No one calls these paraphrases poetry. But are we sure that they are not? Are we certain that none of the original emotion or ideas are left intact in the paraphrase? On the contrary, I believe that the poetry still remains in the paraphrase. True, often the manner of expressing an idea or emotion is what counts in making it poetry, but expression alone does not make poetry. Even a metrical, emotional and beautiful utterance of a commonplace idea sometimes becomes poetry, but I cannot concede that the prose version of a great verse poem may not be poetry if still emotionally expressed.

Let me take a concrete instance. The following passage from Paradise Lost is considered, no doubt justly, poetry, because of the idea, the emotion and the rhythm (academically speaking):

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.

Let us paraphrase this passage and try to retain the idea, the emotion and a prose rhythm by just changing a few words.

And suppose we lost the battle? We have not lost everything. We still have our unconquerable will, our plans for revenge, our eternal hatred, and courage never to give in or surrender, and above all never to be defeated.

Is this passage poetry or not? I submit that it is, if the original is. It is rhythmical (though it doesn't have to be so), the original idea is there, and the passion of the

speaker has not been rooted out. All this proves, then, that much of what we call poetry in verse is either not poetry at all or that there is more poetry in the prose of the world than we ever imagined.

Is there any poetry in Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare? Beyond doubt; just as there is poetry in the tales and histories from which Shakespeare drew his plays. Is there not poetry in the critical discourses about poets where the critic loses himself in the poet's emotions and becomes that poet and gives you his spirit, as, for example, Carlyle does in his study of Burns, or Symonds in his Greek Poets?

All this leads to one conclusion: that we should not be concerned as to whether a piece of literature is or is not something that may be included in a definition of poetry, but whether it is a humane, ecstatic, emotional, thoughtful piece of writing. Do not be worried where the poetry is. Rest assured it is there somewhere, for we should judge poetry by the effect on us and not by the compliance with rules of rhythm or any other rules of composition. And all great literature which has a similar emotional effect upon us, whether it is in verse or prose, has poetry in it. Walt Whitman did not insist that his Leaves of Grass be called poetry; yet that is what it turns out to be.

The reader may reply that if poetry is to be found to a large extent in the prose of the world, all distinctions are broken down as to what poetry is and is not, and you might as well look for it in the stories in the newspapers. I gladly accept the challenge: there is poetry in the newspapers. When the Spoon River Anthology appeared many critics said it was nothing more than a collection of newspaper obituaries, told in the first person, that differed from news items only in that the lines were printed as free verse, and that therefore it was no more poetry than a

newspaper story. On the contrary, it would have been poetry had it appeared as prose in a newspaper.

I have no doubt many readers will recall newspaper stories that moved them like a poem. Those especially well written ones of love tragedies are often poetry; by virtue of their ecstatic nature they arouse our emotions.

The poetry of our day is not monopolized by dabblers in metre and is not shared exclusively by readers of verse. It is being written by our prose writers and occasionally by our journalists, and is being read by the general public. It is not the heritage of the professor or the critic. The verse poets and readers are not the only lovers of poetry, but the great public who reads Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lorna Doone is reading poetry, albeit not of the highest order.

I do not mean to imply that there is more poetry in the prose writings of a nation's literature than in its verse writings. The prose writer usually travels leisurely and waxes ecstatic occasionally. He does not concentrate his emotions nor seek to depict them immediately. The verse writer as a rule tries to depict emotions from the start. He is greater as a poet than many prose writers, because he poetizes, thinking he must do this naturally in verse, while the prose writer does not believe it is his duty to do so in prose, but he is often a poet because he cannot help it. There is more poetry in a volume of Burns or Shelley or Heine than in a volume of similar length by a prose writer, because these poets tried to put emotion into every separate portion, no matter how small. Yet a prose writer can do the same thing if he wants to do so.

Any one who is a great reader of books of travel is impressed by the fact that in these works there is occasionally literature of ecstasy of a high order. There are descriptions and narratives recorded with beauty, vividness,

interest; there are reflections, insight into human nature that often surpass the works of prose fiction and verse poetry we read. Yet because these works are called "travels," they are not supposed to contain poems or creative literature. Had the authors given us as good description in verse, the critics would have called them poets.

Hearn's books on Japan are after all works of travel, but they contain poetry or the literature of ecstasy because Hearn was a poet. I am not claiming for many works of travel a place only as literature, for it is usually conceded that the best books of travel are literature, but I urge that many of these books are in parts poetry, and their authors are poets. It is recognized, however, that Pierre Loti is a poet in his books of travel. Doughty's Arabia Deserta is full of poetry.

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels are but works of travel, and are poetry because of the ecstatic presentation of ideas. You will find poems in prose not only in the travels of great writers, like Goethe, Taine, Heine, in the works of old writers who were chiefly travelers, like Hakluyt, Mandeville, Marco Polo, but in many volumes that have been published in our own day.

Anthologies of thousands of poems in prose could be compiled. The prose of every literature is full of poetry, even concentrated poetry, more or less rhythmical. You may cull poems out of the prose writings of men in England to-day, from Hardy, Moore, Yeats, Symons, Kipling, Hudson, Conrad, Galsworthy, Hewlett and D. H. Lawrence.

You can find poetry in various scenes of the great body of prose dramatists that have grown up in Europe since Ibsen, in Hauptmann, in Synge, in Chekhov, in Jacinto Benavente, in dialogues where an idea is fought for or

an emotion displayed. It is manifestly absurd to crown with the name of poetry every petty emotion or description by some versifier, and deny it to the great dramatists who depict passions and color great ideas with emotion. No one thought of denying the title of poets to the dramatists when they formerly wrote in verse. Are you going to deny it to them because they give us the same, if not a greater effect in their prose than the old dramatist did in verse?

And I find much poetry, especially in letters, memoirs and biographies. I find poems in biographies like Bisland's Hearn, Meynell's Francis Thompson, Woodberry's Poe, Lawton's Balzac. I give these more or less recent books as examples. The works are full of emotional passages dealing with crucial events in the lives of the subjects. You will find poetry in famous biographies like Moore's Byron, Dowden's Shelley, Forster's Dickens, Cooke's Ruskin, Bielschowsky's Goethe, Froude's Carlyle, etc., to name just the lives of some literary men.

It is particularly pleasing to find poetry in literary prose criticism. For it was always held that criticism was but a secondary art, rarely creative in the same sense as poetry, supposed to be a product of the mind and not the soul, and merely a commentary on poetry. It is true, formerly poets were often inclined to write their criticism in verse, thinking that thus it became poetry. But it is only the ecstatic presentation of critical ideas that makes criticism poetry, whether in prose or verse. Poets have often described the mission of poetry in verse, and given us genuine poems. Horace and Verlaine have done this. But we have had great poetry in the critical work in prose of many critics. You will find poetry in Carlyle, Ruskin, Goethe, Pater, Brandes. You will find it in the prose

essays of poets very often in spite of the popular tradition that poets are not good prose writers.

I give two examples. The first is from Swinburne's book on Blake:

To him the veil of outer things seemed always to tremble with some breath behind it; seemed at times to be rent in sunder with clamour and sudden lightning. All the void of earth and air seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and palpitate under the pressure of conscious feet. Flowers and weeds, stars and stones, spoke with articulate lips and gazed with living eyes. Hands were stretched towards him from beyond the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to support, to guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic. About his path and about his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang. Spirits imprisoned in the husk and shell of earth consoled or menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels; the pulse of every minute sounded as the falling foot of God; under the rank raiment of weeds, in the drifting down of thistles, strange faces frowned and white hair fluttered; tempters and allies, wraiths of the living and phantoms of the dead, crowded and made populous the winds that blew about him, the fields and hills over which he gazed.

The second is from James Thomson's essay on Shelley:

The only true or inspired poetry is always from within, not from without. The experience contained in it has been spiritually transmuted from lead into gold. It is severely logical, the most trivial of its adornments being subservient to, and suggested by, the dominant idea; any departure from whose dictates would be the "falsifying of a revelation." It is unadulterated with worldly wisdom, deference to prevailing opinions, mere talent or cleverness. Its anguish is untainted by the gall of bitterness, its joy is

never selfish, its grossness is never obscene. It perceives always the profound identity underlying all surface differences. It is a living organism, not a dead aggregate, and its music is the expression of the law of its growth; so that it could no more be set to a different melody than could a rose-tree be consummated with lilies or violets. It is most philosophic when most enthusiastic, the clearest light of its wisdom being shed from the keenest fire of its love. It is a synthesis not arithmetical, but algebraical; that is to say, its particular subjects are universal symbols, its predicates, universal laws: hence it is infinitely suggestive. It is ever-fresh wonder at the infinite mystery, ever-young faith in the eternal soul. Whatever be its mood, we feel that it is not self-possessed but God-possessed; whether the God came down serene and stately as Jove, when, a swan, he wooed Leda; or with overwhelming might insupportably burning, as when he consumed Semele.

Criticism deals with ideas that relate to life, and when written with ecstasy on human topics and not on technique it is poetry. The passage in Shelley's Defense of Poetry, beginning with the words "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments, etc.," as well as the conclusion of Poe's essay on The Poetic Principle are poetry. The critics here were poets in their prose criticism, no less than in their rhymed lyrics.

As the reader will fathom by this time, my aim is to free poetry from its bondage to requirements that were thought essential to it. I object most emphatically to demands for rhyme, metre, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, parallelism, repetition of word or phrase or line, tropes or figures of speech, poetical diction, and any form of pattern. The poet has the right to use any of the above instruments as he sees fit, whenever he thinks they enhance the ecstasy in his work. But no critic has a right to lay down a definition of poetry and insist that metre or rhythm

must be employed by a poet. Professor Mackail in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry defines poetry as patterned language, formally and technically, adding that the technical essence of the pattern is the repeat, and that when there is no repeat there is technically no poetry. If this definition were true, then passages in the Bible full of poetry, which use no parallelism, would not be poetry. The pattern does not make the poem, it often ruins it. While it is true that when excited we repeat expressions and become rhythmical, we do not do so with regularity and uniformity. How puerile many poems by savages, and even by the early civilized Babylonians and Egyptians, sound because the first impediment of art, the repeat, is employed, and a phrase is repeated ad nauseam like the words of a child learning how to talk. (!)

When we shake off our subservience to the pattern in poetry we shall have little use for the numerous works on the art of writing poetry. We shall find that many of the old books on poetry written with much learning by scholars and poets, like Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger, Vossius, Fabricius, Boileau, Pope, Opitz, Gottsched, Dante, are in part obsolete. I do not mean that these worthy works have all to be thrown on the scrap heap. But they laid down absurd rules as to how to write poetry and how to determine it; they sought to confine it by rules gleaned from older poets and insisted future poets obey these rules. Yet great poets, who never even read them, disregarded all their rules and created great poetry.

The chief thing that can be said for these critics is that they excel the moderns in scholarship. These learned men represent an almost extinct class, men who knew all the classics and all the books of Europe. They make us

regret that the day of the man of learning is over, especially at a time when so many ignorant poets and critics and reviewers discuss and decide emphatically on many matters wherein a little learning is not a dangerous thing.

FOOTNOTES:

[42-A] The italics are mine.

[52-A] "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Wordsworth. "The atmosphere wherein all the arts exist is poetry." Wilhelm A. Ambros: The Boundaries of Music and Poetry.

CHAPTER IV

PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY

Wordsworth believed that the language used by people in poetry should be that of the natural language of men under the influence of their feelings and that the diction of metrical poetry should differ in no wise from that of prose. Yet the only writers who use the natural diction of men are novelists, prose dramatists and short story writers, and, curiously enough, because they did not write verse, it has not often been suspected that these men were poets. Wordsworth's views are really proofs that poetry is found in prose, for the prose writers comply with his requirements of using in their compositions the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. They also comply with Wordsworth's definition of poetry, recording "emotions recollected in tranquillity."

Hazlitt has ably summed up the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth. Our poet did away with mythological references, with tales about legendary characters. He wrote about the emotions of the common people and introduced no far-fetched metaphors, nor made pedantic allusions.

Wordsworth, however, did not claim, as Coleridge thought he did, that the language of verse poetry must be that of ignorant people. Wordsworth never asserted that he wanted the poets to use the language of peasants, except when peasants were portrayed and represented as speaking. He simply protested against stilted, artificial

language in verse poetry. He held the use of such language in verse poetry to be ridiculous, as it was in prose. He was not an exponent of prose poetry, even though he laid little stress on the importance of metre. As the authors of the article on Wordsworth in the Encyclopedia Britannica state, the farthest he went in defense of prose structure in poetry was to say that if the words in verse happened to be in the order of prose, they were not necessarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not (unfortunately) try to eliminate metre in poetry. He no doubt agreed with Coleridge's own defense of meter in the Biographia Literaria. He did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre and—except in some ballads—a diction that was even literary.