In some writers, and these the very greatest—in Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante; Shakespeare, Milton, and perhaps Goethe—poetic energy and poetic art are seen in something like equipoise. It is of poetry as an art, however, that we have mainly to speak here; and all we have to say upon poetry as an energy is that the critic who, like Aristotle, takes this wide view of poetry—the critic who, like him, recognizes the importance of poetry in its relations to man’s other expressions of spiritual force, claims a place in point of true critical sagacity above that of a critic who, like Plato, fails to recognize that importance. And assuredly no philosophy of history can be other than inadequate should it ignore the fact that poetry has had as much effect upon human destiny as that other great human energy by aid of which, from the discovery of the use of fire to that of the electric light, the useful arts have been developed.

With regard to poetry as an art, in the present work most of the great poems of the world have been or will be examined either in connexion with the names of the writers or with the various literatures to which they belong; consequently these remarks must be confined to general principles. To treat historically so vast a subject as poetry would be obviously impossible here.

All that can be attempted is to inquire briefly—(1) What is poetry? (2) What is the position it takes up in relation to the other arts? (3) What is its value and degree of expressional power in relation to these? and, finally, (4) What varieties of poetic art are the outcome of the two great kinds of poetic impulse, dramatic imagination and lyric or egoistic imagination?

1. What is Poetry?— Definitions are for the most part alike unsatisfactory and treacherous; but definitions of poetry are proverbially so. Is it possible to lay down invariable principles of poetry, such as those famous “invariable principles” of the Rev. Mr Bowles, which in the earlier part of the century awoke the admiration of Southey and the wrath of Byron? Is it possible for a critic to say of any metrical phrase, stanza, or verse, “This is poetry,” or “This is not poetry”? Can he, with anything like the authority with which the man of science pronounces upon the natural objects brought before him, pronounce upon the qualities of a poem? These are questions that have engaged the attention of critics ever since the time of Aristotle.

Byron, in his rough and ready way, has answered them in one of those letters to the late John Murray, which, rich as they are in nonsense, are almost as rich in sense. “So far are principles of poetry from being invariable,” says he, “that they never were nor ever will be settled. These principles mean nothing more than the predilections of a particular age, and every age has its own and a different from its predecessor. It is now Homer and now Virgil; once Dryden and since Sir Walter Scott; now Corneille and now Racine; now Crébillon and now Voltaire.” This is putting the case very strongly—perhaps too strongly. But if we remember that Sophocles lost the first prize for the Oedipus Tyrannus ; if we remember what in Dante’s time (owing partly, no doubt, to the universal ignorance of Greek) were the relative positions of Homer and Virgil, what in the time of Milton were the relative positions of Milton himself, of Shakespeare, and of Beaumont and Fletcher; again, if we remember Jeffrey’s famous classification of the poets of his day, we shall be driven to pause over Byron’s words before dismissing them. Yet some definition, for the purpose of this essay, must be here attempted; and, using the phrase “absolute poetry” as the musical critics use the phrase “absolute music,” we may, perhaps, without too great presumption submit the following :—

Absolute poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language.

This at least will be granted, that no literary expression can properly speaking be called poetry that is not in a certain deep sense emotional, whatever may be its subject matter, concrete in its method and its diction, rhythmical in movement, and artistic in form.

That the expression of all real poetry must be concrete in method and diction is obvious, and yet this dictum would exclude from the definition much of what is called didactic poetry. With abstractions the poet has nothing to do, save to take them and turn them into concretions; for, as artist, he is simply the man who by instinct embodies in concrete forms that “universal idea” which Gravina speaks of —that which is essential and elemental in nature and in man; as poetic artist he is simply the man who by instinct chooses for his concrete forms metrical language. And the questions to be asked concerning any work of art are simply these—

Is that which is here embodied really permanent, universal, and elemental? and Is the concrete form embodying it really beautiful—acknowledged as beautiful by the soul of man in its highest moods? Any other question is an impertinence.

Examples are always useful in discussions such as this.

As an example of the absence of concrete form in verse take the following lines from George Eliot’s Spanish Gypsy

“Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken; even your loved words Float in the larger meaning of your voice As something dimmer.”

Without discussing the question of blank verse cadence and the weakness of a line where the main accent falls upon a positive hiatus, “of the unspoken,” we would point out that this powerful passage shows the spirit of poetry without its concrete form. The abstract method is substituted for the concrete. Such an abstract phrase as “the unspoken” belongs entirely to prose.

As to what is called ratiocinative poetry, it might perhaps be shown that it does not exist at all. Not by syllogism, but per saltum, must the poet reach in every case his conclusions. We listen to the poet—we allow him to address us in rhythm or in rhyme—we allow him to sing to us while other men are only allowed to talk, not because he argues more logically than they, but because he feels more deeply and perhaps more truly. It is for his listeners to be knowing and ratiocinative; it is for him to be gnomic and divinely wise.

That poetry must be metrical or even rhythmical in movement, however, is what some have denied. Here we touch at once the very root of the subject. The difference between all literature and mere “word-kneading” is that, while literature is alive, word-kneading is without life. This literary life, while it is only bipartite in prose, seems to be tripartite in poetry; that is to say, while prose requires intellectual life and emotional life, poetry seems to require not only intellectual life and emotional life but rhythmic life, this last being the most important of all according to many critics, though Aristotle is not among these. Here indeed is the “fork” between the old critics and the new. Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage is so vigorous, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, has that passage any right to exist? and should it not, if the substance is good, be forthwith demetricized and turned into prose? Thoreau has affirmed that prose, at its best, has high qualities of its own beyond the ken of poetry; to compensate for the sacrifice of these, should not the metrical gains of any passage be beyond all cavil?

But this argument might be pressed further still. It might seem bold to assert that, in many cases, the mental value of poetry may actually depend upon form and colour, but would it not be true? The mental value of poetry must be judged by a standard not applicable to prose; but, even with regard to the different kinds of poetry, we must not compare poetry whose mental value consists in a distinct and logical enunciation of ideas, such as that of Lucretius and Wordsworth, and poetry whose mental value consists partly in the suggestive richness of passion or symbol latent in rhythm (such as that of Sappho sometimes, Pindar often, Shelley always), or latent in colour, such as that of some of the Persian poets. To discuss the question, Which of these two kinds of poetry is the more precious? would be idle, but are we not driven to admit that certain poems whose strength is rhythm, and certain other poems whose strength is colour, while devoid of any logical statement of thought, may be as fruitful of thoughts and emotions too deep for words as a shaken prism is fruitful of tinted lights? The mental forces at work in the production of a poem like the Excursion are of a very different kind from the mental forces at work in the production of a poem like Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” In the one case the poet’s artistic methods, like those of the Greek architect, show, and are intended to show, the solid strength of the structure. In the other, the poet’s artistic methods, like those of the Arabian architect, contradict the idea of solid strength—make the structure appear to hang over our heads like the cloud pageantry of heaven. But, in both cases, the solid strength is, and must be, there, at the base. Before the poet begins to write he should ask himself which of these artistic methods is natural to him; he should ask himself whether his natural impulse is towards the weighty iambic movement whose primary function is to state, or towards those lighter movements which we still call, for want of more convenient words, anapaestic and dactylic, whose primary function is to suggest. Whenever Wordsworth and Keats pass from the former to the latter they pass at once into doggerel. Nor is it difficult to see why English anapaestic and dactylic verse must suggest and not state, as even so comparatively successful a tour de force as Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” shows. Conciseness is a primary virtue of all statement. The moment the English poet tries to “pack” his anapaestic or dactylic line, as he can pack his iambic line, his versification becomes rugged, harsh, pebbly—becomes so of necessity. Nor is this all: anapaestic and dactylic verse must in English be obtrusively alliterative, or the same pebbly effect begins to be felt. The anapaestic line is so full of syllables that in a language where the consonants dominate the vowels (as in English), these syllables grate against each other, unless their corners are artfully bevelled by one of the only two smoothing processes at the command of an English versifier—obtrusive alliteration, or an obtrusive use of liquids. Now these demands of form may be turned by the perfect artist to good account if his appeal to the listener’s soul is primarily that of suggestion by sound or symbol, but if his appeal is that of direct and logical statement the diffuseness inseparable from good anapaestic and dactylic verse is a source of weakness such as the true artist should find intolerable.

But enough has been said to show that in discussing poetry questions of versification touch, as we have said, the very root of the subject.

Using the word “form” in a wider sense still, a sense that includes “composition,” it can be shown that poetry to be entitled to the name must be artistic in form. Whether a poem be a Welsh triban or a stomello improvised by an Italian peasant girl, whether it be an ode by Keats or a tragedy by Sophocles, it is equally a work of art. The artist’s command over form may be shown in the peasant girl’s power of spontaneously rendering in simple verse, in her stomello or rispetto, her emotions through nature’s symbols; it may be shown by Keats in that perfect fusion of all poetic elements of which he was such a master, in the manipulation of language so beautiful both for form and colour that thought and words seem but one blended loveliness; or it may be shown by Sophocles in a mastery over what in painting is called composition, in the exercise of that wise vision of the artist which, looking before and after, sees the thing of beauty as a whole, and enables him to grasp the eternal laws of cause and effect in art and bend them to his own wizard will. In every case, indeed, form is an essential part of poetry; and, although George Sand’s saying that “L’art est une forme” applies perhaps more strictly to the plastic arts (where the soul is reached partly through mechanical means), its application to poetry can hardly be exaggerated.

Owing, however, to the fact that the word 7roι7n7ς (first used to designate the poetic artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle seems to have assumed that the indispensable basis of poetry is invention. He appears to have thought that a poet is a poet more on account of the composition of the action than on account of the composition of his verses. Indeed he said as much as this. Of epic poetry he declared emphatically that it produces its imitations either by mere articulate words or by metre superadded. This is to widen the definition of poetry so as to include all imaginative literature, and Plato seems to have given an equally wide meaning to the word πoLησus. Only, while Aristotle considered τrotησ^ to be an imitation of the facts of nature, Plato considered it to be an imitation of the dreams of man. Aristotle ignored, and Plato slighted, the importance of versification (though Plato on one occasion admitted that he who did not know rhythm could be called neither musician nor poet). It is impossible to discuss here the question whether an imaginative work in which the method is entirely concrete and the expression entirely emotional, while the form is unmetrical, is or is not entitled to be called a poem. That there may be a kind of unmetrical narrative so poetic in motive, so concrete in diction, so emotional in treatment, as to escape altogether from those critical canons usually applied to prose, we shall see when, in discussing the epic, we come to touch upon the Northern sagas.

Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted against the dictum that substance, and not form, is the indispensable basis of poetry was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the arrangement of words is really a very fine piece of literary criticism. In his acute remarks upon the arrangement of the words in the sixteenth book of the Odyssey, as compared with that in the story of Gyges by Herodotus, was perhaps first enunciated clearly the doctrine that poetry is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristotelian theory as to invention, however, dominated all criticism after as well as before Dionysius. When Bacon came to discuss the subject (and afterwards) the only division between the poetical critics was perhaps between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato as to what poetry should, and what it should not, imitate. It is curious to speculate as to what would have been the result had the poets followed the critics in this matter. Had not the instinct of the poet been too strong for the schools, would poetry as an art have been lost and merged in such imaginative prose as Plato’s 1 Or is not the instinct for form too strong to be stifled Ί By the poets themselves metre was always considered to be the one indispensable requisite of a poem, though, as regards criticism, so recently as the time of the appearance of the Waverley Novels, the Quarterly Review would sometimes speak of them as “poems and perhaps even now there are critics of a very high rank who would do the same with regard to romances so concrete in method and diction, and so full of poetic energy, as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, where we get absolutely all that Aristotle requires for a poem. On the whole, however, the theory that versification is not an indispensable requisite of a poem seems to have become nearly obsolete in our time. Perhaps, indeed, many critics would now go so far in the contrary direction as to say with Hegel {Aesthetik, iii. p. 289) that “metre is the first and only condition absolutely demanded by poetry, yea even more necessary than a figurative picturesque diction.” At all events this at least may be said that in our own time the division between poetical critics is not between Aristotelians and Baconians; it is now of a different kind altogether. While one group of critics may still perhaps say with Dryden that “a poet is a maker, as the name signifies,” and that “he who cannot make, that is, invent, has his name for nothing,” another group contends that it is not the invention but the artistic treatment, the form, which determines whether an imaginative writer is a poet or a writer of prose,—contends, in short, that emotion is the basis of all true poetic expression, whatever be the subject matter, that thoughts must be expressed in an emotional manner before they can be brought into poetry, and that this emotive expression demands even yet something else, viz., style and form.

But, although many critics are now agreed that “L’art est une forme,” that without metre and without form there can be no poetry, there are few who would contend that poetry can exist by virtue of any one of these alone, or even by virtue of all these combined. Quite independent of verbal melody, though mostly accompanying it, and quite independent of “composition,” there is an atmosphere floating around the poet through which he sees everything, an atmosphere which stamps his utterances as poetry; for instance, among all the versifiers contemporary with Donne there was none so rugged as he occasionally was, and yet such songs as “Sweetest love, I do not go for weariness of thee” prove how true a poet he was whenever he could master those technicalities which far inferior poets find comparatively easy. While rhythm may to a very considerable degree be acquired (though, of course, the highest rhythmical effects never can), the power of looking at the world through the atmosphere that floats before the poet’s eyes is not to be learned and not to be taught. This atmosphere is what we call poetic imagination, a subject which will have to be fully discussed further on. But first it seems necessary to say a word or two upon that high temper of the soul which in truly great poetry gives birth to this poetic imagination.

The “message” of poetry must be more unequivocal, more thoroughly accentuated, than that of any of the other fine arts. With regard to modern poetry, indeed, it may almost be said that if any writer’s verse embodies a message, true, direct, and pathetic, we in modern Europe cannot stay to inquire too curiously about the degree of artistic perfection with which it is delivered, for Wordsworth’s saying “That which comes from the heart goes to the heart” applies very closely indeed to modern poetry. The most truly passionate poet in Greece was no doubt in a deep sense the most artistic poet; but in her case art and passion were one, and that is why she has been so cruelly misunderstood. The most truly passionate nature, and perhaps the greatest soul, that in...