Chapter 3 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 C?sar is found in every detail in Plutarch's Lives of C?sar, 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 C?sar 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 Debacle? 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.

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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.

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