LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY Of 
 CALIFORNIA 
 SAM DIE6O
 
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 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY
 
 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 & LIVERICHT, INC. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .... 9 
 
 CHAPTER II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
 ECSTASY 18 
 
 CHAPTER III. ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, 
 
 ESSENTIAL TO POETRY 42 
 
 CHAPTER IV. PROSE THE NATURAL 
 LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF 
 ECSTASY 77 
 
 CHAPTER V. PROSE PRECEDES VERSE 
 HISTORICALLY 96 
 
 CHAPTER VI. BLANK VERSE AND FREE 
 VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE . . . . in 
 
 CHAPTER VII. MORAL AND PHILO- 
 SOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN 
 WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY 123 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. POETRY RISES ABOVE 
 ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION 138 
 
 CHAPTER IX. HIGH FORM OF POETRY 
 ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF AD- 
 VANCED SOCIAL IDEALS 152
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 CHAPTER X. LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 179 
 
 CHAPTER XI. LOVE ECSTASY IN ARA- 
 BIAN POETRY 203 
 
 CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION 226
 
 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 compo- 
 sition 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 ig- 
 norant 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 pre- 
 dominating feature is ecstasy. Poetry is an emotional 
 
 9
 
 io THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 atmosphere that pervades all literature in its finest parts ; 
 it characterizes any purely personal expression of the 
 creative imagination. As the reader perceives, my defini- 
 tion 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 depart- 
 ment 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,* just 
 as the exigencies of the emotion require, is the natural 
 language of the emotions, that it was so at the very be- 
 ginnings 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 
 
 *A11 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 un- 
 rhythmical prose.
 
 INTRODUCTION n 
 
 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 expressive- 
 ness, 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 some- 
 times 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.
 
 12 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Should the reader conclude to accept the prose litera- 
 ture 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 er- 
 roneous. There is only one species of poetry, the utter- 
 ance 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 de- 
 picted. 
 
 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 emo- 
 tional 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.
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 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 con- 
 ception 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 con- 
 ception 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 pro-
 
 14 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 duced 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, es- 
 pecially 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 produc- 
 tions, and apply it to emotional writing in general. No 
 term for the word poet in any language that I am ac- 
 quainted with includes in its etymological significance 
 the idea of rhythm or metrical pattern. The Hebrew 
 word for poet is one who utters prophecies or para- 
 bles; 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 pro- 
 duced, 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 litera- 
 ture 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 unconr
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 scious, as developed by Freud and his disciples, or as be- 
 ing 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. When- 
 ever a new great poet appeared, like Wordsworth, Whit- 
 man 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 ^Eschylus had been en- 
 tirely 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 ^schylus 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 in- 
 stead, 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 recog- 
 nized 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 con- 
 cerned with the prose form of poetry, but with poetry as
 
 16 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 a psychological process, as a social force and as a philo- 
 sophical expression. 
 
 Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all con- 
 vertible 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 rep- 
 resent 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 en- 
 ables me, I hope, to eliminate many of the so-called con- 
 flicts 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 utter- 
 ance of great intellectual conceptions or impassioned ex- 
 pression of the love of justice. Shakespeare's line, "We 
 are but such stuff as dreams are made of," is but a meta- 
 physical 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 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 moral- 
 ity 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 rhet- 
 orical 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 culti- 
 vating substitutes for it. What a superficial assumption 
 that because people do not like verse or read verse (espe- 
 cially 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.
 
 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; de- 
 spite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the austere 
 Wordsworth * 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 Baude- 
 laire 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 repre- 
 sents 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 con- 
 
 *I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth 
 missed ecstasy. 
 
 18
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 19 
 
 dition 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 con- 
 ditions. 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 intellecual 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 enter- 
 tains; 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.
 
 20 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 an- 
 thropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of con- 
 quest 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 a 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 <ise in its communications to us of those very 
 physical infirmities that mystics assume it shuns, those re- 
 siding 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 21 
 
 trance, and speak out of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of 
 
 the body.* 
 
 Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of 
 poetry is not the same as that known to mysticism. How- 
 ever, 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 sub- 
 limated 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 
 
 * 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 in- 
 fluence of Donne has never been greater than at present.
 
 22 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 ac- 
 cordance 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 philoso- 
 phy that even the believer may accept. That is why the 
 Persian poet, Jalalu '1-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, be- 
 cause 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 char- 
 acter and shows the poet's desire for union not with an 
 anthropomorphic God, but with nature whom he recog-
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 23 
 
 nizes 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 re- 
 ligious 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 nar- 
 row mystic and a medical sense, with neither of which 
 significances are we here concerned, it is understood gen- 
 erally as referring to any condition where man is over-
 
 24 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 powered 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 philo- 
 sophical 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, ^Eschylus 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 25 
 
 a notion. It exhibits the critical faculty as a great under- 
 lying 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 censor- 
 ship 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 de- 
 priving the poet of his intellectual powers. Poetry is only 
 the result of inspiration, if by this term we mean that ra- 
 tionalized 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 mad- 
 ness. 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 com- 
 posing 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
 
 26 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 illustra- 
 tion 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, Alci- 
 biades 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 27 
 
 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 Athen- 
 ians; 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 popu- 
 larity 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 ^Eschylus was the great example 
 of unconscious art among Greek playwrights, and that he 
 exemplifies Plato's theory of poetry. 
 
 ^schylus'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 ^schylus'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
 
 28 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 for Agamemnon whose wife Claetemnestrae was unfaith- 
 ful 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 be- 
 cause 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 com- 
 municated 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 elabor- 
 ating 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 de- 
 liverer, 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.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 29 
 
 All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, 
 possess this power ; above all the ecstasy of sexual excite- 
 ment, 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 mis- 
 take 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
 
 30 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 to poetry, and we have an illustration of it in the con- 
 nection 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 Euri- 
 pides'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 in- 
 stinct. 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 moraliz- 
 ing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and 
 Tiresius is, in the words of Nietzsche, that we must dis- 
 play 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 re- 
 pentance 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 31 
 
 and Whitman, dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and 
 other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written be- 
 sides love poetry, passionate defences of liberty and re- 
 publicanism. 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 Lespi- 
 nasse, 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 mad- 
 ness. 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 Al- 
 ving. 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, Ver- 
 laine, because we wish to find our own emotions ex- 
 pressed. 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 dif-
 
 32 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 ferently. 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, dif- 
 ferences 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."
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 33 
 
 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 wail- 
 ing 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. Senti- 
 mentalism 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 emo- 
 tions. 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
 
 34 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 songs and mushy lachrymose verses. The many poems, 
 stories and plays about "mother," "baby," "the flag," 
 "home," "our country," etc., are often drivelling senti- 
 mentalism 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 re- 
 lation 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 35 
 
 ecstasy is his recognition of its identity with the uncon- 
 scious. 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 ex- 
 pansion, yet he does not know its cause! And a man 
 sometimes thinks about a thing, and it makes an impres- 
 sion on his soul. Then he forgets the cause, but the im- 
 pression 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 pro- 
 duces 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 un- 
 conscious nature. Ecstasy is related to longing for some- 
 thing 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 Ghaz- 
 zali 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 thinkng of the ecstasy of love
 
 36 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 in- 
 fluenced 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 in- 
 spiration 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 view- 
 point. 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 37 
 
 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 imagin- 
 ative 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 bring- 
 ing 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 inter- 
 penetrated their ecstasy with a high sense of social justice. 
 An ecstatic state, with a keen intellect, a high moral out- 
 look, and a noble social ideal characterized the prophet. 
 His state of ecstasy was due to this highly developed
 
 38 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 revolu- 
 tions 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 mes- 
 sages 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
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 39 
 
 of experience and destiny, as the. greatest poet. (See 
 Poetry and Religion.) 
 
 Nor did the prophets of old sing their messages in artifi- 
 cial form. They did not count their syllables and give us 
 metre, though they indulged in parallelisms. They wrote 
 in rhythmical prose.* 
 
 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 in- 
 cluded also that which taught by means of passions, de- 
 sires and emotions and that which had its field of action in 
 relation to the great moral capacities of man. The litera- 
 ture of power, according to De Quincey, includes that 
 
 * "Hebrew poetry is 
 
 Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness. 
 
 'Ecstasy affords 
 
 The occasion and expediency determines the form.' " 
 
 MARIANNE MOORE in Others (1916).
 
 40 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 
 opinon 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 in- 
 cludes 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 litera- 
 ture. 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.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY 41 
 
 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 com- 
 plete 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 posse'ssive 
 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 ex- 
 pression it takes unconsciously the tone, the color and 
 the temperature thereof." (James Russell Lowell: The 
 Function of the Poet. "The Imagination." P. 70.)
 
 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 fol- 
 lowed 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 dia- 
 logues 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 dia- 
 logues on the one hand ; and, on the other, to poetic imita- 
 tions 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, hexa- 
 meter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the 
 poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately 
 to the name.* 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 Empe- 
 docles 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 
 
 * The italics are mine. 
 
 42
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 43 
 
 Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley com- 
 posed 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 Savon- 
 arola, and was again restated by the Italian critic Castele- 
 vetro, 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 imita- 
 tion 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
 
 44 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 poems. His book practically convinces one that nearly all 
 the great English writers of prose wrote not only rhyth- 
 mical 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 Aylwier's Field or Enoch Arden from 
 grave novels not in verse like Silas Marner and Adam 
 Bedc, 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.
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 45 
 
 My contention then is that what decides whether a com- 
 position 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 distrib- 
 uted. 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 ex- 
 pression. 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
 
 46 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 ecstasy in prose has rhythm besides ecstasy and should 
 certainly be called poetry. Dr. Patterson made one error, 
 however, to which Dr. Gary 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 em- 
 phatically 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
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 47 
 
 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 emo- 
 tional 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. De- 
 scription, narration, exposition, even argument and ex- 
 clamation, 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 desti- 
 tute of the attributes of poetry. Humorous and didactic 
 efforts, mere jokes or commonplace sermons, do not be- 
 come 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 inter- 
 esting 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 diffi-
 
 48 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 cult to classify this literature, for the extreme beauty arjd 
 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 per- 
 ceived 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 philoso- 
 phers 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 com- 
 municate pleasure, and remarked: "But the communica- 
 tion 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 be- 
 tween Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 49 
 
 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, in- 
 stancing 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 character- 
 ized Chateaubriand, Senancour and Guerin 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 de- 
 nominate 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 con- 
 nected 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
 
 50 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 be- 
 lieve, 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 speci- 
 fied. 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.
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 51 
 
 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 writ- 
 ten in prose, but Wordsworth had to give us some pre- 
 liminary 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 sym- 
 phonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, 
 mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappear- 
 ing 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
 
 52 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 m-ay exist without figures of speech, 
 rhyme, metre or rhythm* Its most natural language is 
 prose or free verse. Let us have no more such classifica- 
 tion 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. 
 
 * "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." 
 Wordsworth. "The atmosphere wherein all the arts exist is 
 poetry." Wilhem A. Ambros : The Boundaries of Music and 
 Poetry.
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 53 
 
 Critics are agreed that it must consist of the artistic ex- 
 pression of words which arouse the reader's emotion, but 
 they have insisted that these words be rhythmically ar- 
 ranged. 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 por- 
 tion . 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 philo- 
 sophical works like Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, Re- 
 public and other dialogues, Bacon's Essays, Schopen- 
 hauer'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 Confes- 
 sions, in letters like Madame Lespinasse's and Mrs. Brown- 
 ing'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 de-
 
 54 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 scribes 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 Copper field en- 
 titled, "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 in- 
 cline, and the bramble shoots wander amid moist rich 
 herbage, etc. 
 
 If the sphere of poetry has thus been widened to in- 
 clude 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 un- 
 ecstatic 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. Win- 
 now the voluminous verse writers and but a modicum 
 of poetry remains.
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 55 
 
 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 irregu- 
 lar rhythmical lines. Just a few slight verbal changes 
 are necessary. The new product then fulfills the condi- 
 tions 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 state- 
 ment 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 dif- 
 ference 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.
 
 56 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 Caesar, 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 Ccesar 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
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 57 
 
 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 Aeneidf 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 Pere 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 Par me 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 fol- 
 lowed 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
 
 58 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 con- 
 stantly 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 Miserables 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 neverthe- 
 less be produced. When Macpherson in the eighteenth 
 century and Chateaubriand in the early part of the nine- 
 teenth 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 advo- 
 cate 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 classi- 
 fication 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 aca- 
 demic 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
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 59 
 
 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 Eugenie Grand et 
 is surely poetry. Balzac regarded his stories Louis Lam- 
 bert, Seraphita and The Lily of the Valley as poems. In- 
 flated 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 where- 
 abouts 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 tell- 
 ing of the reflections and memories which led to this de- 
 cision 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.
 
 60 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 ... 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 antici- 
 pated in the claim that Lincoln was a poet, as the Gettys- 
 burg speech has been on several occasions called a poem. 
 
 It may be asserted that it is rather difficult to differ- 
 entiate 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 be- 
 cause 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 stu- 
 pendous 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
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 61 
 
 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 arrange- 
 ment, 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 imme- 
 diate 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 in- 
 stantly 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 re- 
 spond to it as quickly as we do, though they have to 
 forego the rhyme and the metre. The writer of un- 
 rhythmical 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 con- 
 centrated in a short prose poem as readily as in a verse,
 
 62 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 concen- 
 trated 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 emo- 
 tional narrative prose under the term poetry, which he
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 63 
 
 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 descrip- 
 tive, 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 litera- 
 ture; 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 in- 
 clusion. 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,
 
 64 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 him- 
 self to his brothers? Fearing they will be dismayed be- 
 cause 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 :
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 65 
 
 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 an- 
 other 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 
 Eloises'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 para- 
 graphs 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.
 
 66 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 pas- 
 sage 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 con- 
 stitutes 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 ad- 
 mitted on all sides that poetry is no longer written pri- 
 marily 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.
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 67 
 
 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 habita- 
 tion 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," em- 
 ploys 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 pas- 
 sages 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
 
 68 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 actually greater poems than the originals. Most of the 
 great poems in literature have been analyzed or para- 
 phrased 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 be- 
 comes 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
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 69 
 
 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 news- 
 papers. When the Spoon River Anthology appeared many 
 critics said it was nothing more than a collection of news- 
 paper 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
 
 70 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 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 occa- 
 sionally by our journalists, and is being read by the gen- 
 eral 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 occa- 
 sionally literature of ecstasy of a high order. There are 
 descriptions and narratives recorded with beauty, vivid-
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 71 
 
 ness, 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 be- 
 cause 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 presenta- 
 tion 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 Eng- 
 land to-day, from Hardy, Moore, Yeats, Symons, Kipling, 
 Hudson, Conrad, Galsworthy, Hewlett and D. H. Law- 
 rence. 
 
 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
 
 72 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 an emotion displayed. It is manifestly absurd to crown 
 with the name of poetry every petty emotion or descrip- 
 tion 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 dra- 
 matists 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 de- 
 scribed 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
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 73 
 
 essays of poets very often in spite of the popular tradi- 
 tion 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 dark- 
 ness of material nature, to tempt or to support, to guide 
 or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest alle- 
 gories 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
 
 74 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 never selfish, its grossness is never obscene. It perceives 
 always the profound identity underlying all surface dif- 
 ferences. 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 sug- 
 gestive. 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 over- 
 whelming might insupportably burning, as when he con- 
 sumed Semele. 
 
 Criticism deals with ideas that relate to life, and when 
 written with ecstasy on human topics and not on tech- 
 nique 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 criti- 
 cism, 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 
 clown a definition of poetry and insist that metre or rhythm
 
 ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL 75 
 
 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 tech- 
 nical 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
 
 76 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 regret that the day of the man of learning is over, espe- 
 cially 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.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE 
 OF ECSTASY 
 
 WORDSWORTH believed that the language used by peo- 
 ple 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 char- 
 acters. 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, ex- 
 cept when peasants were portrayed and represented as 
 speaking. He simply protested against stilted, artificial 
 
 77
 
 78 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 language in verse poetry. He held the use of such lan- 
 guage 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 neces- 
 sarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not (un- 
 fortunately) 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. 
 
 Though both Wordsworth and Coleridge were not over- 
 awed by the necessity of metre in poetry, they believed 
 in its use, and were opposed to prose poetry. Coleridge, 
 however, wrote a prose poem The Wanderings of Cain 
 and some of his essays are prose poetry. Coleridge also 
 devoted an entire chapter in his Biographia Literaria 
 to the defense of metre as a vehicle for poetry. He 
 attributes the origin of metre to the fact that the 
 mind makes a conscious effort to hold passion in check 
 by fettering it with regular numbers. On the contrary, 
 this conscious check is due to imitation of old examples, 
 to fear in defying the critics, for the natural language of 
 passion is irregular rhythm, and it is impatient of being 
 confined in regular, artificial numbers. Coleridge thinks 
 the effect of metre is "to increase the vivacity and sus- 
 ceptibility both of the general feelings and the attention" 
 by the continued excitement of surprise. I submit that 
 metre often distracts the attention from the poem's real 
 object, which is to depict ecstasy. Metre often diverts our 
 ear to the singsong tone in which the emotions are
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 79 
 
 couched. Instead of adding to the vivacity and suscepti- 
 bility of the feelings it really makes us suspect that the 
 poet is not sincere, for the man of emotions expresses 
 them spontaneously and does not trick them out in pat- 
 tern. Next, Coleridge assumes that because of custom, 
 metre must have some property in common with poetry. 
 This argument cannot stand when we take into considera- 
 tion the innumerable emotional passages that have been 
 written in prose. A custom is only a passing practice, and 
 free verse writers have abandoned the custom of writing 
 in metre and in many cases have produced good poetry. 
 Lastly, our critic thinks that every poet is impelled "to 
 seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establish- 
 ing the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole 
 must be assimilated to the more important and essential 
 parts." But why assume that there is no unity of har- 
 monious adjustment in an emotional passage in prose? 
 Or why identify such unity with a metrical pattern? Isn't 
 a Psalm in the Bible a unity of harmonious adjustment? 
 Even if the essential part of a poetic piece tends to assume 
 a certain pattern it does not mean that the whole piece 
 should be given a patterned form. Some day it will be 
 recognized that a long composition recording different 
 emotions is really unaesthetic in a uniform pattern. 
 
 "As to the accents of words," says Bacon, in his Ad- 
 vancement of Learning, Book VI, Ch. I, "there is no 
 necessity for taking notice of so trivial a thing; only it 
 may be proper to intimate that these are observed with 
 great exactness, whilst the accents of sentences are 
 neglected ; though it is nearly common to all mankind to 
 sink the voice at the end of a period, to raise it in interro- 
 gation, and the like." 
 
 This passage is the first attack in English on metre. 
 
 It was Whitman who gave the death blow to metre. He
 
 8o THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 brought poetry back to rhythmical prose, and is the greatest 
 liberator poetry has ever had. He demonstrated that an 
 entire volume might be written in rhythmical prose (with 
 the lines broken up), and that the product could be the 
 highest poetry. His Leaves of Grass ignored all the rules 
 laid down in various books on poetics. Whitman has done 
 more than most critics to convey to the world what poetry 
 really is. 
 
 "In my opinion," says Whitman, "the time has arrived 
 to essentially break down the barriers of form between 
 prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win 
 and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the 
 measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and 
 that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to 
 furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes (espe- 
 cially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems hence- 
 forward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic 
 in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow), the truest and 
 greatest Poetry (while subtly and necessarily always 
 rhythmic, and distinguishable enough) can never again, 
 in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and 
 rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or 
 the truest power and passion." 
 
 We have long been laboring under the mischievous 
 Aristotelian division of poetry into Epic, Dramatic and 
 Lyric, and critics have exhausted themselves trying to 
 determine which of these was the highest form of poetry. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the epic poem was only the primi- 
 tive author's method of writing a poetical novel centering 
 around wars ; or a later poet's imitation of that form. The 
 dramatic poem was another way of telling a story without 
 introducing much narration or description. Poetry does 
 not inhere in an epic of Homer or a play of Sophocles 
 by virtue of the form, but because of the emotions de-
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 81 
 
 scribed, and similar descriptions of emotions are to be 
 found in our fiction and prose plays. 
 
 Again we have followed the ancients in subdividing 
 lyric poetry into elegy, pastoral, ode, satire, idyll. The 
 moderns introduced the sonnet, the ballade, the ballad and 
 other forms. These divisions have perverted our knowl- 
 edge as to the nature of poetry. Any one can make a 
 similar classification of the poetry in prose, but it is use- 
 less to do so. Poetry is recorded emotion and depicts 
 various characteristics. The Song of Deborah is a war 
 song, a hymn and a satire, all in one. 
 
 Professor Posnett in his Comparative Literature pro- 
 tested long before Croce against these artificial divisions 
 in poetry. 
 
 Poetry is the voice of excited man; it is as Baum- 
 garten said "perfect sensitive speech," a definition that 
 Croce regards as probably the best ever given of poetry, 
 while Saintsbury scoffs at it. It is immaterial whether 
 the rhythm is there or not. Prose is always poetry when 
 it is sensitized. Nietzsche, himself a great poet, also saw 
 this. "Let it be observed," said Nietzsche, "that the great 
 masters of prose have almost always been poets as well, 
 whether openly, or only in secret and for the closet ; and 
 in truth one only writes good prose in view of poetry." 
 He names Leopardi, Landor, Emerson and Merimee 
 among the great prose writers who were poets. We can 
 add many other writers of essays, dialogues, and criticisms 
 to complement his list. 
 
 "The distinction between poetry and prose cannot be 
 justified," said Croce. "Poetry is the language of senti- 
 ment ; prose of intellect ; but since the intellect is also 
 sentiment, in its concretion and reality, so all prose has a 
 poetical side." "There exists poetry without prose, but 
 not prose without poetry." Poetical material permeates
 
 82 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 the souls of all ; any expression of it in verse or prose, in 
 painting or music, is poetry. Since all poetry is expression 
 and all expression lyric, the divisions of different kinds of 
 poetry into epic, dramatic, etc., or different divisions of 
 one poem into scenes, books, chapters, acts, stanzas, para- 
 graphs, are of little importance, and are matters of con- 
 venience. 
 
 Poetry is essentially lyrical. There is no such thing 
 as dramatic or epic poetry. All poetry is the emotional 
 outcry of the poet or his characters. We may have an 
 emotion recorded in a separate poem called a lyric, or in 
 a speech in a composition divided into acts, following cer- 
 tain rules and known as a drama. Similarly the speeches 
 in epic poems are lyrics. The poetry of Homer or Shake- 
 speare is not epic or dramatic, for poetry is just an emo- 
 tional outburst. Andromache's speeches and Hamlet's 
 soliloquies could have appeared alone and they would have 
 been considered lyrics ; they remain lyrics even in the body 
 of a long composition. The emotional passages in all prose 
 works are also lyrical poetry. There is really only one 
 kind of poetry, lyrical poetry, for all poems are emotional 
 outbursts of an individual. Every imaginative literary 
 composition, whether in verse or prose, is made up of 
 lyrical poems, more or less. 
 
 One should no more look for a chapter on the drama 
 in a book like this dealing with poetry than for a treatise 
 on the novel. A drama, considered merely as a series of 
 scenes bound together by a plot in a fit manner to be 
 presented on the stage to move people, and based on rules 
 that relate to economy of words, concentration of facts 
 and strikingness of action, is a performance that has a 
 technique of its own ; the dramatist is a poet only by virtue 
 of the ecstasy he puts in the work. Considered in its 
 primary significance as a performance where action is
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 83 
 
 the chief feature, the drama becomes poetry in those parts 
 where the action and emotion are concentrated. 
 
 It is, however, often difficult to extract scenes from 
 the play, as they lose in effectiveness by being thus sepa- 
 rated. But the fact remains that there is no such thing as 
 dramatic poetry, for the essence of all poetry is its lyricism. 
 Dramatic scenes contain the lyric cries of the dramatis 
 persona. Action is but the emotional disturbances of the 
 characters and no longer merely means violent conduct, 
 surprises, battles, duels, suicides, murders. All great 
 novels have dramatic scenes and they are often as exuber- 
 ant in poetry as are similar scenes in plays. We no longer 
 regard as tragedies only those plays in verse where a 
 virtuous person of high degree is in a frightful predica- 
 ment because of unjust and unlooked-for defeat with 
 fate. No, in spite of Aristotle, the suffering of even a 
 wicked person of low station, depicted as due to his own 
 fault as of Hurst wood in Sister Carrie, and described 
 in prose narrative, is also tragedy. There is incidentally 
 no such thing as a comic dramatic poem, but a comic 
 scene may be poetic if it moves to ecstasy (not merely 
 to farcic laughter), and if it is essentially lyrical. Comedy 
 also appears in works of fiction in prose, and may be 
 poetical. Moreover, most performances in prose dialogue 
 or fiction present an admixture of tragic and comic. 
 
 Tragedy often presents lyric poems greater than any 
 other work of literature ; hence Aristotle and his imitators 
 concluded that a verse tragedy was the highest form of 
 poetry. This is not so. If Shakespeare and Sophocles 
 lived in our day they might have written novels or essays, 
 and I daresay with their genius those novels or essays 
 would have been as good as their plays and would have 
 contained as great poetry. 
 
 Our great poets do not owe their greatness to the use
 
 84 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 of the stereotyped literary metrical forms. A man 
 may have a great gift for the use of these forms and 
 not be a great poet, just as he may be a great poet and 
 fall flat when they encumber him. Ruskin and Dickens 
 were great poets, but when we say that their metrical 
 compositions were not great poetry we merely mean that 
 they were not adept in choosing rhymes and complying 
 with metrical rules. To do this requires a distinct gift. 
 An amateur selects forced rhymes and has no ear. Swin- 
 burne, besides being a great poet, had a distinct gift of 
 creating melodious verse ; but many parodists have shown 
 that they also had this gift without being able to write 
 poetry. / 
 
 Mrs. Browning was a good poet both in verse and in 
 prose. She wrote her love poems in prose in her letters to 
 her husband, and in verse in the Portuguese sonnets which 
 are nothing more than some of the letters put into metre 
 and rhyme ; there are some who think that the letters are 
 the better poetry of the two. Her sentiments did not be- 
 come poetry because they were put in sonnet form. 
 
 The following letter is poetry : 
 
 I pour out my thoughts to you, dearest, dearest, as if 
 it were right rather to think of doing myself that good 
 and relief, than of you who have to read all. But you 
 spoil me into an excess of liberty by your tenderness. 
 Best in the world ! Oh you help me to live I am better 
 and lighter since I have drawn near to you even on this 
 paper already I am better and lighter. And now I am 
 going to dream of you ... to meet you on some mystical 
 landing place ... in order to be quite well to-morrow. 
 Oh we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing grieves 
 us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we are 
 touched in ourselves ... in the apple of our eye ... in 
 the quick of our heart ... in what you are and where you 
 are . . . my own dearest beloved! So you need not be
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 85 
 
 afraid for me. We all look to our own, as I to you; the 
 thunderbolts may strike the tops of the cedars, and, except 
 in the first part, none of us be moved. True it is of me 
 not of you perhaps, certainly you are better than I in all 
 things. Best in the world you are no one is like you. 
 Can you read what I have written ? Do not love me less ! 
 Do you think that I cannot feel you love me, through all 
 this distance? If you loved me less, I should know, with- 
 out a word or sign. Because I live by your loving me! 
 (June 24, 1846.) 
 
 It took the Greeks and Romans some time to learn that 
 prose was the best medium for philosophy and history. 
 Plato had the good sense to write in prose instead of fol- 
 lowing the ridiculous method of versifying of the early 
 Greek philosophers, like Parmenides and Empedocles. 
 
 In the first century A.D. various Roman historians 
 wrote of historical events in the form of epic poems. 
 These are really histories with a little occasional glimmer 
 of poetry. Thus we had Silius's Pontlca, Valerius Flac- 
 cus's Argonautica, Statius's Thebais, and Lucan's Phar- 
 salia. The last two works were especially admired in the 
 medieval ages when rhymed or metrical historical chron- 
 icles were the fashion, and they were favorites of Dante. 
 Very few people to-day read these metrical histories. Eng- 
 lish literature also is full of metrical and rhymed histories, 
 geographies, criticisms, scientific works, essays, etc. But 
 no one reads Warner's Albion's England, Drayton's Poly 
 Olbion, or Daniel's First Four Books of the Civil War. 
 And Darwin's versified Botanical Garden has been a 
 standing joke. 
 
 It is remarkable how past usages in literature influence 
 us. The examples of Lucretius versifying philosophy in 
 his Nature of Things, and that of Horace writing literary 
 criticism in verse in his Art of Poetry, have been fruitful 
 of mischief. Even much of the lengthy works of Shelley,
 
 86 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Byron and Browning would have been better had they 
 been written in prose, and they would have lost none of 
 their poetic qualities. The greatness of the Ring and the 
 Book, Don Juan and the Revolt of Islam remains when 
 these works are translated into the prose of another lan- 
 guage. 
 
 The French have perfected the art of poetical prose,* or 
 prose poetry, probably more than any other nation. The 
 reason may be that they have not been prolific of good 
 poetry in verse, and have instead reserved their poetry for 
 prose, a more natural medium than Alexandrine lines. 
 
 Fenelon was one of the first moderns who attacked verse. 
 In two critical works, Dialogues on Eloquence and Letters 
 to the French Academy (there is an English translation of 
 both, out of print), he emphasized the insignificant part 
 played by versification in poetry. He held that there was 
 no true eloquence without a due mixture of poetry, that 
 poetry was the very soul of eloquence. He said that there 
 were many poets who were poetical without making verses, 
 and he considered versification distinct from poetry. In 
 his definition of poetry he excluded a consideration of 
 versification. He thought the perfection of French verse 
 impossible, that versification loses more than it gains by 
 rhyme, and that French poets were cramped by versifica- 
 tion. He wanted superfluous ornaments removed and 
 the necessary parts turned into natural ornaments. Still 
 he did not insist on a complete abandonment of rhyme, but 
 wanted greater freedom. His biographer, St. Cyr, says 
 that Fenelon wanted to abolish verse altogether in French 
 poetry. Fenelon also wrote a novel in prose poetry in 
 1699, Telemaque. But prose poetry existed in France 
 before him, in old romances like the story of Aucassin and 
 
 * See the selections in Pastels in Prose ( 1890) , and the sympa- 
 thetic introduction by William Dean Howells.
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 87 
 
 Nicolette and in Bossuet's funeral orations. His example 
 was followed by Sainte Pierre, in Paul and Virginia, by 
 Prevost in Manon Lescaut, by Rousseau and especially by 
 Chateaubriand in Atala, The Genius of Christianity and 
 The Martyrs. Unfortunately, Fenelon insisted in intro- 
 ducing the cliches of verse into prose; artificial and un- 
 natural language hence ruined some of his work and as- 
 sisted in bringing the term prose poetry into contempt. 
 
 The French have always regarded the poet in a broader 
 sense than have the English. The article on poetry in 
 the French Encyclopedia deals with prose poems as well 
 as with verse poems. Victor Hugo in his Shakespeare, 
 when he calls the lists of poets, mentions prose writers 
 like Diderot, Rousseau, Balzac, Chateaubriand, George 
 Sand, Le Sage and Cervantes. He who was himself a 
 great poet knew that poetry did not depend on metre. 
 
 Eugene Veron, the great French critic, author of a valu- 
 able work on ^Esthetics (fortunately translated into Eng- 
 lish), also takes a broad conception of the term poetry. He 
 says that it would be absurd to deny Moliere's L'Avare is 
 poetry because it is in prose, for poetical, creative imagina- 
 tion and personal emotions are at work here. He states 
 that there was poetry in the story of Don Juan before 
 Corneille put it in verse. Versification, he urges, does not 
 constitute poetry. He sees that verse would not have im- 
 proved such prose poems as Paul and Virginia, La Mare 
 au Diable, or UOiseau (Michelet), and he places in the 
 front rank of poetry passages from Demosthenes, Cicero, 
 Bossuet (no doubt referring to some of the famous 
 funeral orations) and Mirabeau. He also says it is im- 
 possible to refuse to see poetic character in the novel, for 
 this deals with the creation of character and the portrayal 
 of passions.
 
 88 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 I do not wish to go into the prose poetry written by 
 other nations, for every literature is full of it. 
 
 There is a growing tendency in England to encourage 
 prose poetry.* De Quincey having made a special plea for 
 impassioned prose is looked upon as the father of it, 
 though there was prose poetry in English literature from 
 the earliest times; Malory, Sidney, Sir Thomas Browne, 
 Raleigh, Drummond, Milton, Bunyan, Taylor and Fuller 
 were great prose poets. 
 
 John Stuart Mill and Lord Beaconsfield both recognized 
 the utterly negligible role of metre in determining the 
 nature of poetry. In an early essay, originally published 
 before he was thirty and collected with another under the 
 title Poetry and Its Varities, Mill gives us his definition 
 of poetry. Guided by a statement of the author of the 
 Corn Law Rhymes, Ebenezer Elliot, that poetry is impas- 
 sioned truth, and by another definition from Blackwood's, 
 that poetry is "man's thought tinged by his feelings," he 
 says, "Every truth which a human being can enunciate, 
 every thought, even every outward impression, which can 
 enter into his consciousness, may become poetry when 
 shown through any impassioned medium, when invested 
 with the coloring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or 
 admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred, or terror : 
 and, unless so colored, nothing, be it as interesting as it 
 may, is poetry." There is nothing said in this definition 
 about rhythm or metre, and indeed Mill regarded as the 
 vulgarest of all any definition of poetry which confounds 
 it with metrical composition. 
 
 An idea emotionally treated becomes poetry whether in 
 prose or verse, whether rhythmical or not. Mill under- 
 
 * See The Chapbook, April, 1921, London. Poetry in Prose, 
 Three Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard Al- 
 dington.
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 89 
 
 stood that, yet he erred when he assigned a minor role to 
 the emotions excited by the incidents in prose fiction, 
 though it is true that the emotions of excitement wakened 
 by the mere novel of adventure are indicative of a lower 
 order of poetry. It is to be regretted, however, that about 
 five years later he somewhat modified his main views. 
 
 Prose poetry was consciously written by Lord Beacons- 
 field, who tells us in the early preface to his novel, Alroy, 
 that he was trying to write rhythmical prose poetry in 
 that novel. He did not always succeed, but throughout 
 all his novels are found many excellent prose poems. He 
 was writing prose poetry in the early eighteen thirties be- 
 fore Baudelaire, and in some of his tales, like Pompanilla, 
 we have prose poems. He often became bombastic, but he 
 was a poet, nevertheless. 
 
 Later English critics have returned to the subject of 
 prose poetry. 
 
 In his Aspects of Poetry Professor John C. Shairp says 
 that he grants "that the old limits between prose and 
 poetry tend to disappear." He concludes his book with 
 two chapters on prose poets, on Carlyle and Newman. 
 And Courthope, worshipper of metre that he is, concludes 
 his History of English Poetry with a chapter on the 
 poetry in the Waverly Novels. We also recall that Bage- 
 hot could see little difference between Tennyson's novels 
 in verse and George Eliot's novels in prose. 
 
 A great critic like Pater maintained the rights of the 
 poet in prose. In his essay on Style he said "Prose will 
 exert in due measure all the varied charms of poetry down 
 to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, Michelet, or Newman, 
 gives its musical value to every syllable." 
 
 The first lengthy and systematic plea for prose poetry 
 I know of in English, outside of Disraeli's and De 
 Quincey's modest apologies for writing in this manner,
 
 90 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 was made by David Masson in an essay on Prose and 
 Verse: De Quincey, published as a review of De Quincey 
 in 1854. De Quincey 's preface, pleading for impassioned 
 prose, suggested Masson's essay. Masson had, however, 
 dwelt on the poetic side of prose the year before in an 
 article on Dallas's Poetics, called Theories of Poetry. 
 Both of Masson's essays are to be found in his Words- 
 worth, Shelley, Keats and Other Essays. Masson very 
 ingeniously asks why we are not allowed to write prose in 
 the manner that Milton writes in verse, or in the manner 
 of ./Eschylus in prose translation. He concludes that 
 poetry and prose are not two entirely separate spheres, 
 but intersecting and penetrating. To-day we go even 
 farther than Masson and urge that prose, except in short 
 lyrics when verse may be used, should be the sole language 
 of passion and the imagination. He vindicates De 
 Quincey's right to use impassioned prose ; he quotes as an 
 example of prose poetry a beautiful passage from the 
 conclusion of Milton's pamphlet, Causes That Have Hin- 
 dered the Reformation in England, and mentions especially 
 Jean Paul Richter, the prose poet who was responsible for 
 the prose poetry of two disciples, De Quincey and 
 Carlyle. Richter's Christ and the Universe is highly re- 
 garded by him as prose poetry. 
 
 Masson's prediction that the time was coming when the 
 best prose should more resemble verse than it had done in 
 the past, and that the best verse should not disdain a 
 certain resemblance to prose, is being fulfilled. Remember 
 Masson wrote before the Leaves of Grass appeared, and 
 before the vogue of free verse. 
 
 Yet his viewpoint was severely criticized by a scholar 
 like John Earle, whose English Prose contains an at- 
 tack on prose poetry. Earle says that prose poetry is 
 found chiefly in ages of literary decadence like the Latin
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 91, 
 
 Silver Age in writers from Tacitus to Boethius. On the 
 contrary, it is found as well in the golden ages of literature, 
 as, for example, in Sidney's Arcadia, which he himself 
 quotes from, in Plato, in Pascal, in Dante's prose. It is 
 strange that this view of Earle's should still largely pre- 
 vail. Poetry and prose are still regarded by academic 
 scholars like Earle, Saintsbury, Courthope, Bosanquet 
 Watts-Dunton and Gummere as two distinct branches of 
 literature. Earle is right only when he objects to the 
 cliches of verse in prose, but to-day we object to all cliches. 
 
 Poetic prose, however, should not be used on every occa- 
 sion, but only when an ecstasy is to be expressed. And, 
 above all, it should be avoided and this is how prose 
 poetry got into disrepute in expressing sentimental emo- 
 tions, commonplace ideas, and the merely popular. When 
 we read in eloquent prose, the grand eulogies on the flag, 
 on the purity and redeeming virtues of mother-love, on the 
 dignity of toil, on the glory of dying for one's country, on 
 the goodness of God, etc., themes which have been cele- 
 brated so often that they are nauseous to us because 
 nothing new is said, then we see how ridiculous prose 
 poetry may become. 
 
 But as Pater says impassioned prose has become the 
 special and opportune art of the modern world, and it can 
 exert all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm. 
 
 "The muse of prose-literature," says Masson, "has been 
 hardly dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should 
 not be much of that license in the fantastic, that measured 
 riot, the right of whimsy, that unbalanced dalliance with 
 the extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by 
 prescription, to verse. Why may not prose chase forest- 
 nymphs and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in 
 peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the stars, and roll 
 mists about the hills, and watch the sea thundering through
 
 92 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 caverns and dashing against the promontories ? Why, in 
 prose, quail from the grand or ghastly in the one hand, or 
 blush with shame at too much of the exquisite on the 
 other? Is Prose made of iron? Must it never weep, 
 never laugh, never linger to look at a butterfly, never ride 
 at a gallop over the downs?" 
 
 Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells 
 us in his Avowals that the greatness of English genius does 
 not appear in its prose, but in its poetry, i. e., in verse. 
 The greatness of English genius is in its poetry, but in the 
 poetry of its prose as well as in the poetry of its verse. 
 It appears in the ordinary dialect of its novels and prose 
 plays. 
 
 As a matter of fact, poetic prose has always been used. 
 It is found in the earliest as well as the later literature of 
 every nation. The Bible, Oriental Literature, the medieval 
 romances, early Saxon prose are full of it. It made a re- 
 appearance with renewed force in the romantic movement 
 that spread over England, Germany and France in the 
 latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nine- 
 teenth centuries. In an age like the romantic, when the 
 right to live and express emotions was pleaded, poetic 
 prose, seeking restraint from metre, was especially ap- 
 propriate. George Brandes has studied this movement 
 in his Main Currents. Many of the leading writers of the 
 romantic period used impassioned prose. Saintsbury has 
 found much poetry even in the prose of John Wilson, who 
 is not much read, one who was to some extent an enemy 
 of the romantic movement, and Saintsbury reprints in his 
 Specimens of English Prose Style, Wilson's The Fairy's 
 Funeral. 
 
 America has contributed greatly to the development of 
 prose poetry. Hawthorne, Poe and Emerson were the 
 first great masters in prose poetry we have had, and I
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 93 
 
 doubt if as poets they have been surpassed by any of 
 our metrical verse writers. One of the finest poems in 
 American literature is undoubtedly Hawthorne's re- 
 flections of his lonely life in the Ivory Tower, when he re- 
 visited his old chamber in Salem where he spent so many 
 years. The famous passage from his diary, quoted in all 
 big biographies, is as great a poem, though in prose. 
 
 Emerson's essays are studied with prose poems. I 
 shall mention only one, the address to the poet, at the con- 
 clusion of the essay on "The Poet." 
 
 The Hawthorne passage is as follows : 
 
 Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion). 
 .... Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I 
 used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written 
 many tales, many that have been burned to ashes, many 
 that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be 
 called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands 
 of visions have appeared to me in it ; and some few of them 
 have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a 
 biographer, he ought to make great mention of this 
 chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely 
 youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character 
 were formed ; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and 
 here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long 
 time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and 
 sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or 
 whether it would ever know me at all, at least, till I were 
 in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were al- 
 ready in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and 
 benumbed. But oftener I was happy, at least, as happy 
 as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility 
 of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely 
 chamber, and called me forth, not, indeed, with a loud 
 roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice, 
 and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I 
 thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And 
 now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many 
 years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break
 
 94 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 through the viewless bolts and bars ; for if I had sooner 
 made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard 
 and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my 
 heart might have become callous by rude encounters with 
 the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of 
 time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the 
 freshness of my heart. ... I used to think I could 
 imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart 
 and mind; but how little did I know! . . . Indeed, we 
 are but shadows ; we are not endowed with real life, and 
 all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest sub- 
 stance of a dream, till the heart be touched. That touch 
 creates us, then we begin to be, thereby we are beings of 
 reality and inheritors of eternity. . . . 
 
 And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith : 
 O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and 
 pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-blade any 
 longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt 
 leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not 
 know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or 
 opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For 
 the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal 
 chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by 
 succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of 
 joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold 
 and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak 
 for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall repre- 
 sent all courtesy and worldly life for thee ; others shall do 
 the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie 
 close hid with nature,, and canst not be afforded to the 
 Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renuncia- 
 tions and apprenticeships, and this is thine ; thou must pass 
 for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the 
 screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-be- 
 loved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, 
 and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou 
 shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in 
 thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And 
 this is the reward ; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and 
 the impressions of the actual world shall fall like sum-
 
 PROSE THE LANGUAGE OF ECSTASY 95 
 
 mer rain, copious, but not troublesome to thy invulner- 
 able essence. Thou shalt have the sole land for thy 
 park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, with- 
 out tax and without envy ; the woods and the rivers thou 
 shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein others are 
 only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord ! sea-lord ! 
 air-lord ! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds 
 fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the 
 blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, where- 
 ever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are 
 outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, 
 and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for 
 thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou 
 shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or 
 ignoble.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 
 
 ONE of the frequent sayings in the text books of literary 
 history is that the literature of a nation always begins with 
 poetry in verse, and that good prose is a later development. 
 England and Greece are especially cited as examples, 
 since Homer lived before Herodotus and the author of 
 Beowulf before King Alfred. 
 
 Scholars follow one another often like sheep. When a 
 man of prominence utters an idea, it is taken up by a 
 disciple and soon becomes a convention. The academic 
 critics and professors usually enshrine the idea and it be- 
 comes a heresy to question it. The best illustration of this 
 is the almost universal adherence given to the idea that 
 verse poetry came before prose, a view first set forth by the 
 geographer Strabo in speaking of Homer in the beginning 
 of his Geography. His views were not entertained, I be- 
 lieve, by Plato or Aristotle. The passage is worth quoting 
 as I know of no other in literature that has raised so much 
 confusion and misapprehension as to the nature of poetry: 
 
 Prose discourse I mean artistic prose is, I may say, 
 an imitation of poetic discourse ; for poetry as an art first 
 came upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then 
 came Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, 
 with prose writing in which they imitated the poetic art, 
 abandoning the use of metre, but in other respects pre- 
 serving the qualities of poetry. Then subsequent writers 
 took away, each in his turn, something of these qualities, 
 
 96
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 97 
 
 and brought prose down to its present form, as from a 
 sublime height. In the same way we might say that 
 comedy took its structure from tragedy, but that it also 
 has been degraded from the sublime height of tragedy to 
 its present "prose-like" style, as it is called. Geography, 
 i. 2. 6. 
 
 Most critics have accepted this view. Scaliger, how- 
 ever, in the middle of the sixteenth century repudiated it. 
 He asked whether the first so-called poems, the metrical 
 records in temples, antedated everyday speech. 
 
 Strabo was led to his error by the fact that the Iliad 
 and Odyssey were among the very few survivals of the 
 end of an epoch of verse poetry, and also because some of 
 the pre-Socratic philsophers like Parmenides and Em- 
 pedocles wrote in verse. Now scholars are all agreed that 
 the authors of the Homeric poems had many predecessors 
 in the art of composing poetry for many ages back down 
 into legendary times. The perfected poems in a pattern 
 as regular as the dactylic hexameter were a stage of evo- 
 lution and did not spring up out of the darkness of an 
 age which had no literature. The Delphians claim that 
 their first priestess invented the dactylic hexameter; the 
 Delians said that Olen, a mythical singer from Asia 
 Minor, first used it, but it was, of course, a development. 
 Prose was not a development from verse, as Strabo 
 thought. On the contrary, all verse, including Greek 
 verse, was a development from rhythmical prose. The 
 stories about Troy were first told in prose; next they 
 were sung in ballads ; then they were combined into epics. 
 
 Musaeus, one of the earliest legendary poets, ante- 
 dating Homer, was said to have composed prose. 
 
 As the earliest literatures of most nations have not 
 been preserved to us, we can examine various literatures 
 in their earliest stages only ; we shall in almost every case
 
 98 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 find that these are written in rhythmical prose or possess 
 the beginning of a pattern hardly differing from rhythmic 
 prose. It is against all human experience to conclude that 
 an elaborate work of art following laws of measure could 
 precede the production in prose that represents the tran- 
 scription of the natural language of people which is in 
 prose. We shall discover, however, that in some cases, 
 like the Sagas of Iceland, we have in prose, the very first 
 poetical compositions, while other poetical compositions, 
 like the epics of Ireland, show us the prose along with the 
 metrical development in the body of the compositions. 
 
 First let us briefly note the characteristics of the poetry 
 of natural savages. This is always in rhythmical prose, 
 or free verse, and this may be seen in the anthology of 
 Indian poems collected by Cronyn in The Path of the 
 Rainbow. The writer of the preface, Mary Austin, ven- 
 tures the opinion that the writers of free verse poems in 
 America are merely returning to the primitive form of 
 poetry written by the native Americans. Similarly the 
 emotional outbursts of native African tribes' are in 
 rhythmical prose. The only form of pattern in the poems 
 of savages as well as of people in an early stage of 
 civilization is a tendency to repeat the same phrase. But 
 in their most emotional stories, fables and legends, in 
 their proverbs and crude moral and religious philosophiz- 
 ing they use plain prose. This prose, especially that of the 
 legends, contains their first poetry, and of course there is no 
 pattern here. The pattern, assuming the form of irregular 
 rhythm and repetition of phrase, appears chiefly in hymns 
 and chants, and these are only two aspects of poetry. 
 
 The first change that occurs in a later stage of the 
 hymn is that the phrase or clause, instead of being re- 
 peated exactly, is varied by a change of words, having a 
 similar import. In short, we have the beginning of
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 99 
 
 parallelism. There is parallelism in the poems of all early 
 civilizations. It reaches its fullest development in an age 
 of civilization, as we observe in the poems of the Bible. 
 
 Probably the oldest poetry we have is that of the Egyp- 
 tians and the Babylonians, and there is no regular metre 
 of any kind in these except parallelism. The works are 
 all irregularly rhythmical and in many cases the lines are 
 arranged like modern free verse, to call attention to this 
 irregular rhythm. 
 
 Dr. James H. Breasted, speaking of the Pyramid Texts, 
 in his Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, says: 
 "Among the oldest literary fragments in the collection are 
 the religious hymns and these exhibit an early poetic 
 form, that of couplets displaying parallelism in arrange- 
 ment of word, and thought the form which is familiar to 
 all in the Hebrew Psalms as 'parallelism of members.' It 
 is carried back by its employment in the Pyramid Texts 
 in the fourth millennium B. C, by far earlier than its 
 appearance anywhere else. It is indeed the oldest of all 
 literary forms known to us. Its use is not confined to the 
 hymns mentioned, but appears also in other portions of 
 the Pyramid Texts, where it is, however, not usually so 
 highly developed." 
 
 All the poems of the Egyptians were written simply in 
 rough, irregular lines of rhythmical prose. Read the 
 famous Song of the Harper where an epicurean life is 
 praised ; it is impassioned rhythmical prose. Take up the 
 love poems, elegies, fairy tales and prayers of the ancient 
 Egyptians. They have no device of metre, rhythm or 
 rhyme. The only pattern is the parallelism. A few 
 hymns are arranged in stanzas of ten lines with a break 
 in the middle of each line, but no definite metrical laws 
 existed for the lengths of lines or number of feet, so as to 
 make a uniform rhythmical pattern of the composition.
 
 100 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 The Egyptians wrote much of their poetry in parallel- 
 istic prose. If we do not know how they pronounced 
 their vowels, we know enough of their literature to see 
 that regularity of accents and equal numbers of syllables 
 were not characteristic of their poetry. 
 
 The epic of Gilgash, the chief poem of the Babylonians, 
 and the various hymns translated by Professor Langdon, 
 are all in irregular rhythmical prose. These may be older 
 than the poetry of the Egyptians, but in form they are a 
 great deal alike simply prose with a rough rhythm, fre- 
 quent parallelism, but no uniform device. The lines are 
 arranged often like free verse. "It is difficult to draw the 
 line between their poetry and the higher style of prose," 
 says Francis Brown.* "There is a primitive freedom and 
 lack of artificiality in the poetic movement, much greater 
 than in the Hebrew Psalms. Metre is felt and observed 
 at times, but then abandoned the thought carrying itself 
 along beyond the strict boundaries of metrical division." 
 
 We have seen that critics find in the hymns of the 
 Egyptians and Babylonians the irregular rhythm and 
 parallelisms of the Psalms, in short, impassioned rhyth- 
 mical prose. 
 
 Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the 
 Bible. 
 
 W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of 
 the Old Testament," posthumously collected in Lectures 
 and Essays, showed that Hebrew poetry was rhythmic 
 without possessing laws of metre, for the rhythm of 
 thought created a naturally rhythmic prose. Rhythm is 
 the measured rise and fall of feeling and utterance, to 
 which the rhythm of sound is subordinate. Prosodic 
 rules are not necessary, "for the words employed naturally 
 
 * '"The Religious Poetry of Babylonia." Presbyterian Review, 
 1888, p. 76.
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 101 
 
 group themselves in balanced members, in which the 
 undulations of the thought are represented to the ear." 
 When poetry becomes more artificial people do not trust 
 to the rhythm of thought but attribute importance to 
 metre and finally "we are apt to forget its essential sub- 
 ordination to rhythmic flow of thought." 
 
 There has been no more amusing game than the ever- 
 renewed attempt to find metres in the .Bible. One of the 
 most ridiculous claims, at one time widely in vogue, was 
 that the Greek metres were to be found in the Bible. 
 Vossius and the younger Scaliger denounced these views, 
 first advanced by Josephus and Philo. 
 
 We are beginning to see to-day that the chief character- 
 istic of the form of the poetry in the Bible is parallelism 
 in irregular rhythm. 
 
 Dr. Konig and other scholars agree that it is this irregu- 
 lar rhythm based on accent of syllable that distinguishes 
 Hebrew poetry. Each line had a number of accented 
 syllables ranging from two to five, but the lines did not 
 regularly or alternately have the same number of ac- 
 cented syllables. The unaccented syllables were also not 
 counted. The poem became nothing more than rhythmi- 
 cal prose. Sir George A. Smith says, in his The Early 
 Poetry of Israel, that the Hebrew poets indulged deliber- 
 ately in the metrical irregularities of verse. They devi- 
 ated more than Shakespeare, who did not always confine 
 himself to the iambic foot and pentameter line in his 
 blank verse. "In every form of Oriental art we trace the 
 influence of what may be called Symmetrophobia, an in- 
 stinctive aversion to absolute symmetry, which if it knows 
 no better, will express itself in arbitrary and even violent 
 disturbances of the style or pattern of the work." The 
 more correct view, however, is that this symmetry was 
 never intended by the Hebrew poets; that the irregular
 
 102 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 arrangement of accents with occasional symmetry was 
 the rule. 
 
 Both Smith and Konig cite G. Dalman, who says that 
 this irregular rhythm is found in the songs of Arabia to- 
 day sung in Palestine. These songs are made up of lines 
 of from two to five syllables, of which one to four are un- 
 accented, the poet being bound by no definite numbers. 
 This is the irregular rhythm of Hebrew poetry, and also, 
 by the way, of the Nibelungen Lied. It is the rhythm of 
 all early poetry, the Egyptian and Babylonian. 
 
 But even those who have given up the hope of finding 
 metres in Hebrew poetry insist that a regular metrical 
 form was used for the Kinoth or lamentations. Professor 
 Budde held that the Kinoth had a regular metre. But the 
 discovery merely amounted to this : that a long line was 
 followed regularly by a short line. There was no uni- 
 formity of accented syllables in successive or alternate 
 lines. There are two, three and four syllables in them 
 almost at the will of the poet. 
 
 We may then conclude that rhythm is never regular in 
 the poetry of the Bible. 
 
 All ancient Hebrew poetry was in rhythmical prose; 
 prophecies, elegies, songs, hymns, parables, and dialogues. 
 The irregular rhythmical form was a natural outflow of 
 the ecstatic element. 
 
 But what about the parallelism? Does this make the 
 Bible verse? Bishop Lowth, in his Lectures on the 
 Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, delivered at Oxford in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, no doubt performed 
 great service in calling attention to the parallelisms of 
 Hebrew poetry. The importance of these in ancient 
 Hebrew poetry has, however, been overestimated. Par- 
 allelism did not create poetry, but was often its garment. 
 There are passages employing parallelisms that are not
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 103 
 
 poetry, while many poems exist in which these are not 
 used. Dr. Edward Konig, in his article on Hebrew 
 Poetry in the Jewish Encyclopedia, concludes that the 
 poets of the Bible were not bound by parallelism, often 
 setting it aside and not using it. 
 
 In his account of The Literary Study of the Bible, 
 Professor Richard G. Moulton has given an excellent 
 study of the parallelism of the Bible, but he admits that 
 parallelisms of clause are also prose devices. If parallel- 
 ism, then, is also a property of prose, we cannot say that 
 parallelism alone is sufficient to distinguish poetry from 
 prose, or even Hebrew poetry from Hebrew prose. 
 Moulton finds that prose and poetry overlap each other 
 in the Bible. All this merely proves that parallelisms 
 were no doubt anciently used to differentiate prose litera- 
 ture conveying emotions from prose literature barren of 
 feeling. But parallelism was not indispensable to the 
 literature of ecstasy. 
 
 Yet we cannot deny the fact that parallelisms occur in 
 the Bible with such frequency as almost to have become a 
 pattern of Hebrew poetry. Bishop Lowth thought the 
 origin of the parallelism was due to the system of chant- 
 ing hymns where there was a response by the congrega- 
 tion, and that the practice of the parallelism soon extended 
 to all poetry. But, for example, proverbs from their 
 very epigrammatic nature tend towards parallelism. The 
 origin was most likely due to the variations of phrase 
 introduced by individuals who tired of the incessant, silly 
 repetition of similar words such as are indulged in by 
 savages. 
 
 There is parallelism in all poetry, in Beowulf and the 
 Kalevala, and even in prose. For it must be admitted that 
 under emotion a man tends to repeat an idea, in the same 
 or in a synonymous language.
 
 104 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 There can be no doubt that parallelism was consciously 
 and deliberately indulged in by the Hebrew poets, but it 
 is as absurd to confuse it with Hebrew poetry as to 
 confuse metre with English poetry. There are poetical 
 passages in the Bible containing no parallelisms. It 
 should also be borne in mind that parallelism developed as 
 a perfect pattern when poetry was at a high stage. Like 
 all patterns it was a product of a type of civilization. 
 No rude state of society can develop a pattern, which is 
 the result of evolution. 
 
 Parallelism is not used frequently to-day as a pattern 
 of verse, though it can be found in all modern literature. 
 Yet it is a more natural means of expressing one's 
 emotions than rhyme or metre. 
 
 The only pattern of importance, then, that appears 
 extensively in the Bible is that of parallelism. There is 
 no pattern of rhythm at all, for this is free. The result is 
 that the poetry of the Bible is in what may be called 
 prose, for the repetition of the idea and language in the 
 parallelism is natural even in prose. Parallelism in the 
 Bible did not create a distinct branch of literature called 
 verse, as metre did. Those Psalms that have parallelism 
 are very little different from those Psalms where it is 
 absent. They are both really prose. 
 
 It was unfortunate that Hebrew poetry later eschewed 
 the rhythmic prose used in the Bible and adopted first 
 rhymed prose and then rhymed metre. There were sev- 
 eral circumstances that led to this. 
 
 It has been usually recognized that rhymed prose was 
 first used among the Hebrews in the Liturgy by Jannai, 
 who flourished in the seventh century. Metre was intro- 
 duced in the tenth century by Dunash ben Labrat. Both 
 these poets followed Arabic models. Saadyah, the He- 
 brew philosopher, blamed Dunash for having ruined the
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 105 
 
 beauty and naturalness of the Hebrew language for poetry. 
 Even Jehudah HaLevi, the great national poet who used 
 Arabic meters, regretted, in his philosophical work, 
 Hacuzari* that these foreign Arabian influences should 
 prevail among the Hebrew poets. 
 
 The oldest Arab poetry was also in prose. The 
 earliest pattern for poetry among the Arabians was the 
 Saj (cooing), or rhymed but unmetrical prose. Gold- 
 ziher calls the Saj the oldest form of poetic speech ; it con- 
 tinued to exist even after the regular metres were estab- 
 lished, the Koran, for instance, being in Saj. At first it 
 was unrhymed, as Goldziher says; the earliest Arabic 
 poetry was in unmetrical prose. 
 
 From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly 
 metrical, and forms the transition to the artificial Arabic 
 meters. 
 
 The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of 
 the Muallaqat, composed before Mohammed, are so per- 
 fect in form that all Arabic scholars assume they were pro- 
 duced after a long period extending through many years 
 of poetic practice. They were not rude products, but had 
 an historical background, as did the Iliad. They are 
 written in perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj 
 is older than these. 
 
 We have two other proofs that poetry was in early 
 times written in rhythmical prose, or at least in a rhythm 
 that makes only a slight approach to metre. These are 
 to be found in two of the oldest Aryan literary monu- 
 ments extant, the Rigveda of India and the Avesta of 
 Iran. 
 
 Two-fifths of the hymns of the Rigveda are composed 
 in a metre called trishtubh, the most frequent measure in 
 the Veda. It is made up of stanzas of four lines, each of 
 
 * There is an English translation of this work.
 
 106 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 eleven syllables, the last four of which only have to follow 
 a pattern, this consisting of two iambuses or an iambus and 
 a spondee. This requirement left a good deal of liberty 
 to the poet. Here is an example of it, in the Hymn to 
 Dawn, in MacDonnels' Sanskrit Literature (P. 83) : 
 
 Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us: 
 Darkness has gone away and light is coming. 
 She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel : 
 We have arrived where men prolong existence. 
 
 Max Miiller in his translation in prose has adhered in 
 many cases to the original metre, and the reader feels he is 
 reading prose. The Hindus, like the free verse writers, 
 merely arranged their lines to call attention to the rhythm, 
 but it was really prose employing metrical rules only at 
 the end of the line. It has none of the hampering qualities 
 of classic or English metres, or of the metres in the later 
 Indian epics when the quantity of every syllable was de- 
 termined. 
 
 The Rigvedas are fixed by some scholars at 1500 B. C. 
 
 When we come to the Avesta of the Iranians who left 
 India and wrote their work in a language that is almost 
 Sanskrit, we find more liberty as regards the metres. 
 The Gathas, which are said to be the oldest portions of the 
 work, the work of Zoroaster himself, have the same or 
 nearly the same kind of metre as the Vedic hymns, but 
 there is greater liberty. The syllables need not be of a 
 uniform quantity at the end of the line, but each line, as in 
 the Rigvedas, also has the same number of syllables. The 
 third of the five Gathas uses the trishtubh or most fre- 
 quent metre of the Veda, four lines of eleven syllables, 
 but without restrictions as to quantity of final vowels. 
 
 Of course the reader can see that such verse is really 
 prose, for there are no limitations as to when accent or 
 quantity should uniformly be used. L. H. Mills in his
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 107 
 
 translation of the Gathas keeps close, as he tells us, to the 
 original metres. He wisely breaks up the metrical line, 
 based merely on the counting of syllables, and the result 
 reads like prose, which it really is in the original. 
 
 A study of the five "metres" of the five Gathas appears 
 in Martin Haug's Essays in the Sacred Language, Writ- 
 ings and Religion of the P arsis. 
 
 The Gathas were written about the fourteenth century 
 B. C. by Zoroaster and hence are not much later than the 
 Rigvedas. 
 
 In the Rigvedas and Gathas we have the first stage of 
 metre used by Aryan nations; these are the basis of all 
 later metres. They were written, it must be recalled, not 
 in ages of barbarism, and represent the transition from 
 prose to regular metre. They are so near prose that only 
 an arrangement into lines makes us call them metrical. 
 After all, they do not differ much from the rhythmical 
 prose in which the poetry of Ancient Egyptians, Baby- 
 lonians and Hebrews was written. We see thus that 
 rhythmical prose was the first language wherein poetry 
 was written, and that hampering metre is always late in 
 the literary development of a nation. We learn how great 
 is the delusion of literary historians that metrical poetry 
 is the first literature of all nations and that prose is a later 
 growth. 
 
 The earliest poetry of a country is expressed first in 
 prose by word of mouth. It is then put down first in 
 writing in prose, and later versions sometimes change the 
 prose into meter. Often the earlier prose version is lost 
 and it is then concluded that a literature of a nation begins 
 in verse. 
 
 Let us examine the form of the earliest Irish literature. 
 The oldest stories in Irish literature center around the ex- 
 ploits of Cuchulinn, who is reputed to have died at the
 
 io8 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 beginning of the Christian era. This means that the tale 
 about him was told by word of mouth up till the time they 
 were written down in the seventh or eighth century. The 
 versions of a few centuries later are the copies we now 
 have in the epic Tain Bo Cualnge. According to Edmund 
 C. Quiggin's article on Irish Literature in the Brittanica, 
 the original Tain consisted of prose interspersed with 
 rhythmical prose called rhetoric. Later metrical poems 
 were largely substituted for the rhetoric. As Mr. Quiggin 
 says, the Tain is of interest as showing the preliminary 
 stage through which the epics of all other nations had 
 gone. No doubt even the Iliad was originally told in 
 prose (and probably written in prose) while the verse ver- 
 sions are the latest we have of the story. 
 
 Eleanor Hull, in A Text Book of Irish Literature, 
 also says in Vol. i, p. 95, that there are few verse poems 
 in the earlier Tain Bo Cualnge, most of the poetry being 
 usually in declamatory prose style known as rosg, while in 
 the later version long verse poems are frequent. 
 
 The earliest Teutonic verse was rather rhythmical prose, 
 with some alliteration. It is often hard to distinguish 
 Anglo-Saxon prose from Anglo-Saxon verse. ^Elfric, 
 who is regarded by many as one of the fathers of English 
 prose, wrote his Lives of the Saints in rhythmical prose, 
 arranged in irregular lines just like our modern free verse. 
 The reader may consult Professor Skeat's edition. This 
 arrangement, needless to say, did not make poetry of it. 
 But free verse, as we see, was written in England in 1000 
 A. D. 
 
 Dr. Edwin Guest, in his History of English Rhythms, 
 says that the Anglo-Saxon writers sometimes gave a very 
 definite rhythm to their prose, and he cites a few passages 
 characterizing King William, from the Chronicle at- 
 tributed to Wulfstan in the latter part of the eleventh cen-
 
 PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY 109 
 
 tury. Dr. Guest adds that in his opinion this rhythmical 
 prose was one of the instruments in breaking up the alliter- 
 ative system of the Anglo-Saxons. The passage he cites, 
 however, is no more rhythmical than many passages in 
 modern English prose. Anglo-Saxon prose, then, often 
 was rhythmical, and even arranged like free verse, but it 
 became genuine poetry only when the element of ecstasy 
 was present. Even the middle-English impassioned allit- 
 erative prose poem, The Wooing of Our Lord, of the 
 thirteenth century, does not differ much from Anglo- 
 Saxon verse. 
 
 The earliest Teutonic poetry was emotional prose, and 
 only later did definite rules bind it. The author of 
 Beowulf, though the first English verse poet, is not the 
 oldest Teutonic poet; he had predecessors in rhythmic 
 prose. "When we consider primitive Teutonic verse 
 closely," says Gosse in his article in the Brittanica on 
 Verse, "we see that it did not begin with any conscious 
 art, but as Vigfussen had said, 'was simply excited and 
 emphatic prose' uttered with the repetition of catch 
 words and letters. The use of these was presently regu- 
 lated." English poetry, then, began in the use of excited 
 and emphatic prose. One of the best pieces of Anglo- 
 Saxon prose poetry is the Sermon to the English on 
 the ravages of the Dane by Archbishop Wulfstan of 
 York in the early part of the eleventh century. It reads 
 like Anglo-Saxon verse. One sees the unconscious in- 
 fluence of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry as late as Drum- 
 mond's The Cypress Grove (1623), an ecstatic prose poem 
 against death. 
 
 The fact that the Sagas, the earliest literature of Ice- 
 land, were written in perfect prose has puzzled those who 
 claim that the early literature of all nations is verse poetry, 
 and that prose is a later development. The events which
 
 I io THE LITERATURE 1 OF ECSTASY 
 
 the Sagas celebrate took place in the tenth century, and the 
 following century was the period of their narration. 
 They were written down in the present form chiefly in the 
 thirteenth century. Ari Frodi (1067-1148) is considered 
 by many the first inventor of classic Norse prose. The 
 most famous of the Greater Sagas is the Njala written 
 about the middle of the thirteenth century and celebrating 
 events of the beginning of the eleventh century. 
 
 Earlier Icelandic verse poetry did exist, but it does not 
 belong to Iceland proper. The great strength of real 
 Iceland poetry was in the Sagas, which Morris calls "un- 
 versified poetry." Some of these existed as early as the 
 first part of the tenth century. It seems anomalous to the 
 literary historian that a nation should at the very beginning 
 of its literary history have developed prose before verse, 
 that it should have celebrated its heroes in prose instead of 
 verse song. All stories among ancient people were, how- 
 ever, originally told in prose ; the first expression was al- 
 ways in rhythmical poetical prose. 
 
 It is not true, then, that verse is the first form in which 
 a nation's poetry is written, or that prose developed from 
 verse. Prose was the original language of poetry, and to 
 prose it should return. The pattern was a gradual de- 
 velopment.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE 
 
 THE unrhymed iambic pentameter known as blank 
 verse is really a form of free verse ; it is a modified form 
 of the unrhymed classical measure. It made its appear- 
 ance in Italy in the early part of the sixteenth century, and 
 was used by Ariosto in his comedies, except that he em- 
 ployed a final additional unaccented syllable, making 
 eleven syllables in each line. Surrey, who used it in his 
 translation of two books of the JEneid, imported it from 
 the Italians. It was called by the Italians versi sciolti, 
 "untied or free verse." It was, then, the old classical 
 measure with more freedom. 
 
 In his essay, Blank Verse, John Addington Symonds 
 dwells especially on the plasticity and variety of blank 
 verse, which he says it has more than any other national 
 metre. It may be used for the commonplace and the 
 sublime, the tragic and the comic, etc. It does not have 
 to consist of five iambuses only, but other feet may be 
 substituted almost at the caprice of the poet. This, how- 
 ever, practically amounts to saying that blank verse is after 
 all a great deal like prose ; indeed, it may be arranged like 
 modern free verse with great ease. Its plasticity and 
 variety are due to the fact that its artificial requirements 
 are less than those of most other metres. It was a for- 
 tunate day for English drama and poetry when Marlowe, 
 Shakespeare and Milton, following in the footsteps of 
 Surrey's translation of two books of the BLneid, and Sack- 
 in
 
 112 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 ville's and Norton's play, Gorboduc, made blank verse 
 fashionable. The writers really brought poetry back into 
 prose. For blank verse is but a restricted prose, because 
 there is as often as not no natural pause at the end of the 
 line, and because other feet may be substituted for the 
 iambus. 
 
 One of the reasons why English verse poetry excels 
 French is because blank verse, a more natural medium 
 than the rhymed Alexandrines, became the chief vehicle 
 for poetry. 
 
 In fact, the blank verse of the later Elizabethan 
 dramatists is really prose, for it is less rhythmical than that 
 of Shakespeare. Blank verse was said to have degener- 
 ated with them. It is also said to be prosaic as used by 
 Wordsworth. These poets, however, are merely less 
 rhythmical than the alleged masters of blank verse. All 
 blank verse is as near prose as any metrical medium that 
 has been hitherto introduced. Bernard Shaw said he 
 found it easier than prose. It appears very often in prose 
 without the writer being aware of it. Dickens had a 
 tendency, as also did Ruskin, to drop unconsciously into 
 blank verse in his prose. 
 
 The great English blank verse poets and nearly all the 
 poets of England in the nineteenth century used this 
 medium, and are really our supreme prose poets. 
 
 The experiment of arranging blank verse in the form of 
 prose and of putting prose in the metre of blank verse has 
 been often tried with success. I have no intention of using 
 this means of showing that blank verse is really a more 
 modulated prose. Any passage of blank verse can nat- 
 urally also be put into modern free verse, into the free 
 rhythms of Whitman, for example. 
 
 The lovers of blank verse imagine, however, that its 
 beauty is partly derived from the existence of a pause at
 
 BLANK AND FREE VERSE 113 
 
 the end of the fifth foot and because the next line begins 
 with a capital letter. As a matter of fact, there is no par- 
 ticular virtue in having that pause, and the next line need 
 not begin with a capital letter, and should be continued 
 as of the same line. For the real pauses are, after all, not 
 in these artificial places but where our natural speech and 
 punctuation marks dictate them. 
 
 The virtues of blank verse are the virtues of rhythmic 
 prose, which is still freer and more natural than blank 
 verse, just as blank verse is preferable to the heroic 
 couplet. 
 
 Our English poets who write in blank verse would have 
 done even better to use prose, rhythmical or unrhythmical. 
 To us moderns there is something of a distortion in chop- 
 ping up good prose into lines of five feet, each beginning 
 with a capital letter. The more beautiful and natural 
 medium is prose, for blank verse is but a confined prose. 
 It is not fair or right to make characters speak in this 
 fettered prose. It is absurd to state that their speeches 
 become poetry only because of this fettered prose. Every 
 great passage in Shakespeare in blank verse would have 
 continued to be poetry in regular prose. We observe that 
 the great prose passages of Shakespeare are poetry even 
 though not in blank verse. English poetry should free it- 
 self from the bondage of blank verse, and use prose. 
 However, next to free verse blank verse is the best 
 medium that English poetry has yet found. 
 
 Blank verse was in disfavor in the eighteenth century 
 and was regarded as prose. We may smile at Samuel 
 Johnson's remark upon it in his Life of Roscommon, but 
 on reflection we find that he was, after all, right. 
 "Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little opera- 
 tion either on ear or mind; it can hardly support itself 
 without bold figures and striking images. A poem frig-
 
 114 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 idly didactic, without rhyme, is so near prose that the 
 reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse." He 
 argues, either write prose or rhyme, but choose no inter- 
 mediate measure. 
 
 The free verse of modern times, the revival of which is 
 due to Walt Whitman, is really the oldest form in which 
 poetry was expressed. It existed along with parallelism 
 among the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews, among 
 the Hindoos and the Anglo-Saxons. It is rhythmical 
 prose, arranged so as to call attention to the rhythm. 
 It is not a third medium for expression, next to prose 
 and the regular verse- forms. The lines do not return upon 
 themselves, that is, there is no repeat any more than in 
 rhythmical prose. 
 
 In its present form in English it dates from Aelfric's 
 Lives of the Saints, about 1000 A.D. 
 
 Free verse has come to stay, and numbers many able 
 poets among its devotees. It is more natural than rhymed 
 or metrical verse, which, however, it will not wholly dis- 
 place. The manuscripts of many poets who used conven- 
 tional metres show that the original form of composition 
 was free verse. The detractors of free verse need not 
 think they bring a valid argument against it when they ar- 
 range free verse in prose form, and, vice versa, chop up 
 prose sentences into brief lines beginning with a capital, 
 and ask what is the difference between the two. It is ad- 
 mitted there is none. It matters not if the poet wishes to 
 arrange his composition in free verse forms to call atten- 
 tion to the rhythm, or to print it as prose. It is immaterial 
 if you call vers libre rhythmical prose or a distinct verse 
 form. The poetry is independent of any ordering of the 
 lines. Neither of the resulting products loses or gains in 
 poetical attributes by the objector's turning prose into free 
 verse, or free verse into prose. The question is, how much
 
 BLANK AND FREE VERSE 115 
 
 ecstasy or emotion, what impassioned ideas there are in the 
 work. 
 
 Free verse may or may not have a cadence all its own, 
 but one feels that those who advocate free verse need not 
 try to prove that it does and must possess a cadence pe- 
 culiar to itself. Free verse may have great poetic value 
 even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose 
 into prominence lately because poets wanted to be freed 
 from the bonds of metre. They should not encumber 
 themselves with the shackles of a new prosody. 
 
 Let us illustrate our point: we shall take a few lines 
 from a great prose poem by Lafcadio Hearn and arrange 
 them in free verse. It is from the essay called "The 
 Eternal Haunter" in the volume Exotics and Retro- 
 spectives. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or 
 the spirit of life in the past. 
 
 Ancient her beauty 
 
 As the heart of man, 
 
 Yet ever waxing fairer, 
 
 Forever remaining young. 
 
 Mortals wither in time 
 
 As leaves in the frost of autumn ; 
 
 But time only brightens the glow 
 
 And the bloom of her endless youth. 
 
 All men have loved her 
 
 But none shall touch with his lips 
 
 Even the hem of her garment. 
 
 It is seen that this prose passage in the tree verse 
 transformance has the cadences which were present before. 
 It is still poetical, as it was in the original version as well. 
 It really matters little if Hearn had written it as it now 
 stands. It is a question of personal preference with the 
 poet, in what form he wishes to write.
 
 ii6 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly 
 for October, 1919, considers the free verse form different 
 from prose. He took a passage from Pater's Renaissance 
 and arranged it in free verse form, and then a passage from 
 Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose, and tried 
 unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not be- 
 come free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not 
 become good prose. His mistake was in trying to take 
 a passage from Sandburg that had a patterned form, and 
 in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were too 
 brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages from 
 Pater, Hewlett, Fiona Macleod, Conrad and George Mere- 
 dith and printed them as free verse, and they truly read 
 like free verse poems. 
 
 The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, 
 but there is hardly any of it in Masters's poems in the 
 Spoon River Anthology which could have been printed as 
 prose passages. They would have been just as good and 
 poetical as they are in free verse, but Masters has the right 
 to make any arrangement he wanted. Ecstasy is more 
 important than cadence, and he has ecstasy. 
 
 The following passage from Roosevelt's essay on History 
 as Literature is poetry by virtue of its ecstasy and visual- 
 izing effect, though printed in prose form. Roosevelt 
 might have arranged it in the long lines of irregular lengths 
 like those of Whitman into which it fits better than it 
 would into lines of brief, irregular length. But its poetry 
 does not depend upon the rhythms which are in the 
 original prose. It is only one of the few cases where 
 Roosevelt succeeds in being a poet, for he was rather the 
 orator who swayed by rhetoric many of the worst of 
 popular prejudices.
 
 BLANK AND FREE VERSE 117 
 
 The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if 
 
 it were the present . . . 
 
 Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities, 
 And the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins 
 
 crumbled to dust ages ago ; 
 Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste 
 
 spaces, its caravans shall move; 
 And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean 
 
 with their lonely prows, 
 Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float 
 
 above armed hosts. 
 We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that 
 
 have changed the course of time. 
 We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers. 
 Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed 
 
 greatly, 
 
 Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty 
 That never have they been reached 
 Ry the sons and daughters of men. 
 Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might 
 And the love and the beauty of women. 
 
 Dr. Andrews in his Writing and Reading of Verse has 
 also given us illustrations of rhythmic prose that he has 
 resolved into free verse. Like Professor Patterson, he 
 rightly refuses to recognize free verse as a distinct species 
 of verse, holding it to have an affinity at least to prose.* 
 He notes that the free verse advocates have not really 
 defined special laws of free verse. He also recommends 
 the would-be practitioners of free verse to study the prose 
 rhythms of men like Pater and De Quincey. 
 
 Professor Corson, the Browning scholar, wrote to Walt 
 Whitman that be believed that impassioned prose would 
 be the medium in which the poetry of the future would be 
 written, and that he considered the Leaves of Grass one of 
 
 * Spingarn's Creative Criticism and Erskine's The Kinds of 
 Poetry, two excellent brochures in aesthetic criticism, take a sim- 
 ilar view point.
 
 ii8 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but 
 impassioned prose, shows that his prophecy is coming true. 
 In England Matthew Arnold and Walter Henley used 
 it. Edward Carpenter had been writing it as a result of 
 Whitman's influence, in Towards Democracy in 1883. 
 In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse 
 vogue started, had been writing in his The Conservator 
 free verse poems. No one paid attention to these even 
 when some of them were collected in Optimos in 1910, 
 except a few disciples. Richard Hovey, Ernest Crosby, 
 and Stephen Crane had also been writing free verse 
 after Whitman before the year 1900. About 1912 an 
 impetus was given to free verse by the poets of the new 
 poetic era which set in and which Untermeyer calls the 
 New Era in American Poetry. Most of the contemporary 
 free verse poets began writing simultaneously. 
 
 Nearly all of our modern free verse poets are admittedly 
 indebted to Whitman ; Louis Untermeyer names Whitman 
 as the leading influence on modern American poetry. Let 
 us also be thankful that Whitman did not write about 
 the "technique of free verse," about "cadence," "strophe" 
 and "return." 
 
 Whitman is without a doubt the father of free verse in 
 America and England to-day. He did not claim to have 
 originated it, since he found a form of it in the prose poetry 
 of the Bible and Ossian. It was also used by Milton and 
 Blake and in German by Goethe and Heine. As Bliss 
 Perry also shows, The Lily and the Bee by Warren, the 
 author of Ten Thousand a Year, was written in free verse, 
 before Whitman. Tupper also used it. Free verse was 
 adopted in France and Belgium as a result of Whitman's 
 influence. America owes nothing to French free verse 
 which was usually rhymed and corresponds to the
 
 BLANK AND FREE VERSE 119 
 
 Pindaric Ode founded by Cowley in the middle of 
 the seventeenth century.* 
 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus was one of the few ancient 
 critics who brought the boundaries of prose and poetry 
 close. His work On Literary Composition contains two 
 chapters on the importance of rhythm, which he considers 
 an important element in prose as well as in verse, and he is 
 especially impressed by the rhythms of Thucydides, Plato 
 and Demosthenes. At the conclusion of this work, which 
 has been translated by W. Rhys Roberts, are two chapters 
 entitled "How Prose Can Resemble Verse," and "How 
 Verse Can Resemble Prose." He wants prose not to be 
 cast in metre or rhythm but simply to appear rhythmical 
 and metrical; the metres and rhythms must be unob- 
 strusively introduced. In this he follows Aristotle's 
 Rhetoric which says prose should have rhythm but of not 
 too marked a character. Dionysius especially shows 
 Demosthenes's great care in the matter of rhythm, and in- 
 stances as examples of artistic finish among the Greeks 
 the fact that Isocrates worked ten years on his Panegyrics. 
 After having shown how prose may resemble verse he 
 points out how verse resembles prose. When the clauses 
 and sense do not coincide with the metrical line but are 
 carried over for completion in another line, the result is 
 prosaic. That is what makes our English blank verse 
 so much like prose. 
 
 Dionysius erred however in not emphasizing the im- 
 portance of the ecstatic element in making prose and verse 
 resemble each other. He over-valued the use of rhythm in 
 prose, but he was after all swayed by the ecstasy of the 
 writer. He tells of the influence upon him of reading one 
 
 * For a history of French free verse see Mcrcure De France, 
 March 15, 1921. Premiers Poetes Du Vers Libre by fidouard 
 Dujardin.
 
 120 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 of Demosthenes's speeches. If Sidney said that he could 
 not take up the ballad of Percy and Douglas without feel- 
 ing his heart moved as by a trumpet, Dionysius says even 
 more beautifully, "When I take up one of his speeches, 
 I am entranced and am carried hither and thither, stirred 
 now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, 
 anxiety, fear, disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, 
 jealousy. I am agitated by every passion in turn that 
 can sway the human heart, and am like those who are 
 being initiated into wild mystic rites." 
 
 However, regularity of feet or metre in prose carried on 
 to a great extent makes the prose artificial. The Romans 
 occasionally indulged in it, but they generally used rhyth- 
 mical prose, as the reader of Cicero and Livy will observe. 
 Quintilian, who recognized that prose has often metrical 
 feet that read like verse, thought it ugly and inelegant 
 that an entire verse should appear in a prose composition. 
 He says that he does not entertain "the idea that prose, 
 which ought to have sweeping and fluent motion, should 
 dawdle itself into dotage in measuring feet and weighing 
 syllables. For this would be the part of a wretched crea- 
 ture, occupied on the infinitely little. Nor could one who 
 exhausted himself in this care, have time for better things. 
 
 Probably we need not better reply than this to the high 
 claims made for the French form known as polyphonic 
 verse. Prose that is interspersed with metrical patterns is 
 not natural. 
 
 The truth of the matter is that all the metrical features 
 that are demanded of poetry belong to the ornamental re- 
 quirements like metaphors, myths, rhetorical flourishes and 
 all other gewgaws. There are always stages in civiliza- 
 tion when man wants adornment for his speech. Some- 
 thing of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck 
 and bedrape our poetry with trappings without which it is
 
 BLANK AND FREE VERSE 121 
 
 better off. Artificialities appear even in comparatively 
 modern prose. The prose of Milton is full of rhetoric and 
 the great Burke had rhetorical characteristics that we call 
 Asiatic. We are familiar with the euphuistic qualities of 
 the Elizabethan prose, especially pervading John Lyly's 
 novel Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia. 
 
 In an excellent essay Plutarch shows that he understood 
 that verse was largely natural to man in a certain stage of 
 civilization, because all ornament was natural to him. In 
 his essay on "Wherefore the Pythian Priestess now Ceases 
 to Delivei Her Oracle in Verse," he gives the love of orna- 
 ment as the real reason for the growth of metre as a form 
 of literary expression. 
 
 Often the topic is broached whether men like Hardy 
 and Meredith are greater as poets than as novelists. The 
 question is not put properly. It should be, Do these writers 
 cease being poets when they use the fetters of rhyme and 
 metre, or are they with those fetters greater poets than 
 they were in their novels. I have no intention of trying to 
 answer these questions, though it is usually agreed that 
 these writers are greater in their novels than in their verse, 
 but the point is that they are poets whether they use prose 
 or verse as their medium. 
 
 Some authors get more ecstasy into their work when 
 they write in prose than in verse, as readers of the novels 
 and verse poems of Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray 
 are aware. Other authors are successful in crystallizing 
 their ecstasy whether they write in prose or verse. Gold- 
 smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Scott, Emerson, 
 Poe, James Thomson, B. V., Hardy, Meredith, Symons, 
 Hugo, De Musset, Goethe and Heine, are examples of 
 masters of the literature of ecstasy in both prose and 
 verse. Other verse poets have not at all succeeded nor 
 tried to succeed in writing ecstasy in ordinary prose.
 
 122 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 The authors who have given us ecstasy only in prose 
 but have not tried to do so at all in verse are too 
 numerous to mention. v 
 
 I believe that poetry will again return to the natural 
 language of prose. Critics are taking an entirely different 
 stand toward rhythm, admitting that the poets have the 
 right to vary their measures, create new rhythm and not 
 be held in bondage to old verse forms. The day is dis- 
 appearing when a man like Hegel could say that a pro- 
 duction not in metre is not poetry. A sane attitude to- 
 wards the free use of rhythms by poets has been given us 
 in a New Study of English Poetry by Henry Newboldt. 
 Liberal critics are helping the poets break their shackles; 
 the following passage from a review of Newbolt's book, 
 by J. Middleton Murry is worth quoting: 
 
 Great Poets have always been those who believed that 
 poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest 
 arguments of which the soul of man is capable. Yet a 
 poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great 
 prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be 
 assimilated to the conditions of poetry, such as Plato's 
 Republic, or Milton's Areopagitica, but the prose of the 
 great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's 
 Cherry Orchard has as good claim to be called poetry as 
 The Essay on Man, Tess of the D'Urbervillcs as The Ring 
 and the Book, The Possessed as Phedre. Where are we 
 to call a halt in the inevitable progress by which the kinds 
 of literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm 
 is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the 
 accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will 
 have to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. 
 The difference in such must be substantial and essential 
 aspects of Literature* 
 
 * Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor 
 George M. Harper in the preface to his John Morley and Other 
 Essays, in Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," The Dial, 
 August, 1920, and the preface to F. S. Flint's Otherworld.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN 
 WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY 
 
 OUR views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, il- 
 luminate many dark crannies in one of the most un- 
 fathomable caverns of aesthetic speculation; speculation 
 of the connection between poetry and morals, form and 
 matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been 
 often asked whether poetry should deal with moral sub- 
 jects, sociological questions, and philosophical ideas. 
 The question disappears* when we regard literature of 
 ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt with in 
 prose and some may be ecstatically treated. If poetry is 
 an atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most 
 various ideas. Emotional treatment of the ideas gives 
 us literature of ecstasy or poetry. If the natural lan- 
 guage of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not wish to see 
 a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views 
 treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right 
 who did not want poetry (a long composition in verse, as 
 he understood it) to deal with ethics or science. 
 
 The question is then not really whether poetry should 
 be concerned with moral, sociological or psychological 
 themes, for these themes always have poetry in them, and 
 an emotional treatment of them brings the poetry into 
 prominence. Ideas are the substance of poetry and nearly 
 all ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even 
 scientific facts and metaphysical utterances may be so 
 stated by a writer as to show the latent poetry. The two 
 
 123
 
 124 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 famous passages in Leaves of Grass beginning "I open 
 my scuttle at night" and "I am an acme of things accom- 
 plished and an encloser of things to be" are emotional 
 statements of the facts of the infinity of the universe 
 and of the evolution of man, respectively; Whitman 
 brought out the poetry in a philosophical and in a scien- 
 tific idea. 
 
 'Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be 
 poetry. The theme of Great Expectations is a sermon 
 against pride and snobbery, and the emotional treatment, 
 especially by force of example, makes part of the book 
 poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truth- 
 fully and movingly artistic as to arouse an ecstatic state 
 in the reader, become poetry. Hence Tartuffe and Peck- 
 sniff are poetical portraits, even when drawn in prose. 
 
 Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose 
 to the intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by 
 the heart, prose by the mind ; fancy was thought to hold 
 sway in poetry, logic in prose. But nevertheless, the great 
 English poets like Shakespeare, Browning, Shelley, 
 Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was 
 produced by the intellect, weighed by the mind, and gov- 
 erned by logic. Any intellectual and even moral per; 
 formance may be elevated into poetry, when emotionally 
 and ecstatically presented. And philosophers like Plato, 
 Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have demonstrated 
 this. 
 
 Our definition of poetry throws much light on the sub- 
 ject of the relations of politics and morals, of social and 
 philosophical problems to poetry. Poets should instruct, 
 while delighting, is the contention of one group. They 
 ought merely to express beauty and emotions, is the em- 
 phatic demand of another class. I doubt if there has ever 
 been a great poet who hasn't done both of these things.
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 125 
 
 If a poet is to teach he must teach something ; he must ex- 
 press ideas, and ideas mean thoughts about life, and these 
 in turn refer to the relations of man to himself, to one 
 another, to the opposite sex, to society, to the universe, 
 to nature. But it is while doing this that he must give us 
 beauty and emotion. 
 
 When a prose writer is purely didactic without any 
 emotional or aesthetic appeal he is no poet. It is mani- 
 festly absurd also for an author to give in metre didactic 
 works which could be better written in prose. To this ex- 
 tent the disciples of art for art's sake are right, that the 
 poet should not give us unecstatic political, philosophical 
 or moral lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions 
 may be expressed in prose or free verse probably more 
 poetically than even in metre, it is surely inadvisable to 
 drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and especially at great 
 length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave us 
 an effective harangue against spiritualism in Mr. Sludge, 
 "The Medium," in blank j verse, Byron proved a good 
 critic of society in Don Juan, in Ottava Rima metre, 
 Shelley preached moral reforms in the Revolt of Islam, 
 in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of the 
 nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their 
 authors, are Swinburne's Hertha, and Browning's Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, and they are both ecstatically didactic. 
 
 But the future poets will not spin out their ideas in 
 metre at great length. The short verse poem embodying 
 an idea will always be with us, but I doubt if we will 
 have, or at least ought to have, philosophical or moral 
 works, extending into hundreds or thousands of lines of 
 regular verse. 
 
 John Addington Symdnds has in his Essays Specula- 
 tive and Suggestive taken two of the most famous dicta 
 in English literature regarding the function of poetry in
 
 126 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 relation to form and matter, and given us a sane view- 
 point. He analyzes Arnold's statement that poetry is a 
 criticism of life, and Pater's assumption that all art, in- 
 cluding poetry, aspires towards the condition of music 
 which thus in his opinion becomes the true type or meas- 
 ure of consummate art. Symonds shuns both the didac- 
 ticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship 
 of form implied in Pater's statement; though it should 
 be said that Pater in his essay on "Style" urges that, after 
 all, subject matter is the deciding factor in determining 
 great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us rather a 
 revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment accord- 
 ing to his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is 
 more a reporter and a seer than a judge. Poets take their 
 final rank by matter and not by form. Though Sy- 
 monds mentions slurringly a great poet like Baudelaire, 
 still the following lines should be carefully pondered by 
 many of our versifiers : "The carving of cherry-stones' 
 in verse, the turning of triolets and rondeaux, the seeking 
 after sound and color without heed for sense, is all fore- 
 doomed to final failure." Poetry appeals to the imagina- 
 tive reason, and must embody thought and emotion. As" 
 Symonds remarks, Pater's discrimination between these 
 two is fanciful. 
 
 Poetry then must not be timid about dealing with ideas 
 in an emotional or imaginative manner. It may even take 
 up moral problems provided it does not sink into the 
 commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the Psalm 
 of Life and Excelsior, two of Longfellow's most inferior 
 and popular poems. An idea that is the result of reason 
 may be uttered with ecstasy, and hence there may be logic 
 in poetry. 
 
 In his Oxford Lectures on Poetry in the essay on 
 "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," Professor A. C. Bradley
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS' 127 
 
 takes issue with those who claim that it is no consequence 
 what a poet says but how he says it, and he rightly re- 
 gards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy 
 which encourages men to taste poetry as though it were 
 wine. Poetry inheres in ideas. To insist, as the poetry 
 for poetry's sake school does, that a poem has no more 
 lesson for us than a tree is to institute a false comparison, 
 for the tree has a lesson for any one who finds it. 
 
 When one finishes a volume of poetry by some of the 
 purely aesthetic poets, one is amazed at the kind of life 
 they embody in art. It is often such a petty life, a talk 
 to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an old poet, or 
 a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the 
 substance of which noble lives are made. We are pained 
 to find that trite utterances or references are tricked out 
 in gaudy images and given forth to the world in large 
 quantities. 
 
 Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice 
 are not poetry. Indeed, it is a petty employment for poets 
 to be giving vent to labored conceits about gold fish, and 
 vases, about dandelions and kittens and lollypops, invest- 
 ing none of these themes with imagination or intellect. 
 Man is stirred by thousands of emotions arising from his 
 inability to adjust himself to surroundings, by his 
 thwarted will and suppressed desires. He is often 
 wrapped in gloom for want of real truthful consoling 
 poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts with 
 relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or 
 amorous affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed 
 out by the prevailing of stupid and deplorable customs ; he 
 is often starving or being insufficiently fed, and frequently 
 sees his children in unhappy circumstances. He is the 
 victim of tyrants and unjust social systems, and is en- 
 gaged in soul-killing occupations. He faces the great
 
 128 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 mysteries of existence, the riddle of the Sphinx. He wit- 
 nesses cruelties of all kinds, persecution of races and 
 individuals, mismanagement of affairs, lynchings, mas- 
 sacres, wars and imprisonments. Hypocrisy and vindic- 
 tiveness are rife and man suffers thereby. He thirsts for 
 beauty, he pants for happiness. 
 
 Yet poets who may find numerous and important sub- 
 jects for the literature of ecstasy, are busy writing 
 sugared verses about mosaics, candles, and puppies, and 
 arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's souls are 
 starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish 
 and file and chisel verses on themes that interest no one. 
 As Horace says, the mountains are in labor and the is- 
 sue is but a ridiculous mouse. 
 
 Indeed it is not the subject the poet chooses that one 
 objects to, but to the absence of ideas, or the shallow- 
 ness or triviality of the idea. Burns took a daisy and 
 made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could write 
 about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal 
 idea. Shelley and Keats could endure emotions and 
 thoughts by singing of a skylark or a nightingale. But 
 the petty poet cannot deduce anything but a trifling 
 idea, no matter what theme he selects. 
 
 Another feature which distinguishes the minor poet 
 in prose or verse is his investing a trite idea with an 
 emotion out of all proportion. He hales with enthusiasm 
 a commonplace, he gets into ecstasy about that toward 
 which an intelligent man displays little or no emotion. 
 It is the distinction of the unknown author of the an- 
 cient Greek fragment On the Sublime that he deprecates 
 the tendency to wax emotional about the unemotional. 
 The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get 
 excited are often an index to their own moral and in- 
 tellectual failing, as well as their aesthetic deficiency.
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 129 
 
 From Sainte-Beuve Matthew Arnold appropriately 
 quotes a saying to the effect that, in judging a work, the 
 French question not only whether they are moved by it, 
 but whether also they have the right to be moved by it. 
 
 So when we look through much of the so-called popu- 
 lar poetry, we see why we cannot often admit it to the 
 high realm of the literature of ecstasy. It contains the 
 childish sentimental excitement about facts that every 
 thinking man takes for granted. When we read the 
 eloquent sermon on the advantage of practicing justice, 
 we wonder at the folly of making a comment about so 
 obvious a truism. It is for this reason that moral 
 axioms lack the elements of poetry, because they do not 
 admit of exposition with appreciable ecstasy. Verse 
 is full of stale themes sung over so often that we al- 
 most rebel when the new poet comes along and sings 
 over the same old story. 
 
 It requires a great intellect to know when to judge 
 rightly about the propriety of one's emotions for the 
 subject of literature. We do not think that it is the sub- 
 ject matter of emotion to go into ecstatic praises, for 
 example, over a man who supports his child. We find 
 that animals provide food for their young; hence it is 
 not fit to grow eloquent because a man does what even 
 the lowest animal has the instinct to do. 
 
 Conventional morality only becomes poetry when col- 
 ored by the imagination or illustrated by an unusually 
 pleasing ecstatic presentment. When Fuller, for instance, 
 says that we should not mock at the defects of people 
 who are physically or mentally disabled, he utters a stale 
 truism that is not poetry but ethics. When he adds 
 that it is pitiable to beat a cripple with his own crutches, 
 the little prose passage is lifted up into poetry, for we 
 are brought into a state of ecstasy by the imaginative
 
 130 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 illustration. Similarly take some of the instances of self- 
 sacrifice by the common people which Bret Harte and 
 O. Henry delighted in depicting. Some of their stories 
 become poetry by emotional presentation of a trite idea. 
 
 There must also be more or less sympathy with the 
 poet's viewpoint. "All right human song," says Ruskin in 
 his Lectures on Art, "is the finished expression by art, 
 of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. 
 And accurately in proportion to the Tightness of the cause, 
 and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine 
 art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser 
 cannot sing of his lost money." 
 
 Ruskin may have corrupted our artistic outlook some- 
 what by insisting on an ethical aim. Yet we should re- 
 member that our aesthetic feelings are influenced by our 
 moral outlook. While we should not seek an ethical 
 aim in literature as an end in itself, while we should 
 shun the preacher of -commonplaces who poses as a poet, 
 we cannot respond to the sympathetic depicting of an 
 emotion which we ourselves could never feel because of 
 repugnance to it. 
 
 To appreciate a poem truly, we must feel as the poet 
 does and sympathize with the motives that inspired his 
 feelings. The reasons that urge him to express his emo- 
 tions must appear to us just ones. If our intellect is 
 far greater than that of the poet, we shall find that many 
 of the causes that inspire him to sing as he does would 
 not at all arouse in us the emotions experienced by him; 
 his poem is not the greatest art to us. If his intellect is 
 superior to ours, we shall not like his work; but then 
 it will be because he is more advanced that we are. 
 
 If a poet were to sing of an incestuous love ; or de- 
 cry sympathy for the distressed; or to laud a cruel ac- 
 tion; or to gloat over the schemes of the fraudulent; or
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 131 
 
 sing favorably of any action which we think a base one, 
 his poem would not be art for it does not evoke emo- 
 tional response from anybody. 
 
 Poe laid down the principle of art for art's sake that 
 poetry deals with beauty alone and that the only faculty 
 for appreciating it is that of taste. He held that poetry 
 had nothing to do with truth or duty; that the intellect 
 and the moral sense were concerned with these and 
 hence had no field for exercising themselves either in 
 writing or judging poetry. 
 
 As a matter of fact all three faculties, taste, intellect 
 and moral sense, are called into use in creating and ap- 
 preciating the highest kind of poetry or any other form 
 of literature. There is no reason why a poet should not 
 make use of all three faculties if he has them all de- 
 veloped. Goethe and Ibsen possessed them. The high- 
 est form of taste can scarcely be attained unless the poet's 
 intellect and moral sense are fine. For falsehood and sin 
 are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is 
 absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a fool- 
 ish and inconceivable conception of intellectual values 
 will be certainly deficient in some phases of beauty. Our 
 consciences and our minds are unconsciously consulted 
 in our conception of the beautiful. Not only truth, but 
 duty is beauty. Even Poe maintained that Taste held 
 intimate relations with Intellect and Truth and he there- 
 fore placed it between them. 
 
 The greatest classics are those that appeal to all three 
 faculties in us and those works which offend both our in- 
 tellect and moral sense do not completely satisfy our 
 sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to Brandes 
 understood that. Fortunately many of the classics have 
 lost only in parts their moral and intellectual value, and 
 hence still hold sway over us. And sometimes the beauty
 
 132 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 is so intensely striking that we charitably overlook faults 
 of morality and intellect. 
 
 As Professor Woodberry says in his A New Defense 
 of Poetry in The Heart of Man: "Can there by any sur- 
 prise when I say that the method of idealism is that of 
 all thought ? that in its intellectual process the art of the 
 poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same 
 as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman ? It 
 is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind 
 acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are 
 no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds 
 of gravitation." 
 
 The connection between art and ethics is closer than 
 some critics imagine. Spingarn was mistaken when he 
 said that we have done with all moral judgment of litera- 
 ture. A book is often artistically great chiefly because 
 its ethical viewpoint is right. The Tightness of it is 
 often what creates the ecstasy. Let us take Ibsen's 
 Ghosts. The real greatness of this play is not chiefly 
 in its picture of heredity or of a man becoming an idiot. 
 Its real value lies in its attitude towards the marriage 
 problem and its- contrast of the two characters, Mrs. 
 Alving, the representative of the new order, and of 
 Pastor Manders, representing society. The leading ques- 
 tion there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone back to 
 her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a 
 loathsome disease which might be inherited by any 
 possible progeny? Was she justified in leaving him? 
 That these are the important questions is evident from 
 the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, 
 namely, to answer the critics of the Doll's House. 
 The conclusion reached by Ibsen from the terrible pic- 
 ture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going back to her 
 husband, that there are times when it is justifiable to
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 133 
 
 leave one's husband. This is the moral lesson of the 
 play, and is conveyed with great ecstasy; in fact, the 
 moral intensifies the ecstasy. A conventional playwright 
 would have concluded that Mrs. Alving should have re- 
 mained with her husband in obedience to duty, that the 
 simple-minded Pastor was in the right. The play even 
 if handled as well as by Ibsen could not have been the 
 great work of literature that it is, if written in defense 
 of the conventional moral code. A great author attacks 
 conventional morality to battle for a higher morality. 
 
 The moral ideas of an author have much to do with 
 the literary excellence of his work.* But this does not 
 mean that we must go back to the old Greek idea that 
 poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation of the common- 
 place ethics. Nor does it imply that we cannot appre- 
 ciate a poet because we disapprove of the religion or 
 political party with which he is affiliated. 
 
 In the conclusion of his essay on "How a Young Man 
 Should Study Poetry," Plutarch shows that the philos- 
 opher and the poet are engaged in the same mission. He 
 takes passages from the poets and shows us that they are 
 similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The 
 doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas 
 by the dramatists spoken on the stage, and with those 
 that lyricists sang to the harp. We may accept Plutarch's 
 views except in so far as he urges that poetry should 
 preach dogmatic and conventional ethics. 
 
 We also see that parts of Dante, Pope, and Shelley 
 may be placed parallel respectively to passages from 
 thinkers who influenced them, Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and 
 
 * "Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism. . . . 
 The values of literature are in the last resort moral. . . . Liter- 
 ature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more 
 strenuous liberty prevails." J. Middleton Murry.
 
 134 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Godwin, to learn that the poetry resided in the original 
 philosophic prose passage. It was enhanced not by the 
 verse form but by the process of ecstatic re-statement. 
 
 Should we say that Cowper and Wordsworth are 
 poets, and that Rousseau, from whom they got many 
 ideas, is not? Is Browning only a poet and no philos- 
 opher, and is Carlyle only a philosopher and not a poet? 
 Is the verse of Goethe where pantheism is taught, 
 poetry, and do you find no poetry at all in Spinoza's 
 Ethics? 
 
 Among the most famous philosophical passages of 
 Shakespeare is the one in The Tempest describing the 
 transitoriness of this world and ending with the famous 
 line about our life being rounded with sleep. If there 
 is anything in Shakespeare that is poetry of a high order, 
 this famous passage is, and yet it is really philosophy. 
 It is poetry not because it is in blank verse or has rhythm, 
 but because the ideas are stated in an emotional and 
 ecstatic manner. There is poetry in ideas and those 
 critics who shrink from applying the word poetry to in- 
 tellectual performances are urged to honeycomb their 
 Shakespeare for numerous ideas that are beyond question 
 poetry. 
 
 A great idea is poetry ; a profound and f arseeing idea 
 is poetry, whether written with rhythm or not. If a com- 
 monplace thought, rhythmically adorned, may sometimes 
 be poetry, most certainly a profound idea ecstatically but 
 unrhythmically expressed is poetry. 
 
 What is the difference between poetry and philosophy? 
 Tf we examine into the nature of each we will find that 
 there is a line at which they meet and where it is 
 hard to distinguish one from the other. As a rule, the 
 principles of metaphysics, epistemology and logic as 
 written down in the average philosophical work seldom
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 135 
 
 are poetry. Only occasionally have the philosophers 
 waxed ecstatic. Yet many novelists, essayists and verse 
 writers have made many of these philosophical principles 
 poetry by stating them in an ecstatic manner. Any phil- 
 osophical principle arousing our emotions is poetry. 
 
 The general truths of sociology, ethics and psychology 
 form the subject matter of the literature of ecstasy, but 
 they are poetry only when ecstatically treated. The 
 psychological novel and the problem play deal with these 
 truths. Go to some original treatises on sociological, 
 moral or psychological subjects and omit the statistics, 
 the laboratory work and the cold hard reasoning and 
 you will often find great ideas emotionally stated that 
 belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have parted 
 with the idea that an author must be tearing a passion 
 to tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in 
 order to produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes 
 love for a page and a half and tells us how it is com- 
 posed, we exclaim, this is the literature of ecstasy even 
 though we find it in a treatise on psychology. He 
 describes to us how we feel when we love by enumer- 
 ating to us the different sensations we experience. 
 (Principles of Psychology Vol. I, Part IV, Ch. 8, Par. 
 215.) The passage may not be passionate poetry, but 
 it would not have been out of place in a novel by Stend- 
 hal, George Eliot or Meredith. 
 
 When Freud reveals our souls to ourselves, when 
 Fabre writes a book on the doings of insects, we often 
 are reading poetry or the literature of ecstasy, when we 
 think we are reading science. 
 
 We might select many passages from philosophical 
 works that belong to the literature of ecstasy, passages 
 from Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, but more 
 especially from Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
 
 136 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we 
 find the imagination and the intellect fused ; we cannot dis- 
 tinguish that which belongs to the realm of logic and that 
 which is the result of pure emotion. Of philosophers 
 of our own time, Bergson and Bertrand Russel have 
 occasional passages where a profound idea is emotional- 
 ized. Hence these belong to the literature of ecstasy, or 
 poetry. 
 
 We must no longer conclude that only that is poetry 
 which sings a song in verse. It is just because the verse 
 lyric, epic, and tragedy are among the oldest forms of 
 literature that the theories of poetry have been built up 
 by examining chiefly these forms. Aristotle's Poetics, ex- 
 cept for a few vital passages, has done more mischief in 
 literary criticism than his Logic has done in philosophy. 
 
 What a queer definition of poetry is that which in- 
 cludes a metrical insipid utterance or a versified fact of 
 microscopic importance, and excludes the sublime reflec- 
 tions of philosophers who contemplate the nature of the 
 entire cosmos, who fathom the mysteries of the universe, 
 and who state for us our relation to it and give us pro- 
 found conceptions of it. If one finds poetry only in the 
 saccharine sonnets of our magazine writers and none 
 at all in the great philosophers, he does not understand 
 what poetry is. If you, however, call a philosophical 
 principle poetry when you find it in verse, you must ad- 
 mit that the poetry was there before it was put in verse, 
 in the prose version. For poetry, not being a branch of 
 literature but an emotional spirit bathing all literature, 
 also holds philosophical ideas, intellectual conceptions in 
 solution, whenever these are in prose and move to ecstasy. 
 
 Aristotle and many others were also absorbed a to the 
 difference between poetry and history, as they had been 
 between poetry and philosophy. He stated truly enough
 
 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 137 
 
 that Homer as a poet did not differ from Herodotus as a 
 historian simply because of their difference in metre. He 
 found that the difference between poetry and history lay 
 in this, that poetry dealt with the universal and history 
 with the particular. This definition means very little 
 to us to-day even though commentators try to explain 
 that Aristotle includes under poetry any treatment also 
 of the particular which presents universal situations and 
 depicts universal traits. History, however, also treats 
 of the universal, for it records universal traits in the 
 particular events which it describes. Aristotle's distinc- 
 tion falls, for history and poetry deal with both the par- 
 ticular and universal. We cannot say with Aristotle that 
 history tells what Alcibiades actually did, while poetry 
 would tell what any man would do. An actual emotional 
 account of the deeds and character of Alcibiades is 
 poetry, as you will observe by reading Plutarch. 
 
 For all historical writing may be poetical and contain 
 poems, if the ecstasy is there. What distinguishes the 
 poetry in history is the emotion, and all history that is 
 a dry narrative is history and not poetry. Thucydides's 
 Peloponnesian War and Carlyle's French Revolution con- 
 tain much poetry though they deal with the particular, 
 but they are made poetry by the ecstasy. Some of Hero- 
 dotus is poetry, and much of Homer is history. 
 
 Again Aristotle's distinction is obsolete in these days 
 of prose fiction which deals with the particular, and often 
 with the actual, and merely changes the names. And 
 these novels often contain poems. We recall Fielding's 
 distinction between novels and histories, the former be- 
 ing true in everything but the names, and the latter be- 
 ing false in everything but the names. 
 
 There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, 
 and all great historians.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION 
 
 THE first lengthy formulation of the theory of art for 
 art's sake was made, I believe, by Gautier in the preface 
 to his Madamoisellc de Maupin, in 1833. The theory it- 
 self had previously also been advanced and put into 
 practice by Keats, and a little later by Poe. Hugo claims 
 to have been the first one to have used the term. He was 
 also one of the most bitter opponents of the idea, as the 
 readers of his Shakespeare will note. The view was sup- 
 ported in France by Baudelaire and Flaubert, and by 
 later schools like the Symbolists. In England Swinburne 
 made an excellent defense of it in his book on William 
 Blake. The poets of "The Nineties" like Wilde and Sy- 
 mons wrote in favor of it. Mention should also be made 
 of an exceedingly good chapter on the Dignity of Tech- 
 nique in R. A. M. Stevenson's Velasquez, and especially 
 Whistler's Ten o'Clock Lecture. 
 
 Needless to say, most of these writers had their own 
 conception of what art for art's sake was. They agreed 
 on several phases of it that the subject matter and 
 ideas of a work of art did not count, that the important 
 thing was the execution, that art was not to be judged 
 by any standard of morality, that it had its own morality, 
 and that it did not matter if from a conventional point of 
 view it was immoral, provided it was well executed. The 
 theory was antagonistic to the introduction of ideas, of 
 humanitarian motives, of tendencies to the portrayal of 
 
 138
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 139 
 
 life and the analysis of emotions. Its use was certainly 
 an undemocratic phase of art. 
 
 In many respects the theory awakens sympathy in 
 all lovers of literature ; it was a reaction to the moralist 
 view which wanted art to teach the commonplace ethical 
 notions we all know. Art has always had an enemy in 
 the bourgeois moralist. He always looked for a sermon, 
 and stamped the artist as immoral who arrived at con- 
 clusions different from those countenanced by the church 
 or the state. He was not satisfied to read of a wonder- 
 ful portrayal of a passion, done as a lesson in psychology 
 without any moral comments by the author. He wanted 
 the artist to act like a preacher and condemn at all times, 
 instead of portray. The Puritan opposed the truthful 
 description of natural emotions ; he looked askance upon 
 references to the body ; he wanted people drawn in obedi- 
 ence to laws, instead of as breaking through them. He 
 tried to thrust subjects upon the artist and limit him. He 
 had no ear for sound, no eye for color, no appreciation 
 of beauty. 
 
 Little wonder that the artist lost patience and sent mor- 
 ality to the devil, and deified technique and deliberately 
 chose unseemly subjects. The disciples of art for art's 
 sake did much good to the cause of art. They broadened 
 its field. They gave the artist the right to write about a 
 corpse or delirium tremens, to describe a murder or a 
 crime without pointing out lessons. They permitted him 
 to use his imagination to the full extent, and to invent 
 any forms he chose. 
 
 But the theory overrode itself. It became an apology 
 for abuses of art. Writers began to create meaningless 
 jargon, to waste words on trite ideas, to avoid all con- 
 tact with life, to eliminate man as a subject of art. Art 
 lacked soul, and if it showed a personality behind it, it
 
 140 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 was a petty, sterile and inane one. Art fought against 
 intellect as well as against morals. Even those who advo- 
 cated it were writing in direct violation of it. Flau- 
 bert's realistic novel Madame Bovary and Swinburne's 
 Songs Before Sunrise were not art for art's sake. The 
 Ballad of Reading Gaol was not art for art's sake; im- 
 prisonment had changed Wilde's views. Men like Gau- 
 tier and Swinburne, who were the most ardent cham- 
 pions of the theory of art for art's sake, found them- 
 selves in a peculiarly inconsistent predicament by being 
 the greatest admirers of Victor Hugo, much of whose 
 work was written with humanitarian motives. Hearn 
 in America started out as a believer in the theory and 
 ended by attacking it. 
 
 Tolstoy wrote most bitterly against the idea, and we 
 may say that from the time of the appearance of his What 
 is Art? in 1897, the theory fell into disrepute. Not that 
 people accepted Tolstoy's views that art should teach the 
 love of God and man, but his idea did much to humanize 
 art. Before Tolstoy, Nietzsche had also taken a fling at 
 the theory. 
 
 Critics to-day recognize that life forms the substance 
 of art, that art gets all its material from life and that 
 man is properly the subject of art, thinking man as well 
 as emotional man. They further perceive that literature 
 is so human in its origins that even unconscious human 
 emotions are present where they were not suspected. 
 The more we humanize literature the greater art does it 
 become. It is true, however, that after the art work is 
 completed, it has influence on life. Our lives may be de- 
 voted to art, we may have life for art's sake, but not art 
 for art's sake. 
 
 Still, art for art's sake is a good theory to be invoked 
 against the extreme didactic-minded one who thinks
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 141 
 
 nothing should be written unless it illustrates a lesson in 
 our commonplace and bourgeois morality, a morality very 
 often false and outworn. They would ask writers to 
 show us men conforming to this morality, instead of re- 
 volting from it. They would make literature exalt self- 
 sacrifice in all circumstances and would stamp out any 
 tendencies to liberal speculation. They demand that poetry 
 uphold society in all its institutions, teach obedience, and 
 prevail on us to bow down before the mandates of priests 
 and capitalists. But literary men are often at variance 
 with the moral views entertained by the clergy and the 
 ruling classes, and they have the right to illustrate the 
 views of morality that they consider much higher than 
 the customs of society. An author should not be bound 
 by the views of his age. He should in fact expose them 
 and show their evil influence. He does not, however, 
 then write in conformity with the theory of art for art's 
 sake, for he expresses another morality than that of so- 
 ciety's, and thus has a higher moral purport in view. 
 Ibsen's greatness lies in the fact that he did not sub- 
 scribe to conventional morality: he attacked it and thus 
 he really was an artist with a moral aim. 
 
 Brandes has shown in his essay on Bjornson how the 
 attack upon art with a purpose is really often a dis- 
 guised means of objecting to liberal thought in literature. 
 Art for art's sake occasionally thus becomes an apology 
 for conventional morals too. Most of the great works 
 were written with a purpose. Dante and Milton have 
 left records in their prose works of the purpose of their 
 poems. But no one objected to the purpose of these 
 poets, because they defend conventional morality. Yet as 
 soon as literature tries to advance new ideas we hear the 
 cry against its moralizing and didactic tendency. Art for 
 art's sake is then the shout of even the conventional moral-
 
 142 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 ist. Those who declare themselves against the tendency 
 of the intellectual element in literature are often those who 
 fear new ideas; they would want only romance, homely 
 morals, happy endings and impossible adventures, con- 
 stant triumph of good, etc. They do not understand what 
 literature has to do with problems of marriage and di- 
 vorce, the state and the individual. They want it to be 
 separated from real life. Nevertheless, they cannot ig- 
 nore the great books of our day which deal with these 
 questions. They have been driven to the theory of "art 
 for art's sake" by their hatred of liberal ideas. 
 
 "The formula, 'written with a purpose,' " says Brandes, 
 "has been far too long employed as an effective scare- 
 crow to drive authors away from the fruit that beckons 
 to them from the modern tree of knowledge." 
 
 When Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Zola brought us 
 messages in ecstatic prose, the enemies of intellect in 
 art called them preachers of filthy ideas, misguided mor- 
 alists, and would not consider them as artists and poets. 
 The moralist and aesthete joined forces in attacking 
 Balzac and Stendhal when these novelists gave us unpop- 
 ular ideas emotionally expressed. The critic who hates 
 advanced thought exclaims that he wants no ideas in art 
 at all ; he does not wish it to become the vehicle of views 
 he personally dislikes. Hence at times even the Philistine 
 critic who opposed the introduction of intellect in art 
 found himself in harmony with members of the art for 
 art's sake school. 
 
 Nothing better illustrates the harm which may result 
 from the theory that shuns a purpose in art, than the 
 neglect it brings about for books with an unpopular mes- 
 sage. England, for example, has neglected the best 
 work of one of the poets of the nineties, who intellectually 
 ranks with her best poets. Who reads the later work
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 143 
 
 of Robert Buchanan? Attention is riveted to his 
 early lyrics, and good as these are, his more thoughtful 
 poetry has been forgotten. A. Stoddart- Walker wrote 
 after Buchanan's death Robert Buchanan, the Poet of 
 Modern Revolt, and Harriet Jay wrote a biography. 
 Attention was called in these volumes to the later works 
 of Buchanan, where he stood for liberty of thought. 
 Nor was he didactic in his pleas, in such poems as The 
 City of Dreams, The Wandering Jew, The Ballad of 
 Mary the Mother, The Outcast, The Devil's Case, and 
 The New Rome. Lecky called' The City of Dreams the 
 modern Pilgrim's Progress, and said that it would take 
 a prominent position in the literature of the time. But 
 no one knows these poems, and of Buchanan's work only 
 a few ballads are known. Buchanan is not any more 
 didactic than Browning, but since he represents bold 
 speculation (and also made too many personal enemies) 
 he was throttled by Philistinism. 
 
 The opponents of utilitarianism in art have been the 
 calumniators of poets with ideas unacceptable to the ma- 
 jority. They have hindered the popularity of pessimis- 
 tic poets like Leopardi and Thomson. They are shocked 
 by the morbidities of Dostoievsky and Strindberg. But 
 every author has the right to describe emotions without 
 being compelled to draw a moral from them. In such 
 case the writer becomes a great psychologist, and his 
 work is by no means devoid of intellectual content. Thus 
 the stories of Poe which have no moral outlook are really 
 stories with a purpose for they are profound documents 
 in psychology. To them psychologists like Mosso have 
 gone for studies of the emotion of fear. One finds ideas 
 in them that throw light on the nature of our emotions. 
 Hence Brownell in his well written essay on Poe which 
 attacked him because of his indifference to moral prob-
 
 144 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 lems (a view in which Ho wells and James concur) is 
 wrong in denying to Poe a high place in art. Poe did 
 what all artists do; he drew on his emotions and if he 
 could portray fear and grief for death, it was because he 
 had known them. Graham describes the timid nature of 
 Poe, who was afraid to be himself alone. That feeling 
 accounts for the Fall of the House of Usher. Poe's 
 stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data. 
 None of them, except William Wilson, has an ethical 
 aim, but they all have an intellectual, utilitarian purport, 
 in giving us profound knowledge of man's hidden emo- 
 tions. They are the result of Poe's keen intellect as well 
 as of his emotions. They have anticipated many re- 
 searches by psychologists ; they have set circulating pro- 
 found views of the psychic constitution of man. They 
 thus became art with a purpose, not however to spread 
 ethical truisms, but broad liberating ideas. 
 
 Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspira- 
 tion from Poe's essay on the Poetic Principle, sadly mis- 
 understand their critic. Except in two poems written 
 as metrical and musical experiments, The Bells and 
 Ulalume, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in 
 verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, Shadow, 
 Silence, The Colloquy of Monos and Una, The Con- 
 versation of Eiros and Charmion, The Power of Words, 
 and Eureka. He was justified in his pleading that poetry 
 should not become the mere vehicle of moral common- 
 places, for these are not beautiful, and the vogue of the 
 New England school was beginning to make the moral 
 aims of poetry too paramount. 
 
 The poet should be free and if he wants to emotionalize 
 a social message he should be allowed to do so, risking 1 
 aesthetic value if he becomes didactic, or is false in his 
 views. And he should also be allowed to describe beauty
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 145 
 
 and emotions, without being compelled to draw a moral 
 conclusion therefrom. 
 
 Croce, who defined poetry as intuition, has helped to 
 keep on its last legs the idea of art for art's sake. He 
 falsely teaches that poetry deals with pure emotions, and 
 that emotions and ideas are two separate functions, one 
 of the feeling man, the other of the thinking man. 
 
 Though Croce admits that the intellectual has its 
 aesthetic side, that art deals with the philosophic and 
 moral, yet this definition of literature in terms of in- 
 tuition is not a true account of the nature of literature, for 
 he regards the intuitive faculty as totally opposed to the 
 logical faculty, a Kantian relic. Intuition, however, is 
 the combined product of all the logical faculties exer- 
 cised by man in the past, just as the action of an in- 
 voluntary muscle is the continued action of a muscle once 
 voluntary, but which by force of habit for ages became 
 involuntary. 
 
 Intuition is not merely the knowledge of our hearts 
 but of our brain as well. The great novels and plays of 
 the world's literature are the artistic results of the in- 
 tellect collaborating with the emotions. Croce presents 
 an ingenious explanation to enable him to call works of 
 art which are full of intellectuality, works of intuition. 
 He says that the effect of the work as a whole is that 
 of an intuition. He holds that when intellectual concepts 
 are mingled with intuition they are not then intellectual 
 concepts but part of the intuition. If this be so, the rule 
 works the other way around. If intuition is mingled with 
 intellectual concepts appearing in a philosophical or 
 scientific work, why not then say that the intuitive quality 
 disappears and becomes part of the intellectual concept 
 and that the scientific or philosophic work becomes a 
 work of intuition or a work of art as a whole? There
 
 146 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 is intellectual working in Hamlet and intuitive expression 
 in a dialogue of Plato. The former is not wholly intuitve 
 nor the latter wholly intellectual. 
 
 This is Croce's great fault that he tries to rid poetry 
 of what he calls any suggestion of intellectualism.* He 
 identifies the first rudimentary form of knowledge with 
 intuition, he distinguishes the so-called first degree of the 
 activity of the mind, the unreflecting, unreasoning emo- 
 tion, from intellectual and perceptual knowledge, which 
 involves concepts, so that his view of poetry is that of the 
 art for art's sake school, that poetry deals not with ideas 
 but with intuitive feeling. 
 
 Now, feeling and thought are not separable. Feeling 
 involves knowledge and instant reflection. The bereaved 
 poet knows and reflects on many things at the very in- 
 stant he is suffering the shock of his loss. His in- 
 tellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart 
 from the psychical activity of his emotions. The authors 
 of the greatest English elegies philosophized while be- 
 moaning their loss. The moral, intellectual and logical 
 faculties are at work along with the intuitive faculty, or 
 immediate knowledge of feeling, in all great poets. 
 
 It is in his views on intuition that Croce reduces art 
 to presentation of childish impressions or views, divested 
 of judgment and reflection. He discourages reasoning 
 and thinking on the part of the artist. He seeks only the 
 first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits 
 that in real life sensations are followed by reflections and 
 mental solutions. He thinks the purest artists are those 
 who persist longest in that first moment of intuition, and 
 are innocent and childish in their outlook. 
 
 * Wordsworth was on better ground when he said, "Our con- 
 tinued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our 
 thoughts." Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 147 
 
 Art is not, as Croce thinks, devoid of the character of 
 conceptual knowledge. No, discrimination and judg- 
 ment, distinction between reality and unreality, is an im- 
 portant part of the poet's work, and to say that it mat- 
 ters little what the poet thinks or says or concludes, that 
 correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought 
 from him, is to reduce him to the level of a babbling 
 child. The ideality of poetry does not, as Croce thinks, 
 disappear as soon as reflection and judgment enter, for 
 these may be bathed in ecstasy. Croce's definition of 
 imaginative literature excludes ideas, except as casually 
 introduced, or as the utterances in accordance with the 
 truth of the character portrayed. He levels literature 
 to a primitive degree. 
 
 Croce seems to think that art is expression of only 
 intuition, but is not expression of intellectual concepts 
 which he claims belong to philosophy. He who did so 
 much to clear away ithe artificial divisions reigning in 
 the various arts, commits a greater error. He assigns 
 one kind of expression intuition to one branch of 
 human endeavor art; and another kind of expression 
 true concepts to another branch i)f human endeavor, 
 logic. Yet he admits that intuition and concepts are two 
 moments in a single process. As a matter of fact, ex- 
 pressed concepts are also literature .when emotionalized, 
 and logic is poetry when combined with ecstasy. 
 
 Man cannot separate the two faculties, and we seldom 
 have what Croce calls pure intuition, that is, knowledge 
 free of concepts. Hence poetry scarcely deals with in- 
 tuition in Croce's understanding of the term. Croce 
 takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical 
 sensation, and from association. For him intuition is not 
 unconscious memory but the first degree of the mind's 
 activity which is expression. One fails to see why even
 
 148 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 sensation may not be intuition and hence art ; some of the 
 world's best literature describes hunger. And to deny 
 that intuition includes unconscious memory is to de- 
 prive it of its essential quality. 
 
 Croce lost sight of the importance of that phase of 
 art which deals with the thinking man who feels, and he 
 tried to bridge over the gap by asserting that what de- 
 termined the difference of the intellectual and intuitive 
 fact lay in the result, in the effects aimed at by their au- 
 thors. Yet Virgil thought he was a poet in his Georgics 
 but he gave us a book in farming instead. Plato sought 
 to be a philosopher in his Banquet but he wrote a poem 
 also. 
 
 Croce's conclusions lead to strange anomalies. His 
 view that philosophical passages, that is, intellectual con- 
 cepts occurring in a novel or play, become part of the 
 intuition of the author, would mean that the most un- 
 ecstatic concept transposed from, say Hegel, to a Shakes- 
 pearean play, becomes intuition. The converse would 
 also follow that a passage of Shakespeare incorporated 
 in Hegel is no longer poetry. 
 
 One of the results of Croce's aesthetic views on intui- 
 tion is to drive out of literary criticism the exercise of the 
 intellect. He would have us judge a book by its own 
 standards and merely seek to find if the author succeeded 
 in doing what he intended. This view has been wrongly 
 attributed also to Goethe and Carlyle. It is, however, 
 Maupassant's view about the novel as he expounded it 
 in his preface to Pierre and Jean. We cannot accept this 
 view. We must ask why does the author intend what he 
 does, and is he justified in his intentions? We must go 
 back of his intentions and show him that his intellect and 
 outlook are due to certain causes and we must state 
 whether or not we agree with him, and why. An author
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 149 
 
 may record his ecstasy in expounding absurd ideas. I 
 want to know why he believes in these ideas and I want 
 to see if he can make me believe them. If he does not, 
 I cannot satisfy myself with studying his intentions, even 
 when they are in the form' of verse or in a novel. I also 
 am concerned with the question whether he is right in 
 accepting these ideas, though I admit his sincerity. 
 
 Again I take up a Puritanical poem. I cannot judge 
 the author by merely studying the writer's intentions and 
 contenting myself with the knowledge that he has faith- 
 fully and beautifully recorded them. No, I want to know 
 why he is a Puritan ; I seek to show the folly of his ex- 
 pression; I must register my protest that I have not been 
 moved by him, that I consider him intellectually and 
 morally deficient. 
 
 The great fault of Croce's views, however, is that in 
 looking upon art as expression he takes no interest in 
 the question whether it meets with sympathy. It is true 
 he recognizes that the poet often expresses our own in- 
 tuitions for us, when he expresses his own. But he is 
 not concerned with the question whether the poet has a 
 right to feel that way and whether he has a sympa- 
 thetic audience no matter how small. Yet the artist who 
 expresses his intuitions is always bound to have some au- 
 dience. It is because "every atom that belongs to me as 
 good belongs to you." He is bound to have sympathizers. 
 If Croce had said that the artist should not be concerned 
 because the majority does not agree with him, we could 
 follow him, but only because we think the artist is right 
 and the majority is wrong. But to cast aside the ques- 
 tion of sympathy altogether, to refuse to take into con- 
 sideration the emotions of any readers, is to demoralize 
 art and cast intelligence out of it. 
 
 It cannot be repeated then too often that poetry is not
 
 ISO THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 a matter of emotions only, but of intellectual perception 
 and moral outlook as well. The poet who has described 
 a painful episode in his life does not always just merely 
 record the pain, he goes further than his intuition. He 
 thinks and judges and condemns and plans. He is also 
 a philosopher and a moralist, excited to such states by 
 his intuition. It wasn't intuition that created the plays 
 of Shakespeare and Ibsen, it was a moral and intellectual 
 vision working with the poet's intuition. Logic, science, 
 metaphysics, ethics, are part of the poetic material. All 
 ideas are philosophic or scientific, and emotionally and 
 beautifully expressed may become poetry or literature. 
 
 However, Croce did good service in calling for the 
 independence of art, since reformers and moralists often 
 seek to force upon art a practical end outside and be- 
 side it. He also admits that the practical and aesthetic 
 are often found united, and that it would be erroneous 
 to maintain that the artist's independence of vision should 
 be extended to the communication. "If art be understood 
 as the externalization of art, then utility and morality 
 have a perfect right to deal with it ; that is to say, the right 
 one possesses to deal with one's own household." Since 
 the artist selects from his intuitions when he writes, his 
 selection is governed by the economic conditions of life 
 and of its moral direction. Hence Croce finds the artist's 
 use of the concepts of morality to some extent justified. 
 
 But where the ideas dealt with by an author are such 
 as all accept, the beauty of the work depends on the man- 
 ner in which it is written. Here he does not write for 
 the purpose of the underlying idea, which he uses merely 
 as a pretext for artistic work. He seeks to portray an 
 emotion and to make the reader feel it. Drawing a pic- 
 ture may be the object of the author. He may merely 
 try to reproduce with vividness what we all see ; or nar-
 
 POETRY RISES ABOVE ART 151 
 
 rate what we all know. The importance of his work lies 
 then in its technique. There is no question that tech- 
 nique is always to be considered in determining one's 
 greatness as a writer. 
 
 What distinguishes the layman from the artist is that 
 the former has no power of craftsmanship; he does not 
 understand the secrets of any of the forms of literature; 
 he does not know how to set down his thoughts or senti- 
 ments in a pleasing or beautiful manner. There are many 
 laymen who have better views on morality and who pos- 
 sess a greater intellect than many successful authors, but 
 they are not artists. If by knowing how to tell a story or 
 sing a poem they could move the world, if they had 
 craftsmanship, then we would call them artists. 
 
 It does not follow, however, that because an author 
 has certain technical genius, but is destitute of any in- 
 tellect, and dallies with trite ideas, that he is a great 
 artist. To rank among the great artists perfection of 
 form should be welded with great and important ideas of 
 life.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 HIGH FORM OF POETRY ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF 
 ADVANCED SOCIAL IDEALS 
 
 WE are always fascinated by the poet who comes to the 
 aid of the people, and is even rejected by them for his 
 advanced ideas. We like to think of the poet as one 
 who belongs to the minority, as a non-conformist, as a 
 champion of liberty, as a sponsor for advanced views. 
 We want him not to be uttering and singing the common- 
 places of to-day but the truths of the morrow. In the 
 long run it is the Shelleys and Whitmans and Ibsens 
 that count. Even though the poets be mad like Don 
 Quixote or Brand, and do evil with good intentions, we 
 admire them. 
 
 What sad figures the versifiers of unimportant con- 
 ceits make when confronted with the great poets who 
 use their intellect. These petty minstrels are the same 
 types whom Milton attacked ; they are the gossips of lit- 
 erature who like housewives think every trivial fancy 
 must be voiced. And when we are bored by their 
 nuances, their play with words, their records of unprof- 
 itable incidents, they tell us we cannot appreciate poetry, 
 that we have not "taste." Man will always listen even 
 though disapprovingly and hostilely, if the poet reveals 
 a soul. But the minor versifier has no soul, or if he has 
 he keeps it out of his verses. He is ready to talk to you 
 about his spectacles, his bath, or his dinner, but he can- 
 not refer to his inner thoughts and feelings. Even if he 
 does experience an emotion he often conveys it through the 
 images of books. 
 
 152
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 153 
 
 Poetry which champions human liberty and shows 
 characters battling for truth amidst persecution is always 
 great poetry. We like to think of the poet as Baudelaire 
 characterized him, one whose own mother does not un- 
 derstand him, one in whose food the public puts ashes, 
 one with whom his own wife is not in sympathy. We 
 like to think of him as an Ishmaelite, as one who is 
 against his age, since the majority is often incapable of 
 welcoming a new and great idea even emotionally treated- 
 If he is merely a patriotic or a religious or conventionally 
 moral poet, he will appeal to most people, but these rep- 
 resent the audience that is not of an elevated intellectual 
 order. He is not universal, for people of other coun- 
 tries and religions, and the people of the future who will 
 break away from the old morality will not find that he 
 reaches their sentiments. 
 
 We want the progressive poet, and not the eternal 
 harper on the commonplace. 
 
 Nor are these views inconsistent with the assertion 
 that poetry should not be the handmaid of religion and 
 morality. If it must be a handmaid, then let it be the 
 handmaid of a universal religion, which finds its roots in 
 thought and sane feeling; of a morality of love and jus- 
 tice that is still too ideal to be grasped by the age. No 
 worthy poet to-day would write a poem merely to teach 
 us simple precepts of morality. In a rude age, an emo- 
 tional treatment of the most commonplace ethical maxims 
 was great poetry because these were in advance of the 
 age. To us such a production is stale. Hence the "great" 
 poem of one age may become nauseating to a later epoch. 
 
 Poetry is a progressive art. The emotion playing about 
 the old ballads and legends is not as compelling as that 
 found in the great modern novels and plays. Our great 
 later poets and thinkers are more advanced and do not
 
 154 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 worship superstition and defend false beliefs, or cele- 
 brate revenge and war, as the old primeval poets do. 
 When we think of the ideal poet, it is not the champion 
 of the middle class like Longfellow and Tennyson, or 
 one full of the early martial spirit and drawing right- 
 ing heroes like the author of Beowulf, or the Nibelungen 
 Lied. Nor do we think of the poet who incorporates the 
 religious errors and legends of his time and imitates 
 ancient epics, nor of one who portrays a preceding 
 and bygone age. We, or at least a few of us, like 
 to think of him as a man drawing people in the grip 
 of passions and battling for advanced ideas. We like 
 to think of men like Shakespeare and Ibsen, Isaiah 
 and Job, Balzac and Cervantes, Moliere and Goethe, 
 Byron and Shelley, Burns and Heine, Whitman and 
 Swinburne, Carducci and Nietzsche, Carlyle and Ruskin, 
 Dostoievsky and Dickens, Hugo and Rolland. We 
 like to think chiefly of men who were largely personal 
 in their appeal, and depicted their own sufferings, and 
 described grief brought about by the social construction 
 of society which they criticized. Such poets are no 
 dalliers with anaemic feelings. They felt what they sang 
 and were not afraid to give sway to their emotions and 
 ideas. They are not didacticists nor moralists, but emo- 
 tional thinkers. They do not think that they ought to 
 deny the claims of the intellect and the moral vision. I 
 do not say that other kinds of emotional writers are not 
 great poets. I merely cite what I think is a high order 
 of poetry. I do not deny that poets may avoid any 
 moral mission and just sing private emotions, whether 
 in prose or verse. The Troubadours, and the Roman 
 Elegists, De Musset and Verlaine, Hafiz and Keats, are 
 among the very greatest poets, even though they are not 
 prophets.
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 155 
 
 Much of our so-called democratic poetry is not demo- 
 cratic at all. Poetry does not become democratic be- 
 cause some poets dwell on the privileges the working 
 people of to-day have in contrast with those working 
 people had generations ago, or because writers have dis- 
 covered that even common people experience most of 
 the emotions of the upper class. Literature cannot be 
 democratic, while poets write for the few who use them 
 as tools for their own interests, to defend a system which 
 is courteously called competition instead of exploitation. 
 Much of our democratic literature is either capitalistic 
 or bourgeois literature that gives a slight condescending 
 nod to the proletariat. Many wealthy and cultured au- 
 thors have taken up the cause of the laborer just as they 
 would that of caged animals. They have suggested im- 
 provements in the treatment of captives, but not com- 
 plete freedom. Fortunately we have had works like 
 Galsworthy's Strife, Hauptmann's Weavers, Verhaeren's 
 Dawn, Sinclair's Jungle, Zola's Germinal, Gissing's 
 Nether World. 
 
 Poetry will tend to become international, and instead 
 of seeking to encourage national prejudices, will seek 
 to eradicate them. Race prejudice is one of the deepest 
 rooted prejudices which inferior poets often encourage. 
 The old idea that the man of another country is a bar- 
 barian and that the alien is an enemy within our gates, 
 a tolerated, unwelcome guest, must be eradicated. Can 
 any one contemplate without disgust plays and photo- 
 plays that depict Chinese, Japanese, Negroes and Jews 
 as criminals, simply because of their creed or color? Is 
 it true that virtue resides in the breast of the Aryan 
 race only? The eighteenth century idea of the brother- 
 hood of man is not extinct and the future will use poetry 
 to spread this idea. Poetry should not foster hatred of
 
 156 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 people because they are followers of different customs. 
 
 It can hardly be doubted that the poetry of the future 
 will deal more with the emotions as experienced by the 
 proletariat class. The feelings to which many of our 
 greatest poets have given vent in recent years have 
 been those of the middle and capitalistic class, just as 
 bards in the past voiced the emotions of the feudalist 
 lords, and religious and military leaders. The connection 
 between economics and literature or poetry is not as re- 
 mote as it seems. Bernard Shaw has made use of his 
 knowledge of the subject in constructing his plays. The 
 work of Gorki, Hauptmann and Zola has taken into con- 
 sideration the feelings that the average working people 
 go through in their struggle for existence. Yet the 
 works of these writers are art or poetry, and not tracts. 
 Literature written to encourage the working men in their 
 abject and ill-paid condition will not be countenanced by 
 the future. The songs of the poet with lily white hands 
 who writes about the dignity of toil and subservience to 
 the employer will disappear. The emotions connected 
 with the struggle for a living and with a desire for a more 
 equitable distribution of wealth, will be the subject of 
 our poetry. 
 
 Much of the old poetry should be discouraged for it 
 is debased and undemocratic. Take the themes of the 
 epics of India, Persia, Ireland, England, Greece, Fin- 
 land, Rome, Italy, Spain, Germany and Iceland, all of 
 which are lauded as among the greatest literary produc- 
 tions of the world. Wars are the subjects, fighters are the 
 heroes. The lust for fighting is encouraged instead of 
 being decried. While all of these epics contain beautiful 
 passages and poems of glowing and even unsurpassed 
 beauty, they keep man back in the primitive stage, and 
 countenance a state of barbarism that he should outgrow.
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 157 
 
 It may after all be fortunate that the earliest poetry 
 of nations is seldom read, for most of it is of very little 
 intellectual value, celebrating the wars and religions of 
 the writers. Occasionally there are secular poems of 
 modern and universal interest among them. But for the 
 most part, fighting absorbs the writers and all their in- 
 terests are in bloodshed, revenge, cruelty. There are 
 many causes fostering the hatreds and errors of our day, 
 without our using these old works to spread them. We 
 find there silly codes of honor, idiotic conceptions of jus- 
 tice, amazing viewpoints of morality. We want the 
 emotions celebrated in these old works to die out and 
 not to be perpetuated. 
 
 The world of democracy belongs to poetry, not merely 
 the democracy of the realistic novel which was willing 
 to concede that even the poor man like the old kings and 
 the nobility had love tragedies. Poetry will deal not with 
 that philanthropy, which often means the master throwing 
 crumbs to quiet the growling servant. No, it will be 
 based on feelings that emanate from a sincere desire to 
 promote human justice. There is no doubt that some 
 day our system of society which permits a man to roll up 
 billions which he squanders, while it does not allow an- 
 other enough to keep himself and his family in comfort, 
 will disappear, and poetry will express the emotions prev- 
 alent under the new order. 
 
 Much of the poetry of the past has sung the praises 
 of wage slavery. The poetry of the future will sing as 
 Amos did of old the beauty of social and economic 
 equality. To-day the hero of the poem is the successful 
 business man, or the submissive contented working man, 
 just as in the past the soldier and the monk were the 
 heroes. To-morrow it will be the man who fights for 
 economic justice for himself or the masses. Our stand-
 
 158 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 ards of economic justice are changing and this change 
 will effect poetry. The poet who sings in defense of the 
 capitalist or our economic system has little in com- 
 mon with him who is the spokesman of the common 
 people. 
 
 Poetry springs from the people and must take into 
 consideration their emotions in connection with their eco- 
 nomic problems. Very little of the poetry of the past 
 has done this. Consider the literature of the middle 
 ages and note how seldom the troubles of the serfs and 
 villains were expressed by the poets. There were slight 
 efforts made in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 
 in the Romance of the Rose and in Langland's Piers 
 Plowman, respectively, to give some expression to the 
 feelings of the masses. 
 
 Modern poetry tends to deal emotionally with social 
 problems. The poet who calls attention to the suffering 
 of the poor, or the persecutions of reformers, or shows 
 the ills in family life brought about by our marriage 
 system, or announces a social message, is not a propa- 
 gandist when he writes something that evokes our emo- 
 tions. When Untermeyer published his book on poetry 
 he was much criticized for the prominence he gave to 
 James Oppenheim and Arthur Giovanitti, who are ex- 
 cellent poets. It is to be regretted that Untermeyer did 
 not include also a chapter on Horace Traubel. Unter- 
 meyer may insist too 'much on the social mission of 
 poetry, but he is nearer to an exalted conception of poetry 
 than those who weld words to metre and have neither 
 ideas nor substance in their writing. 
 
 Emerson said, "There is no subject that does not be- 
 long to him (the poet), politics, economics, manufac- 
 tures and stock brokerage; as much as sunsets and
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 159 
 
 souls ; only these things, placed in their order, are poetry ; 
 displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic." 
 
 An English clergyman, F. W. Robertson, in his two 
 lectures on the "Influence of Poetry on the Working 
 Classes," delivered in 1852, and posthumously collected 
 in Lectures and Essays, gave vent to many remarkable 
 ideas on the subject of poetry. The following passage 
 was written three years before the Leaves of Grass, and 
 sums up Whitman's ideas, and is worthy of quotation to- 
 day for its timeliness : 
 
 The Poetry of the coming age must come from the 
 Working Classes. In the upper ranks, Poetry, so far at 
 least as it represents their life, has long been worn out, 
 sickly and sentimental. Its manhood is effete. Feudal 
 aristocracy with its associations, the castle and the tourn- 
 ament, has passed away. Its last healthy tones came from, 
 the harp of Scott. Byron sang its funeral dirge. But 
 tenderness, and heroism, and endurance still want their 
 voice, and it must come from the classes whose observa- 
 tion is at first hand, and who speak fresh from nature's 
 heart. What has poetry to do with our Working 
 Classes ? Men of work ! We want our poetry from you 
 from men who will dare to live a brave and true 
 life; 
 
 It does not follow that individualism in poetry will die 
 out and that ignorant laborers are to be the sole heroes 
 and subjects of poetry. The intellectual reader will still 
 find in poetry his intellectual heroes. There will never 
 be equality of intellect, and hence there will also be 
 something of an intellectual aristocracy in connection 
 with the literature and poetry of democracy. 
 
 The note of ecstasy as a passion for righteousness 
 and social justice is of a high order usually. It was this 
 note in which Greek and Roman poetry, however, was 
 deficient. It is this ecstasy that raises the prophetic por- 
 tions of the Bible to the high plane they occupy.
 
 160 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Professor Butcher, surely one in sympathy with Greek 
 art, pointed out the weakness of Greek criticism, in that 
 it failed to consider the social state in connection with the 
 work of art. This state of criticism was due to the fact 
 that the poetry of the Greeks showed no deep interest 
 in social justice. Pindar, the greatest lyricist of the 
 Greeks, wrote about athletic contests; athletes were his 
 heroes. The Greeks glorified healthy bodies in their 
 poetry, an exalted feature undoubtedly. Homer wrote 
 about wars, and Achilles remained the type of Greek 
 hero. ^Eschylus dwelt on the laws of divine retribution 
 for indulgence in crime. Sophocles contemplated the 
 irony of fate. Sappho recorded her love troubles. 
 
 The only exception of a work treating of poetry in 
 connection with social justice is Plato's Republic, and he 
 concluded that the poet was unnecessary. Yet he him- 
 self is one of the few Greek poets who showed deep in- 
 terest in social justice. 
 
 The first critic who pointed out the connection between 
 poetry and social conditions was the author of On the 
 Sublime, who ends his treatise with a beautiful attack on 
 the love of money which hinders the development of good 
 art. This is the first passage in pagan antiquity to point 
 out the evils of commercialism in connection with art. 
 
 None of the Greek poets (except perhaps Aristo- 
 phanes) thought it worthy of their art to cry out against 
 the social abuses of the time, and to lament the existence 
 of wrong. The Roman satires alone in pagan literature 
 approached, though weakly, the ecstasy for social justice 
 in the prophecies of the Bible. The prophecies of Isaiah 
 and Jeremiah rank higher than most of the Greek poems 
 because they show a social consciousness steeped in emo- 
 tion. Passages like these are Hebraic and not Greek.
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 161 
 
 "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field 
 to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed 
 alone in the midst of the earth." Isaiah (Ch. 5, v. 8). 
 "They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass the 
 deeds of the wicked : they judge not the cause, the cause 
 of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the 
 needy do they not judge." Jeremiah (Ch. 5, v. 28). 
 "Take away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will 
 not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run 
 down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." 
 Amos (Ch. 5, v. 23-24). 
 
 Fenelon in a famous passage eloquently proclaimed the 
 superiority of Hebrew poetry to Greek poetry. Heine, a 
 pronounced Hellenist, came to the final conclusion that 
 the Greeks were children and the Hebrews men. 
 
 The Hebrew idea of righteousness was a different one 
 from the later Christian notion of consciousness of sin. 
 The latter was really a perversion of the former, and 
 ended rather in social injustices as the history of the 
 medieval ages shows. 
 
 The discussion in regard to the merits of poetry with 
 a mission, or poetry that is purely aesthetic, was revived 
 on the occasion of the publication of Untermeyer's book 
 The New Era in American Poetry. His critics made the 
 mistake of thinking that those who want poetry to 
 deal with social ideas are not ready to recognize poems 
 that are beautiful, or convey an emotion, even if 
 there is little intellectual content behind the work. There 
 is no social message in Poe's Raven, for example, but 
 I could not imagine Untermeyer not being moved by 
 that poem, for it digs down into the emotions; it was 
 written out of Poe's tragic life and finds a response in 
 us all. Untermeyer has not been tardy in his apprecia-
 
 162 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 tion of poets without a message like Frost and Robinson. 
 In fact Untermeyer ignores quite a number of Revolu- 
 tionary poets. 
 
 The reader may say that a new social idea in poetry is 
 just as bad as an old moral saw, in that they are both 
 didactic. It all depends on the ecstatic 'presentation, 
 but I think that an idea that is advanced and unrecog- 
 nized is by virtue of its novelty and truth more capable 
 of swaying the emotion that we call poetic than the repe- 
 tition of a hackneyed ethical maxim which every child 
 knows and hears usually without emotion. Ibsen's plays 
 are poetry not only because of the treatment, but be- 
 cause of the ideas there, while many of the English 
 eighteenth century moralists in verse are poets neither in 
 treatment nor ideas. 
 
 The only country where critics have had almost no use 
 for the theory of art for art's sake has been Russia. 
 Here they have also had no such compromising views 
 that seek to know only whether the poet has done his 
 work well, and whether he has delivered his message ir- 
 respective of its value, importance or truth. The Rus- 
 sian critics were men who were interested in the connec- 
 tion between life and poetry, and never failed to have 
 their eye on the former while considering the latter. 
 They did more, they had their eye on the future, and 
 hence were usually liberal. We know very little about 
 these Russian critics, and only recently has the nature of 
 their work been outlined by Thomas G. Masaryk, who 
 before the war published The Spirit of Russia just trans- 
 lated into English. Previously Kropotkin and a few his- 
 torians of Russian literature had touched on their work. 
 Some day perhaps we may be so fortunate as to have 
 translations into English of the works of Bielinski, 
 Tchernishevski, Dobrolubov, Pisarev and Mihailovsky.
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 163 
 
 To these men art was a serious thing, and they would 
 not have its value lost in metaphysical theories of 
 aesthetics about beauty, in endless discussions about the 
 niceties and importance of metrical forms. Poetry dealt 
 with social problems and suggested changes in society. 
 Its mission was to deal with the unbared human soul and 
 above all not to lie and affect. 
 
 Every one has conceived the function of poetry as 
 being something different, usually as something to 
 spread his own views. Thus the theologian looks upon 
 it as a handmaid of religion, to show the beauty of a 
 dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with 
 his religion. The voluptuary thinks it merely a means 
 of arousing sexual morality. Some philosophers think 
 it a vehicle to promulgate their own systems. Thus 
 Nietzsche believed poetry should spread the gospel of 
 the will to power, while Schopenhauer thought it reached 
 its highest point when it glorified the denial of the will 
 to live. 
 
 The world can never be fully agreed as to what poetry 
 is any more than it can agree as to what beauty, truth, or 
 duty is. A passage may appeal to one person and not to 
 another. It all depends on the beliefs, tastes, experiences 
 and education of the reader. Patriotic and religious 
 poetry, whether in verse or prose, falls flat on the inter- 
 nationalist and free thinker respectively, because they 
 do not adore the sentiments therein, though they might 
 admit the beauty of the writing and recognize the ap- 
 peal it makes to those who are in accord with the writer. 
 They cannot be responsive to the soul of the singer be- 
 cause they are differently constituted in their beliefs and 
 because the ideas that aroused in the poet one train of 
 emotions, move them to a contrary passion. 
 
 Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few cen-
 
 164 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 turies ago was sentenced to be burned at the stake for 
 his religious beliefs. A poet who approved of this course 
 wrote a poem where his emotions are crystallized. He 
 was sorry for the victim and hoped God would pardon 
 him and make him see the error of his ways. He praised 
 the executioner who himself was grieved that he had to 
 take this course to save the infidel's soul. He was cer- 
 tain that God was pleased with the sentence. He de- 
 plored the evil effects that might follow if this man were 
 allowed to live to spread his infamous doctrines, he re- 
 buked the man for the trouble he brought on his family. 
 On the whole he gave us a metrical and emotional com- 
 position actually describing his sensations, not even omit- 
 ting sympathetic reference to the sufferings of the vic- 
 tim. This was poetry to those thousands that day who 
 approved of this act. But most of us cannot to-day en- 
 ter into the ecstasy of the writer ; it is not poetry to us. 
 But while people to-day are not burned at the stake, they 
 are persecuted for advancing ideas that are beyond 
 the public. The poets, who are on a low level of thought 
 with the public, in writing poems against such individuals 
 or the ideas or cause represented by them, are not poets 
 to those who support the persecuted individual or his 
 ideas. Most poets still write in defense of burning at 
 the stake of great humanitarians, but they advocate other 
 measures than burning by real fire. 
 
 When Ibsen said in reply to the critic who would not 
 allow Peer Gynt to be called poetry, that the definition 
 of poetry would have to be changed to take in his poem, 
 he was stating a condition that always takes place when 
 a new poetic masterpiece appears. The conception as to 
 what is poetry always changes, for what moves man in 
 one age does not move him in another. The poets often 
 have to do what Whitman and Wordsworth did, create
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 165 
 
 the tastes by which they are to be enjoyed. We are all 
 aware that in the eighteenth century poetry meant some- 
 thing entirely different from what we believe it to be 
 to-day. Many men were considered poets then whom 
 we do not regard as such. The same is true of poetry 
 in prose. There was hostility to the poetry in the novels 
 of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, because the public did not 
 want to accept their artistic innovations, their frankness 
 and their views. 
 
 Yeats in his essay "What is Popular Poetry" in the 
 Ideas of Good and Evil, said that poetry of a very high 
 order, like the Epipsychidion, is not popular for it pre- 
 supposes more than it says. All good poetry, whether 
 springing from a written or an unwritten tradition, is 
 always "strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have 
 not understanding," and suggests remembrance of im- 
 possible things, and glimmers with thoughts and images 
 dating back to unknown history. 
 
 There is a great deal of literature or poetry which 
 presupposes some culture, and a sensitiveness to beauty, 
 and especially a highly developed intellect. The man with 
 the commonplace mind, even though he be educated and 
 well read, is often unable to appreciate the beauty of 
 poetry in which new and advanced and unpopular ideas 
 are held in solution. The poetry in the work of Whit- 
 man and Nietzsche and Ibsen was not felt by people 
 who could not enter into the spirit of their revolt from 
 contemporary morality. The public cannot appreciate the 
 prose poetry of Hearn because of his rich language and 
 aesthetic sensitiveness. 
 
 The public can take an interest in the beauty and 
 poetry of ideas it understands, and written in language 
 that it speaks and in images that it uses ; but the poet is 
 often at his best an aristocrat in thought and, language,
 
 166 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 and then it takes a well trained individual reader to like 
 him. Poetry is no longer mere folklore or ballads or 
 musical numbers, all of which the public may enjoy. 
 
 There is no such thing as absolute truth. Truth is only 
 a relative term. When a man speaks of the truth he 
 means those doctrines which he himself embraces. 
 Every man believes that the views that he entertains are 
 true, otherwise he would not hold them. Many people 
 have in the past died for the "truth," when we know 
 that they upheld falsehood. 
 
 A writer who is liberally inclined will hold liberal 
 ideas to be the truth ; a conservative regards only con- 
 servative views as true. An author who embraces ideas 
 from both the conventional and radical spheres, con- 
 siders only those books as true whose authors do the 
 same thing. 
 
 In a sane essay on DeVigny, Mill makes a remarkable 
 distinction between the conservative and radical poet, 
 concluding that the greatest poet will always partake of 
 the nature of both, mentioning as example Balzac and 
 De Vigny. Had he written on the subject a half -cen- 
 tury later he might have named Ibsen, whose Brand and 
 Wild Duck are good conservative poems. Mill, who was 
 no disciple of art for art's sake, said that the radical 
 poet will paint passionate love, "will show it at war with 
 the forms and customs of society, nay even with its 
 laws and religion, if the laws and tenets which regulate 
 that branch of human relations are among those which 
 have begun to be murmured against." "To him, what- 
 ever exists will appear from that alone fit to be repre- 
 sented : to probe the wounds of society and humanity is 
 part of his business, and he will neither shrink from ex- 
 hibiting what is in nature, because it is morally culpable, 
 nor because it is physically revolting." Here Mill an-
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 167 
 
 ticipates Zola, Ibsen and Freud. No wonder that so radi- 
 cal a critic as Brandes was attracted to him. It is a pity 
 he did not continue literary criticism. 
 
 It is probably vain to try to define different types of 
 poetic or literary excellence, but we may state some of 
 these. Formerly a first-class poet was one who suc- 
 cessfully imitated a model and followed certain rules. 
 Or he was one who successfully voiced the current ac- 
 cepted views of the age. It is these reasons that still 
 make many people consider Dante and Milton among 
 the first-class poets. Again there is a tendency to re- 
 gard as poets of the first class those who perfected their 
 art technically. Hence ^schylus and Sophocles are 
 ranked among the greatest poets. Sometimes he is re- 
 garded among the greatest poets because he is among 
 the earliest, like Homer. The position of poets like 
 Shakespeare, Moliere, Cervantes and Goethe as first-class 
 world poets and writers, cannot be contested, because 
 they are so universal. 
 
 Under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw in his preface to 
 a new edition of his novel The Irrational Knot laid down 
 an interesting distinction between literature of the first 
 and of the second order. The distinction applies to 
 poetry as well. Shaw considered as literature of the 
 first order work which makes a distinct original contri- 
 bution to morality, even if such writing is literary criti- 
 tism. He regards the writers who accept ready-made 
 morality as of the second order. Shaw admits that 
 writers of the first order are often less readable and 
 less constructive than writers of the second order. He 
 mentions among writers of the first order, Ibsen, Eurip- 
 ides, Byron, Wilde and La Rochefoucauld, and Shakes- 
 peare in Hamlet. From prefaces in other books of his 
 we know he would include men like Blake, Shelley,
 
 168 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Nietsche, and Butler. As writers of the second order 
 he mentions Shakespeare, Scott, Dumas, Dickens, 
 Ruskin, Carlyle, and he would no doubt include writers 
 like Macaulay and Holmes. He does not mean that a 
 writer of the first order is always greater than one of the 
 second order, but he does insist as follows : "No man 
 who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion 
 and morality are offered to him on a long spoon, can 
 share the same Parnassian bench with those who make 
 an original contribution to religion and morality, were it 
 only a criticism." In spite of the contention of the art 
 for art's sake school that poetry has nothing to do with 
 morality or religion, the greatest poets are those authors 
 of the literature of ecstasy who championed new ideas, 
 fought for liberty in their works, expressed the ad- 
 vanced ideas of the age, and gave us a new and more 
 liberal outlook on life. While it is true that often poets 
 of the second order have expressed strongly and mov- 
 ingly just the common sentiments of everybody, on the 
 whole the original poets rank higher. It is this which 
 puts Whitman above Longfellow, Nietzsche above 
 Macaulay, Byron and Shelley above Tennyson and Ros- 
 setti, Ibsen above Scott. Yet there are many poets who 
 made no distinct original contribution to a new morality, 
 but expressed common emotions so humanely and pow- 
 erfully, that we think of them as poets of a very high 
 order. The Dickens of the Christmas Carol and the 
 Burns of the love songs were not original but they are 
 great nevertheless by the infectious depicting of uni- 
 versal emotion, which is always of highest importance 
 in literature. Though there is nothing new in a novel like 
 Eugenie Grandet but a wonderful description of a miser, 
 it is poetry of a very high order, for an account of a 
 passion in an intense manner is great poetry. Most of
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 169 
 
 Hafiz's poems record his loves, but though he was a 
 liberal and against the asceticism of his day, he was in 
 the main not an exponent of anything new ; nevertheless, 
 he is a poet of a high order. 
 
 The world usually does not recognize the original poet 
 and accepts a poet of the second order as one of the 
 first order, but posterity adjusts the matter. Shelley and 
 Ibsen finally won their places and I think to-day the 
 growing coldness to Scott and Tennyson is due to their 
 lacking in great original ideas. 
 
 We need not agree with Shaw when he says that Dick- 
 ens, Ruskin and Carlyle made no contributions to the 
 morality of their day. The humanitarian reforms sug- 
 gested by Dickens' novels, the conceptions about sin- 
 cerity in history, and the importance of individualism and 
 the heroic Carlyle and Ruskin's views in art criticism 
 and economics, were all original. They all had in addi- 
 tion the great power of expression, and though they 
 were not always very profound in their views, they are 
 poets of a high order. 
 
 A poet, then, is of the first order if he expresses in 
 prose the ecstasy connected with a great original idea of 
 social justice far in advance of his age. 
 
 There is an opinion ruling among academic circles, 
 also derived from Aristotle, that poetry is the highest 
 form of literature, and that a verse epic, drama or lyric 
 is, when at its best, always better than any work in prose. 
 Nothing could be farther from the truth. Who would 
 say that great novels like Don Quixote, great plays like 
 Ibsen's, great essays like Montaigne's are not superior 
 as literature to many of the best known verse productions. 
 Nor must we assume that the literature of emotion or 
 ecstasy, whether in prose or verse, is always the highest 
 form of literature. The literature that shows great in-
 
 170 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 sight into character, that brims most with intellectual 
 ideas, that is universal and human in interest even if not 
 emotional, ranks higher than poetry which voices no 
 ideas. You will find greater literature in books like 
 Taine's History of English Literature, or Hazlitt's es- 
 says, even in those passages which do not belong to the 
 literature of ecstasy, than in many poems of James Whit- 
 comb Riley or Longfellow. The two latter produced 
 many poems that belong to the literature of emotion, but 
 while they are genuine poets, they are intellectually de- 
 ficient. 
 
 Aesthetics and criticism have tended to place little 
 aesthetic value on the literature of ideas. A passage 
 from Hume's Essays is greater as literature than many 
 verses in our magazines. Much literature consists of a 
 succession of ideas or facts, no particular one of which 
 moves us to ecstasy, but the work as a whole does have 
 aesthetic value and yet is not poetry, but has greater 
 literary value than some poetry. 
 
 Neither verse poetry, nor the prose literature of 
 ecstasy, then, is the highest literature necessarily. 
 Shakespeare was one of the greatest poets, not only be- 
 cause he depicted emotions, but because his intellect, his 
 psychological insight, his universality, his personality, all 
 combine to make him the great figure he is. He would 
 have continued to be as great a figure even if he had 
 written nothing more than a diary. It is genius that 
 counts and not the form one uses. To say that the drama 
 or epic is the highest literary form is absurd ; it may be 
 the essay, if a genius is using that form. 
 
 When we have a description of emotions, we have 
 poetry or the literature of ecstasy. But profound thought 
 may give a work more enduring qualities than ecstasy. A 
 love song by Burns is wonderfully sweet, but I can see
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 171 
 
 no reason why, because it is poetry, we must say that 
 it is a greater piece of literature than even an emotional 
 prose passage out of Nietzsche or Carlyle at their best. 
 Goethe's prose essays are profound and are often greater 
 as literature than his lyrics. There are intellectual pass- 
 ages in Wilhelm Meister that are superior as literature to 
 emotional scenes in Faust as literature. 
 
 Critics like Henry Newbolt are supporting the view 
 that poetry must be in touch with life. Though he clings 
 to the idea that poetry and rhythm go together he thinks 
 that the natural tendency of poetic rhythm will be to- 
 wards perpetual change ; the value of his book, however, 
 consists especially in a chapter on "Poetry and Politics." 
 He recognizes that both reason and intuition play a part 
 in poetry ; men are not divided into men of thought and 
 men of feeling, the one speaking the language of science, 
 the other that of poetry. If man is a reasoning animal, 
 he also is a creature of instinct as well as of thought. 
 Hence poetry depends on science, the facts of which be- 
 come part of our imagination. The poet builds a more 
 livable world ; he may write great political poetry if he 
 does not become a partisan. Poetry seeks to change 
 human feeling; that is what the Prophets did, and they 
 were in a sense political poets. "Great poetry," says 
 Newbolt, "is the poetry which has the power to stir many 
 men and stir them deeply," but is especially great when it 
 "is the expression of our consciousness of this world, 
 tinged with man's universal longing for a world more 
 perfect, nearer to the heart's desire." 
 
 Newbolt finds that the reason so much religious poetry 
 is futile is because it is remote from earth. But he finds 
 in the Psalms a fervor of patriotism and moral enthusi- 
 asm that he compares to the common liturgical poetry 
 "as a great and sonorous bell to the vague whistle of the
 
 i;2 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 wind." They preach no dogma, they are remote from 
 practical politics, they are rooted in human emotions, and 
 are the product of no particular church. That is why 
 they always move. 
 
 Incidentally one may add that is why the great medie- 
 val Hebrew poets like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah Ha 
 Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra, are great poets.* 
 
 Heine in his poem on Jehuda Ben Halevi deplores the 
 fact that these three poets are not well known to Aryan 
 peoples. In fact the liturgical poetry of the medieval 
 Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be appreciated by 
 any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of 
 poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's Ode to Zion, 
 or Bachya Ibn Pakuda's My Soul. There are able prose 
 translations of these in B. Halper's Post-Biblical Hebrew 
 Literature. An Anthology, Vol. II. 
 
 Any one who reads the history of the poetry of a 
 country, that is, of the poetry in verse, will find much 
 to amuse him in the alleged progress made in the conven- 
 tions of poetry. One poet dethrones another and the 
 reader gets the impression that the later poet is always 
 superior to the earlier one because he has destroyed con- 
 vention, and introduced what is often a minor change. 
 The eighteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser rather 
 low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, 
 Tennyson and Browning were assumed to have advanced 
 upon Byron and Shelley, and the mid- Victorians in turn 
 were deemed to have been supplanted by the poets of 
 "the nineties." Though a later age may make some tech- 
 nical improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is 
 genius that counts. Many problems about poetry have 
 
 *The greatest authority in America on medieval Hebrew 
 poetry is Prof. Israel Davidson of the Jewish Theological 
 Seminary, New York City.
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 173 
 
 disturbed critics since Byron died, but none of the suc- 
 ceeding generations have been able to detract from the 
 quality of poets like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 Byron, Shelley and Keats. For a poet is such by virtue 
 of his ability to convey great emotion and thought, and 
 he does not become obsolete solely by the technical inno- 
 vations of a later age. 
 
 Many poets are praised for the "note of revolt" in 
 their poetry, because they have brought about some 
 changes in the technical art of writing poetry, or have 
 written their poetry in a manner different from the 
 ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the 
 fact that these changes which are considered tokens of 
 great courage on the part of the innovators, amount to 
 very little when these so-called audacious poets remain 
 on an intellectual and moral level with the masses and 
 do not rise as high as the older poet whose vision soared 
 ahead of his time. 
 
 A poet may be great even though he uses the old ma- 
 chinery of the supernatural, even though he indulges in 
 artificial diction, cliches and stereotyped metres, for what 
 counts in poetry is the greatness and power of a human 
 soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an ad- 
 vanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, 
 freedom and justice, the intensity and importance of his 
 emotion. People are under the impression that all the 
 martyrs for human liberty perished in the medieval 
 ages ; that the world has been set free by those who gave 
 up their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, 
 and that there is no more work to be done by poets to- 
 day in championing human liberty. Critics who admire 
 Milton and Shelley as champions of liberty attack to- 
 day's unpopular champions of it. It amuses one to read 
 of the epithets, revolutionary and radical, applied to versi-
 
 174 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 fiers because they have arranged a system of vowel- 
 sounds combination in their poems, or imported a metre, 
 or broken with an old conventional metre, while the sub- 
 stance of their poetry remains far below the intellectual 
 and aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries 
 ago. 
 
 But what greater poetry has been produced in the last 
 two generations, than many of the novels and prose 
 dramas written in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Eng- 
 land and Scandinavia? Why is there greatness in 
 the poetry in these works? Is it not because of the 
 character drawing, the delineation of great emotional 
 conflicts, of the ecstasy bathing the ideas ? Would these 
 poets have been any the less great, had they continued 
 to use the same ideas, emotions and situations, tricked 
 out even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, 
 tropes, allegories, high personages, supernatural agen- 
 cies ? In fact plays like Peer Gynt and The Sunken Bell 
 are rather technically conventional as verse plays, but 
 could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless 
 and trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern 
 "revolutionary" poets? The great poet who deals with 
 the capabilities of man in experiencing emotion, and fears 
 not to track the human soul, even into morbid feelings, 
 who has the courage to challenge society with ideas, even 
 though these arouse the most bitter antagonism of some 
 of the leaders of society, is the man whom posterity 
 will most enjoy, for he is most human and bold and he 
 never loses sight of the fact that he deals with real 
 ecstasy, and not with the cultivated nuances of some 
 cliques of versifiers. 
 
 If the reader will make a close study of many of the 
 revolutions in writing poetry, he will find that the great 
 change often amounted to nothing more than the substitu-
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 175 
 
 tion or creation of a new rhythm or trope for the one used 
 by the old poet ; such changes are of minor importance. 
 No doubt our contemporary poets have done away with 
 many conventions. They no longer employ inversions 
 of words and phrases, nor cultivate the stock poetical 
 terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic 
 license. They no longer tolerate cliches such as whenas, 
 o'er, whatime, dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, 
 main, taen, athwart, e'en, forsooth, alack, oh thou, didst, 
 hath, perchance, methinks, steed, gleeds, prithee, trow, 
 'neath, 'gainst, ween, wist, espy, twixt. But it took them 
 a long time to discover what the prose writers always 
 knew ; namely, that distorted speech should be avoided in 
 literature. But the avoidance of cliches does not make 
 a poet. 
 
 Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy 
 Lowell are artificial in substance and manner, labored and 
 uninspired, dull and bookish, and lacking in human inter- 
 est, ecstasy and ideas. Their technique may be different 
 from that of the old poets, but these new writers often 
 have no ideas, reveal no poetic personality, and convey no 
 emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, 
 and as a result they fall below even the old New England 
 poets whom they despise. A poet like Longfellow may 
 be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with 
 liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of 
 such human interest as Evangeline, presents an idea 
 against war as in The Arsenal at Springfield, or draws 
 on his personal life in such fine lyrics as My Lost Youth, 
 The Bridge, The Day is Done, he moves us and we know 
 we are reading poetry, though it has not the emancipat- 
 ing and stimulating effect of some of the work of Walt 
 Whitman Lafcadio Hearn, by the way, condemned the 
 tendency to depreciate Longfellow.
 
 176 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Many of our free verse writers produce no great 
 poetry, even though they write in a medium that is the 
 proper language of poetry. The opponents of the free 
 verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's 
 productions, are often right; these productions are not 
 poetry because they lack ecstasy and ideas. Much of the 
 work in the old forms produced to-day has more ecstasy, 
 and hence it is poetry. 
 
 Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence 
 to-day is outside the scope of this volume. 
 
 There has been much comment about the fact that we 
 need and indeed are getting an American or national 
 poetry. Now one of the things that Whitman has over- 
 done was this demand for poetry that is distinctly Ameri- 
 can. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man 
 first. A great idea like a passage in the Song of Myself 
 could have been written by and can be appreciated by 
 the people of another nation. A cry of sympathy for the 
 sufferings of animals and man such as you find in Out of 
 the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is not an American but a 
 human note. 
 
 You can translate a love poem from the Greek, Latin, 
 German, French or Italian into English prose, and if you 
 remove the proper names or other unessential adjuncts, 
 no expert or scholar will be able to tell what nationality 
 the poem represents. No one has better shown the hol- 
 lowness of the claimants for nationalism than James 
 Russell Lowell in two essays on nationality in literature, 
 one written in sympathetic review of Longfellow's Ka- 
 vanagh and collected in The Round Table, and another in 
 review of Piatt's poems, collected in The Function of the 
 Poet. 
 
 Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely 
 national poetry. True, there are national traits and char-
 
 ECSTASY OF SOCIAL IDEALS 177 
 
 acteristics, modes of thought and feeling peculiar to dif- 
 ferent peoples, that enter into and distinguish every lit- 
 erature, but these do not usually make one literature so 
 national as to be incomprehensible to other nations. 
 When this does happen, the product has no universal 
 appeal and hence is not great poetry. Again poetry may 
 have local color ; it may be steeped in national traditions, 
 it may express a racial philosophy but it is then of value 
 only in so far as it represents the mode of thinking and 
 feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in 
 the soil, be an indigenous product, depict native customs 
 or a provincial life ; it may depict certain types of heroes, 
 and glory in the country of its birth, and describe its 
 richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human 
 nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is uni- 
 versal, though it may be colored by national traits, though 
 one nation may feel more keenly, or indulge a certain 
 emotion more frequently than others. The heart and the 
 head, the emotions and the mind, rule in writing. The 
 Old Testament and Shakespeare are no longer national 
 products for they speak to the whole world. They have 
 the local color and the ideas of their time and depict a 
 certain phase of life, but we all feel in reading these 
 books that they are written about ourselves and to our- 
 selves. "We have spoken too much about nationalist 
 art, forgetting that though the roots may lie in nationality 
 and personality, the results, independent of school and 
 nation, should overleap boundaries and enter the universal 
 heart." (Isaac Goldberg, Studies in Spanish-American 
 Literature. ) 
 
 Poetry then grows out of the soil, but like imported 
 fruit tastes as well to the man a thousand miles away 
 as to the native. 
 
 The literature of a country however should be indi-
 
 178 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 vidualistic, not imitative. Whitman is an American poet 
 in the sense of recording his own individually, while 
 Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a Whit- 
 man rather than a Lowell who could have written the fol- 
 lowing passages, which appear in the famous Preface to 
 the first edition of Leaves of Grass. 
 
 In the make of the great masters the idea of political 
 liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of 
 heroes wherever man and woman exist but never takes 
 any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from 
 poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They 
 out of the ages are worthy the grand idea to them it is 
 confided, and they must sustain it. Nothing has prece- 
 dence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it. 
 
 I do not mean that the author of that bold poem in the 
 first Bigelow Paper, against the recruiting sergeant, and 
 of the lecture on Democracy, was not, in spite of his dis- 
 like of Whitman, in accord with the above quoted pas- 
 sage. Nor do I mean that he could not have learned to 
 write a passage like that from the nation which gave us 
 such fine prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's 
 Areopagitica, Locke's Letters on Toleration, Jeremy Tay- 
 lor's Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, Mill's Lib- 
 erty and Morley's Compromise. But Whitman was the 
 first American poet who taking his cue from American 
 political documents embodied in his poetry views of po- 
 litical and individual liberty, as the fruit of democracy. 
 Even Whitman stopped short of championing economic 
 liberty. Some of his present-day disciples do champion 
 it. But Whitman's plea for liberty does not make him a 
 national poet, for European poets have also sung of 
 liberty.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE 
 UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 ARISTOTLE'S best known contribution to literary criti- 
 cism is his statement that tragedy has the effect of a 
 catharsis upon the reader and helps him to discharge emo- 
 tions of pity and fear that overburden him. We have con- 
 siderably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under 
 tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose 
 or verse, in dialogue or narrative. We believe that perus- 
 ing literature in general relieves the reader of all nerve- 
 racking emotions and produces a homeopathic effect 'upon 
 him by the aesthetic voicing of his unconscious feelings. 
 
 Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, Literary Criticism in 
 the Renaissance, gives us a good survey of several Italian 
 commentators who correctly interpreted Aristotle's view 
 of the purgation of the emotions of fear and pity as 
 aesthetic, and not ethical. 'The first of these critics was 
 Robortelli (1548) ; Vettori and Castelvetro followed him, 
 while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emo- 
 tions similar to pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. 
 Minturno likened the purgation to the physician's method, 
 while Speroni pointed out that pity and fear, holding men 
 in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These men 
 anticipated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth 
 century, who destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that 
 Aristotle had in mind the moral purification and reforma- 
 tion of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously thought 
 that this was Aristotle's meaning. 
 
 179
 
 i8o THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have 
 read these Italians when he gave us his correct interpreta- 
 tion of the passage in the preface to Samson Agonistes. 
 Milton properly understood Aristotle's meaning of the 
 function of tragedy. It was to "temper and reduce them 
 (the passions) to just measure with a kind of delight, 
 stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imi- 
 tated." 
 
 We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's 
 view of the function of tragedy from a passage in his 
 Politics. He was thinking of the relief the spectators' 
 surcharged emotions obtained by witnessing similar emo- 
 tions expressed. His real meaning was perceived by Henri 
 Weil and Jacob Bernays, two great Jewish classical 
 scholars of Germany. Bernays states moreover in his 
 work,* first published in 1857, 'that any literary work tell- 
 ing of unhappy events has a homeopathic effect on the 
 reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually suffer, 
 the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within 
 us. Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his 
 History of Aesthetics, believes tragedy or poetry must be 
 written in verse, he is forced to admit that even Vanity 
 Fair and Cousin Bette would come within the definition of 
 tragedy developed by Bernays; for the reader finds his 
 own emotions expressed in these works no less than in 
 Sophocles and obtains relief when he reads them. Bosan- 
 quet further admits that any serious and even formless 
 portrayal of life may be placed within Bernays's theory 
 adding, "It may indeed be admitted to be a development 
 inherent in Aristotle's theory." 
 
 Aristotle perceived that the spectator of tragedy was 
 putting himself in the place of the characters, living their 
 lives emotionally and sympathizing with them. Since the 
 
 * Zwfi Abfandlungen uber d. Aristotleische Theorie d. Drama.
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 181 
 
 novel or lyric poem depicts human sorrow, and the reader 
 is purged by reading these literary forms, just like the 
 spectator of tragedy, all literature has the effect of an 
 aesthetic catharsis upon the reader. 
 
 The novels of Thackeray and Balzac are poetry in parts 
 and the emotional influence in reading them is the same as 
 in seeing a tragic verse-play acted. Bosanquet, however, 
 does not fully accept Aristotle's theory as applied to tragic 
 stories in prose because he regards poetical prose rhetoric 
 and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of 
 tragedy the entire episode in Hardy's Return of the 
 Native, of the death of Eustace's mother? Hardy's 
 tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the Greek play- 
 wrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements of poetic 
 tragedy in that the reader is purged and relieved of pity 
 and fear and kindred emotions. For tragedy is not to be 
 found only in dialogues in verse, but in narration and 
 dialogue in prose, and its function is to relieve us of any 
 choking emotion, besides fear and pity. 
 
 Aristotle is the founder then of psychoanalytic interpre- 
 tation of literature and is a forerunner of Freud. He 
 however refers only to the catharsis upon the spectator, 
 but not to that of the author's work upon himself. 
 
 Every creator of tragedy in prose or verse, in fiction, 
 essay or lyric was first subject to repression and then ecs- 
 tasy. We may say as Nietzsche did, that tragic art is the 
 reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysius, of dreaming and 
 emotional intoxication, and both these conditions are, in 
 Freud's words, due to repression. 
 
 But we have travelled far beyond Aristotle in our views 
 of tragedy. Freud has revolutionized the art of criticism 
 and a disciple of his, F. Wittels, in the Tragische Motiv, 
 gave us an interpretation from the psychoanalytic point of 
 view of the nature and sufferings of tragic characters.
 
 182 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 There is an abstract of the book by Dr. J. S. VanTeslaar in 
 the American Journal of Psychology for April, 1912. 
 Wittels shows that the unconscious unethical desires break 
 into consciousness and cause tragedy. He points out that 
 the Greeks were purified of pent up emotions in the thea- 
 ter, and that they identified the demons of their inner self 
 in the actors. He also says that the Greek drama cannot 
 any longer talk as clearly to us as of old, for with our 
 civilization we have wandered away from the naive Greek 
 mind. The author emphasizes the fact that unconscious 
 causes make the writer compose his work, as well as the 
 fact that characters in history and literature acted from 
 unconscious causes. Thus suppressed erotic impulses in- 
 fluenced the patriotism of Joan of Arc. 
 
 At all times, again, it was vaguely understood that 
 dreams reveal the unconscious, that poetry emanates from 
 the dream state, that in fact poems are even composed in 
 dreams. Thus, the Bible itself is authority for the fact 
 that all the prophets received their messages in a dream or 
 vision. The Hebrew sages said that the dream was a 
 fraction of prophecy, the unripe fruit of prophecy. 
 
 One of the first -critics who treated at length the 
 question whether poetry may actually be composed in 
 dreams is the Hebrew poet and critic Moses Ibn Ezra, who 
 lived in Spain in the early part of the twelfth century. 
 The seventh chapter of his Conversations and Recollec- 
 tions * deals with the subject. He was influenced by 
 Arabs who were absorbingly concerned with the interpreta- 
 tion of dreams. Ibn Ezra thought that it was just in the 
 sleeping state that the use of thought and imagination was 
 
 * This work has never been completely published. Dr. B. Hal- 
 per, of Dropsie College, Philadelphia, has promised us a com- 
 plete translation from the Arabic manuscript. There is a syn- 
 opsis of it by Schreiner in the Revue des Etudes, Juives XXI, 
 XXII.
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 183 
 
 greatest, for then the soul loses consciousness of things, 
 the body and senses are at rest and only the common sense, 
 which the critic uses really as synonymous with the un- 
 conscious, is active. He quotes a Hebrew philosopher to 
 the effect that the soul, when detached from the body, has 
 finer perceptions than when awake. This is in accord- 
 ance with Aristotle who said that the soul can discover 
 hidden things when detached from the senses, when it is 
 pure. Ibn Ezra asserts that his Hebrew authority main- 
 tains that one may compose verses in sleep, and he gives 
 examples of his own. 
 
 Ibn Ezra believed that nightmares have some idea be- 
 hind them, that an interpreter of dreams whose reason is 
 superior to that of the dreamer can discover the idea, 
 for dream interpretation is the science of hidden things 
 communicated by God. The poet also composes verses in 
 dreams, often because he does this in waking life, for many 
 people carry on in their dreams the occupations of their 
 daily life. We all recall that we read in our dreams, es- 
 pecially if we are lovers of reading. We do in our dreams 
 what we would like to do. 
 
 The Aristotelian medieval Hebrew philosophers, Isaac 
 Israeli, Abraham Ibn Daud, Moses Maimomides, and Levi 
 ben Gerson also developed the idea of the connection of 
 prophecy with dreams.* 
 
 We know to-day that the poet creates a congenial sur- 
 rounding for himself out of his imagination. He is re- 
 pelled by the sordidness of his environment or the suffering 
 he has had in life. He writes a poem like Epipsychidion, 
 to build himself a home where he has ideal love, because 
 he is not satisfied with his married life. He writes a prose 
 poem like Dream Children where he sees himself wedded 
 
 * See Isaac Husik's Medieval Jewish Philosophy.
 
 184 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 to his lost love, with their children about him, because he 
 is a bachelor who has neither love nor children. 
 
 Poetry, like dreams, creates a state where unfulfilled un- 
 conscious wishes are gratified. Poetry is the voice then of 
 the unconscious. The poem is usually a product of the 
 day-dream, which is related to the dream of sleep, for both 
 species of dreams reveal the unconscious. Poetry shows 
 conflicts and makes adjustments to reality. Poetry is 
 aesthetic therapeutics.* 
 
 The dream poems of literature are so numerous that 
 one is amazed that the theory of poetry as a dream has not 
 been more prominently discussed by literary critics. In 
 the middle ages many poems were cast in the form of 
 dreams. The allegory was generally a dream. Who can 
 doubt that the Divine Comedy and Pilgrim's Progress, 
 both in the form of dreams, were attempts by the poets to 
 adjust themselves to reality, to purge themselves and re- 
 lieve their unconscious ? 
 
 Even those poets who are always hiding their souls and 
 making inlays of verbal mosaic reveal themselves. Their 
 dabbling with trifles is indicative of an inability or lack 
 of courage to think and feel. They thus make a dis- 
 closure more marked than if they had sung their private 
 thoughts openly. 
 
 Poetry is a psychological art rather than a plastic one. 
 It deals with the soul. Horace's statement that if the poet 
 would make the reader weep he must weep himself, is true. 
 Yet we have often failed to recognize that poetry is a 
 genuine personal cry of a man who dreams. We have 
 confused poetry with prosody, instead of identifying it 
 with the unconscious. 
 
 The poem with the social message, the problem play for 
 
 * F. C. Prescott's Dreams and Poetry is a magnificent essay 
 on the subject.
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 185 
 
 example, or the novel with a purpose, also belongs to the 
 literature of dreams. The poet sees foul infections in- 
 filtrating society; he has often himself been a victim of 
 social abuses. He voices complaints about the unjust 
 system and its tyrannical sway. He shows himself and 
 others suffering in its coils. He dreams a vision of a 
 more beautiful and just system of society where neither 
 he nor others are consumed in vexation. He states 
 ecstatically the ideas that come to him as he condemns; 
 he entertains and expresses views whose adoption would 
 enable man to reconstruct society on a better plan. 
 
 His intellect is colored by his inability to adjust himself 
 socially. His dreams give him ideas. He does not have 
 to become a reformer, but he recognizes social wrongs 
 resulting from custom or stupidity or downright wick- 
 edness. Personal repression and dreaming produce not 
 only love poems, but poems containing Utopias of society, 
 plans for improvement. 
 
 I have fully stated in my The Erotic Motive in Litera- 
 ture the psychoanalytical view of poetry which regards it 
 as the poet's creation of a world in accordance with his 
 fancy to compensate himself for his repressions. Thus the 
 poet relieves himself of emotions that were bursting within 
 him and cures himself of incipient neurosis. I have shown 
 that the view was not wholly originated by Freud, but 
 stated by various English critics like Samuel Johnson, Haz- 
 litt, Lamb and Kingsley. There are several other English- 
 men who held the view, namely Shakespeare and Bacon. 
 Havelock Ellis, however, was the first writer in England to 
 develop the idea that artistic creation is a sublimation of 
 sex repression. (See his essay on Cananova in Affirma- 
 tions, published before Freud's book on dreams.) 
 
 Poets like Burns, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tenny- 
 son, Gothe and Ibsen have told us that they wrote to re-
 
 186 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 lieve themselves of their pent up passions. Further, Co'e- 
 ridge, Shelley, Emerson, Daudet, Holmes, Lowell, Poe 
 and Hearn have left us written evidence of their belief 
 that poetry emanates from the unconscious. It remained, 
 however, for Freud to have -the courage to identify the un- 
 conscious chiefly with sex repression and symbolic speech. 
 
 The first English poet who claimed to allow his uncon- 
 scious self deliberately to dictate his poems, was James 
 John Garth Wilkinson. Havelock Ellis has recently called 
 attention to him. In his Improvisations from the Spirit 
 (1857) Wilkinson wrote down in rhymed verse the first 
 impressions of a chosen theme. He depended chiefly on 
 inspiration. His book was praised by Dante G. Rossetti, 
 and forms the subject of an essay by the poet James 
 Thomson, called "A Strange Book" in Biographical and 
 Critical Studies. Emerson had also praised this physician, 
 who was an authority on Blake and Swedenborg. Wil- 
 kinson claims to have written in what we would call the 
 Freudian method of drawing on his unconscious. He 
 considers reason and will secondary powers in the process. 
 The poems resemble Blake's (even in their obscurity). 
 Thomson rightly distinguishes Wilkinson from fraudulent 
 spiritualists. 
 
 Wilkinson's poems, however, do not make good the 
 claim to be absolutely unconscious art. If he had not told 
 us that he improvised we would never have doubted that 
 these poems were composed like all other poems, with 
 some labor. We cannot believe that Wilkinson did not 
 have to seek ryhmes. He may have taken the first rhyme 
 that came to his head but he had also to consider his metre. 
 Again, no art dispenses altogether with the poet's use of 
 artistic judgment, no matter how much an improvisation 
 that art is. I do not believe that even Coleridge's famous 
 Kubla Khan was actually composed in a dream, but that
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 187 
 
 it was merely suggested by a dream.* He fashioned the 
 form consciously, that is the rhyme and metre. The sub- 
 stance of the poem is, however, always from the uncon- 
 scious. Thomson considers Wilkinson's belief in the 
 divine inspiration of his poem a delusion. Wilkinson's 
 art is not utterly unconscious, for there is no uncensored 
 idea therein, which is bound to be occasionally, in some 
 dreams out of many, of the most virtuous man. This 
 commendable feature shows Wilkinson exercised judg- 
 ment, and this was a conscious artistic process. 
 
 Improvisation is one of the features that characterized 
 Persian and Arabic poetry. It is easier there than in 
 English because of the facility for rhyme in these 
 languages, and because the improvisers usually composed 
 in rhymed prose and were not hampered by metre. The 
 test of the great poet often was his ability to compose a 
 poem on the spur of the moment. Seemingly fabulous, 
 yet apparently true stories of improvisation feats by 
 Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised in 
 different metres, the Arabic poets in competition would 
 compose alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes 
 the poet would improvise a short poem on the basis of any 
 opening verse given to him. We remember the story of 
 Harun al Rashid who recited a line to Abu Nuwas who 
 composed a poem for him. The Arabian Nights is full of 
 improvised poems. Arabic critics always dealt- with im- 
 provisation as a feature of verse making, and this is an 
 argument to those who maintain that Arabic poetry was 
 conscious art and artificial. It was the ecstasy that un- 
 consciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought. 
 
 I would like, however, to make special reference to two 
 Englishmen, John Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very 
 
 * I do not however agree with Bergson, who does not believe 
 poetry can be composed in dreams at all.
 
 i88 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 little read, who left critical works expounding poetry from 
 a psychoanalytic point of view. Keble was Professor of 
 Poetry at Oxford, and the author of a most widely read 
 Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the 
 eighteen-thirties, in Latin. These were published in 1844 
 under the title of De Poeticae vi Medico. They were 
 translated into English for the first time a few years 
 ago. They have been praised by Cardinal Newman, 
 Justice Coleridge, Gladstone and Saintsbury. Dean 
 Church called them the most original and memorable 
 lectures on poetry that had ever been delivered at Oxford. 
 
 Keble defined poetry as "a kind of medicine divinely 
 bestowed upon man, which gives healing relief to secret 
 mental emotions, and yet without detriment to modest re- 
 serve, and yet, while giving scope to enthusiasm, rules it 
 with order and due control." He traces the origin of 
 poetry to the desire for personal relief of pent up emo- 
 tions in the individual and argues that this is the natural 
 conclusion from his definition. He divided poets into two 
 classes primary and secondary. In the first class he put 
 those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for 
 relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In 
 the second class he put imitators of the first and all others. 
 He had been meditating over these views for some time, 
 and they also appear in some of the essays which were 
 collected after his death under the title of Occasional 
 Papers and Reviews. In fact, in one of these essays he 
 used the Freudian word "repression," in referring to the 
 creation of poetry. 
 
 Keble's views are so sound and clear that one marvels 
 they were not taken up before Freud. It is true one will 
 find much that is obsolete in his lectures; one will be 
 amused by his Toryism, his over-emphasis on the religious 
 side of poetry, his academic and classic standards. He
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 189 
 
 however recognized that poetry was a sublimation of the 
 poet's surcharged emotions and that the poet healed him- 
 self, therapeutically treating himself by writing. He was 
 really developing at length Aristotle's famous definition 
 of tragedy as purging the audience of pity and fear. 
 Aristotle was referring however to the aesthetic purgation 
 of the feelings of the audience; Keble, like Freud later, 
 had in mind the poet's relief to himself. Poetry ministers 
 however to the overburdened mind both of the poet and the 
 reader. Both are relieved in finding expression for ideas 
 and emotions that are troubling them. 
 
 It was no doubt Keble's religious nature that made 
 him perceive this important fact. He noted that the 
 psalmists in the Bible sang to relieve themselves of their 
 griefs and he saw that prayer had a psychoanalytic effect 
 on people. Poetry is then the emotional expression of an 
 overcharged heart. But this does not necessarily mean 
 overcharged with grief. For it expresses people who are 
 overflowing with joy or any emotion. It covers what 
 Nietzsche called ecstasy, and especially the ecstasy of love 
 or sexual excitement. It covers the desire for beauty 
 which, as Nietzsche again saw, possessed a sexual con- 
 tagion in it. The happy poet in love desires to give vent 
 to his emotions by some form of expression, whether his 
 love is satisfied or not. And those who seek the origin 
 of poetry in religion must remember the close affiliations 
 that anthropologists have found between love and religion. 
 
 Keble perceived that the greatness of poetry lay in its 
 genuineness and seriousness, and that it was not merely a 
 metrical plaything. He perceived that it revealed the poet 
 himself and that its mission was high. 
 
 One must also admire his broadmindedness in treating 
 Lucretius, whom, in spite of his atheistic views, Keble 
 places among the primary poets. The modern reader
 
 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 might resent the placing of Sophocles and Theocritus 
 among the secondary poets ; nor does every personal poet 
 belong to the primary class, for minor poets are often 
 personal. Poets must, to be in the first class, voice a very 
 compelling emotion based on a very profound idea. 
 Burns and Heine, Shelley and Byron, Goethe and Ibsen, 
 Balzac and Tolstoy are primary poets, not only because 
 they are personal but because they are intellectual. 
 
 Keble anticipated the greatest of modern theories about 
 the nature of art, poetry and literature. He saw that art 
 was not play, as Schiller and Spenser believed, but an 
 expression necessary to relieve both poet and reader. Its 
 origin is not in play but in the desire to heal oneself and 
 create a reality out of a dream. Poetry is an attempt to 
 unburden oneself and adjust oneself to reality, which 
 it does by complaint or by building a dream castle. 
 
 But its sources are always repressions of emotions, 
 which in many cases have become unconscious. The best 
 exposition of the imagination from this point of view is 
 by E. S. Dallas, who published The Gay Science, in two 
 volumes, in 1866. He was a successful book reviewer 
 and had also written a book on Poetics, which David Mas- 
 son reviewed. In chapters in his greater book, on "The 
 Imagination," "The Hidden Soul," "The Play of 
 Thought" and "The Secrecy of Art," he anticipated many 
 of the modern discoveries of art in connection with the 
 unconscious. He saw that man leads a hidden inner life 
 of which he is unaware and that this life appears in his 
 art. You will find more on the nature of imagination 
 and poetry in Dallas's book than in many of the works on 
 taste that have survived. He carried Keble's ideas to 
 much further conclusions and saw that man unburdens 
 not only his conscious emotions, but even those of which 
 he is unconscious.
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 191 
 
 Dallas's four chapters at the end of his first volume 
 form one of the most striking contributions to the nature 
 of poetry and imagination that have ever been penned in 
 English. He finds imagination but another name for the 
 automatic action of the mind or any of its faculties. It 
 is unconscious memory, its logic is the logic of the hidden 
 soul, it is passion that works out of sight. Imagination 
 is the unconscious. It suggests not only the power of 
 figuring to ourselves the shows of sense, but also that of 
 imagery or the comparison of shows. It does not differ 
 from reason, but shows the process of reason working 
 automatically. It is play of thought, it is hidden soul. 
 It combines sensibility to images, wandering of the mind, 
 and finding of comparisons. Its function is not different 
 from reason, memory or. feeling, but its peculiarity is 
 that its work is done in secret automatically or uncon- 
 sciously. Imagination not only builds images, but it 
 creates types, it utters ideas, it speaks a natural language, 
 it voices emotions. 
 
 Even the old critic who separated verse poetry from 
 prose literature as a distinct branch of writing was always 
 suspicious that he was in error, for he knew both were the 
 products of creative imagination. Of the ancients, it was 
 only Aristotle who, defining poetry as imitation, saw that 
 he must include prose that "imitated" in his definition of 
 poetry. The thing that counted was the imitation or 
 imagination in determining poetry and not metre. 
 
 As imagination creates the literature of ecstasy, the 
 real subject of this book has been the function of the 
 imagination, but as the term, like poetry, has been so 
 much abused and misunderstood, the nature of them both 
 is studied by using other terms, like "ecstasy" and the 
 "unconscious." 
 
 I suppose that no word has been more used in connec-
 
 192 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 tion with poetry than the word imagination. And prob- 
 ably no word has been more vaguely and diversely em- 
 ployed. Every one agrees that literature in general must 
 be the function of the imagination. Many people when 
 they speak of imagination really mean nothing more than 
 the introduction of numerous figures of speech; others 
 confuse it with the sportive play of the author with super- 
 natural machinery in his work. To others imagination 
 suggests something that is opposed to the convictions of 
 the intellect and to the moral faculty. Even to-day 
 many people do not know that Aristotle used the term 
 "imitation" and Bacon the word "feigning" where we use 
 the word "imagination." These older terms, in the course 
 of evolution in meaning which words undergo, are used 
 by us no longer to represent poetic creation, or imagina- 
 tive work. 
 
 Every one quotes the famous lines of Shakespeare in 
 the fifth act of the Midsummer Night's Dream, and many 
 fail to see the exact meaning of the master who had a true 
 conception of the function of his art. First he recognizes 
 that the poet is "imagination all compact," and compares 
 him to the lunatic and the lover. Next he uses the word 
 frenzy in speaking of the poet's eye which rolls about and 
 glances over the universe, showing that he had the con- 
 ception of the ecstatic element in the poet's make-up and 
 work. The poet gives shape to the forms of unknown 
 things bodied forth by imagination, he gives a local habita- 
 tion and a name to airy nothing. Shakespeare recognizes 
 the fact that imagination is related to the dream when he 
 says that one of the tricks of imagination is that if it 
 apprehends a joy, it comprehends the bringer of that joy, 
 that is, it builds a dream castle where that joy is realized. 
 His use of the words "unknown things" in addition, as 
 the substance of imagination, shows that he understood
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 193 
 
 that the realm of the unconscious was the province of 
 the imagination. Hazlitt and Lowell among modern critics 
 correctly understood Shakespeare's meaning of imagina- 
 tion as identical with ecstasy.* 
 
 People to-day give vent to their emotions in prose con- 
 versation or in writing prose letters to friends or relatives. 
 Here we have the process that led to the creation of poetry 
 in earliest times. Poetry is the result of ecstasy, the out- 
 pouring of the imagination, the expression of the uncon- 
 scious. If instead of having confused it with song and 
 dancing the critics would have taken it in its real signifi- 
 cance as excited speech, we would have had less misunder- 
 standing about its nature. The lover of to-day who tells 
 his emotions to his love, or confides them to a friend, the 
 bereaved person who relates his grief at the death of a 
 loved one and tells of the virtues of the departed, are rude 
 poets expressing themselves in conversation in prose. 
 When they take the pen in hand and write a letter or keep 
 a diary, they become poets no less than the versifier who 
 puts his feelings down in patterned speech. 
 
 The greatness of the letter or diary as a poem depends 
 not only on the craftsmanship, but on the substance, on 
 the vividness or beauty or power with which the emotion 
 is depicted, on the degree of its capability of moving 
 others, and on the depth of the ideas therein. Similarly, 
 the person who is moved to prayer spontaneously by some 
 religious experience or private passion and utters his words 
 in a natural manner or reduces them to writing, is creating 
 poetry. The writers to-day of letters -and diaries in prose 
 are going through the same mechanism as all the earliest 
 
 * "Poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found 
 for those creations of the mind 'which ecstasy is very cunning 
 in.' " Hazlitt On Poetry. "The imaginative faculty (has) the 
 capabilities of ecstasy and possession." Lowell, "The Imagina- 
 tion." The Function of the Poet."
 
 194 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming 
 artificial and are imitating other verse writers and obeying 
 rules that they studied. 
 
 We have long been familiar with the saying that every 
 man is a poet, though he does not write what is known as 
 poetry. There is no psychical difference between the aver- 
 age man and the great poet. They both are subject to 
 emotions, have imagination, and both express their emo- 
 tions in some manner. The only difference between the 
 average man and the poet is that the poet takes the average 
 man's speech, elaborates it, and puts it into shape so that 
 it moves others. 
 
 Poetry is born in man's soul when his emotions are 
 aroused, and no emotions are aroused unless they are ex- 
 pressed in some way. Hence Croce's view is correct that 
 poetry is expression, if he means by expression emotional 
 and imaginative expression. People have too long been 
 under the impression that the poet was a different creature 
 from the rest of mankind, subject to a livelier imagination, 
 or intenser emotions. He is no different; on the con- 
 trary, there are many people who never wrote a line who 
 are more emotional and imaginative than many poets. The 
 process of the lover writing a letter involves the same 
 imaginative function as of the poet penning a love poem. 
 The prose expression of emotion is also poetry, but we 
 have hitherto given the name "poetry" only to the verse 
 literary composition. 
 
 There is great unanimity of opinion as to the connec- 
 tion of literary poetry in its origin with dance, music and 
 song, an opinion that is wrong nevertheless. In fact, 
 most phases of poetry neither have nor ever had anything 
 in common with dancing or music or song. 
 
 Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or 
 prose poets of the nineteenth century has little relation to
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 195 
 
 dancing, music or singing. Take the Shakespearean plays, 
 the tragedies of Hamlet or King Lear, where we have 
 philosophizing and descriptions of painful crises which 
 are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a .great 
 idea, nor dance to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and 
 Balzac are poets and yet they are far away from dancing, 
 singing or music. Though most good singers are poets, 
 one does not have to be a singer to be a poet. Then take 
 great impassioned oratory or beautiful emotional word 
 painting in prose or verse, or any idea bathed in feeling. 
 They may all be poetry and need not be in fact, by their 
 nature, are not related to dance, music and song. 
 
 An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's 
 Prelude, or a series of impassioned ideas like Lucretius's 
 Nature of Things, or a novel in verse like Aurora Leigh 
 is not related to song, yet it is poetry in parts. (This 
 does not mean that poetry is not the soul of music or 
 dancing.) 
 
 There is nothing more amusing than to read the innum- 
 erable and contradictory theories about the origin of 
 poetry. Many believe that the first poetry was pastoral 
 poetry, since the shepherd's life was, after hunting, the 
 first occupation appropriate and conducive to composing 
 poetry. Scaliger, Fontenelle and Pope endorsed this view. 
 Others believe that the original poetry was written to 
 express man's religious emotions; his prayers and hymns 
 to his gods are considered by many the first poetry. Again 
 the communistic needs of the clans are supposed to have 
 invited the poet to write. Celebration of tribal victories, 
 praise of heroes, incitement to martial courage and re- 
 venge, the virtues of the clan, were supposed to be the 
 first function of the poets. Epics and ballads are cited in 
 proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are thought 
 to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who
 
 ig6 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 were also magicians and hurled them as potent forces 
 against the enemy. Thomas Peacock believed eulogies 
 constituted the first poetry of the human race. Then the 
 proverb and parable have their devotees, as the first imagi- 
 native representation of the common thinking of the 
 earliest people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to 
 the use of verse patterns. One could go on naming vari- 
 ous theories that have been advanced as to what kind of 
 poetry is earliest; there is the poem which designates the 
 awakening of a moral conscience; there is the mythical 
 tale reciting the dream desires of the tribe; the song 
 chanted at various labors and toilings of the common peo- 
 ple; the chorus which served as an accompaniment to 
 holiday celebrations and nature worship; the chanting of 
 the first cantors or priests and the responses of the con- 
 gregation; there are the ecstatic utterances of the earliest 
 prophets, soothsayers and magicians; the admonitions of 
 counselors and legislators; the personal grievances and 
 complaints recited by those seeking redress before the 
 assembly or chief; marriage hymns, love poems and 
 elegies; all of these are separately cited as the original 
 springs from which later poetry developed. 
 
 The critics assume that man was originally possessed 
 of one emotion only, which he celebrated, or that only one 
 feeling predominated to which he gave vent. Now, as 
 a matter of fact, early man was subject to multifarious 
 emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, 
 in speech, later writing them down in prose and finally 
 in some verse pattern. Some of these emotions were 
 originally written down with rhythm and repetition. There 
 really was no state when poetry first began, for the 
 first spoken poetry is as early as human speech which has 
 always been used to express emotions. 
 
 Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 197 
 
 of spoken poetry. We cannot ignore the poetry of nations 
 which has been handed down by tradition and never been 
 reduced to writing. 
 
 The mental process of composing poetry to-day is no 
 different from what it ever was. Different people express 
 verbally the ranges of all the emotions and several indi- 
 viduals give us the written expression of these moods 
 in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or 
 reader. It is true, in early times the religious and martial 
 emotions were much expressed, but this does not prove that 
 religious or warlike feelings alone gave rise to the art of 
 poetry. Every emotion man felt gave rise to the art 
 of poetry. Poetry is the expression of all the emotions 
 and is born with speech and hence is universal expression 
 and the most ancient art we possess. 
 
 Poetry is, however, so often the expression of a per- 
 sonal complaint, the expression of a repression, that we 
 may. say that its real origin to-day, and at all times, is 
 the prose elegy. The person who pours out his griefs Is 
 psychologically the poet in action. Attempts have been 
 made by Greek scholars to show that both the epic and 
 the drama had their origin at public funerals where elegies 
 were recited instead of at the Dionysian rites. This is 
 very plausible. The pang of death was one of the causes 
 that led to the creation of poetry, especially since early 
 man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and 
 wild animals. One should add that the pangs of the loss 
 of one's mate, the grief resulting from being worsted in 
 the battle for the female, were other contributing causes 
 of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of poetry 
 was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament 
 of some kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry 
 ever since. Grief is the source of poetry. Note the num- 
 ber of wailing poems in Irish and Scotch literature where
 
 198 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 the death of a husband in war, or the loss of love, plays 
 a part. Much Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegiac. The 
 earliest poems from Egypt, China, Japan contain laments. 
 Savage literature is full of them. The hymn is really 
 a lament in the form of a plea. The dirge, the threnody, 
 the elegy, these constitute the bulk of much poetry, 
 ancient and modern. Burns's poems are chiefly dirges 
 of some kind. The dirge is most human and appealing 
 to us. Some of the most effective poetry in the Bible 
 are the cries of David in the Psalms and the dirges in 
 Lamentations. 
 
 The modern elegy whether in prose or verse, whether it 
 laments death or lost love, is the direct offspring of the 
 earliest savage cry of grief. The savage wailed in public 
 as the poet does. Our novelists still do unavoidably the 
 same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the 
 death of Levin's brother in Anna Karenina or Ivan 
 Ilyitch, he was actually bemoaning his own brother, whose 
 death made a lasting impression upon him. 
 
 Gummere thinks that the early poetry of man was com- 
 munal and that modern personal lyric poetry is a develop- 
 ment from communal poetry. Surely Professor Gummere 
 was aware that among the religious and communal poetry 
 of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine 
 elegy as The Wanderer and such a beautiful dream poem 
 as The Phoenix. It is a great mistake to think that per- 
 sonal poetry is of modern growth, dating from Villon. It 
 has been more developed in modern times. And then 
 there is much of the personal element in this so-called 
 communal poetry. The man who sang for his tribe in 
 ancient times felt with his tribe, and hence was both 
 communal and personal. 
 
 The research into the origins of poetry can be made in 
 the soul of any writer to-day. The same psychological
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 199 
 
 mechanisms that are at work in the composition of his 
 poem were at work in the production of the most crude 
 savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression 
 leading to the utterance of a complaint or the building of 
 a dream-world. Keble was one of the few critics who 
 considered the personal complaint the chief origin of 
 poetry. 
 
 Schopenhauer defined poetry as one of the arts whose 
 mission was to reveal an idea in the Platonic sense, that 
 is, the permanent essential forms of the world and all its 
 phenomena; art to him was a way of looking at things 
 independent of the principle of sufficient reason. In ac- 
 cordance with his philosophy he regards ideas as the ob- 
 jectivity of the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon 
 the different grades of the obj'ectivation of the will as 
 fixed. The result is that he considers the peculiar end 
 of all the fine arts "to elucidate the objectivation of will 
 at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows 
 itself as the dumb unconscious tendency of the mass in 
 accordance with laws, and yet already reveals a breach of 
 the unity of will with itself in a conflict between gravity 
 and rigidity," while tragedy "presents to us at the highest 
 grades of the objectivation of will this very conflict with 
 itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness." (World 
 as Will and Idea, V. I, p. 330.) 
 
 All this is saying in philosophical terms what we know 
 has been the mission of art, the portrayal of man defeated 
 in his blind and impotent desires. No one denies that 
 poetry must and always will portray man in such circum- 
 stances. Freud has restated the problem when he showed 
 that poets deal with their own repressions. 
 
 One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim 
 of art is to annihilate the will to live. He failed to see
 
 200 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 that much of this tragic literature acts as a relief to us 
 and makes us want to live all the more. 
 
 Dr. Arthur H. Fairchild deserves credit for assigning 
 high importance to poetry when he says that it is a means 
 of self-realization and is a biological necessity. In his 
 The Making of Poetry he expresses what is really the 
 psychoanalytical theory which sees in poetry a means of 
 freeing oneself of complexes, a way of restoring oneself 
 to a better state of mind, a cure for incipient neurosis. 
 When we are sad, the reading of sad poetry relieves us. 
 As Emerson said, "Poetry is the effort of man to in- 
 demnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." The 
 toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's 
 Germinal or Hauptmann's Weavers, or Sinclair's Jungle, 
 and his emotions are discharged. It is true he may be 
 driven to action, but the poet has nothing to do with that. 
 The lover, unhappy in his love, finds help in hearing a 
 poet express his own surcharged feelings resulting from 
 love troubles. The reader may by reading be prevented 
 from going mad. The great public which does not read 
 good literature finds relief in plays, moving pictures, 
 magazine stories or newspapers, all of which, while it is 
 not generally good poetry, may have the effect of a 
 catharsis on the public's rudely developed aesthetic sense. 
 
 Mankind hungers for poetry. Those who are unable to 
 appreciate it in higher form, resort to imitations and sub- 
 stitutes, which express their emotions and relieve them. 
 He who can read and enjoy the great masters of prose 
 and verse, or appreciate good music and painting, does not 
 have to resort to the political meeting or religious revivals 
 to have his emotions played on. Athletic contests like 
 baseball, football and prize fights usually help people to 
 express and relieve surcharged emotions. The love for 
 cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin
 
 EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 201 
 
 in a desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every 
 measure to give his emotions play. He reads newspapers 
 and trashy magazines, he likes to hear melodramas and 
 ranting orators, often because he has a love for emotional 
 excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the 
 best kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, 
 he is ignorant of the simplest principles of literary art ; he 
 cannot read poetry, yet he hungers for it. His dormant 
 instincts will even seek satisfaction in condemnation and 
 persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot 
 express by reading. 
 
 The creation and reading of poetry in prose or verse is 
 an achievement common to man alone of the animals. 
 He is not separated from them by moral or intellectual 
 faculties, for animals have these, but by his faculty to 
 create art and make others share enjoyment of them. It 
 may be that the spider and the bee derive aesthetic satis- 
 faction from contemplating the web or the hive they build, 
 or the bird gets artistic pleasure from the song it sings 
 or hears, or any animal may win sympathy from another 
 by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and 
 ideas in words in an endurable work of art so as to relieve 
 himself and move others. What separates man from ani- 
 mals is not then religion is not the religion of a dog 
 centered in his master as Anatole France has so quaintly 
 shown but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by 
 which I mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, 
 music, painting and sculpture. 
 
 And a life devoted to poetry is the best life we can 
 seek. Let a man have his necessities satisfied, and there 
 is no higher form of life than to enjoy and if possible to 
 create poetry. Poetry makes us want to live and gives us 
 zest in life. Life exists for sensations and we get our 
 sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment
 
 202 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 and creation of poetry. The unlettered savage has his 
 craving for poetry satisfied in his dancing, and war cries, 
 in religion and tribal customs. The child has it satisfied 
 in his toys and games. Adult man appeases his hunger for 
 poetry in diverse ways. Literature, art and music are so 
 far the highest forms of poetry we know, and in literature 
 I include philosophy or thought, in prose as well as verse. 
 
 Poetry acts as a necessary relief to us for emotions and 
 ideas that seek expression, and is hence more real than 
 any other form of life. 
 
 Our views of poetry from a psychoanalytic point of 
 view finds confirmation even in the Bible. One of the 
 leading prophets and the leading psalmists has each 
 told us in scorching words how he felt before he created. 
 Jeremiah says of God, "His word was in mine heart as a 
 burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with 
 forbearing, and I could not stay," Ch. 20, v. 9. David 
 also said, "My heart was hot within me, while I was 
 musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue," 
 Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made reso- 
 lutions to keep silent, but could not ; their choked emotions 
 burned like fire. Their disturbed souls sought relief by 
 expression. Thus the great prophecies and psalms had 
 a subjective origin and a homeopathic effect upon their 
 authors, and they have this effect on us to-day,
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 
 
 ORIENTAL poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the 
 Persians, is notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy 
 couched in intricate conventional forms. The Oriental 
 poems abound numerously in far-fetched figures of 
 speech, and are written in metres following definite laws 
 and are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued 
 in every line in poems of great length. In fact the greatest 
 historian of the Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), 
 defined poetry as effective discourse based on metaphor 
 and descriptions, divided into verses agreeing with one 
 another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a separate 
 idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A 
 poet was supposed to get many thousands of verses by 
 heart before practicing his art. One of the chapters in 
 Ibn Khaldun's famous Prolegomena * or introduction to 
 his history, Book of Examples, has a title stating that the 
 art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas. 
 
 But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was 
 taken for granted that ecstasy was the main object of 
 poetry. There is probably more ecstasy in the poetry of 
 the Arabs and Persians than in that of most other na- 
 tions, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds 
 of form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial 
 forms did not utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor 
 Edgar G. Browne in his scholarly Literary History of 
 
 * There is a French translation of the Prolegomena by Mac 
 Guckin de Slane. 
 
 203
 
 204 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Persia has devoted the first chapter of the second volume 
 to Persian metres and he calls attention to the conven- 
 tional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic 
 poets who were not without influence upon the Persians. 
 We to-day may accept the definition of poetry given in 
 the Four Discourses* (1162) of Nidhami I Arudi, for 
 though he also believed in the importance of the trappings 
 of verse, he had ecstasy primarily in mind. He defined 
 poetry thus: 
 
 Poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imagin- 
 ary propositions, and adopts the deductions, with the 
 result that he can make a little thing appear great and 
 a great thing small, or cause good to appear in the garb 
 of evil and evil in the garb of good. By acting on the 
 imagination, he excites the faculties of anger and con- 
 cupiscence in such a way that by his suggestion men's 
 temperaments become affected with exaltation or depres- 
 sion ; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of great 
 things in the order of the world. 
 
 What more effective definition could there be of the 
 utilitarian power of art to take man out of himself and 
 exalt him into a state of beneficial ecstasy? 
 
 Ibn Khaldun said: 
 
 Poetry is, of all the forms of discourses, that which 
 the Arabs regarded as the noblest; they also made it 
 the depository of their knowledge and their history, 
 the testimony which would attest their virtues and faults, 
 the store-house in which were found the greater part 
 of their scientific views and their maxims of wisdom. 
 The poetic faculty was as much deeply rooted in them 
 as in all the other faculties they possessed. 
 
 He continues, that they have handled poetry so well, 
 that one could deceive oneself and believe that this gift, 
 
 * Translated by Prof. Browne in the Journal of the Royal 
 Asiatic Society, 1899.
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 205 
 
 which is really an acquired art, was with them an innate 
 one. 
 
 These remarkable words of Ibn Khaldun will help us 
 to understand the famous saying that poetry was the 
 register of the Arabs. Never before nor since has 
 poetry been so interwoven with a nation's life. 
 The stories of the competitions for prizes for 
 composing poetry, of the happiness when a poet was 
 born, of the importance assumed by the discussion and 
 recitation of poetry among all classes, read to us like 
 myths. Yet the fact that poetry should be part of the life 
 of a passionate people who lived in the desert, free and 
 untrammeled, is not strange. The Arabs themselves at- 
 tribute also their great superiority in poetry to the beauty 
 of their language, especially as spoken by the Bedouins 
 in the desert. The great Arabian poet Abu Nuwas com- 
 pleted his education by sojourning a year among the 
 Bedouins. 
 
 Another factor enhancing their poetry and one not to 
 be ignored is that after 622 A.D. in Post-islamic times, 
 poetry was rewarded by gifts. Hence the eulogy grew 
 into prominence and the poets were fabulously rewarded 
 for their poems. This, of course, led to fulsome and cring- 
 ing eulogies. The caliph was the patron. When Mo- 
 hammed appeared it seemed that poetry would die out, but 
 it flourished more than ever. It was only after the Abbasid 
 caliphate was exterminated by the Mongol invasion (1258 
 A.D.) that poetry declined in Arabia to such an extent 
 that, as Ibn Khaldun says, no prominent man would deign 
 to devote himself to it. 
 
 Although the Arabs excelled in various kinds of poetry, 
 we think of them primarily as love poets. 
 
 The Arabs, as we gather from The Arabian Nights,
 
 206 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 were a people especially devoted to tenderness in love. 
 When the Arab was smitten with love he was a helpless 
 weeping child. There was one tribe, that of Azra, wherein 
 the victims were said to die of love. One poet said he 
 knew of thirty young men whom love sickness carried off. 
 In answer to a reproach for this weakness, one of the 
 tribe replied: "You would not talk like that if you had 
 seen the great black eyes of our women darting fire from 
 beneath the veil of their long lashes, if you had seen them 
 smile and their death gleaming between their brown lips." 
 (Stendhal: On Love, p. 218.) 
 
 Arabic poetry in the period before Islam between 500 
 A.D. and 622 A.D. did not consist of pure eroticism. 
 Satire, eulogy, elegy, revenge, martial feeling, chiefly 
 characterized it. Many poems were also devoted to the 
 praise of animals and the description of nature. The odes 
 or Qasidas, however, began with a love prelude, called 
 nasib, in which the poet dwelt on his love sorrows merely 
 to win the hearts of his hearers to his chief theme. One 
 of the best of these is that in the ode of Imru'ul Qays the 
 first and greatest of the seven poets of the Muallaqat. 
 
 Pure erotic poetry appeared after Islam with the luxury 
 that spread with the growth of wealth, but the nasib con- 
 tinued to be used, especially in eulogies. The poets still 
 wrote like the Pre-islamic poets instead of celebrating 
 Islam. The Umayyad Dynasty, which extended from 661 
 to 749 A.D., saw the birth of pure love poetry celebrated 
 not as introductory or episodic but purely for itself. The 
 love story of one of the Arabian erotic poets of the period, 
 Majnun, was celebrated by the great Persian poet, 
 Nidhami, who flourished in the twelfth century. His 
 Laila and Majnun has been translated into English by Mr. 
 Atkinson. The story was retold by many Persian and 
 Ottoman poets. Then there was Jamil, who was the lover
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 207 
 
 of Buthaina. These love poems by Majnun and Jamil 
 were of popular origin, and represented the spirit of the 
 people. There were many other love poets, while some 
 did not devote themselves exclusively to love. 
 
 The most celebrated, however, of the love poets was 
 the handsome wealthy Omar ibn Abi Rabia (643-719 
 A.D.). He was of the tribe of Koraish, the same tribe to 
 which Mohammed himself belonged. This tribe was 
 famous for many things, but not for poetry until Omar 
 took away the reproach. His poems were called a crime 
 against God, yet a cousin of the prophet memorized some 
 of them. The fullest account of him in English and of 
 his love affairs, with translations from a few of his poems, 
 appears in an essay by William G. Palgrave in Essays on 
 Eastern Questions. Omar was united in marriage to his 
 love Zeynab after a stormy courtship, opposed by her 
 people, but he had several love affairs. The best idea of 
 the sweetness and pathos of his love poetry is conveyed 
 without further comment by giving two translations made 
 by Mr. Palgrave. 
 
 Ah for the throes of a heart sorely wounded ! 
 
 Ah for the eyes that have smit me with madness! 
 
 Gently she moved in the calmness of beauty, 
 
 Moved as the bough to the light breeze of morning. 
 
 Dazzled my eyes as they gazed, till before me 
 
 All was a mist and confusion of figures. 
 
 Ne'er had I sought her, and ne'er had she sought me; 
 
 Fated the love, and the hour, and the meeting. 
 
 There I beheld her as she and her damsels 
 
 Paced 'twixt the temple and outer enclosure ; 
 
 Damsels the fairest, the loveliest, the gentlest, 
 
 Passing like slow- wending heifers at evening; 
 
 Ever surrounding with courtly observance 
 
 Her whom they honor, the peerless of women. 
 
 Then to a handmaid, the youngest, she whispered, 
 
 "Omar is near: let us mar his devotions.
 
 208 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Cross on his path that he needs may observe us ; 
 Give him a signal, my sister, demurely." 
 "Signals I gave, but he marked not or heeded," 
 Answered the damsel, and hasted to meet me. 
 Ah for that night by the vale of the sand-hills! 
 Ah for the dawn when in silence we parted! 
 He who the morn may awake to her kisses 
 Drinks from the cup of the blessed in heaven. 
 
 Ah ! where have they made my dwelling ? Far, how far, 
 
 from her, the loved one, 
 Since they drove me lone and parted to the sad sea-shore 
 
 of Aden. 
 Thou art mid the distant mountains ; and to each, the loved 
 
 and lover, 
 Nought is left but sad remembrance, and a share of aching 
 
 sorrow. 
 Hadst thou seen thy lover weeping by the sand-hills of 
 
 the ocean, 
 
 Thou hadst deemed him struck by madness: was it mad- 
 ness? was it love? 
 I may forget all else, but never shall I forget her as she 
 
 stood, 
 
 As I stood, that hour of parting ; heart to heart in speech- 
 less anguish; 
 Then she turned her to Thoreyya, to her sister, sadly 
 
 weeping ; 
 Coursed the tears down cheek and bosom, till her passion 
 
 found an utterance ; 
 "Tell him, sister, tell him ; yet be not as one that chides or 
 
 murmurs, 
 Why so long thy distant tarrying on the unlovely shores 
 
 of Yemen? 
 Is it sated ease detains thee, or the quest of wealth that 
 
 lures thee? 
 Tell me what the price they paid thee, that from Mecca 
 
 bought thy absence ?" 
 
 I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by 
 different translators, prose renderings by McGuckin de
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 209 
 
 Slane in Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary and by 
 Terrick Hamilton in the Romance of Antar, respectively, 
 and a verse translation by Lyall. 
 
 The following poem (Ibn Khallikan, V. 2, p. 330) ii 
 attributed to Ibn Alaamidi of the eleventh century: 
 
 Admire that passionate lover! he recalls to mind the 
 well protected park and sighs aloud ; he hears the call of 
 love and stops bewildered. The nightingales awaken the 
 trouble of his heart, and his pains, now redoubled, drive 
 all prudence from his mind. An ardent passion excites 
 his complaints ; sadness moves him to tears ; his old affec- 
 tions awake, but these were never dormant. His friends 
 say that his fortitude has failed; but the very mountain 
 of Yalamlan would groan, or sink oppressed, under such 
 a weight of love. Think not that compulsion will lead 
 him to forget her; willingly he accepted the burden of 
 love ; how then could he cast it off against his will ? 
 
 O Otba, faultless in thy charms! be indulgent, be 
 kind, for thy lover's sickness has reached its height. By 
 thee the willow of the hill was taught to wave its branches 
 with grace, when thy form, robed in beauty, first appeared 
 before it. Thou hast lent thy tender glances to the gazelles 
 of the desert, and therefore the fairest object to be seen 
 is the eye of the antelope. Sick with the pains of love, 
 bereft of sleep and confounded, I should never have out- 
 lived my nights, unless revived by the appearance of thy 
 favor, deceitful as it was. These four shall witness the 
 sincerity of my attachment : tears, melancholy, a mind de- 
 ranged, and care, my constant visitor; could Yazbul feel 
 this last ; it would become like as Suha. Some reproach 
 me for loving thee, but I am not to be reclaimed ; others 
 bid me forbear, but I heed them not. They tell thee that 
 I desire thee for thy beauty ; how very strange ! and where 
 is the beauty which is not an object of desire? For thee I 
 am the most loving of lovers ; none, I know, are like me 
 (in sincerity} or like thee in beauty. 
 
 The next poem represents one of the many outbursts 
 of Antar:
 
 210 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 O bird of the tamarisk ! thou hast rendered my sorrows 
 more poignant, thou hast redoubled my griefs. O bird 
 of the tamarisk! if thou invokest an absent friend for 
 whom thou art mourning, even then, O bird, is thy afflic- 
 tion like the distress I also feel? Augment my sorrows 
 and my lamentations ; aid me to weep till thou seest won- 
 ders from the discharge of my eyelids. Weep, too, from 
 the excesses that I endure. Fear not only guard the 
 trees from the breath of my burning sighs. Quit me not 
 till I die of love, the victim of passion of absence, and 
 separation. Fly, perhaps in the Hijaz thou mayest see 
 some one riding from Aalij to Nomani, wandering with 
 a damsel, she traversing wilds, and drowned in tears, 
 anxious for her native land. May God inspire thee, O 
 dove ! when thou truly sees her loaded camels. Announce 
 my death. Say, thou hast left him stretched on the earth, 
 and that his tears are exhausted, but that he weeps in 
 blood. Should the breeze ask thee whence thou art, say, 
 he is deprived of his heart and stupefied; he is in a 
 strange land, weeping for our departure, for the God of 
 heaven has struck him with affliction on account of his 
 beloved ; he is lying down like a tender bird, that vultures 
 and eagles have bereft of its young, that grieves in un- 
 ceasing plaints whilst its offspring are scattered over the 
 plain and the desert! 
 
 This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unex- 
 celled : 
 
 One Unnamed 
 Nay, ask on the sandy hill the ben-tree with spreading 
 
 boughs that stands mid her sisters, if I greeted thy 
 
 dwelling-place ; 
 And whether their shade looked down upon me at eventide 
 
 as there in my grief I stood, and that for my por- 
 tion chose: 
 And whether, at dawn still there, mine eyelids a burthen 
 
 bore of tears falling one by one, as pearls from a 
 
 broken string. 
 Yea, men long and yearn for Spring, the gladsome: but 
 
 as for me my longing and Spring art thou, my 
 
 yearning to gain thy grace ;
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 211 
 
 And men dread the deadly Drought that slays them : but 
 ' as for me my Drought is to know thee gone, my 
 
 life but a barren land! 
 And sooth, if I suffer when thou greet'st me with words 
 
 unkind, yet somewhat of joy it brings thou thinkest 
 
 on me at all. 
 So take thy delight that I stand serving with aching heart 
 
 and eyes bathed in tears lest thou shouldst sunder 
 
 thyself from me. 
 
 Arabic poetry may lack the light of intellectual outlook 
 that we find in our greatest English poets; it may be 
 deficient in the intensity of religious fervor characteristic 
 of the medieval Hebrew poets; it may fall short of the 
 high mystic strain attained by the Persians, but in the 
 fervor depicting love of passion they have not been sur- 
 passed. The greatest Persian lyric love poet, Hafiz, and 
 the greatest Turkish lyric love poet, Baqui, clearly were 
 under their influence. 
 
 Arabic poetry then is probably richer in love ecstasy 
 than that of any nation. This is due to the fact that they 
 are both a sensuous and at the same time deeply religious 
 people. They were strongly emotional, extremely vin- 
 dictive and extremely hospitable. They recorded their 
 emotions unabashed. They had the naivete of the child 
 and cried out their slightest pain ; they weep and bemoan 
 constantly. Antar, one of the poets of the Muallaqat and 
 the hero of the romance bearing his name, is more of a 
 child than Achilles. He is always sobbing and weeping 
 copiously ; he is the prototype of the medieval knight who 
 wept and declaimed because of absence of his mistress, 
 a feature of romance which Cervantes ably ridiculed in 
 Don Quixote. 
 
 Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, was 
 one of the first to point out the Arabic influence on chiv- 
 alry and romanticism. The battle as to the extent of
 
 212 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Arabic influence has been waged ever since, with, I be- 
 lieve, the victory to the Arabs. FitzMaurice Kelly, the 
 historian of Spanish Literature, emphasizing the Hebrew 
 influence, has resented the statement of the great Arabic 
 influence, but Robert Briffault in The Making of Hu- 
 manity has proved that this influence has been under- 
 estimated rather than exaggerated. 
 
 The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal 
 morality for both sexes women also were freer than in 
 Post-islamic times gave rise to romantic love. 
 
 Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its 
 tender or chivalrous phase, fashionable. True, this note 
 existed very sparingly among the Greeks and Romans in 
 Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic note was singularly 
 absent from European literature in the early medieval ages. 
 Men loved then as they did before and after, but the per- 
 sonal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme 
 for poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. 
 Critics now admit that intense love poetry of the Trouba- 
 dours appearing like an oasis in the barren literature of 
 the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs, the rhymes 
 as well as the themes being taken from the east. The 
 troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and 
 these two groups remain among the best composers of love 
 poetry Europe has had. 
 
 The troubadours also entered England, influencing its 
 poetry for nearly two centuries.* 
 
 The love element in the books of chivalry is due to 
 Arabic influence. Cervantes attributed his Don Quixote 
 to a Moorish author because the Moors wrote so many 
 romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love 
 poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic 
 
 * See W. H. Schofield's English Literature from the Rotnan 
 Conquest to Chaucer, pp. 67-71.
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 213 
 
 spirit. Wyatt and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly 
 influenced English literature. Thus Arabic poetry some- 
 what influenced English poetry. Similarly the Spanish 
 Cid shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic invasion 
 of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effec- 
 tively pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry 
 than Sismondi in his history of the literature of the South 
 of Europe. He begins the work with, after the introduc- 
 tion, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he especially rec- 
 ognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the 
 chivalric attitude towards women came from the Arabs. 
 The most sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great 
 influence of Mohammedan influence upon Europe is in 
 Samuel P. Scott's History of the Moorish Empire in 
 Spain. 
 
 It is said that even the French poem, the Chanson de 
 Roland, shows Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had 
 reached into France. 
 
 We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds 
 together love poems so remotely separated by time and 
 place as those of the medieval Persians, Arabs and Trou- 
 badours, and the modern English poets. 
 
 The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems 
 of Goethe, especially in a few in his West Eastern 
 Divan, influenced by his studies of Oriental literature 
 during the Napoleonic wars. He used his own experiences 
 with eastern names, but he never failed to produce litera- 
 ture of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an 
 influence on Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and 
 Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea of Locksley Hall 
 from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of the 
 Muallaqat; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his 
 Abt Vogler; George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat 
 was written to emulate the Arabian Nights.
 
 214 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most 
 famous elegies in Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a 
 Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder of her two brothers. 
 There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in the 
 notes to his translation of Hariri's Assemblies, V. i, pp. 
 387-391. In fact the elegy is more common among 
 early Pre-islamic poetry than the love poem. The 
 Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always 
 distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, 
 certainly the best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui 
 on the great Sultan Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb 
 in Ottoman Poetry. 
 
 The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that 
 poetry was originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an out- 
 burst of emotion due to repression. The cry of grief for 
 the dead in battle; that is the note in all early literature, 
 Occidental and Oriental. 
 
 The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a 
 definite utilitarian purpose. In early times satire was 
 one of the chief forms under which lyric poetry ap- 
 peared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and 
 his curses against them were supposed to be effective. 
 He was a soothsayer, a prophet, a magician. He voiced 
 not only the communistic feeling of the tribes, but his 
 personal emotions. Even down to our day the public 
 demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in 
 time of war. Goethe was criticized for refusing to write 
 against the French, for example, but he explained later to 
 Eckermann that he had no hatred towards the French. 
 In all wars there have been poets who have written against 
 the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an 
 inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the 
 famous Hymn of Hate by Lissauer in the late world war. 
 
 Nothing in literature illustrates more the belief in the
 
 magical power of poetry than the chapters in the Book of 
 Numbers dealing with the effort of the Moabite King 
 Balak to get Balaam to curse the children of Israel. Balak 
 believed that these curses would help him defeat the He- 
 brews. But instead Balaam blessed them, unwillingly, 
 saying that he could but utter the words God put in his 
 mouth, for the inspiration of the poet came to him always 
 from hidden forces. He reached to ecstasy every time 
 he spoke. 
 
 Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying 
 ecstasy, with all the stock themes of poetry, but especially 
 with love. 
 
 The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and 
 Pre-islamic Arabic poetry have been touched upon by 
 Dr. George A. Smith in his The Early Poetry of Israel 
 and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to 
 his translation of Hariri's Assemblies. Participators in 
 various military events themselves composed the poems in 
 which they told of their exploits, as you may note by 
 comparing the Muallaqat with the songs of Miriam and 
 Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as you 
 may see by comparing descriptions from the Psalms and 
 Job to that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the 
 Muallaqat. The poetry of both nations was often 
 nomadic, the product of the influences of the desert. Both 
 nations recorded personal emotions, springing from tribal 
 events. 
 
 There was also the same tendency in both nations to 
 utter ecstatically sententious and moral sayings. Though 
 only one poem in the Muallaqat, that by Zuhayr, really 
 moralizes, the later Arabic poets always loved to give 
 vent to reflections, proverbs, words of wisdom. Two of 
 the best Arabic poems of the kind are the improvisations 
 ol the vagabond Abu Zayd in the i ith and soth Assembly
 
 216 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 of Hariri's Assemblies. Two finer poems which moralize 
 without losing their poetic quality can scarcely be found 
 in Arabic literature. Most of the reflective poetry of 
 those two pessimistic, skeptic poets Abu 1'Atahiya and 
 Abu '1 Ala al Maarri are of this kind. The ecstatic po- 
 tentiality in reflection is seen in Job, Proverbs and Ec- 
 clesiastes. 
 
 The chief phase of Pre-islamic poetry that will not 
 appeal to us is in the great body of martial verse where 
 love of robbery and bloodshed, cruelty, revenge and 
 hatred are fostered. The Bedouins gave us a transcript 
 of their life. They dwelt in their vices with frankness, 
 but they tried to make virtues out of them. We cannot 
 blame them for not having our ideals of peace and it is 
 also doubtful if cruelties in their warfare were greater 
 than those in our own day. 
 
 The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting 
 in a way that even nauseates us. The martial spirit in 
 the Romance of Antar has made it less popular with us 
 than The Arabian Nights, for the former work is an 
 account of the fighting Arabs of the desert, and the latter 
 deals largely with the merchant Arabs of the city. Even 
 the great and beautiful Song of Vengeance by the Arab 
 Robin Hood, Ta abbata Sharran, of which we have a 
 second hand translation by Goethe, and fine verse versions 
 by R. A. Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs (pp. 
 98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of Arabic 
 Poetry, is very cruel. 
 
 Pre-islamic poetry reeks too much with the ecstasy of 
 delight to shed blood, in which tendency it of course dif- 
 fers little from the early poetry of other nations. How- 
 ever, the remarkable thing is that the hearts of these war- 
 riors possessed so many fine feelings. One of the noblest 
 descriptions of woman is by a companion of the brigand
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 217 
 
 Sharran, from the Mufaddaliyyat, a translation of which 
 appears on pages 81-82 of Lyall's volume. 
 
 The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently 
 translated and written about in English is Pre-islamic 
 poetry. In especial, the Mudlaqat, or the seven so- 
 called suspended poems, has been translated several times- 
 Sir William Jones made the first translation in prose in 
 the eighteenth century. In modern times we have had 
 several translations, one by Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. 
 There has been considerable support for the critical view 
 that these poems represent the highest achievement of 
 Arabic poetry, both among Arabs themselves and Aryan 
 critics. Imru'ul Qays, who flourished in the sixth century 
 A.D., is the most famous of the poets in the collection, 
 and is regarded by many as the greatest Arabian poet. 
 R. A. Nicholson and Clement Huart have given accounts 
 of the Muallaqat in their histories of Arabic Literature. 
 Professor Mackail has published in his Oxford Lectures 
 an essay on these odes and D. Noldeke has given us a full 
 study of them in the Encyclopedia Britannic a. I shall 
 not therefore dwell on them except to say that they were 
 collected in the eighth century by Hammad, and that most 
 of these poems deal with warriors rather than lovers, 
 though they contain love laments. 
 
 Nicholson and others regard the Abbasid period 
 as the great era of Arabic poets. This period* extended 
 from the accession of SafFah in 749 to the de- 
 struction of Bagdad by the Mongols in 1258. Abu Nu- 
 was, Abu '1 Atahiya, Mutanabbi and Abu '1 Ala al Maarri 
 are recognized by Nicholson as the Gods of Arabian poetry, 
 and we in our smug inordinate satisfaction with Aryan 
 poetry, have not even translated or paid attention to them- 
 Abu Nuwas, who flourished in the early part of the ninth 
 century, sang of love and wine and led a riotous and im-
 
 218 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 moral life, and is familiar to the reader of the Arabian 
 Nights as the jester of Harun al Rashid. His Divan 
 is to be found in German but not in English. Many 
 consider him the greatest of the Arabian poets. Abu '1 
 Atahiya is a pessimist and philosophical poet thinker. 
 He was imprisoned by Harun for having ceased writing 
 love poetry because he was hopelessly in love with a slave 
 girl. He described common emotions and used simple 
 language instead of far-fetched conceits. Mutanabbi in 
 the tenth century was the most famous of all the Arabian 
 poets, but he is criticized by many for his rhetoric and 
 ornament. He is the master of the grand style. Then we 
 have in the next century the great Abu '1 Ala al Maarri, 
 who has been called the predecessor of Omar Khayyam. 
 Bauerlein and Rihani have translated some of his verses 
 into English, and Bauerlein has also devoted a little volume 
 to him in The Wisdom of the East series. Abu '1 Ala is 
 the most modern of the Arabian poets. He was a free- 
 thinker and a pessimist and his Luzumiyyat reads like a 
 work of one of our rational poets. It attacks all religion 
 including Islam. His letters have been translated into 
 English by Professor Margoliouth.* 
 
 I have already several times mentioned the most 
 famous Arabic work next to the Koran, the Maqamat or 
 Assemblies, by Hariri (1054-1122). The tales have been 
 called immoral, but Abu Zayd interests us as Gil Bias 
 does. The work written in rhymed prose is most fasci- 
 nating reading. There is a complete translation of this 
 by T. Chenery and F. Steingass, 1867-1898. 
 
 The Arabian Nights is the best known Arabic produc- 
 tion to English speaking people and is full of poetry, 
 
 *The best account and translations of Abu '1 Ala are in 
 Nicholson's Studies in Islamic Poetry, recently published.
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 219 
 
 not only in the interspersed verses, but in the stories 
 themselves. 
 
 The Romance of Antar, from which I quoted a poem, is 
 said to have been written by a poet and philologist in the 
 reign of Harun al Rashid. The work is long and a 
 few abridged volumes were translated into English by 
 Terrick Hamilton in 1819 and 1820. 
 
 Then there is the great poet of Cordova, Ibn Zaydun 
 of the eleventh century, whose love for the princess 
 Wallada has made him celebrated. Here is a beautiful 
 love poem translated by Nicholson, Literary History of 
 the Arabs, pp. 425-426 : 
 
 To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here ; 
 The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear. 
 So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale, 
 In pity of my grief it seems to fail. 
 The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's 
 Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls. 
 Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime, 
 When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time, 
 We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue, 
 That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew. 
 Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep ; 
 They share my passion and with me they weep. 
 Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright, 
 Adding new lustre to Aurora's light; 
 And waked by morning beams, yet languid still, 
 The rival lotus doth his perfume spill. 
 All stirs in me the memory of that fire 
 Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire. 
 Had death come ere we parted, it had been 
 The best of all days in the world, I ween ; 
 And this poor heart, where thou art every thing, 
 Would not be fluttering now on passion's wing. 
 Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly, 
 Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee ! 
 O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed 
 A treasure ! O thou dearest, queenliest !
 
 220 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete 
 And ran an equal race with eager feet. 
 How true, how blameless was the love I bore, 
 Thou hast forgotten ; but I still adore ! 
 
 Nor have I sounded the depth of Arabian poetry. 
 Their greatest mystic poet was Umar Ibn ul Farid, who 
 flourished between 1181 and 1235, and whose work is 
 full of fervid and inspired poetry. 
 
 There is also Baha ad Din Zuhayr (d. 1258 A.D.), the 
 love poet of Egypt, whose complete poems have been 
 translated into English by Edward H. Palmer. 
 
 One of the great products of Arabic culture was its 
 work in literary criticism. While it is the fashion to-day 
 to lay much stress on the Italian and English studies of 
 Aristotle's Poetics in the Renaissance and Elizabethan 
 periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly on 
 poetry centuries before they read the Poetics. They 
 made a specialty of the literature called the Adab, or 
 belles lettres made up of criticism, quotation and rhetoric. 
 
 The criticism of poetry flourished among the Arabs in 
 the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. as a higher art than it 
 did in the sixteenth century among the Italians and Eng- 
 lish. Unfortunately none of these works have been trans- 
 lated; there is not even a reference to their influence in 
 Saintsbury's History of Criticism in Europe. The Arabs 
 had so many poets even in Pre-islamic times in the sixth 
 century that interest in preserving this poetry gave rise 
 later to anthologists who made collections. These an- 
 thologists commented on the poetical work and compared 
 it with that of later periods, and with that of their con- 
 temporaries. 
 
 Ibn Yunus in the early part of the tenth century trans- 
 lated Aristotle's Poetics into Arabic and the Europeans 
 learned of Aristotle's work from the Arabs several cen-
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 221 
 
 turies later. But the best Arabic works on the art of 
 poetry had, however, already been produced, presenting 
 original ideas gleaned from the study of the great Ara- 
 bian poets, and illustrated by examples from them. The 
 Arabic critics did not go to the Greek and Roman poems 
 (which they considered cold besides their own) as did the 
 Italians and English to study the nature of poetry. The 
 Arabs studied Greek science, medicine, and philosophy, 
 but not Greek poetry. Books on prosody and poetry ap- 
 peared after the founding of the system of Arabic meters 
 by Khalil b. Ahmad in the eighth century. There were 
 also the two celebrated schools of grammarians at Basra 
 and Kufa, soon to merge in the school of Bagdad. Never 
 before had the art of poetry and criticism flourished so 
 thrivingly and displayed a so generally high order as 
 among the Arabs in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries. A faint idea of the great number of Arabian 
 grammarians, critics and poets may be gleaned by perus- 
 ing the biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan, who 
 flourished in the thirteenth century. This work, which 
 contains only a partial list, has been compared to the Life 
 of Johnson, by Boswell (Lucas called him a Bagdad Bos- 
 well), and to Plutarch's Lives. 
 
 While Europe was plunged in ignorance and barbarism, 
 the great Arab poets and critics were achieving work that 
 belongs to the best ; but alas, the very names which rank 
 so high among them are unknown to most people. We 
 let them slumber in the difficult Arabic. We translate the 
 Chinese and Japanese poems probably more out of fad- 
 dish reasons than of a true love of their poetry, but we 
 ignore the Arabians. 
 
 The Arab example contradicts the famous platitude 
 that great epochs of creative literary work are not ages of 
 literary criticism. It is just the reverse. Good criticism
 
 222 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 is never so conspicuous as in ages of poetry, for there is 
 such interest in poetry as to provoke literary discussion, 
 then more so than ever. The best criticism of poetry ap- 
 peared in England in the great age of Wordsworth and 
 Byron. The Arabic grammarians and anthologists began 
 their work about the middle of the eighth century. In- 
 credible stories are told of their feats of memory for 
 verse, in the art of improvisation, in skill in manipulating 
 the language. They regarded the letters of their alphabet 
 as, human beings, just as the Hebrew Cabbalists treated 
 their alphabetical letters as angels. 
 
 To name even the most important of grammarians, 
 anthologists, philologists, critics of Arabia, is to call a 
 long list. Even historians, philosophers, scientists and 
 theologians entered the field of poetic criticism. Every 
 one quoted the poets, consequently poetry was bound up 
 not only with criticism but with Arabic thought. One 
 of the most quoted Arabic critics is Ibn Rashiq, of the 
 eleventh century, whose Umda or Pillar of the Art of 
 Poetry is mentioned often by Ibn Khaldun, the historian. 
 The latter also names four great Arabic writers of Adab, 
 Ibn Qutayba's Accomplishments of the Secretary (Ibn 
 Qutayba's Book of Poetry and Poets is more often cited 
 by other writers than the Accomplishments of the Secre- 
 tary}, Jahiz's Book of Eloquence and Exposition, al Mu- 
 barrad's Perfect, all of the ninth century, and in Spaii 
 Abu AH al Qali's Curious Notions, of the tenth centur) 
 whose Book of Dictations, however, is better known. 
 
 Among the writers on poetry in the manner of the 
 Arabs was the Hebrew poet and critic, Moses Ibn Ezra 
 author of the Conversations and Recollections, which was 
 the first study of the kind in Hebrew and the first criti- 
 cism of the poetry of the Bible from an aesthetic point of 
 view. Among Arab critics to whom he is indebted, be
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 223 
 
 sides the aforementioned Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Rashiq, 
 are the first book in Arabian Poetics proper, by the 
 Caliph, Ibn ul Mutazz, of the latter part of the ninth cen- 
 tury, a work by Qudama, and Ornaments of Conversa- 
 tion, by Al Hatimi, both of the tenth century. 
 
 There are many other works that were well known and 
 often cited in Arabic literary circles. I shall name only 
 Tha'alibi (died 1037), whose Solitaire of Time had many 
 continuations by later critics, and the famous Fihrist or 
 Index by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth century), one 
 of the sections of which deal with poetry. 
 
 Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of 
 Chaucer in the thirteenth century, devoted a number of 
 chapters to poetry in the introduction to his famous 
 history. 
 
 As a specimen of poetic criticism among the Arabs and 
 as a corrective to the general impression that ornament 
 and not ecstasy counted in Arabic poetry, I give the fol- 
 lowing English rendering from De Slane's French trans- 
 lation of Khaldun's Prolegomena: 
 
 One of the conditions imposed in the use of this art 
 (of ornament) is that the embellishments appear in the 
 piece quite naturally, without the author's labor in search- 
 ing for them and without his being anxious about the 
 effect that they should produce. If they present them- 
 selves naturally, there is nothing to object to them, for 
 not being purposely introduced, they save the subject the 
 fault of lapsing into barbarism ; but when one imposes 
 upon himself the task of painfully seeking these embel- 
 lishments, he is led to neglect the principles which rule the 
 combination of words, which are the foundation of the 
 discourse; this injures the principles of clearness of ex- 
 pression and causes the distinctness and precision which 
 ought to characterize the discourse, to disappear ; nothing 
 then remains but the embellishments. . . . Another con- 
 dition which should be observed in regard to the science
 
 224 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 of ornaments is to make a rare use of it; that the poet 
 apply it to two or three verses of a poem ; that will suffice 
 to give elegance and luster to the entire piece. The too 
 frequent use of embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Rashiq 
 and others have said. . . . All that we pointed out shows 
 that the artificial discourse (or style), when one writes it 
 laboriously and as a task, is inferior in merit to the nat- 
 ural discourse, for one neglects thereby too many funda- 
 mental principles of the art of speaking well. I leave it 
 to good taste to judge thereof. 
 
 The Arabs then regarded poetry as ecstatic utterances 
 emanating from the unconscious, embodying an idea, and 
 produced with little ornament. This despite their belief 
 that poetry must use the established forms of metre and 
 figures. It is unfortunate that even to the present day 
 these old forms are used, while Turkish literature has 
 only very recently been emancipated from them. Even 
 Arabian political articles are to-day written in rhymed 
 prose. But as Chenery said, the history of rhymed prose 
 is the history of Arabic literature. Rhyme is natural to 
 the Arabic language, whereas it is really foreign to the 
 English language. 
 
 If European civilization could free itself from the 
 prejudices against Semitic and Asiatic culture, and if the 
 universities, instead of studying minutely the barren 
 medieval literature of Europe before the Renaissance, 
 would give fuller courses in the poetry of the Arabs, 
 Hebrews, Persians and Turks, the exchange would be 
 salutary. The only Asiatic literature that Europe made 
 an attempt to study was that of the Hindus, and, as 
 has been suspected by many, this may have been done 
 chiefly out of Aryan vanity, to show that the earliest 
 culture was not Semitic but Aryan, and thus related to 
 European culture. But the fact remains that the poetry 
 of these four nations mentioned is far superior to that
 
 LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY 225 
 
 of medieval Europe. The two nations who were not 
 Semitic, the Persians and the Ottoman Turks, are almost 
 wholly imbued with the Semitic spirit. Persian poetry 
 grew out of Arabic poetry, just as Ottoman poetry de- 
 veloped from Persian poetry. There is nothing of the 
 Tartar spirit at all in Ottoman poetry, as Gibb has pointed 
 out. 
 
 That poetry is subjective, lyric, ecstatic, is best seen in 
 Oriental poetry. It will repay the lover of literature to 
 read such works as Browne's Literary History of Persia, 
 Gibb's History of Ottoman Poetry, and Nicholson's Lit- 
 erary History of the Arabs. As for Post-biblical poetry 
 of the Hebrews, so rich in patriotic and moral fervor, 
 and in hymns and elegies, there are articles in the Jewish 
 Encyclopedia, chapters in Graetz's History of the Jews 
 and works on various phases of it by numerous writers. 
 
 To the Oriental, poetry is ecstasy first and last, and this 
 is all the more remarkable since their poetry is so much 
 more ornate, artificial, figurative, and patterned than 
 European poetry. It is sensuous, passionate but not 
 "simple." Its chief inferiority to European poetry, how- 
 ever, springs from its lack in intellectual profundity, and 
 its severance (except in the Prophets of the Bible) from 
 problems of social justice.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 I HAVE not tried to present a theory of poetry, so much 
 as to point out certain features of a particular kind of 
 writing which I have called the literature of ecstasy. It 
 has developed that I really used the word ecstasy in the 
 same sense that the other critics have employed the terms 
 unconscious, imagination, poetry. I think I have shown 
 that the literature of ecstasy even when in prose is 
 synonymous with poetry as understood by Shakespeare 
 when he used "frenzy" and "things unknown" in refer- 
 ence to the poet. I have also, I hope, pointed out that an 
 ecstatic presentation of intellectual and moral ideas re- 
 sults often in a great poetic product. 
 
 I do not purpose to teach any one how to write poetry 
 or the literature of ecstasy. If my views have any value, 
 it lies in helping us recognize the literature of ecstasy. It is 
 in aiding us to eliminate much trivial, flimsy, unecstatic 
 free verse and regular verse from the sphere of poetry. 
 It lies in inducing us to include much emotional prose as 
 poetry. Since men, however, entertain so many diverse 
 views on life, morals, and social justice, it can never be 
 possible for critics to agree as to which literature of 
 ecstasy is the best, for its value is affected by the question 
 as to the truth of the ideals therein maintained. Every 
 one thinks that he can determine what are the merits of 
 a book. Those who have mastered the rules of prosody 
 are certain that they can judge the qualities of poetry. 
 But only those critics can recognize great poetry whose 
 moral, intellectual and aesthetic faculties are well balanced. 
 
 226
 
 CONCLUSION 227 
 
 It is true that the master of rules of prosody can tell 
 whether a verse poem follows the rules, he can perceive 
 whether the rhymes are false, whether the rhythm is 
 regular, even whether the figures are not far fetched and 
 whether the diction is good ; and a commonplace mind may 
 recognize the ordinary literature of ecstasy. But the 
 chief obstacle to recognizing poetry is that most people 
 derive their views as to what poetry is from rules formu- 
 lated from the writings of older poets. If the great poets 
 of the world had never used a patterned form, there would 
 have been no text books welding poetry and versification 
 together. A great poet not only creates his own forms 
 but displays individuality in the choice of views and 
 ideas. When he becomes recognized, new rules are 
 formulated from his work, and are even used as a fetter 
 to bind later poets and critics. 
 
 Anthologists have often been of great value in choos- 
 ing for us the literature of ecstasy as written by so-called 
 minor and popular poets who have taken no position in 
 the history of the world's literature. A poet, however, 
 is not great because he has succeeded in producing a few 
 pieces that belong truly to the literature of ecstasy. Nor 
 does a poet who once held a high place in the list of 
 poets and has subsequently lost it by the vicissitudes of 
 taste or circumstances or by the change in ideas, cease 
 being a poet to us if he has written poems that belong 
 to the literature of ecstasy. No one, for example, to-day 
 regards Jean Ingelow as a great poet, but the anthologists 
 who select her When Sparrows Build or High Tide on 
 the Coast of Lincolnshire, justly accept these poems as 
 poetry. It will astonish many people who will take the 
 trouble to go through the work of some so-called minor 
 poets, say Philip Bourke Marston, to find gems here and 
 there that properly are part of the literature of ecstasy.
 
 228 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 My theory, I hope, also helps us to determine when 
 certain branches of literature are poetry and when they 
 are not. For example, there has always been a dispute 
 as to whether oratory, comedy and satire are really po- 
 etry. There have been critics who would not admit that 
 these species of writing are properly poetry, even in 
 verse ; on the other hand, other critics have asserted that 
 they are poetry. 
 
 When, if ever, is oratory poetry? Whenever ecstasy 
 and not rhetoric characterizes it, when universal themes 
 of permanent interest and not arguments on a temporal 
 political or economic question are its substance, then 
 oratory is poetry. A plea for adherence to the princi- 
 ples of a political party, a speech about an economic 
 problem, is not as a rule poetry. But why are some of 
 Moses's speeches and the orations of the prophets po- 
 etry? Why is Mark Antony's verse funeral oration on 
 Caesar, poetry? Surely not because of the verse? Why 
 are some of Bossuet's funeral orations, or Thucydides's 
 speech in prose, poetry? All of these orations belong to 
 the domain of the literature of ecstasy, and hence are 
 poetry. 
 
 Nevertheless, oratory is usually hollow and bombastic. 
 The orator makes his appeal to men chiefly by rhetorical 
 expression of commonplaces. Eloquence and artifice 
 count here more than thought or art. The less intellect 
 the audience has the better does the orator succeed. Haz- 
 litt saw the limitations of oratory. It is the unthinking 
 man who is appealed to by theatrical effects. The orator 
 must be commonplace, he cannot deliver profound views. 
 Some of the great orations of the world's literature that 
 are poetry are those that were never really delivered but 
 composed by the historians, like the emotional speeches in 
 Thucydides and Tacitus. You can find poems in orations
 
 CONCLUSION 229 
 
 by Demosthenes and Cicero also, but Fourth of July ora- 
 tions are seldom poetry. Nor is the Congressional Record 
 an anthology of poetic masterpieces. In a footnote in his 
 book in aesthetics, The Critique of Judgment, Kant has 
 ably elucidated the situation. 
 
 I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given 
 me a pure gratification; whilst the reading of the best 
 discourse, whether of a Roman orator or of a modern 
 parliamentary speaker or of a preacher, has always been 
 mingled with an unpleasant feeling of disapprobation, of 
 a treacherous art, which means to move me in important 
 matters like machines to a judgment that must lose all 
 weight for them on quiet reflection. Readiness and ac- 
 curacy in speaking (which taken together constitute rhe- 
 toric) belong to beautiful art; but the art of the orator, 
 the art of availing one's self of the weaknesses of men 
 for one's own design (whether these be well meant or 
 even actually good, does not matter) is worthy of no 
 respect. 
 
 We must not confuse eloquence with poetry, though 
 there are numerous prose pieces which though eloquent 
 are yet poetry. Mere wordiness and grandiloquence may 
 sound like ecstasy yet lack that quality. 
 
 What can be said for famous passages like Burke's 
 sympathetic outburst for Marie Antoinette? I see no 
 reason why we should not call this poetry, though it is 
 not poetry of a high order. The objection to it is that 
 the orator's emotion is misdirected; he wastes sympathy 
 on a dead queen who was at the head of a pernicious 
 system, and ignores the miseries of the thousands of 
 poor Frenchmen. To that extent our appreciation of 
 it is limited. For even though Burke was right when he 
 lamented that the age of chivalry was gone, he did not 
 state that the time of exploitation of man was over, and
 
 230 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 the question of exploitation is probably more important 
 than that of chivalry. 
 
 There is affinity of oratory then to poetry, as 
 it is calculated to arouse the emotions of the audience. 
 But the political oration is usually not poetry, as it has 
 a tendency to the ephemeral. No one will deny, however, 
 that there is genuine prose poetry in orations by Demos- 
 thenes, Cicero, Burke, Webster and Sumner. 
 
 What is true of the oration, is also true of the sermon. 
 Sermons like those of Jeremy Taylor and Sterne contain 
 poetry; they have ecstasy. 
 
 There has also been considerable confusion as to how 
 much poetry exists in witty and humorous writings and 
 in comedy. In other words, the connection between po- 
 etry and tears is well established, but that between poetry 
 and laughter is vague. We may say that most of 
 the so-called humorous verse is not poetry at all, for the 
 merely funny does not merit the term poetry. Yet there 
 is poetry in the humorous writings of men like Mark 
 Twain and O. Henry, on account of the ecstatic effect 
 upon the reader. In reading them one occasionally 
 feels impelled to tears, while moved to laughter. A mere 
 witticism is not poetry, but it may have certain qualities, 
 such as a bit of wisdom conveying ecstasy, which makes 
 it poetry. The wit of Heine and Voltaire often belongs 
 to this class. When laughter is bound up with a pro- 
 found idea or emotion, the work expressing the laugh 
 becomes poetry. However, laughter that springs from 
 seeing horse-play or the mere ludicrous, is not poetry. 
 But the portrayals of Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Parson 
 Adams are poems. 
 
 Meredith has presented the case of the comic spirit 
 better than any one else. He says: "The comic spirit is 
 not hostile to the sweetest song fully poetic," and he
 
 CONCLUSION 231 
 
 shows how this spirit enters the work of Menander, Aris- 
 tophanes, Chaucer, Terence, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cer- 
 vantes, the Restoration Comedians, Pope, Moliere, Field- 
 ing, Smollett. These men were all poets; that is, they 
 gave us poems here and there in their work. 'Meredith 
 might have added Dickens's and his own work among 
 comic works that contain poetry. The writers of comedy 
 deal with feelings and emotions ; most of them were men 
 of intellect and deep feeling. 
 
 In a passage that is itself a poem, Meredith describes 
 the Comic spirit, which he recognized as allied to poetry. 
 And this in part is his delineation of it: 
 
 It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of the 
 faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in 
 an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting 
 smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round 
 satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted 
 by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be 
 of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sun- 
 light of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy 
 enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous ob- 
 servation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure 
 to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering 
 eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it ; 
 their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and 
 wherever they wax out of proportion, overblown, af- 
 fected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, 
 fantastically delicate ; whenever it sees them self-deceived 
 or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting 
 into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short- 
 sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at 
 variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten 
 but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to 
 another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; 
 are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually 
 or in the bulk the Spirit overhead will look humanely 
 malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by 
 volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
 
 232 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 Closely akin to the comic genius is that of satire. Again 
 satire is not poetry, except when presenting ideas and 
 evoking ecstasy. There used to be a distinct form of 
 verse poetry called the satire, but there is often more or 
 less satire in the works of novelists, prose dramatists and 
 essayists. We have as remnants of great ancient satire, 
 poems by Horace and Juvenal, tales by Apuleius and 
 Petronius and the prose dialogues of Lucian. 
 
 The great masters of satire in modern times have done 
 their work in prose and much of this is poetry. We think 
 of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Anatole France and Samuel 
 Butler. There is plenty of poetry in the Penguin Island 
 and Erewhon, for example. Modern satire is prone to be 
 more poetical than the ancient verse satire, being free 
 from coarseness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Sa- 
 tire is not mere ranting and cursing, but a keen and amus- 
 ing way of showing forth human follies. You find it in 
 writers as different as Thackeray and Bernard Shaw. 
 Some of the satire in Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street 
 is excellent poetry. 
 
 The highest form of satire in all the prose writers is 
 poetry, as much so as if put in the heroic couplets of 
 Pope or the ottava rima of Byron's Vision of Last Judg- 
 ment. 
 
 Satire is poetry when it is universal. Much of the old 
 Arabic poetry was satire and yet genuine poetry. Pope's 
 satires are poetry. Laf cadio Hearn has said a few words 
 on the subject that deserve quoting : 
 
 It is not because the satires (of Pope) were true pic- 
 tures or caricatures of any living person in particular, 
 but because they were true pictures of general types of 
 human weakness which have always existed, which exist 
 to-day and which will exist to-morrow. (Life and Lit' 
 erature, p. 286.)
 
 CONCLUSION 233 
 
 My theory of poetry as ecstasy also seeks to do away 
 with the tendency of criticism to identify poetry with the 
 figure of speech or trope. Even when it has lacked the 
 quality which fills the reader with ecstasy, the trope has 
 been called poetry just because it was a trope. Imagery 
 has been confused with imagination, and many critics 
 regard that as poetry which makes the most frequent use 
 of unusual figures of speech. As a result, some of the 
 figures of speech in poetry to-day are more artificial even 
 than those found in Oriental poetry. But no one can 
 take issue with the beautiful figures such as appear in 
 the Bible and in Dante, in Shelley and Keats, of which 
 the essence is a beautiful flight of the imagination that 
 fills us with ecstasy. But when freakish tropes take the 
 place of poetry then we ought to rebel. We like the 
 figure of speech introduced occasionally and naturally, 
 and we don't want the figure substituted for ideas and 
 emotions. 
 
 One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on 
 The Science of Poetry, to identify poetry with the figure 
 of speech. In spite of its eccentricities, and its attempt 
 at creation of new terms like tro-tempotentry, the author 
 recognizes that the critics confuse poetry with metre, 
 and that a prose writer like Robert Ingersoll was a poet. 
 Any one who had read Ingersoll's prose poems, and some 
 of his orations like the one on Liberty in Literature, will 
 recognize this. The mistake that Maxim makes is 
 to call poetry defiantly a science, and then to define it as 
 an art in which figures of speech count most. To create 
 figures of speech is an art. Maxim's definition of poetry 
 is "The expression of insensuous thought in sensuous 
 terms by artistic trope." This definition covers much of 
 ancient poetry, when man constantly used tropes or 
 figures of speech. It is also true that a vast body of the
 
 234 )THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 world's poetry is full of tropes like metaphors and sim- 
 iles. In fact even our free verse is full of them. But the 
 figure of speech is only one of the features that are often 
 present in poetry, and we may and do have the best poetry 
 without it. Its frequent use has become a nuisance; it 
 often atones for lack of ideas, it is often a sign of in- 
 sincerity in the poet, and it occasionally bespeaks a raving 
 imagination. The day of tropes in poetry is, in spite of 
 the Imagists, on the decline. You find none of them in 
 prose plays and very few in prose fiction. The trope was 
 an early adornment of poetry as rhythm was. It is not the 
 essence of poetry, though it often beautifies poetry. 
 
 The critics do not accept the book of Maxim's as a 
 true statement of the aims of poetry, but curiously enough 
 they have always followed the views in his book. They 
 have confused tropes, or figures of speech, or imagery 
 with imagination. In the past the older critics fell into 
 this error and when they spoke of imagination they were 
 really expatiating on imagery. 
 
 One of the best English critics on poetry, Leigh Hunt, 
 sinned in this direction. Like Wordsworth and Coler- 
 idge he made much of the distinction between imagination 
 and fancy. Wordsworth arranged his poems in an edi- 
 tion of his works according to this distinction. Leigh 
 Hunt got up an anthology called Imagination and Fancy, 
 in which he italicized the imaginative and the fanciful 
 passages, and to which he prefixed his famous essay on 
 "What is Poetry?" Here he gave his definitions of and 
 distinctions between imagination and fancy. Half the 
 essay is devoted really to identifying them with figures 
 of speech. The only difference between the two faculties 
 was that fancy was a lighter play of the imagination, a 
 distinction really utterly trivial. His work was needed 
 at a time when the influence of Pope still ruled, and
 
 CONCLUSION 235 
 
 people could not appreciate the rich figures in Shelley 
 and Keats. Pater called attention to the real distinction 
 between imagination and fancy which is "between higher 
 and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of 
 his work, and in his concentration of himself upon his 
 work." For all purposes, however, fancy may be in- 
 cluded under imagination. Imagery is not always imagi- 
 native, for many figures of speech have no ecstatic 
 quality. 
 
 The English poets who were regarded as most gifted 
 with the faculty of imagination under the old definition 
 were Milton and Spenser, chiefly for their bold use of 
 supernatural imagery. Homer and Dante were always 
 noted for their beautiful and effective similes, and they 
 were also the poets of the imagination par excellence. 
 The confusion of imagery with imagination resulted in 
 giving figures of speech a significance in determining the 
 nature of poetry that it did not merit. Puttenham's book 
 in the Elizabethan Age, The Arte of English Poesie, was 
 half employed with ornament or various figures. Oriental 
 poetry was especially figurative ; all Oriental books on rhet- 
 oric deal extensively with figures of speech. In short it 
 was taken for granted by all critics that poetry was imagery 
 or figures of speech, because poetry was a product of the 
 imagination, and imagination was confused with imagery- 
 It is true that it is the function of the imaginaton to com- 
 pare, but that does not mean that it is nothing more than 
 metaphor or simile. The tropes were more natural to 
 early man who personified inanimate things and always 
 saw resemblances to draw from in nature. To-day the 
 novelist or dramatist introduces his metaphor or simile 
 occasionally or naturally, as an ornamental touch to con- 
 vey his meaning better. Many modern versifiers identify 
 poetry with ornament and figures, and it is impossible for
 
 236 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 them to write a poem without a succession of figures. 
 The trope, like the rhythm, is supposed to be poetry. 
 Hunt's essay defines poetry as imaginative passion in 
 versification. He can conceive of no passion being poetry 
 unless presented in metre with figures of speech. His 
 essay is divided into two parts, the one dealing with 
 imagination, or rather imagery, the other with versifica- 
 tion. Great critic that he was, he gave us one of the 
 weakest definitions of poetry we have. 
 
 Any one who has read Tom Jones receives the im- 
 pression that the long similes Fielding introduced in the 
 Homeric manner were written half in jest of Homer, his 
 master. 
 
 Yet the similes of the epic poets are poetry because they 
 belong to the literature of ecstasy. If the trope arouses 
 our emotions it is poetry not because it is an ornament but 
 because it touches our unconscious souls. How many 
 tropes do you find in the prose plays of Ibsen or the 
 novels of Balzac? The ecstasy manages to get conveyed 
 without their use. It was the writers of the Romantic 
 School who made the figure of speech so prominent. 
 These writers who sought that poetry become natural, 
 did much to make it artificial. The reason that such great 
 poets as Keats and Shelley are caviare to the public is 
 that they are rich in tropes. The eighteenth century poets 
 were said to be destitute of imagination chiefly because 
 they did not make frequent use of the metaphor. The 
 sport of critics was to make fun of the peculiar figures of 
 earlier poets. We recall Johnson's dissecting (often with 
 justice) of Cowley's poems. The eighteenth century was 
 right in one respect ; in their extreme unimaginativeness, 
 they also avoided distorted imagery. Many nineteenth 
 century poets made it a rule never to call a thing by its 
 proper name, but by some epithet containing a metaphor.
 
 CONCLUSION 237 
 
 The practice is still persisted in by many of our poets, 
 and epithet-making is one of the functions of many poets- 
 Even prose writers like Carlyle were especially noted for 
 it, but his epithets were often truly poetry. 
 
 I do not think that poetry then should be exclusively 
 identified with tropes. Take a much-praised, in my opin- 
 ion over-praised sonnet of Keats, On Reading Chapman's 
 Homer. The whole idea of this poem is in the comparing 
 his first discovery of Homer to the feelings of the man 
 who discovers a new planet, and to those of the discov- 
 erer of the Pacific Ocean. (He confused Cortes with 
 Balboa, but that is no matter.) Keats conveys to us his 
 idea by two similes. But can this poem compare with 
 such other sonnets of his where he lays bare his inmost 
 emotions, where the figures of speech are not the poems 
 as here, but merely come in incidentally; where he has a 
 profound idea, emerging as the result of a great passion ? 
 
 A trope then is poetry only when arousing ecstasy; 
 such poetry is not of the highest order. 
 
 For many centuries also, that alone was considered 
 imaginative literature which introduced the supernatural 
 or the allegory. Every student is aware how much these 
 two elements figure in medieval poetry. All recipes for 
 writing poems in those days contained provisions about 
 the use of the supernatural and allegory. It did not dawn 
 on critics that these could be dispensed with in a great 
 poetical work. Cervantes laughed away the use of the 
 supernatural, while the eighteenth century realistic novel 
 did away with the use of allegory as a means of telling a 
 story. Nothing better than Poe's remarks has been said 
 against the allegory as a form of literary expression. Yet 
 the artificial supernatural agents of Ariosto and the blood- 
 less types in the Faerie Queene were held to be the truest 
 creations of imagination. The vicious practices of great
 
 238 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 geniuses, often due to the examples of their age, are in- 
 strumental in creating misunderstanding as to what po- 
 etry is, on account of the inability of critics to praise 
 them for their real beauties. Often the passages that 
 have been praised in Homer, Dante, Virgil, Milton, Spen- 
 ser, Ariosto, are not the ones where the ecstasy was finest, 
 but those where the "imaginative" powers of the poet 
 were thought to be the best seen, in the supernatural and 
 allegorical portions. Yet who can doubt that the great- 
 ness of Milton is more apparent when he talks of his 
 blindness than when he gives us the description of Lucifer 
 with the many artificial figures? Who prefers the absurd 
 descriptions of the monsters in Dante's Inferno to the 
 passages where he touches on his own sorrows ? 
 
 Another misapprehension about the nature of poetry 
 lies in identifying poetry with beauty. Poetry does not 
 necessarily deal with the conception of beauty as under- 
 stood by the public or by the aestheticians, though the de- 
 scribing of beautiful objects and scenes is often one of its 
 most important themes. Poetry is very little connected 
 with the science of aesthetics, for you may know all about 
 the nature and laws of beauty, the effect of beauty upon 
 the nature of man, the cause of his love for beauty, and 
 yet you may not be able to make a great poem. Croce is 
 as much mistaken as the old aestheticians when he as- 
 sumes one must study the science of aesthetics to appre- 
 ciate poetry. 
 
 Pater dealt a death blow to the theory that aes- 
 thetic, or the science of abstract beauty, helps us to ap- 
 preciate poetry. The critic who judges a poem need 
 know nothing about abstract beauty, or theories of es- 
 thetic emotion. There is little of value to be given us by 
 the aesthetic treatises to appreciate a play of Shakespeare 
 or Ibsen or a novel of Balzac or Dickens. Even poets like
 
 CONCLUSION 239 
 
 Goethe, Schiller and Lessing became absorbed in aestheti- 
 cal problems, but their novels, poems and plays were 
 written by putting out of mind metaphysical disquisitions- 
 How are you enabled to appreciate a poem by knowing 
 Kant's erroneous theory that the appreciation of beauty 
 is impersonal and disinterested ? 
 
 Pater in his Renaissance took the position that poetry 
 has a personal message for us, an effect on us individu- 
 ally. We cannot learn this effect by following metaphysi- 
 cal discourses on the relation of beauty to truth or ex- 
 perience. In his Appreciations in the essay on "Style" 
 Pater identifies beauty with expression, just as Croce did 
 after him, and Lessing and Winckelmann before him. 
 "All beauty," wrote Pater, "is in the long run only fullness 
 of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommo- 
 dation of speech to that vision within." Here we have 
 Croce's conception of beauty, the word defined as it is 
 being understood to-day. It is in this sense only, the 
 sense of the most adequate expression of emotion, that the 
 word beauty is the same as poetry, or literature of 
 ecstasy. 
 
 Formerly treatises were written about curved lines, 
 elegant diction, etc., on the theory that beauty was the 
 subject of art. But a peasant's description in slang of 
 his emotions, an author's description of a corpse that is 
 rotting, or of a woman giving birth to a child, or of a 
 man going mad, or of a hideous degenerate crime, are also 
 beautiful, for since expression is beauty, the narration or 
 description of the ugly is a work of art. The word beauty 
 in its popular sense no longer has aesthetic significance. 
 Even when it was really believed that art dealt with beau- 
 tiful objects and deeds, the aesthetician had to admit that 
 there was nothing beautiful in tragedies. Nor does beauty 
 mean elegant expression. Many stories and poems in slang
 
 240 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 and dialect belong to the literature of beauty. The ex- 
 pression of emotions, the delineation of ideas, the draw- 
 ing of characters is beauty, if effectively done. The 
 reader need not have what the old aestheticians called 
 "taste"; he must only respond sympathetically to the 
 ecstasy of the author. 
 
 I have made no attempt to set confines to poetry, for no 
 two people will ever agree as to whether a literary per- 
 formance has sufficient ecstasy or whether the ecstasy is 
 of a high strain to entitle it to be called poetry, but I be- 
 lieve all will agree that ecstasy is necessary. 
 
 I believe, however, that many authoritative works and 
 essays on Poetry, from Aristotle to our own day, are 
 obsolete. I shall mention only Watts-Dunton's article on 
 Poetry in the Encyclopedia Britannica which has fur- 
 nished modern critics with many of their ideas. The 
 article is beyond question one of the most interesting 
 produced in England in many years. Watts-Dunton has 
 a true conception of poetry when he calls it the product 
 of inspiration or concrete and artistic expression of the 
 human mind in emotional language. He believes, how- 
 ever, versification is necessary to all poetry. He also 
 makes too much of the divisions of poetry into the vari- 
 ous orders, like epic, lyric, drama, an artificial division 
 adopted by all critics from Aristotle. Watts-Dunton's 
 divisions of poets into those with an absolute or personal 
 vision and those with a relative vision, is arbitrary and 
 confused. All poets are personal, and even when they 
 depict other people's emotions objectively, the product is 
 personal because touched with the creator's personality. 
 He is also too much under the influence of Hegel's 
 Aesthetics. 
 
 Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of im- 
 passioned prose or its right to be called poetry. He once
 
 CONCLUSION 241 
 
 said to William Michael Rossetti that the latter's reputa- 
 tion as a critic would soon vanish because of his admira- 
 tion for Whitman, whom he himself detested. He is 
 blamed with having done much to quench the poetic fire 
 of Swinburne's muse, for whose changed attitude to- 
 wards Whitman he also was responsible. He had no 
 sympathy with the poetry that had a social message and 
 he did not understand its effect as a catharsis. Watts- 
 Dunton cannot remain our leading authority on poetry. 
 His essay belongs to the extinct class of Ars Poetica, with 
 Boileau and Opitz. 
 
 Ecstasy is then the substance of poetry, and there are 
 all kinds of ecstasy, from a very exalted to a primitive 
 order. It includes the scientist's or philosopher's passion 
 for knowledge, the idealist's devotion to a cause. It com- 
 prehends the warrior's madness for battle, the patriot's 
 ardor to die for his country, and man's submission to his 
 God. Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved 
 by reading a great work of art. It sweeps every one 
 who is in the throes of ambition. Those who enjoy na- 
 ture, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy. 
 Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or 
 rejoicing in the emergence of dear ones from illness or 
 danger, those who take pride in watching their children 
 grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of friendship, 
 are all in ecstasy. 
 
 Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better 
 things, every one who fulminates against ugliness and 
 wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are you in a state of 
 rapture because your love is returned, or in one of de- 
 spair, because it is denied ? you are in ecstasy. Are you 
 brooding over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you 
 moved by the spectacle of grief? you are in ecstasy. 
 Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a bad sense.
 
 242 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant 
 emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol 
 aroused. 
 
 The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion 
 with God, the lunatic who thinks demons are prodding 
 him, the spiritualist who imagines he talks to his dead 
 son, the child who is in communication with animals and 
 supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of 
 ecstasy. 
 
 It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of 
 ecstasy to choose, what attitude to take towards it and in 
 what words and form to convey it. 
 
 The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware 
 of the fact. For the great bulk of the poetry read by the 
 people is the prose fiction that they find exciting and 
 stimulating. This fiction is usually of a very low order. 
 Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple 
 and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situa- 
 tions in novels, in the best passages of short stories. 
 Prose poetry is the most democratic and natural poetry, 
 at least in form, and you can rely on the public to ap- 
 preciate some of it. 
 
 The poetry in Dickens is democratic poetry. The 
 drawing of such characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe 
 Gargery, wherein he shows the noble virtues residing in 
 common people, is poetry that the public can appreciate. 
 
 Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for 
 when it deals with ideas beyond the people, such as you 
 find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it does not succeed in evoking 
 the intended response and sympathy from the public, 
 which rejects such ideas. 
 
 So when we hear people say that they do not care for 
 poetry we see that they mean they have an aversion to 
 verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm. But they will weep
 
 CONCLUSION 243 
 
 as they read of the death of Little Nell and be moved by 
 the sorrows of Anna Karenma, and be stirred by the 
 tragedy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Like the gentle- 
 man in Moliere's play who spoke prose all his life with- 
 out knowing it, these readers are fond of poetry without 
 being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature 
 appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is 
 touched by the ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or 
 beautiful prose literature. Here the poetic is divested of 
 metaphors and rhythm and trappings and verbal tricks; 
 here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by affectation. 
 You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in 
 Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord, where the great orator, 
 desolate because of the loss of his son and embittered 
 by criticism for accepting a pension, bares the state of 
 his soul. 
 
 The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those 
 old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered upon me. 
 I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, 
 and lie prostrate on the earth. ... I am alone. I have 
 none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I 
 greatly deceive myself if in this hard season I would give 
 a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and 
 honor in the world. ... I live in an inverted order. 
 They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before 
 me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in 
 the place of ancestors. 
 
 You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in 
 his Confessions his feelings as he lay on his mattress 
 grave, no less than when you peruse his love woes in 
 verse. 
 
 What does it avail me that at banquets my health is 
 pledged in the choicest wines and drunk from golden 
 goblets, when I, myself, severed from all that makes life
 
 244 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 pleasant may only wet my lips with an insipid emotion? 
 What does it avail me that enthusiastic youths and maid- 
 ens crown my marble bust with laurel wreaths, if mean- 
 while the shriveled fingers of an aged nurse press a 
 blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my actual body. 
 What does it avail me that all the roses of Shiraz so ten- 
 derly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two 
 thousand miles away from the Rue d' Amsterdam, where, 
 in the dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to 
 smell, unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins. 
 
 When you read Hardy's Return of the Native and 
 reach the part where Yeobright reproaches his wife 
 Eustacia for causing the death of his mother by closing 
 the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover, you 
 are in the midst of poetry. 
 
 Call her to mind think of her what goodness there 
 was in her : it showed in every line of her face ! . . . O ! 
 couldn't you see what was best for you, but you must 
 bring a curse upon me, and agony and death upon her, 
 by doing that cruel deed ! . . . Eustacia, didn't any ten- 
 der thought of your own mother lead you to think of 
 being gentle to mine at such a time of weariness? Did 
 not one grain of pity enter your heart as she turned 
 away? 
 
 If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of 
 the following passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon- 
 Desire," from the volume Exotics and Retrospectives, 
 you delight in poetry. 
 
 And meantime those old savage sympathies with sav- 
 age nature that spring from the deepest sources of our 
 being . . . would seem destined to sublime at last into 
 forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to 
 infinitude. 
 
 Have you never thought about those immemorial feel- 
 ings ? Have you never, when looking at some great burn-
 
 CONCLUSION 245 
 
 ing, found yourself exulting without remorse in the 
 triumph and glory of fire? never unconsciously coveted 
 the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking 
 force of its imponderable touch? never delighted in the 
 furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories, 
 the ravening and bickering of its dragons, the mon- 
 strosity of its archings, the ghostly soaring and flapping 
 of its spires? Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing 
 in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost, to 
 scream around the peaks with it, to sweep the face of 
 the world with it ? Or, watching the lifting, the gather- 
 ing, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, 
 have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion, 
 no longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in 
 that mighty shout? 
 
 I should like to go on quoting passages from other 
 books to show the reader that if he likes them he is em- 
 phatically a lover of poetry. I might have given one of 
 the great prose poems in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zara- 
 thustra or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's 
 novel Salammbo. I might have presented for the edifica- 
 tion of the "hater" of poetry the renowned description of 
 the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay on Leonardo da 
 Vinci in The Renaissance. I could have added Carlyle's 
 reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from Sartor 
 Resartus, Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in 
 The Florentine Nights, George Brandes's apostrophe to 
 Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his book on Shake- 
 speare, Dickens' description of the tower in Chimes, or 
 Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the Wild 
 Ass's Skin. 
 
 That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any 
 profound idea is ecstatically or passionately stated. That 
 is poetry where man gives utterance to any sorrow or 
 desolation, or where he shouts out his gladness because he 
 finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks of
 
 246 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 the pains or thrills of love; when he shows compassion 
 for the miseries of his fellow-men. You find poetry 
 wherever man is depicted in a spirit of self-sacrifice for 
 an idea or a person he loves ; or where he is shown pur- 
 suing an ideal or ambition. Heroism is poetry; philan- 
 thropy is poetry ; self-development is poetry. Pictures of 
 striking scenes; portrayals of interesting events; conflicts 
 between duties; delineations of tragic situations; toler- 
 ance for human frailties; anger at injustice, admonition 
 for follies, chidings or outbursts against stupidity; cries 
 of helplessness; all of these in artistic form become 
 poems. Accounts of cruelty, barbarism, madness, horror, 
 wicked deeds or abnormal or supernormal conduct, if 
 well described become poetical, for poetry need not point 
 a conventional moral. Hence villainy, immorality, crime, 
 may be so artistically pictured that our emotions are 
 worked upon and though our moral sense is shocked we 
 are held spellbound in witnessing these malign forces in 
 nature. 
 
 I plead then that ecstasy, and not rhythm, should char- 
 acterize much of our literature ; and I seek to show that 
 poetry is not a department of literature but a spirit that 
 permeates the best writing even in prose. Our entire 
 attitude in estimating what is poetry will be changed, for 
 the world's emotional prose literature will be taken into 
 its domain. And the importance of rhythm in making 
 verse will be a thing of the past and genuine emotion will 
 receive its right name. 
 
 I also hope that a higher valuation will be given to 
 literature which shows an interest in the working classes 
 and seeks social justice. I do not, however, assert that 
 the literature of pure rational propaganda would become 
 poetry, or that the writings of men who attach themselves 
 to certain political or economical theories would be great
 
 CONCLUSION 247 
 
 by virtue of the adherence to a particular theory. But 
 there is a tendency to decry a writer when he shows an 
 interest in social problems and tells the world that some- 
 thing is rotten in Denmark. 
 
 There are occasionally great literary products that are 
 to be found often in radical and obscure papers that be- 
 long to the literature of the ecstasy of social justice. 
 These would have never been accepted by the academic 
 or capitalistic bourgeois press, any more than would some 
 of the older prophecies have been accepted had they been 
 submitted as unrequested contributions to our magazine 
 editors. Many,of those compositions depend for literary 
 value on universal feeling, and make no appeal to party 
 feeling or economical theory, and they can be appreciated 
 by people who seek poetry. 
 
 The reader will observe then that not all species of 
 ecstasy belong to the high order of literature. But the skill 
 of the artist may elevate the lower order of ecstasy to that 
 of a higher plane, and the amateurishness of the author 
 may deflect what might be poetry of a higher degree to that 
 of a commonplace order. Stories of adventure, abound- 
 ing in false sentiment, misleading examples and unreal 
 situations, are hardly poetry or good literature of ecstasy. 
 But Stevenson transmutes such a tale into excellent poetry 
 in Treasure Island. Those who have read the pathological 
 outbursts of religio-maniacs, rife in outworn dogma, and 
 seething with morbid emotions, will not maintain that 
 such productions are poetry of a high order, though the 
 ecstatic element is present in marked degree. Yet a St. 
 Augustine occasionally makes good poetry out of such 
 material. 
 
 In general, that is not great poetry or literature of 
 ecstasy which appeals to the rude primitive emotions. 
 When the purpose of a literary work is to wean us from
 
 248 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 finer feelings, to make us sympathize with cruelty, to 
 paralyze the sympathetic emotions within us, and to kill 
 all feelings rooted in love, pity, service, justice and kind- 
 ness, it is not of a great order of poetry. Those works 
 in whole or part that fan the martial spirit within us, and 
 take hold of us as with an hypnotic sway of the hand, and 
 make us seek to murder our fellow men, and to arouse 
 the lust for blood in us, cannot be great works. No liter- 
 ature that is heartless or brutal, or confuses an appeal to 
 the murderous instincts with real love of country, or love 
 of liberty, with self-sacrifice for justice or loved ones, 
 can be valuable to us either practically or aesthetically. 
 No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters unrea- 
 sonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful vic- 
 tories, or crowns with the garland of a hero the mere 
 warrior who is a warrior for the pure delight of killing, 
 is really of the higher type of literature of ecstasy. It is 
 this martial phase that makes most of the early literature 
 of all nations valuable only in parts ; in those parts where 
 the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt 
 with, and where the more genial emotions are crystallized. 
 So many theories of poetry are futile, because they are 
 based on studies primarily of the epic poems of the na- 
 tions, and it is these epic poems that mingle the most 
 impoverished and base poetry with that of a fine quality. 
 Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a 
 high order which is purely tribal or clannish in feeling; 
 nor when chauvinistic and full of hatred for all other 
 peoples. This does not mean that poetry must not smack 
 of the soil, and that it cannot preserve a sane patriotic 
 and national feeling, and worship a culture inherent in a 
 people. But when the ecstasy descends to the kind which 
 kills individualism under 'the pretense of encouraging it, 
 when it is hostile to the stranger and the original thinker,
 
 CONCLUSION 249 
 
 when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts as re- 
 gards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and per- 
 nicious. 
 
 Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a 
 high order which in its mystic quality eludes all com- 
 promises with reason, and borders on absurdity or is 
 pathological. When poetry seeks salvation in apparent 
 madness, and attaches itself to faith in the impossible, and 
 sees distorted visions, and creates a maniac's world of un- 
 questionably inverted order of hell-fire and brimstone, and 
 makes outrageous and unjust demands on human nature 
 it is of a low order. Nor is an unwarranted asceticism in 
 poetry calculated to raise its tone. 
 
 It is vain to enumerate the various ecstasies of a low 
 order, that of the literature which upholds different 
 forms of wrong, as well as that which is too much at- 
 tached to the commonplace, nor is it necessary to show 
 that that poetry is not of a high order whose author goes 
 into ecstasies about nuances, indulges in inappropriate 
 imagery, piles up trite ideas in flowery diction, or gives 
 continual iteration to the least important of commonplace 
 emotions. 
 
 What then is literature of a high order? What is this 
 great form of art that takes us out of ourselves because 
 it has in it so much of ourselves? What is this magical 
 arrangement of words enshrining what ideas and emotions 
 that gives us a zest for life, that makes us drunk with 
 aesthetic pleasure? It includes many species, all, as Mil- 
 ton would say, in a "strain of a higher mood." One of its 
 greatest manifestations is that in which the ecstasy for 
 social justice and a high form of idealism control the 
 poet. We become carried away with his frenzy, for it 
 evokes the highest emotions in us; an undeviating and 
 never swerving enthusiasm for spreading right and hap-
 
 250 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 piness is an elevated form of ecstasy. The grief of the 
 oppressed and the poor goes to our own hearts, and the 
 calamities of the woe-begone become our own. We sub- 
 merge our personality in that of the human race, and the 
 griefs of strangers lure us to cry out for them. 
 
 But it should be remembered that literature never thus 
 becomes a weapon for reform or a piece of didacticism or 
 propaganda. The emotion is the thing. The practical 
 work of relief of suffering is the function of the reformer 
 and not the poet. It is the poet's duty only to make a cer- 
 tain form of ecstasy contagious. Practical results will 
 follow as a matter of course. 
 
 And then there is the ecstasy that revolves around a 
 profound philosophic insight, when the poet rids himself 
 of prejudiced and barren thinking and looks at the uni- 
 verse with awe and goes into rhapsodies about its work- 
 ings. And it takes a high order of intellect to sympathize 
 with the literature of ecstasy of this kind, that pierces 
 into the soul of the universe. The advanced ideas of the 
 greatest poets are, however, often such as only a few 
 people have intellect enough to perceive, or are such as 
 can be grasped only when man throws aside all his 
 prejudices. And here the great philosopher, mathema- 
 tician and scientist come to the aid of the poet, who emo- 
 tionalizes their greatest discoveries. For reason must go 
 hand in hand with ecstasy. 
 
 There is the ecstasy where men are shown in the help- 
 less grasp of great passions, and are in despair because 
 of events beyond their control. Such passions include 
 grief of all kinds, whether brought about by death or 
 wrong or one's own folly. The depicting of great pas- 
 sion belongs to the grand order of the literature of 
 ecstasy even when the poet makes no attempt to moralize 
 from or sympathize with it. Crime and wickedness may
 
 CONCLUSION 251 
 
 be masterfully described with no ethical intent, for we are 
 interested in the grand spectacle of a man whom the Gods 
 have made mad, for madness is potential in all of us. 
 
 There is the ecstasy of the lover in his rapture for his 
 mistress, and in his transformed nature. We are moved 
 by the delicacy of his sentiment, his chivalry, his sacri- 
 fice, we are overcome by his sorrows and his misfortunes. 
 There is the ecstasy of the love of nature where the ma- 
 jesty of this universe is set out in its glory. There is the 
 ecstasy of the lover of beauty for its own sake, and of 
 the artist in the pursuit of his work, and of the reader 
 and of him who listens to music, of him who sees artistic 
 pictures. There is the ecstasy of the scientist in his pur- 
 suit of truth, and of the inventor in transforming the 
 face of the globe. 
 
 We cry out for ecstasy; it is the substance of our 
 lives ; even though, often in our pursuit of pleasant ecstasy, 
 we are launched into tragedy. We are hungry for a happy 
 life of the emotions. It is this which makes lovers and 
 friends and parents of us. It is this which makes us 
 poets, and it is the poet in ourselves that we always. hunt 
 out. 
 
 I hope our study has helped us to distinguish the higher 
 from the lower forms of ecstasy, to find poetry in prose, 
 and to differentiate poetry from verse, wherein there is 
 no ecstasy but various conventions, like inversion, poetic 
 diction, rhyme, metre, figures of speech, parallelisms, 
 technique, and all forms of rhythm and repeats. That 
 much of the best of the world's poetry has made abun- 
 dant use of these mechanisms has led the critics to con- 
 fuse poetry with its conventions. But the ecstasy was 
 forgotten, and the emotional and intellectual value of the 
 poem was overlooked. It was thought because the mas- 
 ters subscribed slavishly to the conventions that they be-
 
 252 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY 
 
 came poets because of them, whereas they were poets 
 first and last because of the ecstasy, sometimes with the 
 aid of the conventions and sometimes despite them. 
 That these mechanisms will always be used in some de- 
 gree is certain, but the most natural poetry will be that 
 which uses them moderately, irregularly and only when 
 the emotions and the ideas naturally clothe themselves in 
 them. 
 
 Poetry and prose then are not contradictory, but prose 
 becomes poetry when the element of ecstasy is present. 
 We use the word prosaic in a sense, it is true, which 
 means destitute of imagination or emotion ; we even call 
 verse of this kind prosaic. But a work in prose may be 
 poetical, and one in verse be prosaic, and science, philos- 
 ophy and morality become poetry, though in the form of 
 prose, when bathed in the spirit of ecstasy. And the 
 highest form of poetry is that wherein the ecstasy springs 
 from our nature's most human and most admirable side. 
 
 After having learned that poetry is more natural with- 
 out metre or a pattern, that it may be in prose with or 
 without rhythm, that it may have a social message, that 
 it is the product of the unconscious, that it is related to 
 dreams in being an imaginary fulfilled wish of the poet, 
 that it acts as a relief to the writer and the reader, that it 
 is always personal and lyric, that it is synonymous with 
 expression in the poet's mind, that its chief characteristic 
 is passion, imagination or ecstasy, that its qualities are 
 often enhanced rather than destroyed by the presence of 
 intellect or morality, that it is an emotional spirit holding 
 literature in suffusion instead of being a branch of litera- 
 ture, we shall find that most of the old definitions of po- 
 etry exclude a great deal of the world's best poetry, and 
 include much that is not poetry.
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Abu ali al Qali, 222 
 
 Abu '1 Ala al Maarri, 216, 217 
 
 Abu '1 Atahiya, 216, 218 
 
 Abu Nuwas, 205 
 
 Abu Zayd, 215 
 
 JElfric, 1 08, 114 
 
 ^schylus, 15, 27 ,160 
 
 Al Ghazzali, 34, 35 
 
 Al Hatimi, 223 
 
 Aldington, Richard, 122 
 
 Ambros, Wilhelm A., 52 
 
 Antar, 209, 211, 219 
 
 Ari Frodi, no 
 
 Ariosto, in, 238 
 
 Aristotle, 15, 29, 42, 96, 136, 
 
 169, 179, 1 80, 193, 221 
 Arnold, Matthew, 23, 49, 64, 
 
 117, 126, 129 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 48, 52, 53, 79, 
 
 135 
 
 Baha Ad Din Zuhayr, 220 
 Balzac, 49, 53, 57, 58, 59, 72, 
 
 87, IS4, 165, 181, 190, 236, 
 
 245. 
 
 Baqui 2ii, 214 
 Baudelaire, Charles, 18, 89, 126, 
 
 138, 153 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, 49, 88, 89 
 Beckford, 213 
 Benavente, Jacinto, 71 
 Bergson, 30, 136 
 Bernays, Jacob, 180 
 Bielinski, 162 
 Blake, William, 18, 44, 73, 118, 
 
 167, 186 
 
 Bosanquet, 180, 181 
 Bossnet, 87, 228 
 Boswell, 221 
 Bradley, A. C, 126 
 
 Brandes, George, 72, 92, 131, 
 
 141, 142, 167, 245 
 Breasted, James H., 99 
 Briffault, Robert, 212 
 Browne, Edgar G., 203, 204, 
 
 225 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 88 
 Browning, Elizabeth B., 53, 61 
 Browning, Robert, 18, 61, 86, 
 
 124, 134, 213 
 Bryant, W. C., 50 
 Buchanan, Robert, 143 
 Bunyan, John, 20, 88 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 49, 120, 229, 
 
 230 
 Burns, Robert, 31, 69, 128, 154, 
 
 173, 185, 190, 198 
 Butcher, S. H., 24, 42, 159 
 Byron Lord, 18, 31, 01, 72, 86, 
 
 125, 154, 167, 173, 185, 190, 
 
 213, 222 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 72, 134, 
 
 137, 148, 168, 169, 171 
 Carpenter, Edward, 118 
 Castelevetro, 43, 179 
 Cervantes, 87, 154, 167, 211 
 Chateaubriand, 49, 58, 87 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 172 
 Chekhov, Anton, 71, 122 
 Cicero, 87, 89, 119, 229, 230 
 Coleridge, S. T., 12, 47, 48, 49, 
 
 77, 78, 121 173, 186, 234 
 Conrad, 57, 71, 116 
 Corneille, 87 
 Cowper, William, 134 
 Crane, Stephen, 118 
 Croce, 15, 28, 81, 145, 146, 147. 
 
 148, 149, 50, 239 
 Crosby, Ernest, 118 
 
 253
 
 254 
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Dallas, E. S., 187, 191 
 
 Dalman, G., 102 
 
 Dante, 13, 47, 133, 141, 167, 233, 
 
 238 
 
 D'Annunzio, 51 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 186 
 Davidson, Israel, 172 
 De Musset, Alfred, 121, 154 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 40, 87, go, 
 
 117 
 De Slane, MacGuckin, 203, 209, 
 
 223 
 
 De Vigny, 166 
 Democritus, 15 
 Demosthenes, 24, 119, 229 
 Descartes, 135 
 Dickens, Charles, 53, 72, 84, 
 
 121, 154, 168, 169, 242 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 28, 
 
 119, 181 
 
 Dobrolubov, 162 
 Donne, 21 
 
 Dostoievsky, 143, 154 
 Doughty, 71 
 Drummond, Henry, 88 
 Dryden, John, 172 
 Dumas, Alexander, 168 
 Dunash ben Labrat, 104 
 
 Eaton, Walter P., 115 
 Eliot, George, 89, 121, 135 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 88 
 Ellis, Havelock, 185, 186 
 Emerson, R. W., 23, 53, 81, 92, 
 
 93, 94, 121, 186, 200 
 Erasmus 43 
 Erskine, John, 117 
 Euripides, 30 
 
 Fairchild, A. H., 200 
 
 Fenelon, 86, 161 
 
 Fielding, 231, 236 
 
 Flaubert, 138, 140, 165 
 
 Flint, F. S., 122 
 
 France, Anatole, 201, 232 
 
 Freud, 15, 28, 135, 167, 181, 185, 
 
 189, 199 
 Froude, 137 
 Fuller, Thomas, 88 
 
 Galsworthy, John, 71, 155 
 Gautier, 138 
 
 Gibbon, 137 
 
 Giovanitti, Arthur, 158 
 Goethe, 46, 71, 72, 118, 121, 131, 
 
 134, 148, 154, 167, 176, 185, 
 
 190, 213, 214 
 Goldberg, Isaac, 177 
 Goldziher, 105 
 Gorki, 156 
 Gosse, Edmund, 64 
 Graetz, 225 
 Gray, Thomas, 19 
 Guerin, 49 
 
 Gummere, Professor, 44, 198 
 Gurney, 62 
 
 Ha Levi, Jehudah, 105, 172 
 
 Hafiz, 154, 211 
 
 Halper ,B., 172, 182 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 53, 71, 121, 181, 
 
 244 
 
 Hariri, 214, 215, 218 
 Harper, G. M., 122 
 Harte, Bret, 50, 130 
 Hauptmann, 71, 155, 156, 200 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 50, 53, 
 
 92 
 
 Hazlitt, 49, 77, 131, 185, 193 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 30, 46, 71, 72, 
 
 115, 140, 175, 232, 244 
 Hegel, 121, 240 
 Heine, Heinrich, 18, 31, 49, 70, 
 
 71, 118, 121, 154, 172, 190, 230, 
 
 243, 245 
 
 Henley, Walter, 117 
 Henry, O., 130, 230 
 Herodotus, 48 
 Hewlett, Maurice, 71, 116 
 Holmes, O. W., 50, 168, 186 
 Homer, 13, 15, 62, 80, 82, 93, 
 
 137, 167, 236, 238 
 Horace, 72, 128 
 Hovey, Richard, 118 
 Howells, W. D., 86, 144 
 Hudson, W. H., 71 
 Hugo, Victor, 58, 87, 140, 154 
 Hume, 135, 170 
 Huneker, 18 
 Hunt, Leigh, 234 
 Ibn Abi Rabia, Omar, 207 
 Ibn Daud, Abraham, 183 
 Ibn Ezra, Moses, 172, 182, 222
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 255 
 
 Ibn Gebirol, Solomon, 172 
 
 Ibn Ishaq, 223 
 
 Ibn Khaldun, 203, 204, 205, 222, 
 
 223 
 
 Ibn Khallikans, 209 
 Ibn Pakuda, Bachya, 172 
 Ibn Rashiq, 223 
 Ibn ul Farid, Umar, 220 
 Ibn ul Mutazz, 223 
 Ibn Yunus, 220 
 Ibn Zaydun, 219 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 38, 48, 71, 
 
 131, 132, 142, 150, 154, 166, 
 
 167, 169, 185, 190, 242 
 Imru 'ul Qays, 206, 215, 218 
 Ingelow, Jean, 227 
 Israeli, Isaac, 183 
 
 Jacob, Gary F., 46 
 
 Jahiz, 222 
 
 Jalalu '1 Din Rumi, 22 
 
 Jannai, 104 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 113, 185 
 
 Kant, 229 
 
 Kaplan, Jacob H., 37 
 
 Keats, John, 18, 128, 138, 154, 
 
 173, 233, 235, 247 
 Keble, John, 187-190 
 Kelley, Fitz Maurice, 212 
 Kempis, Thomas a, 20 
 Khalil Ahmad, 221 
 Khansa, 214 
 Kingsley, Charles, 185 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 50, 71 
 Konig, IQI, 102 
 
 La Rochefoucauld, 167 
 Lamb, Charles, 69, 185 
 Landor, W. S., 81, 213 
 Langdon, Professor, 100 
 Langland, 158 
 Lawrence, D. H., 71 
 Le Sage, 87 
 Lee, A. H. E., 23 
 Leopardi, 143 
 Lespinasse, Madame, 53 
 Lessing, G. E., 62, 63, 179, 239 
 Lewis, Sinclair, 232 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 60 
 Livy, 48, 120, 137 
 
 Locke, John, 178 
 
 Longfellow, H. W., 30, 126, 154, 
 
 170, 175, 176 
 Lowell, J. R., 41, 176, 178, 186, 
 
 193 
 
 Lowes, Professor, 63, 116 
 Lowth, Bishop, 102 
 Lucas, E. V., 221 
 Lyly, John, 121 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., 168 
 Macdonald, Duncan B., 34 
 Machen, Arthur, 23 
 Macleod, Fiona, 116 
 Maggi, 179 
 
 Maimonides, Moses, 37 
 Ma j nun, 206 
 Malory, 55, 88 
 Margoliouth, 218 
 Mark Twain, 59, 230 
 Marston, P. B., 227 
 Marsyas, 26 
 
 Masaryk, Thomas G., 162 
 Masters, Ed. L., 116 
 Maupassant, Guy de, 148 
 Meredith, George, 116, 121, 135, 
 
 230 
 
 Mihailovsky, 162 
 Mill, J. S., 88, 178 
 Mills, L. H., 106 
 Milton, John, 13, 47, 49, 64, 88, 
 
 118, 120, 122, 141, 167, 178, 
 
 1 80, 236 
 Minturno, 179 
 Mirabeau, 87 
 Moliere, 87, 154, 167 
 Morley, John, 168 
 Moore, George, 92 
 Moore, Thomas, 49, 71, 213 
 Moulton, R. G., 103 
 Miiller, Max, 106 
 Murray, Gilbert, 30 
 Murry, J. Middleton, 122 
 
 Neilson, Willian A., 33 
 Newboldt, Henry, 171 
 Newton, Isaac, 40 
 Nicholson, D. H. S., 23, 218, 
 
 219, 225 
 
 Nidham I Arudi, 204 
 Nidhami, 206
 
 256 
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Nietzsche, 28, 30, 53, 81, 124, 
 154, 163, 166, 171, 181, 189, 
 242 
 
 Omar Khayyam, 218 
 Oppenheim, James, 158 
 Ossian, 118 
 
 Palgrave, W. G., 207 
 
 Pascal, 20, 124 
 
 Pater, Walter, 30, 45, 53, 72, 
 
 116, 117, 126, 239, 245 
 Patterson, Professor, 45, 46, 117 
 Perry, Bliss, 118 
 Phelps, W. L., 21 
 Pindar, 160 
 Pisarev, 162 
 Plato, 15, 24, 25, 26, 27, 49, 52, 
 
 53, 96, 119, 122, 124, 132, 
 
 148, 160 
 
 Plutarch, 48, 56, 121, 133, 137 
 Poe, E. A.j 18, 49, 50, 61, 72, 
 
 74, 92, 121, 131, 144, 161 
 Pope, Alexander, 7, 133, 232 
 Prescott, F. C, 184 
 Prevost, 87 
 Pythagoras, 133 
 
 Qudama, 223 
 
 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 66, 
 
 67 
 
 Quintilian, 120 
 Qutayba, 222 
 
 Riley, J. W., 170 
 
 Roberts, W. Rhys, 119 
 
 Robortelli, 179 
 
 Rolland, 154 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 116 
 
 Rossetti, Dante G., 186 
 
 Rousseau, 53, 87, 134 
 
 Ruskin, John, 38, 53, 72, 84, 1 12, 
 
 130, 154, 168, 169 
 Russel, Bertrand, 136 
 
 Saadyah, 104 
 
 St. Augustine, 20, 53 
 
 Saintsbury, George, 43, 44, 81, 
 
 221 
 
 Sand, George, 87 
 Sandburg, 116 
 
 Savonarola, 43 
 
 Schlegel, Frederick, 49 
 
 Schofield, W. H., 212 
 
 Schopenhauer, 53, 124, 135, 163, 
 199 
 
 Scott, Samuel P., 213 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 55, 121, 168 
 
 Senancour, 49 
 
 Shairp, J. C, 89 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 13, 16, 
 56, 57, 69, 82, 83, 101, 112, 
 113, 124, 134, 138, 148, 150, 
 154, 167, 168, 170, 177, 193, 
 226, 238 
 
 Shaw, Bernard, 38, 112, 156, 167 
 
 Shelley, P. B., 12, 18, 23, 29, 
 32, 38, 48, 70, 72, 74, 121, 124, 
 128, 133, 154, 167, 169, 173, 
 185, 186, 190, 233, 235 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 12, 48, 88, 
 119, 121 
 
 Sinclair, Upton B., 155, 200 
 
 Smith, Sir George A., 101, 215 
 
 Smith, W. Robertson, 100 
 
 Socrates, 26, 42 
 
 Sophocles, 13, 80, 83, 160 
 
 Southey, Robert, 213 
 
 Spence^ Herbert, 135 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 13, 236, 238 
 
 Speroni, 179 
 
 Spingarn, 117, 132, 179 
 
 Spinoza, 134, 135 
 
 Stedman, E. C., 32, 58 
 
 Stendhal, 57, 142, 206 
 
 Stevenson, R. A. M., 138 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 247 
 
 Strabo, 97 
 
 Strindberg, 143 
 
 Surrey, 213 
 
 Swinburne, A. C., 18, 29, 73, 
 125, 138, 140, 154 
 
 Symonds, J. A., 27, 69, III, 
 125, 126 
 
 Symons, Arthur, 63, 121, 138 
 
 Synge, 71 
 
 Tacitus, 137 
 
 Taine, 170 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 48, 178, 230 
 
 Tchernishevski, 162
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 257 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 23, 154, 
 
 185 
 
 Tha 'alibi, 223 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 23, 121, 181 
 Thompson, Francis, 72 
 Thomson, James, 186 
 Thucydides, 53, 119, 137, 228 
 Tolstoy, 36, 53, 57, 140, 142, 
 
 190 
 
 Traubel, Horace, 118, 158 
 Tupper, Martin, 118 
 Turgenev, 57 
 
 Untermyer, Louis, 118, 158 
 
 Van Teslaar, J. S., 182 
 Varchi, 179 
 Verhaeren, 155 
 Verlaine, 31, 72, 154 
 Veron, Eugene, 87 
 Vettori, 179 
 Virgil, 57, 62, 148 
 Voltaire, 230 
 
 Warton, Thomas, 211 
 Watts-Dunton, 240 
 
 Weil, Henri, 180 
 
 Whistler, 138 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 12, 15, 23, 31, 
 44, 45, 63, 65, 79, "4, "6, 
 118, 124, 142, 154, 164, 175, 
 178 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 53, 138, 167 
 
 Wilkinson, J. G., 186, 187 
 
 Wittels, F., 181 
 
 Woodberry, Professor, 31, 132 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 12, 15, 
 18, 23, 29, 30, 45, 49, 51, 52, 
 60, 65, 77, 78, 112, 121, 124, 
 
 146, 164, 173, 185, 222, 234 
 
 Wulfstan 107, 108 
 Wyatt, 213 
 
 Xenophon, 48 
 
 Yeats, William Butler, 71, 165, 
 
 Zoroaster, 107 
 
 Zola, Emil, 142, 155, 156, 165, 
 
 167, 200 
 Zuhayr, 215
 
 INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS 
 
 Adam Bede, 44 
 
 Advancement of Learning, 79 
 
 ^Eneid, 53, 54, 57, m 
 
 ^Esthetics, 87 
 
 Albion's England, 85 
 
 Arabia Deserta, 71 
 
 Arabian Nights, 187, 205, 213, 
 
 218 
 
 Arcadia, 121 
 Aeropagitica, 122, 178 
 Ars Poetica, 241 
 Art of Writing, 66 
 Aspects of Poetry, 89 
 Assemblies (or Maqamat), 214, 
 
 215, 218 
 Atala, 87 
 
 Aucassin and Nicolette, 86 
 Aurora Leigh, 61 
 Avesta, 105, 106 
 Avowals, 92 
 Aylmer's Field, 44 
 
 Ballad of Mary the Mother, 
 
 143 
 
 Bedouins, 18 
 Beginnings of Poetry, 44 
 Beowulf, 103, 108 
 Bible, 14, 44, 102, 103, 118, 160, 
 
 177, 202, 215, 222, 233 
 
 Birth of Tragedy, 29 
 Botanical Garden, 85 
 Boundaries of Music and 
 
 Poetry, 52 
 Brand, do 
 Brushwood Boy, 50 
 
 Canterbury Tales, 55 
 Chanting the Square Deific, 23 
 Chapbook, 88 
 Cherry Orchard, 122 
 Christmas Carol, i(J8 
 
 City of Dreams, The, 143 
 
 Confessions, 53 
 
 Confessions of an Opium 
 
 Eater, 40 
 Conservator, 118 
 Convention and Revolt in 
 
 Poetry, 63 
 
 Corn Law Rhymes, 88 
 Cousin Pons, 59 
 Creative Criticism, 117 
 Critique of Judgment, 229 
 Cypress Grove, 109 
 
 David Copperfield, 54 
 
 Dawn, 155 
 
 Decameron, 49 
 
 Defense of Poetry, 73 
 
 Deserted Village, 49 
 
 Devil's Case, 143 
 
 Dialogues on Eloquence, 86 
 
 Divine Comedy, 60, 184 
 
 Doll's House, 132 
 
 Don Juan, 61, 86, 125 
 
 Don Quixote, 39, 49, 169, 211, 
 
 212 
 
 Dream Fugue, 57 
 Dreams and Poetry, 184 
 
 Early Poetry of Israel, ror, 
 
 215 
 
 Elegy in a Country Church- 
 yard, 19 
 
 Eleonora, 50 
 
 English Literature from Roman 
 Conquest, to Chaucer, 212 
 
 Enoch Arden, 44 
 
 Epipsychidion, 165, 183 
 
 Erewhon, 232 
 
 Erotic Motive in Literature, 
 185 
 
 Essay on Man, 122 
 
 259
 
 260 INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS 
 
 Essays in Sacred Language, 
 Writings and Religion of the 
 Parsis, 107 
 
 Essays Speculative and Sug- 
 gestive, 125 
 
 Essentials of Poetry, 33 
 
 Ethics, 134 
 
 Eugene Grandet, 59 
 
 Euphues, 121 
 
 Excursion, 60 
 
 Exotics and Retrospectives, 
 "5, 244 
 
 Fall of the House of Usher, 
 
 144 
 
 Fathers and Sons, 57 
 Fingal, 58 
 First Four Books of Civil War, 
 
 85 
 Foundations and Nature of 
 
 Verse, 46 
 
 French Revolution, 53, 137 
 Function of the Poet, 41 
 Fuzzy Wuzzy, 50 
 
 Gathas, 107 
 
 Genesis, Book of, 64 
 
 Genius of Christianity, 87 
 
 Georgics, 62, 148 
 
 Germinal, 155, 200 
 
 Ghosts, 59 
 
 Gilgash, loo 
 
 Gorboduc, 112 
 
 Great Expectations, 124 
 
 Greek Poets, 69 
 
 Guide to the Perplexed, 37 
 
 Gulliver's Travels, 71 
 
 Hacuzari, 105 
 
 Harvard Lectures on Greek 
 
 Subjects, 24 
 Haunted Mind, 50 
 Heart of Midlothian, 55 
 Heathen Chinee, 50 
 Hertha, 23, 125 
 Hieroglyphics, 23 
 History as Literature, 116 
 History of Criticism in Europe, 
 
 43, 220 
 History of English Literature, 
 
 170 
 
 History of English Poetry 89 
 History of English Prose 
 
 Rhythm, 43 
 History of English Rhythms, 
 
 108 
 
 History of the Jews, 225 
 History of Moorish Empire in 
 
 Spain, 213 
 
 House of Gentlefolk, 57 
 Huckleberry Finn, 59 
 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 
 
 23 
 
 Idylls of the King, 55 
 Iliad, 97, 105 
 Inspiration of Poetry, 31 
 Ion, 25 
 Irrational Knot, 167 
 
 Jewish Encyclopedia, 225 
 Julius Caesar, 56 
 Jungle, 155, 200 
 
 Kalevala, 103 
 Kinds of Poetry, 117 
 Koran, 218 
 Kubla Khan, 186 
 
 La Mare au Diable, 87 
 
 Lady of the Lake, 55 
 
 Laila and Majnun, 206 
 
 Laocoon, 62 
 
 L'Avare, 87 
 
 Le Chartreuse de Parme, 57 
 
 Le Debacle, 57 
 
 Leaves of Grass, 65, 80, 124, 
 
 159, 178 
 
 Lectures on Art, 130 
 Lectures on Sacred Poetry of 
 
 Hebrews, 102 
 Les Martyrs, 58 
 Les Miserables, 58 
 Letters to French Academy, 86 
 Levana and Our Ladies of 
 
 Sorrow, 57 
 Life of Johnson, 221 
 Life of Roscommon, 113 
 Lily and the Bee, 118 
 Lily of the Valley, 59 
 Literary Criticism in the 
 
 Renaissance, 179
 
 INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS 261 
 
 Literary History of the Arabs, 
 
 219 
 Literary History of Persia, 
 
 203, 225 
 
 Literary Study of Bible, 103 
 Lives of the Saints, 108, 114 
 Locksley Hall, 213 
 Logic, 136 
 L'Oiseau, 87 
 Lorna Doone, 70 
 Lost Illusions, 59 
 Louis Lambert, 59 
 Luzumiyyat, 218 
 Lyrical Ballads, 65 
 
 Macbeth, 56 
 
 Madame Bovary, 140 
 
 Madamoiselle de Maupin, 138 
 
 Main Currents of the Nine- 
 teenth Century, 92 
 
 Main Street, 232 
 
 Making of Humanity, 212 
 
 Making of Poetry, 200 
 
 Manon Lescaut, 87 
 
 Maqamat, 218 
 
 Martyrs, 87 
 
 Master Builder, 59 
 
 Michael, 51 
 
 Modern Painters, 53 
 
 "Mr. Sludge, the Medium," 125 
 
 Muallaqat, 105, 206, 211, 213, 
 215 
 
 Nature of Poetry, 32 
 
 Nether World, 155 
 
 New Era in American Poetry, 
 
 161 
 
 New Rome, 143 
 Niebelungen Lied, 102, 154 
 Nigger of the Narcissus, 57 
 Njala, no 
 Notre Dame de Paris, 58 
 
 Odyssey, 07 
 
 On Literary Composition, 119 
 On the Sublime, 15, 128, 160 
 Optimos, 118 
 Orlando Furioso, 60 
 Otherworld, 122 
 Ottoman Poetry, 214, 225 
 Outcast, 143 
 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat, 50 
 Oxford Book of English Verse, 
 
 66 
 Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 
 
 75, 126 
 
 Panegyrics, 119 
 Paradise Lost, 68 
 Paradise Regained, 67 
 Path of the Rainbow, 98 
 Paul and Virginia, 87 
 Peer Gynt, 59, 164, 174 
 Peloponessian War, 53, 137 
 Penguin Island, 232 
 Pere Goriot, 57 
 Phaedrus, 26, 53, 122 
 Pickwick Papers, 23 
 Pierre and Jean, 148 
 Piers Plowman, 158 
 Pilgrim's Progress, 49, 184 
 Poetic Principle, 74, 144 
 Poetics, 42, 43, 136, 221 
 Poetry and Its Varieties, 88 
 Poetry and Religion, 39 
 Politics, 180 
 Poly Olbion, 85 
 Pompanilla, 89 
 Pontica, 85 
 Possessed, 122 
 
 Post-Biblical Hebrew Litera- 
 ture, 172 
 
 Power of Sound, 62 
 Principia, 40 
 
 Principles of Psychology, 135 
 Progress of Poesie, 19 
 Prolegomena, 203 
 Prophetic Books, 44 
 Psalms, 20, 64, 100, 171, 215 
 Psychology of Prophecy, 37 
 
 Qasidas, 206 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 23, 57 
 
 Raven, 61 
 
 Religion and Thought in An- 
 cient Egypt, 99 
 
 Renaissance, 53, 116 
 
 Republic, 26, 53, 122, 160 
 
 Revivifying of the Sciences of 
 the Faith, 34 
 
 Revolt of Islam, 86, 125
 
 262 INDEX OF BOOKS AND WRITINGS 
 
 Richard Feverel, 54 
 Rigveda, 105, 106, 107 
 Ring and the Book, 61, 86, 122 
 Robinson Crusoe, 49, 71 
 Romance of the Rose, 158 
 Rudin, 57 
 
 Sagas, 98, 109, no 
 
 Sanskrit Literature, 106 
 
 Scarlet Letter, 53 
 
 Science of Poetry, 233 
 
 Silas Marner, 44 
 
 Sister Carrie, 83 
 
 Solitaire of Time, 223 
 
 Song of the Harper, 99 
 
 Song of Myself, 176 
 
 Songs Before Sunrise, 140 
 
 Spanish-American Literature, 
 
 Studies in, 177 
 Specimens of English Prose 
 
 Style, 92 
 
 Spirit of Russia, 162 
 Spoon River Anthology, 69, 
 
 116 
 
 Strife, 155 
 
 Studies in Islamic Poetry, 218 
 Sunken Bell, 174 
 Symposium, 26, 53 
 
 Tain Bo Cualnge, 108 
 Tales from Shakespeare, 69 
 Tales of a Wayside Inn, 50 
 
 Telemaque, 86 
 
 Tempest, 134 
 
 Ten o'Clock Lecture, 138 
 
 Ten Thousand a Year, 118 
 
 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 122 
 
 Text Book of Irish Literature, 
 
 108 
 
 Theoria Sacra, 48 
 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 245 
 Tom Jones, 236 
 Tragische Motiv, 181 
 Treasure Island, 247 
 Tristram Shandy, 49 
 Triumph of Death, 51 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 70 
 Upanishads, 22 
 
 Vanity Fair, 23, 65, 180 
 Vedas, 22, 105 
 Velasquez, 138 
 Vicar of Wakefield, 49 
 
 Wandering Jew, 143 
 War and Peace, 57 
 Weavers, 155, 200 
 What is Art ? 140 
 WildK Ass's Skin, 59 
 Wild Duck, 59 
 Wilhelm Meister, 49 
 Wooing of Our Lord, 109 
 World as Will and Idea, 53
 
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