The Literature of Ecstasy Part 3

Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of _Tristram Shandy_ a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a poet more because of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ than the _Deserted Village_.

Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry without absolutely being poetry, instancing _Robinson Crusoe_, _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _Decameron_.

Heine spoke of _Don Quixote_ as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called _Wilhelm Meister_ poetry. Brandes regards Lord Beaconsfield a poet.

Matthew Arnold characterized Chateaubriand, Senancour and 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 denominate every lengthy performance in verse a poem _in toto_. Before Poe, Coleridge said that "a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry." Poe gave us the reasons for this proposition and demonstrated to us that a long epic poem is but a series of short poems connected by uninspired pa.s.sages in metre. The same thing may be said of literary verse performances of moderate length. To those who object to using the word "poem" in connection with any prose composition one may reply that these, like verse productions, are also often made up of poetical parts here and there; they simply lack regular rhythm and this is not a sufficient line of demarcation as to what const.i.tutes 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 Gra.s.s and Hawthorne's _Haunted Mind_ are greater poems, though in prose, than most of Holmes' and Bryant's verse poems are. I see no reason why we should not designate as poetry, prose tales where ecstasy and emotion predominate. Kipling's _Brushwood Boy_ or Bret Harte's _Outcasts of Poker Flat_ is as poetical, I believe, as any tale in Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The same laws of emotional appeal are working in the one as in the other; a similar artistic stamp is printed on all these stories. In fact, Longfellow's tales are inferior in the quality and quant.i.ty of poetry to the stories specified.

His compositions could easily be arranged in prose and the stories of Kipling or Harte could be transposed into metrical verse. The transfer would not affect the poetry in either of them.

It is a confused system of literary cla.s.sification 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 t.i.tle "poems."

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

One is from a work that is rich with poetry and written by one of England's greatest poets and yet the particular section, though in metre, is but a dry statement of facts. I quote from Wordsworth's _Michael_, one of the finest things in English literature, yet unpoetical in the first part:

Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.

An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.

His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen, And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men.

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

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

And in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed.

The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more restless poignant anxiety pa.s.sed over all the instruments and expressed a continual and ever vain effort to attain the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every grasp, although it shone ever so near, etc.

I shall show more fully that our definitions of what is poetry and what is a poem have been faulty. The error is so perceptible that it is surprising that so few critics have detected it. Meanwhile I will give my definitions:

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

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

Poems may therefore be found in imaginative philosophical works like Plato's _Symposium_, _Phaedrus_, _Republic_ and other dialogues, Bacon's _Essays_, Schopenhauer's _World as Will and Idea_, Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, Emerson's _Essays_, in critical works like Pater's _Renaissance_, Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, Wilde's _Intentions_, in histories like Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French Revolution_, in autobiographies like St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and Rousseau's _Confessions_, in letters like Madame Lespina.s.se's and Mrs.

Browning's, in diaries like those of Amiel, in novels by Balzac, d.i.c.kens, 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 pa.s.sionless enough to be termed science. But the story of Hester Prynne is poetry as truly as the tale of Dido, and undoubtedly you cannot refuse the appellation poetry to the chapter in Hawthorne's novel which describes how Arthur Dimmesdale gets up in the pulpit and confesses to the congregation his part in Hester Prynne's guilt. The _Aeneid_ is really a novel in verse.

We are not often moved by metrical writing as we are by the last part of the chapter in _David Copperfield_ ent.i.tled, "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 pa.s.sage, which being rhythmical besides, begins:

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

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

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

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

I hence fail to see why the _Idylls of the King_ should be alone called poems and not also parts of Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, which Tennyson paraphrased in blank verse. Malory has, however, been deemed a poet by some critics and any one who will read the lament over the death of Sir Lancelot will not begrudge the author that t.i.tle. One admits that the _Tales_ of La Fontaine and Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ are very rich in poetry, but why say that the original prose stories which these poets often re-tell in verse (undoubtedly improving them by their own genius) are not? And who will deny the statement that the best of Scott's novels, say _The Heart of Midlothian_, contains as much, if not more, poetry than some of his novels in verse like the _Lady of the Lake_?

Even in his day the reviewers saw that there was no difference between Scott's verse and prose stories as far as the quality of the poetry was concerned; indeed they saw that there was more of the divine afflatus in the latter than there was in the former. In fact the _Quarterly Review_ referred to Scott's novels as poems.

One may even say that the great Shakespeare found in the dramas, tales and chronicles that were his sources some of the poetry we note in his plays. Especially is this true in regard to his use of Plutarch. Brandes has pointed out that _Julius Caesar_ 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 pa.s.sages of North's translation, accepting the characters as they stood there and repeating all the leading incidents. If _Julius Caesar_ 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 pa.s.sage 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 impa.s.sioned prose and are as much ent.i.tled to the rank of poetry as are most of the blank verse of the drama. Hamlet's advice to the players though art criticism, and prose, is so lit up with poetic glamor that it deserves the name poetry more than the metrical version of some of the moral commonplaces in the play.

One may ask various questions of the critic who clings to the old definition that metre or rhythm must accompany poetry. Why should Conrad's supreme poetic description of a storm at sea in his _n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus_ not be called a poem, when you designate by this word Virgil's famous description in dactylic hexameters in the first book of the _Aeneid_? Powerful and deservedly renowned as the Virgil pa.s.sage 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 Parme_ or _War and Peace_ or _Le Debacle_? And how can you on any pretence refuse to include in the category of poetry De Quincey's famous prose poems _The Dream Fugue_ and _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_?

Since the critics would not admit that any unrhythmical prose is poetry, it is little wonder that Baudelaire founded as a distinct and conscious form the composition he called "poem in prose." We are told by his translator, Mr. Sturm, that he had dreamed in his days of ambition "of a miracle of poetical prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme." He understood and proved that rhythm was not necessary to poetry. He derived the idea of this separate form from Poe and Bertrand. He has been followed by Turgenev, who left us some prose poems which he called _Senilia_. The reader may recall the love scene in _The House of Gentlefolk_ and the concluding chapters of _Rudin_ and _Fathers and Sons_, which are all prose poems. Gorki has written some exquisite prose poems. One of them, _The March of Man_, is one of the most beautiful poems ever written. (Translated in _The Cosmopolitan_ for July, 1905.)

Really, every great literary man is a poet, for he is constantly occupied with ecstasy and human emotions. Do you think Hugo was a poet only when he chanted in verse and ceased being one when he wrote _Les 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 nevertheless be produced. When Macpherson in the eighteenth century and Chateaubriand in the early part of the nineteenth century gave us in imitation of the old epics the long prose poems _Fingal_ and _Les Martyrs_, respectively, they sinned artistically only because they were imitators and were stilted and rhetorical. These books contain excellent poetry in prose; we to-day can scarcely imagine the vogue they had. Had they been more natural they would still be read.

I believe the application of the theory of poetry I advocate would work many changes in literary values. Who can doubt that Ibsen and Balzac are greater poets than John Hay or Edmund Clarence Stedman, both of whom have respectable rank elsewhere, the former as a statesman and the latter as a critic? Yet our system of literary cla.s.sification stamps these two as poets because of a few popular and able lyrics in verse, while Ibsen and Balzac, who wrote in prose, are not even considered poets, according to academic standards. It is true Ibsen also wrote some lyrics and a few plays in verse, but he is as much a poet in _The Wild Duck_ or _The Master Builder_ as he is in _Peer Gynt_ or _Brand_. The scenes of Oswald losing his mind at the end of _Ghosts_ or of Ella Rentheim rebuking _John Gabriel Borkman_ for his desertion of her are magnificent poems. As for the poems of Balzac they are too numerous to mention. The picture of the miser in _Eugenie Grandet_ is surely poetry.

Balzac regarded his stories _Louis Lambert_, _Seraphita_ and _The Lily of the Valley_ as poems. Inflated as they occasionally are, they are suffused with poetical qualities. One could go on selecting poems from _Cousin Pons_, _The Wild a.s.s'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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 p.r.o.ne to exclude our greatest imaginative and philosophical humorist from the ranks of Apollo's servants?

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

I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. . . . I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; . . . and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was.

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

It may be a.s.serted that it is rather difficult to differentiate the poetical portions of a prose work from the rest. This same problem confronts us in verse. Who can point out exactly which lines in the _Iliad_ are poetry? The fact is that there are pa.s.sages in both prose and metrical literature that we unhesitatingly call poems because they instantly transform us. Just as you never doubted that the speeches of Andromache are poetical and that the catalogue of the s.h.i.+ps is not, so you will find it no problem to discard the tedious descriptions in Balzac as unpoetical while you accept the emotional sections as poems.

Just as critics have selected the poems from lengthy metrical works, choosing the story of Margaret from Wordsworth's _Excursion_, for example, so they could glean the poems of prose literature.

One objection raised to the use of prose as a poetical vehicle is its tendency to diffusiveness. It is claimed that here there are always temptations to digress and become trivial; hence we get the interminable novels and stupendous treatises which as a rule we do not have in verse.

But one may grow verbose and expatiate too much in metre as well: the matter rests entirely with the author. Note how ponderous are some of the old epics, the _Iliad_, the _Divine Comedy_ and _Orlando Furioso_.

In modern times Byron's _Don Juan_, Browning's _Ring and the Book_ and Mrs. Browning's _Aurora Leigh_ are examples of lengthy stories in verse.

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

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

Many brief prose poems in literature are dynamos of emotion. Ecstasy can be concentrated in a short prose poem as readily as in a verse, lyric or sonnet. The important thing is that the poet record the sentiments instantly, avoiding preliminaries.

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

Gurney in his _The Power of Sound_ calls attention to the fact that when Lessing defined the limits between the plastic arts and poetry, he made no distinction between verse and prose in his conception of poetry.

Whatever Lessing says about poetry in the _Laoc.o.o.n_ applies equally well to prose. True, he uses Homer as an ill.u.s.tration, 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 _Laoc.o.o.n_ that the author includes all vivid emotional narrative prose under the term poetry, which he distinguishes from painting. It is easy to see that his famous distinction, that objects side by side in s.p.a.ce or bodies with their visible properties are the fit subjects for painting, while actions or objects which succeed each other in time are the peculiar subjects of poetry, is really also a distinction between the plastic arts and the prose novel or short story. Painting, according to Lessing, was descriptive, poetry was narrative. Now narrative properly is the object of the novel. It is true Lessing defined poetry in a limited manner, as if it were only narrative literature; but we are grateful to him for implying that vivid prose narrative is poetry, and that poetry extends beyond metrical compositions.

It is commonly said that an emotional piece of prose writing is not poetry, but the raw material for poetry. Even Arthur Symons calls such warning only poetical substance. One critic has even designated it as a sort of b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 t.i.tle of poet to Whitman and he shrinks from denying that the best free verse is poetry. He feels vaguely that since prose is also often rhythmical, the old definition of poetry as an emotional piece of rhythmical writing is faulty, for it must include also emotional rhythmical prose, and he objects to this inclusion.

Professor Lowes, who, in his _Convention and Revolt in Poetry_, recognizes the similarity between the rhythm of free verse and that of prose, unsuccessfully solves the problem by saying that poetry is used in a loose as well as in a more rigid sense and that free verse is an artistic medium of not fully developed possibilities. He, like most critics, falls into the error of saying that we cannot include prose whenever we speak of poetry. Still we must be grateful to Lowes for his liberal att.i.tude 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 succ.u.mbed 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.