A STUDY OF POETRY

byBLISS PERRY

_Professor of English Literature in Harvard University_

Author of "A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION, " "WALT WHITMAN, ""THE AMERICAN MIND, " etc. 

TO

M. S. P. 

PREFACE

The method of studying poetry which I have followed in this book wassketched some years ago in my chapter on "Poetry" in _Counsel Upon theReading of Books_. My confidence that the genetic method is the naturalway of approaching the subject has been shared by many lovers of poetry. I hope, however, that I have not allowed my insistence upon the threefoldprocess of "impression, transforming imagination, and expression" toharden into a set formula. Formulas have a certain dangerous usefulnessfor critics and teachers, but they are a very small part of one's trainingin the appreciation of poetry. 

I have allotted little or no space to the specific discussion of epic anddrama, as these types are adequately treated in many books. Our owngeneration is peculiarly attracted by various forms of the lyric, and inPart Two I have devoted especial attention to that field. 

While I hope that the book may attract the traditional "general reader, "I have also tried to arrange it in such a fashion that it may be utilizedin the classroom. I have therefore ventured, in the Notes andIllustrations and Appendix, to suggest some methods and material for theuse of students. 

I wish to express my obligations to Professor R. M. Alden, whose_Introduction to Poetry_ and _English Verse_ I have used in my own Harvardcourses in poetry. His views of metre have probably influenced mine evenmore than I am aware. The last decade, which has witnessed such anextraordinary revival of interest in poetry, has produced many valuablecontributions to poetic theory. I have found Professor Fairchild's _Makingof Poetry_ particularly suggestive. Attention is called, in the Notes andBibliography, to many other recent books on the subject. 

Professors A. S. Cook of Yale and F. B. Snyder of Northwestern Universityhave been kind enough to read in manuscript certain chapters of this book, and Dr. P. F. Baum of Harvard has assisted me most courteously. I amindebted to several fellow-writers for their consent to the use ofextracts from their books, particularly to Brander Matthews for a passagefrom _These Many Years_ and to Henry Osborn Taylor for a passage from his_Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_. 

I wish also to thank the publishers who have generously allowed me to usebrief quotations from copyrighted books, especially Henry Holt & Co. Forpermission to use a quotation and drawing from William James's_Psychology_, and The Macmillan Company for permission to borrow from JohnLa Farge's delightful _Considerations on Painting_. 

B. P. 

CONTENTS

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

I. A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

II. THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

III. THE POET'S IMAGINATION

IV. THE POET'S WORDS

V. RHYTHM AND METRE

VI. RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

VII. THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

VIII. RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

IX. RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

X. THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

A STUDY OF POETRY

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

 "Sidney and Shelley pleaded this cause. Because they spoke, must we be dumb?"GEORGE E. WOODBERRY, _A New Defense of Poetry_

A STUDY OF POETRY

CHAPTER I

A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

It is a gray day in autumn. I am sitting at my desk, wondering how tobegin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the windowa woman is contentedly kneeling on the upturned brown earth of hertulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbsfor next spring's blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's versesabout "Planting Bulbs"? Probably not. But I find myself dropping theprocrastinating pen, and murmuring some of the lines:

 "Setting my bulbs a-row In cold earth under the grasses, Till the frost and the snow Are gone and the Winter passes--

 * * * * *

 "Turning the sods and the clay I think on the poor sad people Hiding their dead away In the churchyard, under the steeple. 

 "All poor women and men, Broken-hearted and weeping, Their dead they call on in vain, Quietly smiling and sleeping. 

 "Friends, now listen and hear, Give over crying and grieving, There shall come a day and a year When the dead shall be as the living. 

 "There shall come a call, a foot-fall, And the golden trumpeters blowing Shall stir the dead with their call, Bid them be rising and going. 

 "Then in the daffodil weather, Lover shall run to lover; Friends all trooping together; Death and Winter be over. 

 "Laying my bulbs in the dark, Visions have I of hereafter. Lip to lip, breast to breast, hark! No more weeping, but laughter!"

Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do younot write an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of lookingout of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes overme, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginningthe chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this book is toset forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: itspower, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that of a womanplanting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of thedead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and brown earth intobeauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheermusic; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and hauntingfear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is changed into laughter andautumnal premonitions of death into assurance of life, and the narrowpaths of individual experience are widened into those illimitable spaceswhere the imagination rules. Poetry does all this, assuredly. But how? Andwhy? That is our problem. 

"The future of poetry is immense, " declared Matthew Arnold, and there arefew lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the pastof poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in itsimmemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history, poetryseems to have occupied the attention of men, and some of the finestspirits in every race that has attained to civilization have devotedthemselves to its production, or at least given themselves freely to theenjoyment of reciting and reading verse, and of meditating upon itssignificance. A consciousness of this rich human background shouldaccompany each new endeavor to examine the facts about poetry and todetermine its essential nature. The facts are indeed somewhat complicated, and the nature of poetry, in certain aspects of it, at least, will remainas always a mystery. Yet in that very complication and touch of mysterythere is a fascination which has laid its spell upon countless generationsof men, and which has been deepened rather than destroyed by the advanceof science and the results of scholarship. The study of folklore andcomparative literature has helped to explain some of the secrets ofpoetry; the psychological laboratory, the history of criticism, theinvestigation of linguistics, the modern developments in music and theother arts, have all contributed something to our intelligent enjoyment ofthe art of poetry and to our sense of its importance in the life ofhumanity. There is no field of inquiry where the interrelations ofknowledge are more acutely to be perceived. The beginner in the study ofpoetry may at once comfort himself and increase his zest by rememberingthat any real training which he has already had in scientific observation, in the habit of analysis, in the study of races and historic periods, inthe use of languages, in the practice or interpretation of any of the finearts, or even in any bodily exercise that has developed his sense ofrhythm, will be of ascertainable value to him in this new study. 

But before attempting to apply his specific knowledge or aptitude to thenew field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the widerquestions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these questionshas to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general fieldof Aesthetics. 

_1. The Study of Poetry and the Study of Aesthetics_

The Greeks invented a convenient word to describe the study of poetry:"Poetics. " Aristotle's famous fragmentary treatise bore that title, and itwas concerned with the nature and laws of certain types of poetry and withthe relations of poetry to the other arts. For the Greeks assumed, as wedo, that poetry is an art: that it expresses emotion through wordsrhythmically arranged. But as soon as they began to inquire into theparticular kind of emotion which is utilized in poetry and the variousrhythmical arrangements employed by poets, they found themselves compelledto ask further questions. How do the other arts convey feeling? Whatarrangement or rhythmic ordering of facts do they use in this process?What takes place in us as we confront the work of art, or, in other words, what is our reaction to an artistic stimulus?

For an answer to such wider questions as these, we moderns turn to theso-called science of Aesthetics. This word, derived from the Greek_aisthanomai_ (to perceive), has been defined as "anything having to dowith perception by the senses. " But it was first used in its present senseby the German thinker Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century. He meant by it "the theory of the fine arts. " It has proved a convenientterm to describe both "The Science of the Beautiful" and "The Philosophyof Beauty"; that is, both the analysis and classification of beautifulthings as well as speculation as to the origin and nature of Beautyitself. But it should be borne in mind that aesthetic inquiry and answermay precede by thousands of years the use of the formal language ofaesthetic theory. Mr. Kipling's "Story of Ung" cleverly represents thecave-men as discussing the very topics which the contemporary studio andclassroom strive in vain to settle, --in vain, because they are the eternalproblems of art. Here are two faces, two trees, two colors, one of whichseems preferable to the other. Wherein lies the difference, as far as theobjects themselves are concerned? And what is it which the preferable faceor tree or color stirs or awakens within us as we look at it? These arewhat we call aesthetic questions, but a man or a race may have a delicateand sure sense of beauty without consciously asking such questions at all. The awareness of beautiful objects in nature, and even the ability tocreate a beautiful work of art, may not be accompanied by any gift foraesthetic speculation. Conversely, many a Professor of aesthetics hascontentedly lived in an ugly house and you would not think that he hadever looked at river or sky or had his pulses quickened by a tune. Nevertheless, no one can turn the pages of a formal History of Aestheticswithout being reminded that the oldest and apparently the most simpleinquiries in this field may also be the subtlest and in a sense the mostmodern. For illustration, take the three philosophical contributions ofthe Greeks to aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet:[Footnote: Bosanquet, _History of Aesthetic_, chap. 3. ](1) the conception that art deals with images, not realities, i. E. Withaesthetic "semblance" or things as they appear to the artist;(2) the conception that art consists in "imitation, " which they carried toan absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation must be less "valuable"than the thing imitated;(3) the conception that beauty consists in certain formal relations, suchas symmetry, harmony of parts--in a word, "unity in variety. "

Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice thefirst of these conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "freeverse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value tothe student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory issometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion contained inAristotle's _Poetics_, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in theindirect stimulus to his sympathy and taste. For he must survey thewidespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods ofartistic creation in the Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling forlandscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the emergenceof the sense of the "significant" or individually "characteristic" inthe work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself with Kant or Hegel orColeridge in philosophical theories about the nature of beauty, or tofollow the curious analyses of experimental aesthetics in modernlaboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions to aesthetic stimuli arecunningly registered and the effects of lines and colors and tones uponthe human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need nottrouble himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. Thechief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate preoccupation ofmen with beautiful objects and to remember that any inquiry into thenature and laws of poetry will surely lead him into a deeper curiosity asto the nature and manifestations of aesthetic feeling in general. 

_2. The Impulse to Artistic Production_

Furthermore, no one can ask himself how it is that a poem comes into beingunless he also raises the wider question as to the origin and working ofthe creative impulse in the other arts. It is clear that there is a gulfbetween the mere sense of beauty--such as is possessed by primitive man, or, in later stages of civilization, by the connoisseur in the finearts--and the concrete work of art. Thousands enjoy the statue, thesymphony, the ode; not one in a thousand can produce these objects. Mere connoisseurship is sterile. "The ability to produce one fine line, "said Edward FitzGerald, "transcends all the Able-Editor ability in thisably-edited universe. " What is the impulse which urges certain persons tocreate beautiful objects? How is it that they cross the gulf whichseparates the enjoyer from the producer?

It is easier to ask this question than to find a wholly satisfactoryanswer to it. Plato's explanation, in the case of the poet, is simpleenough: it is the direct inspiration of the divinity, --the "god" takespossession of the poet. Perhaps this may be true, in a sense, and we shallrevert to it later, but first let us look at some of the conditions forthe exercise of the creative impulse, as contemporary theorists haveendeavored to explain them. 

Social relations, surely, afford one of the obvious conditions for theimpulse to art. The hand-clapping and thigh-smiting of primitive savagesin a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before admiringspectators, the chorus of primitive ballads, --the crowd repeating andaltering the refrains, --the rhythmic song of laboring men and of women attheir weaving, sailors' "chanties, " the celebration of funeral rites, religious processional and pageant, are all expressions of communalfeeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in widestcommonalty spread"--which has inspired, in Greece and Italy, some of thegreatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has proceeded, this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in thepresence of the individual artist only. We see Keats sitting at his gardentable writing the "Ode to Autumn, " the lonely Shelley in the Cascine atFlorence composing the "West Wind, " Wordsworth pacing the narrow walkbehind Dove Cottage and mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writingmusic. But the creative act thus performed in solitude has a singularpotency, after all, for arousing that communal feeling which in the momentof creation the artist seems to escape. What he produces in his lonelinessthe world does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomesknown, really unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its functionis social consolidation. "

Tolstoy made so much of this "transmission of emotion, " this "infectious"quality of art as a means of union among men, that he reduced a good caseto an absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking that if a given workof art does not infect the spectator--and preferably the uneducated"peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art at all. Heoverlooked the obvious truth that there are certain types of difficultor intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly inpoetry--which so tax the attention and the analytical and reflectivepowers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured spectatoror hearer simply unaware of the presence of beauty. Debussy's music, Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were notwritten for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to himnothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his casewith childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting uponemotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative instinct isundeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the actual workof production and in the resultant object, and something of this pleasurein the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the competentobserver. The permanent vitality of a work of art does consist in itscapacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One has only to thinkof Gray's "Elegy" and the delight which it has afforded to generations ofmen. 

Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally it with the"play-instinct. " According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdomof play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in thissphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself. He is wholly man only when he "plays, " that is, when he is free to create. Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogybetween the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplusenergy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles, and that"playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which seems to characterizethe artist. This analogy is curiously suggestive, though it isinsufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in human artisticproduction. 

The play theory, again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception ofthe Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances ratherthan with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance ofthings; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically orlogically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of theimpressionist painter or the imagist poet illustrates this conception. Theconventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings, conversations, actions, are all affected by the "_optique du théâtre_"they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a harmoniousimpression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. Thecraving for "real" effects upon the stage is anti-aesthetic, like thosegladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw anunskilful fencer, acting the part of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: theeffect was lifelike, beyond question, but it was shocking. 

From this doctrine of aesthetic semblance or "appearance" many thinkershave drawn the conclusion that the pleasures afforded by art must in theirvery nature be disinterested and sharable. Disinterested, because theyconsist so largely in delighted contemplation merely. Women on the stage, said Coquelin, should afford to the spectator "a theatrical pleasure only, and not the pleasure of a lover. " Compare with this the sprightly egotismof the lyric poet's

 "If she be not so to me, What care I how fair she be?"

A certain aloofness is often felt to characterize great art: it isperceived in the austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples and theVenus of Melos:

 "And music pours on mortals Its beautiful disdain. "

The lower pleasures of the senses of taste and touch, it is often pointedout, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory. Your dinner is _your_ dinner--your exclusive proprietorship of lowerpleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver andradiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they aresharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, itis nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute observerslike Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction, but the generalinstinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and form andsound "sharable, " because they exist for all who can appreciate them. The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not lessened, but ratherincreased, by the coexistent happiness of others in the same object. 

There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiarimportance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse towardartistic creation always works along lines of order. The creative impulsemay remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as manyphilosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy which issomehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage, have now and again possessed this vital creative power. They have beenable to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:

 "I have a bit of fiat in my soul, And can myself create my little world. "

The little world which their imagination has created may be representedonly by a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece ofbone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be anything more thanthe mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is orderedplay or labor. It follows a method. It betrays remeditation. It is theexpression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler usuallywhittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something. His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows apattern--invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from otherpatterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and fromhis tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood. But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from his sense ofmaking something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern orpurpose or "design" is recognized by others the maker's pleasure isheightened, sharable. For he has accomplished the miracle: he has thrownthe raw material of feeling into form--and that form itself yieldspleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it:made it expressive of something. All the "arts of design" among primitiveraces show this pattern-instinct. 

But the impulse toward an ordered expression of feeling is equallyapparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking ofhands or feet in unison, the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regularbeat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contestas they break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves ofcheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some onestarts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in acircle, all serve to illustrate the law that as feeling gains in intensityit tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of hismarvelous moments of insight, is the result of "a more than usual state ofemotion" combined "with more than usual order. "

What has been said about play and sharable pleasure and the beginning ofdesign has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin:[Footnote: Article on "The Fine Arts" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. ]

"There are some things which we do because we must; these are ournecessities. There are other things which we do because we ought; theseare our duties. There are other things which we do because we like; theseare our play. Among the various kinds of things done by men only becausethey like, the fine arts are those of which the results afford to manypermanent and disinterested delight, and of which the performance, callingfor premeditated skill, is capable of regulation up to a certain point, but that point passed, has secrets beyond the reach and a freedom beyondthe restraint of rules. "

_3. "Form" and "Significance" in the Arts_

If the fine arts, then, deal with the ordered or harmonious expression offeeling, it is clear that any specific work of art may be regarded, atleast theoretically, from two points of view. We may look at its "outside"or its "inside"; that is to say at its ordering of parts, its pattern, its"form, " or else at the feeling or idea which it conveys. This distinctionbetween form and content, between expression and that which is expressed, is temptingly convenient. It is a useful tool of analysis, but it isdangerous to try to make it anything more than that. If we were looking ata water-pipe and the water which flows through it, it would be easy tokeep a clear distinction between the form of the iron pipe, and itscontent of water. But in certain of the fine arts very noticeably, such asmusic, and in a diminished degree, poetry, and more or less in all ofthem, the form is the expression or content. A clear-cut dissection of thecomponent elements of outside and inside, of water-pipe and water withinit, becomes impossible. Listening to music is like looking at a brook;there is no inside and outside, it is all one intricately blended complexof sensation. Music is a perfect example of "embodied feeling, " asstudents of aesthetics term it, and the body is here inseparable from thefeeling. But in poetry, which is likewise embodied feeling, it is somewhateasier to attempt, for purposes of logical analysis, a separation of thecomponent elements of thought (i. E. "content") and form. We speakconstantly of the "idea" of a poem as being more or less adequately"expressed, " that is, rendered in terms of form. The actual form of agiven lyric may or may not be suited to its mood, [Footnote: Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's "Reverie of PoorSusan. "]or the poet may not have been a sufficiently skilful workman to achievesuccess in the form or "pattern" which he has rightly chosen. 

Even in poetry, then, the distinction between inside and outside, content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, likepainting and sculpture, it often becomes highly interesting andinstructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The Frenchpainter Millet, for instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil whoshowed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you tosay?" The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance. " The Englishpainter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same fashion: "I paintfirst of all because I have something to say. .. . My intention has not beenso much to paint pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest greatthoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and kindle allthat is best and noblest in humanity. .. . My work is a protest against themodern opinion that Art should have nothing to say intellectually. "

On the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have givenassent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of painting. According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges aPersian rug--by the perfection of its formal beauty, its harmonies ofline, color and texture, its "unity in variety. " It is evident that themen who hold this opinion are emphasizing form in the work of art, andthat Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinkingprimarily of expression, and the other of that which is expressed. Theimportant point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this divergenceof opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure form, or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been called, --such as arectangle, a square, a cube, --carries a certain element of associationwhich gives it a degree of significance. There is no absolutely bare orblank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it isintimately connected with our experience. [Footnote: See Bosanquet, _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_, pp. 19, 29, 39, and Santayana, _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 83. ]It cannot be a mere question of balance, parallelism and abstract "unityin variety. " The acanthus design in architectural ornament, the Saracenicdecoration on a sword-blade, aim indeed primarily at formal beauty andlittle more. The Chinese laundryman hands you a red slip of paper coveredwith strokes of black ink in strange characters. It is undecipherable toyou, yet it possesses in its sheer charm of color and line, something ofbeauty, and the freedom and vigor of the strokes are expressive ofvitality. It is impossible that Maud's face should really have been

 "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more. "

Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist, theartist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, thathis product lacks interest and proves tedious or nonsensical. There is"nonsense-verse, " as we shall see later, which fulfills every conditionfor pure formal beauty in poetry. Yet it is not poetry, but onlynonsense-verse. 

Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the workof art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one thatreveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They areassociated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or lessobscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest. They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, withrepresentative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes. Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The Return ofthe Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down, as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which thecomposer has striven to make it carry. 

There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed toofar, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may beemphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between theelements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? Thisquestion has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing. The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning, Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon it. 

Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a roughstroke of common sense:

 "Is it so pretty You can't discover if it means hope, fear, Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi. "]

He tried again in the well-known passage from _The Ring and the Book_:

 "So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall, -- So note by note bring music from your mind Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived, -- So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save the soul beside. "

How Whistler, the author of _Ten O'Clock_ and the creator of exquisitelylovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet'scarefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History ofAesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims ofform and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic orindividual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject tothe conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium. "That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as youobserve the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which youare working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But theartist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium of expression;if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws ofmusic or poetry in order to attempt that valiant enterprise of saving asoul. 

_4. The Man in the Work of Art_

Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is bafflingto the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspectof the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It isthis: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has putthere. _What he has put in_ is our content question; _what shape he hasput it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical language:"A man is the middle term between content and expression. " There isdoubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative power, but thisis a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's materialas such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whateverother medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of thisparticular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, tothink in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time, as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go. "The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and"space-arts" in his _Laokoon_ consisted in the emphasis laid upon thespecific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varyingopportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. Butthough human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustiblepossibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, afterall, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and thebrain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as itpasses through his "shop, " in some such way as iron is transformed intosteel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a "transformer" alters thewave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to lowpressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in asomewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by thesenses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes strikingillustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of theimagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter. But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artistsand then to examine the psychological basis of this central function ofthe artist's mind. 

"Painting is the expression of certain sensations, " said Carolus Duran. "You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you, but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon themind. .. . Take careful account of the substances that you mustrender--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproducenature _as you feel it_, then you falsify it. _Painting is not done withthe eyes, but with the brain_. "

W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is not nature. .. . The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. _It must passthrough the mind of the artist and be changed_. Art is nature reflectedthrough the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling, passion of the spirit that reflects it. "

In John La Farge's _Considerations on Painting_, a little book which isfull of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are manypassages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of theartist's view of the world. " La Farge points out that "drawing from lifeis an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment ismerely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings, former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, andthrough which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entireeducated part of our nature. "

One of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length:[Footnote: _Considerations on Painting_, pp. 71-73. Macmillan. ]

 "I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they were well known to the public are concerned. 

 "What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us. Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually indicates--as you know, or ought to know--whether we are looking far or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and down--that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of sky above--was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with different precision and different attention. In one picture the open sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the upper sky was of no consequence--it was the clouds and the mountains that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say, the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his neighbour liked. 

 "The colour of each painting was different--the vivacity of colour and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole; and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes. 

 "I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first desire of expressing _ourselves_, and I think would have been very much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And we were each one true to nature. .. . If you ever know how to paint somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see it--which is yourself. "

Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the briefsayings of the critics, like Taine's well-known "Art is nature seenthrough a temperament, " G. L. Raymond's "Art is nature made human, " andCroce's "Art is the expression of impressions. " These painters and criticsagree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts asa "transformer. " It receives the reports of the senses, but alters thesereports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that themost personal and essential function of the artist's brain is to befound. 

Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used inhandbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of anerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usuallydrawn after this fashion:

Sensory stimulus Nerve-centre Motor Reaction________________________________O______________________________ --------------------> -------------------->

The process is thus described by William James:[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, American Science Series, p. 91. Henry Holt. ]

 "The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the animal and with the irritant applied. "

The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hindleg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving thespinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of theacid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus, consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is thelaw. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors thesea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may bemultiplied indefinitely. [Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale, quoted in Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919. ]It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightenedcuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading inkupon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a questionof an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitaryreaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrowcomes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces _In Memoriam_. "[Footnote: _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, p. 219. Houghton MifflinCompany. ]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But theperson who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find apreliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to"expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere hemust reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream ofconsciousness, " sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detectmodification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes throughthe higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed"impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus thetemple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination whichhas brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete, a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. AnAmerican millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet, " that is to say, a pieceof colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperamenthas recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as ithas been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. Acertain stimulus or "impression, " an organism which reshapes impressions, and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the termspermitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process whichseems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricatelyfascinating than in poetry. 

CHAPTER II

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

 "The more I read and re-read the works of the great poets, and the more I study the writings of those who have some Theory of Poetry to set forth, the more am I convinced that the question _What is Poetry?_ can be properly answered only if we make _What it does_ take precedence of _How it does it_. " J. A. STEWART, _The Myths of Plato_

In the previous chapter we have attempted a brief survey of some of thegeneral aesthetic questions which arise whenever we consider the form andmeaning of the fine arts. We must now try to look more narrowly at thespecial field of poetry, asking ourselves how it comes into being, whatmaterial it employs, and how it uses this material to secure thosespecific effects which we all agree in calling "poetical, " however widelywe may differ from one another in our analysis of the means by which theeffect is produced. 

Let us begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, likeeach of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor'sline accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongsto it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always difficult andsometimes impossible. But the field itself is admittedly "there, " in allits richness and beauty, however bitterly the surveyors may quarrel aboutthe boundary lines. (It is well to remember that professional surveyors donot themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How muchmap-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping andclassifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, betweenartist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the artson the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relativecomplexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation toimitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one caresparticularly to-day about such matters of precedence--as if the arts werewalking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. On the otherhand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of thedistinction made by Lessing in his _Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting andPoetry_; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression, according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say, the "time-arts"--like poetry and music--deal primarily with actions thatsucceed one another in time. The space-arts--painting, sculpture, architecture--deal primarily with bodies that coexist in space. Hencethere are some subjects that belong naturally in the "painting" group, andothers that belong as naturally in the "poetry" group. The artist shouldnot "confuse the genres, " or, to quote Whistler again, he should not pusha medium further than it will go. Recent psychology has more or less upsetLessing's technical theory of vision, [Footnote: F. E. Bryant, _The Limits of Descriptive Writing_, etc. AnnArbor, 1906. ]but it has confirmed the value of his main contention as to the fieldsof the various arts. 

_1. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice_

An illustration will make this matter clear. Let us take the Greek myth ofOrpheus and Eurydice, which has been utilized by many artists during morethan two thousand years assuredly, and how much longer no one knows. Virgil told it in the _Georgics_ and Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_. Itbecame a favorite theme of medieval romance, and whether told in a French_lai_ or Scottish ballad like "King Orfeo, " it still keeps, among all thestrange transformations which it has undergone, "the freshness of theearly world. " Let us condense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-Saxonversion of Boethius's _De Consolatione Philosophiae_: "There was once afamous Thracian harper named Orpheus who had a beautiful wife namedEurydice. She died and went to hell. Orpheus longed sorrowfully for her, harping so sweetly that the very woods and wild beasts listened to hiswoe. Finally, he resolved to seek her in hell and win her back by hisskill. And he played so marvelously there that the King of Hell to rewardhim gave him back his wife again, only upon the condition that he shouldnot turn back to look at her as he led her forth. But, alas, who canconstrain love? When Orpheus came to the boundary of darkness and light, he turned round to see if his wife was following--and she vanished. "

Such was the myth in one of its manifold European forms. It dealsobviously with a succession of events, with actions easily narratable bymeans of a "time-art" like poetry. The myth itself is one of fascinatinghuman interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne had chosen to tell itin his _Wonder-Book_, we should doubtless speak of it as a "poetic" story. We should mean, in using that adjective, that the myth containedsentiment, imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pathos--the qualitieswhich we commonly associate with poetry--and that Hawthorne, although aprose writer, had such an exquisite sympathy for Greek stories that hishandling of the material would be as delicate, and the result possibly aslovely, as if the tale had been told in verse. But if we would realize thefull value of Lessing's distinction, we must turn to one of the countlessverse renderings of the myth. Here we have a succession of actions, indeed, quite corresponding to those of the prose story. But these imagesof action, succeeding one another in time, are now evoked by successivemusical sounds, --the sounds being, as in prose, arbitrary word-symbols ofimage and idea, --only that in poetry the sounds have a certain orderedarrangement which heightens the emotional effect of the images evoked. Prose writer and poet might mean to tell precisely the same tale, but inreality they cannot, for one is composing, no matter how cunningly, in thetunes of prose and the other in the tunes of verse. The change in theinstrument means an alteration in the mental effect. 

Now turn to Lessing's other exemplar of the time-arts, the musician--formusicians as well as poets, painters and sculptors have utilized the mythof Orpheus and Eurydice. What can the musician do with the theme? Gluck'sopera may serve for answer. He cannot, by the aid of music alone, call upvery definite ideas or images. He cannot tell the Orpheus story clearly toone who has never heard it. But to one who already knows the tale, acomposer's overture--without stage accessories or singing actors or any"operatic" devices as such--furnishes in its successions and combinationsof musical sound, without the use of verbal symbols, a unique pleasurableemotion which strongly and powerfully reinforces the emotions suggested bythe Orpheus myth itself. Certain portions of the story, such as thoserelating to the wondrous harping, can obviously be interpreted betterthrough music than through the medium of any other art. 

What can Lessing's "space-arts, " sculpture and painting, do with thematerial furnished by the Orpheus myth? It is clear that they cannot tellthe whole story, since they are dealing with "bodies that coexist" ratherthan with successive actions. They must select some one instant of actiononly, and preferably the most significant moment of the whole, the partingof husband and wife. In the museum at Naples there is the wonderful Greektreatment of this theme, in sculptured high relief. The sculptor haschosen the moment of parting. Hermes, the messenger of the gods to recallEurydice, has twined his hand gently around the left hand of the woman. With her right hand she still touches her husband, but the dread instantis upon them all. The sculptor, representing the persons in threedimensions, as far as high relief allows, has sufficientlycharacterized their faces and figures, and with exquisite sense of rhythmand balance in his composition has fulfilled every requirement of formalbeauty that marble affords. 

In Sir Frederick Leighton's painting of Orpheus and Eurydice and in manyanother less famous painter's rendering of the theme, there is likewisethe portrayal of an arrested moment. But the painter represents thepersonages and the background in two dimensions. He can separate hisfigures more completely than the sculptor, can make their instant ofaction more "dramatic, " can portray certain objects, such as thediaphanous robe of Eurydice as she vanishes into mist, which are beyondthe power of the sculptor to represent, and above all he can suggest thecolor of the objects themselves, the degree of light and shade, the"atmosphere" of the whole, in a fashion unapproachable by the rival arts. 

The illustration need not be worked out more elaborately here, though thestudent may profitably reflect upon the resources of the modern movingpicture--which is a novel combination of the "time" and "space" arts--andof the mimetic dance, as affording still further opportunities forexpressing the artistic possibilities of the Orpheus story. But the chieflesson to be learned by one who is attempting in this way to survey theprovinces of the different arts is this: no two of all the artists whohave availed themselves of the Orpheus material have _really had the samesubject_, although the title of each of their productions, if catalogued, might conveniently be called "Orpheus and Eurydice. " Each has had his ownconception of the theme, each his own professional technique in handlinghis chosen medium, each his own habits of brain, each, in a word, hasfound his own subject. "Are these children who are playing in thesunlight, " said Fromentin, "or is it a place in the sunlight inwhich children are playing?" One is a "figure" subject, that is to say, while the other is a landscape subject. 

The whole topic of the "provinces" of the arts becomes hopelessly academicand sterile if one fails to keep his eye upon the individual artist, whosefree choice of a subject is conditioned solely by his own artisticinterest in rendering such aspects of any theme as his own medium ofexpression will allow him to represent. Take one of the most beautifulobjects in nature, a quiet sea. Is this a "painter-like" subject?Assuredly, yet the etcher has often rendered the effect of a quiet sea interms of line, as a pastellist has rendered it in terms of color, and amusician in terms of tone-feeling, and a poet in terms of tone-feelingplus thought. Each one of them finds something for himself, selectshis own "subject, " from the material presented by the quiet sea, andwhatever he may find belongs to him. We declaim against the confusion ofthe genres, the attempt to render in the terms of one art what belongs, aswe had supposed, to another art, and we are often right in our protest. Yet artists have always been jumping each other's claims, and the soletest of the lawfulness of the procedure is the success of the result. Ifthe border-foray of the impressionist or imagist proves successful, welland good, but a triumphant raid should not be mistaken for the steadylines of the main campaign. 

_2. The Special Field_

What then do we mean by the province of poetry? Simply that there is aspecial field in which, for uncounted centuries, poets have produced acertain kind of artistic effect. Strictly speaking, it is better to say"poets" rather than "the poet, " just as William James confesses thatstrictly speaking there is no such thing as "the Imagination, " there areonly imaginations. But "the poet" is a convenient expression to indicate aman functioning _qua_ poet--i. E. A man poetizing; and we shall continue touse it. When we say that "the poet" in Sir Walter Scott inspires this orthat utterance, while "the novelist" or "the historian" or "the critic" inhim has prompted this or that other utterance, we are within our rights. 

The field of poetry, as commonly understood, is that portion of humanfeeling which expresses itself through rhythmical and preferably metricallanguage. In this field "the poet" labors. The human feeling which heembodies in verse comes to him originally, as feeling comes to all men, inconnection with a series of mental images. These visual, auditory, motoror tactile images crowd the stream of consciousness as it sweeps inward tothe brain. There the images are subjected to a process of selection, modification, transformation. [Footnote: "The finest poetry was first experience; but the thoughthas suffered a transformation since it was an experience. " Emerson, _Shakespeare: The Poet_. ]At some point in the process the poet's images tend to become verbal, --asthe painter's or the musician's do not, --and these verbal images are thendischarged in rhythmical patterns. It is one type of the threefold processroughly described at the close of Chapter I. What is peculiar to the poetas compared with other men or other artists is to be traced not so much inthe peculiar nature of his visual, auditory, motor or tactile images--forin this respect poets differ enormously among one another--as in theincreasingly verbal form of these images as they are reshaped by hisimagination, and in the strongly rhythmical or metrical character of thefinal expression. 

Let carbon represent the first of the stages, the excited feelingresulting from sensory stimulus. That is the raw material of poeticemotion. Let the diamond represent the second stage, the chemical change, as it were, produced in the mental images under the heat and pressure ofthe imagination. The final stage would be represented by the cutting, polishing and setting of the diamond, by the arrangement of thetransformed and now purely verbal images into effective rhythmical ormetrical designs. 

Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed

 "The vision and the faculty divine, Though wanting the accomplishment of verse. "

Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process alreadydescribed. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions ofevery kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the innerworld and the other world. " The "faculty divine, " into which vision blendsinsensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions--as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passionrecollected in tranquillity, "--into words possessing a peculiar life andpower. The "accomplishment of verse" is easier to understand. It is theexpression, by means of these words now pulsating with rhythm--the naturallanguage of excitement--of whatever the poet has seen and felt, modifiedby his imagination. The result is a poem: "embodied feeling. "

Browning says to his imaginary poet:

 "Your brains beat into rhythm--you tell What we felt only. "

There is much virtue, for us, in this rudely vigorous description of "thepoet. " Certainly all of us feel, and thus far we are all potential poets. But according to Browning there is, so to speak, a physiologicaldifference between the poet's brain and ours. His brain beats into rhythm;that is the simple but enormous difference in function, and hence it isthat he can tell what we only feel. That is, he becomes a "singer" as wellas "maker, " while we, conscious though we may be of the capacity forintense feeling, cannot embody our feelings in the forms of verse. We mayindeed go so far as to reshape mental images in our heated brains--for allmen do this under excitement, but to sing what we have thus made is deniedto us. 

_3. An Illustration from William James_

No one can be more conscious than the present writer of the impossibilityof describing in plain prose the admittedly complicated and mysteriousseries of changes by which poetry comes into being. Those readers who findthat even the lines just quoted from Wordsworth and Browning throw littlenew light upon the old difficulties, may nevertheless get a bit of helphere by turning back to William James's diagram of the working of thebrain. It will be remembered that in Chapter I we used the simplestpossible chart to represent the sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and thesucceeding motor reaction, and we compared the "in-coming" and "out-going"nerve processes with the function of Impression and Expression in thearts. But to understand something of what takes place in the making ofpoetry we must now substitute for our first diagram the slightly morecomplicated one which William James employs to represent, not those lowernerve-centres which "act from present sensational stimuli alone, " but thehemispheres of the human brain which "act from considerations. "[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, pp. 97, 98. Henry Holt. ]Considerations are images constructed out of past experience, they arereproductions of what has been felt or witnessed. 

 "They are, in short, _remote_ sensations; and the main difference between the hemisphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely expressed by saying that _the one obeys absent, the other only present, objects. The hemispheres would then seem to be the chief seat of memory. _"

Then follows the accompanying diagram and illustration. 

 "If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare the nervous system, _C_, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from sense-organ to muscle along the line _S. .. C. .. M_. The hemisphere, _H_, adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass when for any reason the direct line is not used. 

[Illustration: M ?----- C ?----- H ?----- C ?---- S ]

 "Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of delicious rest and coolness pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge into the muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the dangerous repose. But the loop-line being open, part of the current is drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarrhal reminiscences, which prevail over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest more safely. "

William James's entire discussion of the value of the hemisphere"loop-line" as a reservoir of reminiscences is of peculiar suggestivenessto the student of poetry. For it is along this loop-line of "memories andideas of the distant" that poetry wins its generalizing or universalizingpower. It is here that the life of reason enters into the life of meresensation, transforming the reports of the nerves into ideas and thoughtsthat have coherence and general human significance. It is possible, certainly, as the experiments of contemporary "imagists" prove, to writepoetry of a certain type without employing the "loop-line. " But this ispure sensorium verse, the report of retinal, auditory or tactile images, and nothing more. "Response to impressions and representation of thoseimpressions in their _original isolation_ are the marks of the new poetry. Response to impressions, _correlation of those impressions into aconnected body of phenomena_, and final interpretation of them as a wholeare, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in allliterature, whether poetry or prose. "[Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naiveté, " _Atlantic_, April, 1916. ]To quote another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not, except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies tothe bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular envelopes orauditory canals. Their power lies in their freightage of association, in their tactical position at the focus of converging experience, inthe number and vigor of the occasions in which they have crossed andre-crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life. . .. Sense-impressionsare poetically valuable only in the measure of their power to procreate orre-create experience. "[Footnote: O. W. Firkins, "The New Movement in Poetry, " _Nation_, October14, 1915. ]

One may give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity ofimagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of senseexperience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naivecourage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature. "[Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III. ]Like "free verse, " it has widened the field of expression, although itsadvocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of "imagist" poems lieembedded in the verse of Browning and even in the prose of GeorgeMeredith. [Footnote: J. L. Lowes, "An Unacknowledged Imagist, " _Nation_, February24, 1916. ]We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at thispoint that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in itslack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitelysensitive decapitated frog. It is "hemisphereless" poetry. 

_4. The Poet and Other Men_

The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than thevision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowmentsof habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets likeTennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-knowncase of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye andnear-sighted in the other! No doubt the life-long practice of observingand recording natural phenomena sharpens the sense of poets, as it doesthe senses of Indians, naturalists, sailors and all outdoors men. Thequick eye for costume and character possessed by a Chaucer or a Shakspereis remarkable, but equally so is the observation of a Dickens or a Balzac. It is rather in what we call psychical vision that the poet is wont toexcel, that is, in his ability to perceive the meaning of visualphenomena. Here he ceases to be a mere reporter of retinal images, andtakes upon himself the higher and harder function of an interpreter of thevisible world. He has no immunity from the universal human experiences: heloves and he is angry and he sees men born and die. He becomes accordingto the measure of his intellectual capacity a thinker. He strives to seeinto the human heart, to comprehend the working of the human mind. Hereads the divine justice in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetratesbeneath the external forms of Nature and perceives her as a "livingpresence. " Yet the faculty of vision which the poet possesses in soeminent a degree is shared by many who are not poets. Darwin's outward eyewas as keen as Wordsworth's; St. Paul's sense of the reality of theinvisible world is more wonderful than Shakspere's. The poet is indeedfirst of all a seer, but he must be something more than a seer before heis wholly poet. 

Another mark of the poetic mind is its vivid sense of relations. The partsuggests the whole. In the single instance there is a hint of the generallaw. The self-same Power that brings the fresh rhodora to the woods bringsthe poet there also. In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, hebeholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. Theconscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walkingshadow, " and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when heexclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through theshifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of theuniverse; his mimic play and "the great globe itself" are alike an"insubstantial pageant, " though it may happen, as Tennyson said ofWordsworth, that even in the transient he gives the sense of theabiding, "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. "

But this perception of relations, characteristic as it is of the poetictemper, is also an attribute of the philosopher. The intellect of aNewton, too, leaps from the specific instance to the general law; everyman, in proportion to his intelligence and insight, feels that the worldis one; while Plato and Descartes play with the time and space world withall the grave sportiveness of Prospero. 

Again, the poets have always been the "genus irritabile"--the irritabletribe. They not only see deeply, but feel acutely. Often they are toohighly sensitized for their own happiness. If they receive a pleasure moreexquisite than ours from a flower, a glimpse of the sea, a graciousaction, they are correspondingly quick to feel dissonances, imperfections, slights. Like Lamb, they are "rather squeamish about their women andchildren. " Like Keats, they are "snuffed out by an article. " Keenerpleasures, keener pains, this is the law of their life; but it isapplicable to all persons of the so-called artistic temperament. It is oneof the penalties of a fine organism. It does not of itself describe apoet. [Footnote: I have here utilized a few paragraphs from my chapter on"Poetry" in _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, Houghton MifflinCompany. ]

The real difference between "the poet" and other men is rather to betraced, as the present chapter has tried to indicate, in his capacity formaking and employing verbal images of a certain kind, and combining theseimages into rhythmical and metrical designs. In each of his functions--as"seer, " as "maker, " and as "singer"--he shows himself a true creator. Criticism no longer attempts to act as his "law-giver, " to assert what hemay or may not do. The poet is free, like every creative artist, to make abeautiful object in any way he can. And nevertheless criticism--watchingcountless poets lovingly for many a century, observing their variousendowments, their manifest endeavors, their victories and defeats, observing likewise the nature of language, that strange medium (so muchstranger than any clay or bronze!) through which poets are compelled toexpress their conceptions--criticism believes that poetry, likeeach of the sister arts, has its natural province, its own field of thebeautiful. We have tried in this chapter to suggest the general directionof that field, without looking too narrowly for its precise boundaries. InW. H. Hudson's _Green Mansions_ the reader will remember how a few sticksand stones, laid upon a hilltop, were used as markers to indicate theoutlines of a continent. Criticism, likewise, needs its poor sticks andstones of commonplace, if it is to point out any roadway. Our own roadleads first into the difficult territory of the poet's imaginings, andthen into the more familiar world of the poet's words. 

CHAPTER III

THE POET'S IMAGINATION

 "The essence of poetry is _invention_; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. " SAMUEL JOHNSON

 "The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets. " WALT WHITMAN

We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radicaldistinction between "the poet"--as we have called him forconvenience--and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that thisdistinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets aftera certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, atsome moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, theother day, spoke of a telegraph wire as "that message-vine. " Her fatherand mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was achild's instinctive "poetizing" imagination, but the father and mother, while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, wereconscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, forthe instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart'sdesire. That is to say, they could still feel "poetically, " though theirwonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon asthe gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood. 

All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, andthat if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And allreaders agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker ofpoetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But themoment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin. 

_1. Feeling and Imagination_

What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? Thepsychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors ofgenerations of specialists; and it is obvious that the general theoriesabout the nature of imagination have shifted greatly, even within thememory of living men. Nevertheless there are some facts, in thisconstantly contested territory, which now seem indisputable. One of them, and of peculiar significance to students of poetry, is this: in the streamof objects immediately present to consciousness there are no images offeeling itself. [Footnote: This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor A. H. R. Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_. Putnam's, 1912. ]

"If I am asked to call up an image of a rose, of a tree, of a cloud, or ofa skylark, I can readily do it; but if I am asked to feel loneliness orsorrow, to feel hatred or jealousy, or to feel joy on the return ofspring, I cannot readily do it. And the reason why I cannot do it isbecause I can call up no image of any one of these feelings. Foreverything I come to know through my senses, for everything in connectionwith what I do or feel I can call up some kind of mental image; but for nokind of feeling itself can I ever possibly have a direct image. The onlyeffective way of arousing any particular feeling that is more than merebodily feeling is to call up the images that are naturally connected withthat feeling. "[Footnote: Fairchild, pp. 24, 25. ]

If then, "the raw material of poetry, " as Professor Fairchild insists, is "the mental image, " we must try to see how these images are presentedto the mind of the poet and in turn communicated to us. Instead ofasserting, as our grandfathers did, that the imagination is a "faculty"of the mind, like "judgment, " or accepting the theory of our fathers thatimagination "is the whole mind thrown into the process of imagining, " thepresent generation has been taught by psychologists like Charcot, Jamesand Ribot that we are chiefly concerned with "imaginations, " that is, aseries of visual, auditory, motor or tactile images flooding in upon themind, and that it is safer to talk about these "imaginations" than about"the Imagination. " Literary critics will continue to use this lastexpression--as we are doing in the present chapter--because it is tooconvenient to be given up. But they mean by it something fairly definite:namely, the images swarming in the stream of consciousness, and theirintegration into wholes that satisfy the human desire for beauty. It isin its ultimate aim rather than in its immediate processes that the"artistic" imagination differs from the inventor's or scientist's orphilosopher's imagination. We no longer assert, as did Stopford Brookesome forty years ago, that "the highest scientific intellect is a jokecompared with the power displayed by a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante. " Weare inclined rather to believe that in its highest exercise of power thescientific mind is attempting much the same feat as the highest type ofpoetic mind, and that in both cases it is a feat of imaginative energy. 

_2. Creative and Artistic Imagination_

The reader who has hitherto allowed himself to think of a poet as a sortof freak of nature, abnormal in the very constitution of his mind, andachieving his results by methods so obscure that "inspiration" is ourhelpless name for indicating them, cannot do better than master such abook as Ribot's _Essay on the Creative Imagination_. [Footnote: Th. Ribot, _Essai sur l'Imagination créatrice_. Paris, 1900. English translation by Open Court Co. , Chicago, 1906. ]This famous psychologist, starting with the conception that the rawmaterial for the creative imagination is images, and that its basis liesin a motor impulse, examines first the emotional factor involved in everyact of the creative imagination. Then he passes to the unconscious factor, the involuntary "coming" of the idea, that "moment of genius, " as Buffoncalled it, which often marks the end of an unconscious elaboration of theidea or the beginning of conscious elaboration. [Footnote: See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, themathematician, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter. ]Ribot points out that certain organic changes, as in blood circulation--the familiar rush of blood to the head--accompany imaginative activity. Then he discusses the inventor's and artist's "fixed idea, " their "willthat it shall be so, " "the motor tendency of images engendering theideal. " Ribot's distinction between the animal's revival of images and thetrue creative combination of images in the mental life of children and ofprimitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to usis his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come intobeing. There are two types of this process, and three stages of each: (A)the "idea, " the "discovery" or invention, and then the verification orapplication; or else (B) the unconscious preparation, followedby the "idea" or "inspiration, " and then by the "development" orconstruction. Whether a man is inventing a safety-pin or a sonnet, theseries of imaginative processes seems to be much the same. There is ofcourse a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealingwith clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the artsof form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imaginationwhich prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective andemotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example. Butwhatever may be the specific type of imagination involved, we find alikein inventor, scientist and artist the same general sequence of "germ, incubation, flowering and completion, " and the same fundamental motorimpulse as the driving power. 

Holding in mind these general characteristics of the creative imagination, as traced by Ribot, let us now test our conception of the distinctivelyartistic imagination. Countless are the attempts to define or describe it, and it would be unwise for the student, at this point, to rest satisfiedwith any single formulation of its functions. But it may be helpful toquote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alexander's brilliant and subtle book, _Poetry and the Individual_:[Footnote: Putnam's, 1906. ]

 "The energy of the mind or of the soul--for it welds all psychical activities--which is the agent of our world-winnings and the procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to acquire--memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being an assimilator rather than the mere weigher of what is set before it; from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins--the will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme end--the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the beautiful. The imagination synthesises, humanises, personalises, illumines reality with the soul's most intimate moods, and so exalts with spiritual understandings. "

The value of such a description, presented without any context, will varywith the training of the individual reader, but its quickening power willbe recognized even by those who are incapable of grasping all theintellectual distinctions involved. 

_3. Poetic Imagination in Particular_

We are now ready, after this consideration of the creative and artisticimagination, to look more closely at some of the qualities of the poeticimagination in particular. The specific formal features of thatimagination lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal imagery, and in thecombination of verbal images into rhythmical patterns. But are there notfunctions of the poet's mind preceding the formation of verbal images? Thepsychology of language is still unsettled, and whether a man can thinkwithout the use of words is often doubted. But a painter can certainly"think" in terms of color, as an architect or mathematician can "think" interms of form and space, or a musician in terms of sound, withoutemploying verbal symbols at all. And are there not characteristicactivities of the poetic imagination which antedate the fixation andexpression of images in words? Apparently there are. 

The reader will find, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter, aquotation from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he refers to the"region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with theirradiations of the world. " That is to say, the inward-sweeping stream ofconsciousness is instantly met by an outward-moving activity of the brainwhich recognizes relationships between the objects proffered to the sensesand the personality itself. The "I" projects itself into these objects, claims them, appropriates them as a part of its own nature. ProfessorFairchild, who calls this self-projecting process by the somewhatambiguous name of "personalizing, " rightly insists, I believe, that poetsmake a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotessome of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats's "If a sparrowcome before my window I take part in its existence and pick about thegravel"; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, "I alwaysfeel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull, gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shallbecome a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one. " I canmatch this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H. , son of aneminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by hismother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time inhis life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bignessand nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he wasenough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

 "Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me, Bless thy little _cow_ to-night"--

_Larry being the cow. _

 "There was a child went forth every day, "

records Walt Whitman, "And the first object he look'd upon that object he became. "

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the manypassages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are allsummed up in Coleridge's heart-broken

 "Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live. "

This "animism, " or identifying imagination, by means of which the child orthe primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic ororganic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poeticfaculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbalimages or symbols. 

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with thepreceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not asyet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strangefeeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility, transparency--the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects--of theworld as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are notlooking--at least when in this mood--at our "logical" world of hard, clearfact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called "the eternalfloat of solution, " the "flowing of all things" of the Greeks, the"river within the river" of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked, of course, in artists possessing the "diffluent" type of imagination, andRomantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination, said Wordsworth, "recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, theindefinite. "[Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his _Poems_. ]"Shakespeare, too, " says Carlye, [Footnote: Essay on Goethe's Works. ]"does not look _at_ a thing, but into it, through it; so that heconstructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it togetheragain; _the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anewcreates itself before him_. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, asfor Shakespeare, _the world lies all translucent, all fusible_ we mightcall it, encircled with _Wonder_; the Natural in reality the Supernatural, for to the seer's eyes both become one. "

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic ofthe mind of the typical poet: "He is no mere observer and compiler;rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty whichexisting things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, towhom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creationsrepresenting and ennobling its effects. "

Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create. "[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_. ]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poetshave recorded, in which their feeling of "diffusion" has led them to doubtthe existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping "at a wall ortree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality, " andTennyson's "weird seizures" which he transferred from his own experienceto his imaginary Prince in _The Princess_, are familiar examples of thistype of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change inthe objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type ofdiffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poeticmind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher andthe scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing, onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely"being. " "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in alate-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth notyet appear what we shall be. " "The primary imagination, " assertedColeridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act ofcreation in the infinite _I am_. "[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 13. ]Here, evidently, unless the "God-intoxicated" Coleridge is talkingnonsense, we are in the presence of powers that do not need as yet any useof verbal symbols. 

_4. Verbal Images_

The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet isclearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to thepoet's consciousness. In the re-presentation of these pictures to us thepoet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise point atwhich he becomes conscious of employing words no doubt varies with theindividual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual ortactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as workingprimarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff ofsharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff ofvisual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of _expressionto us_ is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these intothe real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his ownpeculiar raw material into the current coin of human speech. 

Nevertheless, many poets have been sufficiently conscious of what is goingon within their workshop to tell us something about it. ProfessorFairchild has made an interesting collection[Footnote: _The Making of Poetry_, pp. 78, 79. ]of testimony relating to the tumultuous crowding of images, eachclamoring, as it were, for recognition and crying "take me!" He instances, as other critics have done, the extraordinary succession of images bywhich Shelley strives to portray the spirit of the skylark. The similesactually chosen by Shelley seem to have been merely the lucky candidatesselected from an infinitely greater number. In Francis Thompson'scaptivating description of Shelley as a glorious child the reader isconscious of the same initial rush of images, although the medium ofexpression here is heightened prose instead of verse:[Footnote: _Dublin Review_, July, 1908. ]

 "Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child. Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song. "

_5. The Selection and Control of Images_

It is easier, no doubt, to realize something of the swarming of images inthe stream of consciousness than it is to understand how these images areselected, combined and controlled. Some principle of association, some lawgoverning the synthesis, there must be; and English criticism has longtreasured some of the clairvoyant words of Coleridge and Wordsworth uponthis matter. The essential problem is suggested by Wordsworth's phrase"the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. " Is the"excitement, " then, the chief factor in the selection and combination ofimages, and do the "feelings, " as if with delicate tentacles, instinctively choose and reject and integrate such images as blend withthe poet's mood?

Coleridge, with his subtle builder's instinct, uses his favorite word"synthesis" not merely as applied to images as such, but to all thefaculties of the soul:

"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of maninto activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each otheraccording to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and aspirit of unity, that blends, and as it were fuses, each into each, bythat synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriatethe name of Imagination. " "Synthetic and magical power, " indeed, with aColeridge as Master of the Mysteries! But the perplexed student of poetrymay well wish a more exact description of what really takes place. 

An American critic, after much searching in recent psychologicalexplanations of artistic creation, attempts to describe the genesis of apoem in these words:[Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 215. Macmillan, 1900. ]

 "The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance with laws of association that may at least in part be described, these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling mimicry of the actual world of the senses--all the time delicately controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so growing intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy and strength. "

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although somecritics would question the phrase, "all the time delicately controlled bythe poet's conscious purpose. "[Footnote: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted accordingto the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will composepoetry. '. . . It is not subject to the control of the active powers of themind. . .. Its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with theconsciousness or will. " Shelley, _A Defense of Poetry_. ]

For sometimes, assuredly, the synthesis of images seems to take placewithout the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dreamor revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundantexamples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with agentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds andthe long grasses trailing from the banks; then somehow the tide seems tochange, and all the water and the weeds and grasses, even the fishes inthe stream, turn slowly and flow out to sea. The current synthesizes, harmonizes, moves onward like music, --and we are aware that it is all adream. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan, " composed in a deep opium slumber, moveslike that, one train of images melting into another like the interwovenfigures of a dance led by the "damsel with a dulcimer. " There is no"conscious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning" in the ordinaryinterpretation of that word. Nevertheless it is perfect integration ofimagery, pure beauty to the senses. Something of this rapture in the sheerrelease of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote toColeridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy tillyou have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so. " (June 10, 1796. )

If "Kubla Khan" represents one extreme, Poe's account of how he wrote "TheRaven"[Footnote: _The Philosophy of Composition_. ]--incredible as the story appears to most of us--may serve to illustratethe other, namely, a cool, conscious, workmanlike control of every elementin the selection and combination of imagery. Wordsworth's naiveexplanation of the task performed by the imagination in his "Cuckoo" and"Leech-Gatherer"[Footnote: Preface to poems of 1815-1845. ]occupies a middle ground. We are at least certain of his entirehonesty--and incidentally of his total lack of humor!

 "'Shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?'

"This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of thevoice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporealexistence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power bya consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heardthroughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight. .. . 

 "'As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence, Wonder to all who do the same espy By what means it could thither come, and whence, So that it seems a thing endued with sense, Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself. 

 Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead. Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age. * * * * * Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth altogether if it move at all. '

"In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifyingpowers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are allbrought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the powerof life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped ofsome of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; whichintermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing theoriginal image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figureand condition of the aged man; who is divested of so much of theindications of life and motion as to bring him to the pointwhere the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison. "

Wordsworth's analysis of the processes of his own imagination, like Poe'sstory of the composition of "The Raven, " is an analysis made after theimagination had functioned. There can be no absolute proof of itscorrectness in every detail. It is evident that we have to deal with aninfinite variety of normal and abnormal minds. Some of these defyclassification; others fall into easily recognized types, such as "thelunatic, the lover and the poet, " as sketched by Theseus, Duke of Athens. How modern, after all, is the Duke's little lecture on the psychology ofimagination!

 "The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact; One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"[Footnote: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, v, i, 7-22. ]

Shakspere, it will be observed, does not hesitate to use that dangerousterm "the poet!" Yet as students of poetry we must constantly bringourselves back to the recorded experience of individual men, and fromthese make our comparisons and generalizations. It may even happen thatsome readers will get a clearer conception of the selection and synthesisof images if they turn for the moment away from poetry and endeavor torealize something of the same processes as they take place in imaginativeprose. In Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, for example, the dominant image, which becomes the symbol of his entire theme, is the piece of scarletcloth which originally caught his attention. This physical objectbecomes, after long brooding, subtly changed into a moral symbol of sinand its concealment. It permeates the book, it is borne openly upon thebreast of one sufferer, it is written terribly in the flesh of another, itflames at last in the very sky. All the lesser images and symbols of theromance are mastered by it, subordinated to it; it becomes the dominantnote in the composition. The romance of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, as we sayof any great poem or drama, an "ideal synthesis"; i. E. A putting togetherof images in accordance with some central idea. The more significant theidea or theme or master image, the richer and fuller are the possibilitiesof beauty in detail. Apply this familiar law of complexity to a poet'sconscious or unconscious choice of images. In the essay which we havealready quoted[Footnote: _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 216. ]Lewis Gates remarks:

"In every artist there is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritualorganization and play of instincts, which results in large measure fromthe common life of his day and generation, and which represents thislife--makes it potent--within the individuality of the artist. Thisso-called 'acquired constitution of the life of the soul'--it has beendescribed by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy acuteness andthoroughness--determines in some measure the contents of the artist'smind, for it determines his interests, and therefore the sensations andperceptions that he captures and automatically stores up. It guides him inhis judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and dislikes as regardsconduct and character, and controls in large measure the play of hisimagination as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and the destiniesof his heroes. Its prejudices interfiltrate throughout the molecules ofhis entire moral and mental life, and give to each image and idea someslight shade of attractiveness or repulsiveness, so that when the artist'sspirit is at work under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric ofa poem the competing images and ideas in his consciousness, certain ideasand images come more readily and others lag behind, and the resulting workof art gets a colour and an emotional tone and suggestions of value thatsubtly reflect the genius of the age. "

_6. "Imagist" Verse_

Such a conception of the association of images as reflecting not only this"acquired constitution of the soul" of the poet but also the genius of theage is in marked contrast to some of the theories held by contemporary"imagists. " As we have already noted, in Chapter II, they stress theindividual reaction to phenomena, at some tense moment. They discard, asfar as possible, the long "loop-line" of previous experience. As fordiction, they have, like all true artists, a horror of the _cliché_--therubber-stamp word, blurred by use. As for rhythm, they fear anyconventionality of pattern. In subsequent chapters we must look moreclosely at these matters of diction and of rhythm, but they are bothinvolved in any statement of the principles of Imagist verse. RichardAldington sums up his article on "The Imagists"[Footnote: "Greenwich Village, " July 15, 1915. ]in these words:

"Let me resume the cardinal points of the Imagist style:1. Direct treatment of the subject. 2. A hardness and economy of speech. 3. Individuality of rhythm; vers libre. 4. The exact word. The Imagistswould like to possess 'le mot qui fait image, l'adjectif inattendu etprécis qui dessine de pied en cap et donne la senteur de la chose qu'ilest chargé de rendre, la touche juste, la couleur qui chatoie et vibre. '"

In the preface to _Imagist Poets_ (1915), and in Miss Amy Lowell's_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917) the tenets of imagism arestated briefly and clearly. Imagism, we are told, aims to use always thelanguage of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not thenearly-exact nor the merely decorative word; to create new rhythms--as theexpression of new moods--and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echoold moods; to allow absolute freedom in the choice of a subject; topresent an image, rendering particulars exactly; to produce poetry that ishard and clear, never blurred or indefinite; to secure condensation. 

It will be observed that in the special sort of picture-making whichImagist poetry achieves, the question of free verse is merely incidental. "We fight for it as a principle of liberty, " says Miss Lowell, but shedoes not insist upon it as the only method of writing poetry. Mr. Aldington admits frankly that about forty per cent of _vers libre_ isprose. Mr. Lowes, as we have already remarked, has printed dozens ofpassages from Meredith's novels in the typographical arrangement of freeverse so as to emphasize their "imagist" character. One of the mosteffective is this:

 "He was like a Tartar Modelled by a Greek: Supple As the Scythian's bow, Braced As the string!"

Suppose, however, that we agree to defer for the moment the vexed questionas to whether images of this kind are to be considered prose or verse. Examine simply for their vivid picture-making quality the collectionsentitled _Imagist Poets_ (1915, 1916, 1917), or, in the _Anthology ofMagazine Verse_ for 1915, such poems as J. G. Fletcher's "Green Symphony"or "H. D. 's" "Sea-Iris" or Miss Lowell's "The Fruit Shop. " Read MissLowell's extraordinarily brilliant volume _Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916), particularly the series of poems entitled "Towns in Colour. " Then read theauthor's preface, in which her artistic purpose in writing "Towns inColour" is set forth: "In these poems, I have endeavoured to give thecolour, and light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing _thepurely pictorial effect_, and with little or no reference to any otheraspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wanderthrough a city looking for its _unrelated beauty_, the beauty by which itcaptivates the sensuous sense of seeing. " [Footnote: Italics mine. ]

Nothing could be more gallantly frank than the phrase "unrelated beauty. "For it serves as a touchstone to distinguish between those imagist poemswhich leave us satisfied and those which do not. Sometimes, assuredly, theinsulated, unrelated beauty is enough. What delicate reticence there is inRichard Aldington's "Summer":

 "A butterfly, Black and scarlet, Spotted with white, Fans its wings Over a privet flower. 

 "A thousand crimson foxgloves, Tall bloody pikes, Stand motionless in the gravel quarry; The wind runs over them. 

 "A rose film over a pale sky Fantastically cut by dark chimneys; Across an old city garden. "

The imagination asks no more. 

Now read my friend Baker Brownell's "Sunday Afternoon":

 "The wind pushes huge bundles Of itself in warm motion Through the barrack windows; It rattles a sheet of flypaper Tacked in a smear of sunshine on the sill. A voice and other voices squirt A slow path among the room's tumbled sounds. A ukelele somewhere clanks In accidental jets Up from the room's background. "

Here the stark truthfulness of the images does not prevent an instinctive"Well, what of it?" "And afterward, what else?" Unless we adopt theJapanese theory of "stop poems, " where the implied continuation of themood, the suggested application of the symbol or allegory, is the solejustification of the actual words given, a great deal of imagist verse, inmy opinion, serves merely to sharpen the senses without utilizing the fullimaginative powers of the mind. The making of images is an essentialportion of the poet's task, but in memorably great poetry it is only adetail in a larger whole. Miss Lowell's "Patterns" is one of the mosteffective of contemporary poems, but it is far more than a document ofimagism. It is a triumph of structural imagination. 

_7. Genius and Inspiration_

Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to analyse theimage-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is anecessary element in the production of poetry. Let Coleridge have thefinal statement of this mystery of his art: "The power of reducingmultitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by someone predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, butcan never be learnt. It is in this that _Poeta nascitur non fit_. " Wecannot avoid the difficulties of the question by attributing the poet'simagination to "genius. " Whether genius is a neurosis, as some think, orwhether it is sanity at perfection, makes little difference here. Both a Poe and a Sophocles are equally capable of producing idealsyntheses. Nor does the old word "inspiration" help much either. Whatever we mean by inspiration--a something not ourselves, supernaturalor sub-liminal--a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan of Arc, the"god" that moved within the Corybantian revelers--it is an excitement ofthe image-making faculty, and not that faculty itself. Disordered "genius"and inspiration undisciplined by reason are alike powerless to produceimages that permanently satisfy the sense of beauty. Tolstoy's common-sense remark is surely sound: "One's writing is good only where theintelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one ofthem over-balances the other, it's all up. "[Footnote: Compare W. A. Neilson's chapter on "The Balance of Qualities"in _Essentials of Poetry_. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912. ]

_8. A Summary_

Let us now endeavor to summarize this testimony which we have takenfrom poets and critics. Though they do not agree in all details, andthough they often use words that are either too vague or too highlyspecialized, the general drift of the testimony is fairly clear. Poetsand critics agree that the imagination is something different from themere memory-image; that by a process of selection and combination andre-presentation of images something really new comes into being, and thatwe are therefore justified in using the term _constructive_, or _creative_imagination. This imagination embodies, as we say, or "bodies forth, " asDuke Theseus said, "the forms of things unknown. " It ultimately becomesthe poet's task to "shape" these forms with his "pen, " that is to say, tosuggest them through word-symbols, arranged in a certain fashion. Theselection of these word-symbols will be discussed in Chapter IV, and theirrhythmical arrangement in Chapter V. But we have tried in the presentchapter to trace the functioning of the poetic imagination in those stagesof its activity which precede the definite shaping of poems with the pen. If we say, with Professor Fairchild, [Footnote: _Making of Poetry_, p. 34. ]that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making ofpoetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying, " it is obviousthat we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use thefamous terms employed by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, we have beenconsidering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types ofimagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly andsuggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginnerin the study of poetry. 

If the beginner desires to review, at this point, the chief mattersbrought to his attention in the present chapter, he may make a real testof their validity by opening his senses to the imagery of a few lines ofpoetry. Remember that poets are endeavoring to convey the "sense" ofthings rather than the knowledge of things. Disregard for the moment theprecise words employed in the following lines, and concentrate theattention upon the images, as if the image were not made of words at all, but were mere naked sense-stimulus. 

In this line the poet is trying to make us _see_ something ("visual"image):

 "The bride hath paced into the hall, _Red as a rose_ is she. "

Can you see her?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us _hear_ something ("auditory"image):

 "A _noise like of a hidden brook_ In the leafy month of June That to the _sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune_. "

Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear

 "_The tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens_"?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodilysensations ("tactile" image):

 "I closed my lids and kept them close, _And the balls like pulses beat_; For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky, _Lay like a load on my weary eye_, And the dead were at my feet. "

Do your eyes feel that pressure?

You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines("motor" image):

 "I _sprang_ to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; I _galloped_, Dirck _galloped_, we _galloped_ all three!"

Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there byconveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery andrhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become _your_ sense ofriding. 

If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through hisown body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is opento him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes toanalyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, hemay select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the variousfunctions of the imagination are illustrated by them. Suppose the linesare Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted inpart:

 "The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy. "

Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some onecharacteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the"nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying orabstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress. The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture, presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thussatisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mindtakes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality asColeridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset, "At one stride comes the dark, "

or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise, "O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire. "

Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts thata sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dimregion through which the poet feels his way before he comes to theconscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those wordsinto beautiful rhythmical designs. 

CHAPTER IV

THE POET'S WORDS

 "Words are sensible signs necessary for communication. " JOHN LOCKE, _Human Understanding_, 3, 2, 1. 

 "As conceptions are the images of things to the mind within itself, so are words or names the marks of those conceptions to the minds of them we converse with. " SOUTH, quoted in Johnson's _Dictionary_. 

 "Word: a sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical relations. .. . A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe. .. . " _Century Dictionary_. 

 "A word is not a crystal--transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used. " Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _Towne vs. Eisner_. 

 "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the _best_ words in the best order. " COLERIDGE, _Table Talk_. 

_1. The Eye and the Ear_

"Literary" language is commonly distinguished from the language ofordinary life by certain heightenings or suppressions. The novelist oressayist, let us say, fashions his language more or less in accordancewith his own mood, with his immediate aim in writing, with the capacity ofhis expected readers. He is discoursing with a certain real or imaginaryaudience. He may put himself on paper, as Montaigne said, as if he weretalking to the first man he happens to meet; or he may choose to addresshimself to the few chosen spirits of his generation and of succeedinggenerations. He trusts the arbitrary written or printed symbols ofword-sounds to carry his thoughts safely into the minds of other men. The "literary" user of language in modern times comes to depend uponthe written or printed page; he tends to become more or less "eye-minded";whereas the typical orator remains "ear-minded"--i. E. Peculiarly sensitiveto a series of sounds, and composing for the ear of listeners rather thanfor the eye of readers. 

Now as compared with the typical novelist, the poet is surely, like theorator, "ear-minded. " Tonal symbols of ideas and emotions, rather thanvisual symbols of ideas and emotions, are the primary stuff with which heis working, although as soon as the advancing civilization of his racebrings an end to the primitive reciting of poetry and its transmissionthrough oral repetition alone, it is obvious that he must depend, likeother literary artists, or like the modern musicians, upon the written orprinted signs for the sounds which he has composed. But so stubborn arethe habits of our eyes that we tend always to confuse the look of thepoet's words upon the printed page with the sound of those words as theyare perceived by the ear. We are seldom guilty of this confusion in thecase of the musician. His "music" is not identified with the arbitraryblack marks which make up his printed score. For most of us there isno music until those marks are actually translated into terms of tone--although it is true that the trained reader of music can easily translateto his inner ear without any audible rendering of the indicated sounds. 

This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem isnot primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is aseries of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for thesesounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered--except tothose readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, caninstantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of theminto physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear forit. They are hopelessly "eye-minded. " They try to decide questions ofmetre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by theappearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poetslike Mr. Vachel Lindsay--who recites or chants his own verses after themanner of the primitive bard--have rendered a true service by leadingus away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheerdelight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates. 

_2. How Words convey Feeling_

For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in somebody-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmicutterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotionto the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to beembodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at someof the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodimentof poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace theseprocesses in so far as they are revealed by the poet's use of words. Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter. 

We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself. The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those ofexperiences and objects associated with feeling. The words employed torevive and transmit these images are usually described as "concrete" or"sensuous" in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are"experiential" words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact withobjects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individualfeeling. Such words have a "fringe, " as psychologists say. They are richin overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheerintelligence, but covered with veils of association, with tokens of pastexperience. They are like ships laden with cargoes, although the cargovaries with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable thatthis very word "ship, " just now employed, calls up as many differentmental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews hasrecorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word"forest. " Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in aLondon club, tried to tell one another what "forest" suggested to each:

 "Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France. To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every language, since there must always be two partners in any communication by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them. "[Footnote: Brander Matthews, _These Many Years_. Scribner's, New York, 1917. ]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Lethalf a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shopwhere sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fishing-rods, tennisracquets, riding-whips, golf-balls, running-shoes, baseball bats, footballs, oars, paddles, snow-shoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubsand rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of theobserver in more or less exact proportion to his interest in theparticular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a passionate tennisplayer, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of theracquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favoritestrokes with it, winning tournaments with it--though he seems to bestanding quietly in front of the window. The man next him is alreadysnowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse, or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet orriding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they maystir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has neverexperienced. His eye is likely to pass them over as indifferently as if hewere glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varyingresponses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or thatphysical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to illustrate hiscapacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomesa symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe. They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while anotherobject leaves them cold. 

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark, talking--evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No twocan possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures. Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker ofthe company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand theword, approximately, but each _feels_ it in a way unexperienced by hisfriend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous, picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical andmental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and mostuniversal words for things and sensations--such as "hand, " "foot, " "dark, ""fear, " "fire, " "warm, " "home"--are suffused with personal emotions, faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are _my_ hand, foot, fear, darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singingin the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them "See this" or"Feel that" in the literal sense of "see" and "feel"; he can only call upby means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already, and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations, new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyageswith fresh sails upon seas untried. 

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himselfin solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expressionrather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill's distinction betweenthe orator and the poet: "Eloquence is _heard_; poetry is _over_heard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us tolie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feelingconfessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itselfin symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feelingin the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. "[Footnote: J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry, " in _Dissertations_, vol. 1. See also F. N. Scott, "The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry andProse. " Published by Modern Language Association, 19, 2. ]But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a manswears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings toother persons, it remains true that a poet's language betrays his bodilyand mental history. "The poet, " said Thoreau, "writes the history of hisown body. "

For example, a study of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H. Herford[Footnote: _Robert Browning_, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66. Blackwood & Sons. 1905. ]emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quickand eager apprehension of space-relations:

 "He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and plastic form. .. . He delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments of the eye. He caught at the edges of things. .. . _Spikes_ and _wedges_ and _swords_ run riot in his work. .. . He loved the grinding, clashing and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. .. . He is the poet of sudden surprises, unforseen transformations. .. . The simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming. "

The same truth is apparent as we pass from the individual poet to thepoetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history. Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms ofbodily sensation. 

 "_Anger_, " says Renan, [Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, _The Bible as Literature_, p. 114. ] "is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion, now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking, now from shivering. _Discouragement_ and _despair_ are expressed by the melting of the heart, _fear_ by the loosening of the reins. _Pride_ is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure straight and stiff. _Patience_ is a long breathing, _impatience_ short breathing, _desire_ is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of hiding, of coating over the fault. In _Job_ God sews up sins in a sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he forgets them. .. . 

 "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God. 

 "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. 

 "I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. 

 "I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God. "

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words, thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray[Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek, " _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1912. ]has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:

 "The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables produces a kind of dancing joy. .. . Greek lyric is derived directly from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the feet, _but the yearning movement of the whole body_, the ultimate expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech, compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling. "

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising "a graceful andornate rhetoric, " declares that poetry, compared with this, is "moresimple, sensuous and passionate. "[Footnote: _Tract on Education. _ ]These words "sensuous" and "passionate, " dulled as they have become byrepetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. Whilelanguage is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas andfeelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation ofindividual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poetis still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the newwonderful Beasts---so terrible, so delightful!--come marching by. 

_3. Words as Current Coin_

But the poet's words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individualexperience, must also have a general _transmission value_ which rendersthem current coin. If words were merely representations of privateexperience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pass thewalls of the Garden inhabited by each man's imagination. "Expression"would be possible, but "communication" would be impossible, and indeedthere would be no recognizable terms of expression except the "bow-wow" or"pooh-pooh" or "ding-dong" of the individual Adam----and even theseexpressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and thatin highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp towords, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it, speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a socialinstrument. "It belongs, " says Professor Whitney, [Footnote: W. D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, p. 404. ]"not to the individual, but to the member of society. .. . What we mayseverally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employedby our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by theacts of individuals, is wrought out by the community. "

. .. A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up inutter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the naturearound him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which laywithout, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he wouldall his life remain a mute. "

What is more, the individual's mastery of language is due solely to hissocial effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; theyare painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought upin China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a traceof his English parentage in form or idiom. [Footnote: See Baldwin's _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_, article "Language. "]His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the mediumalready established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race. In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have anytransmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded byChaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all thatage-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lostwithout a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman andnothing else. 

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school andcollege. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book ofsuch a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was anexceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and itrevealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson's delicate and surefelicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effortof which most of his American classmates were incapable, had mastered manyof the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the richtreasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself, instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would havepreferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for theexpression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, nomatter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to anAmerican professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that thepower of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others isconditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange. 

4. _Words an Imperfect Medium_

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficultiesof the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all humanintercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium ofcommunication. They "were not invented at first, " says Professor WalterRaleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted atbest, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all theweaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by theprejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. Theyperpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of humanextravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. Butwith all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for thequiet and accurate statement of the thing that is. .. . Beasts fight withhorns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes ofmeaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which arequite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailedillustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is notwhat a word means, but what it imputes. "[Footnote: Raleigh's _Wordsworth_. London, 1903. ]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideallanguage of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetryis unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers andits glories. No poet can keep for very long to the "neutral style, " to thecool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color---passionatewords that will "stick fiery off" against the neutral background ofconventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against "purplepatches"; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to usepurple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotionaleffect--orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials--utilize incertain passages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as ifthey ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups ofwords in upper-case type. 

And yet these "upper-case words" of heightened emotional value are notreally isolated from their context. Their values are relative and notabsolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness dependsupon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violentword for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a fadedgarment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give therichest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight ofthe axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets likeMarinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity oflogical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone. "Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation, " says Marinetti, "willflash against one another, will interlace their various forms ofmagnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force. "[Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir HenryNewbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_. Dutton, 1919. ]But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti's poemon the siege of a Turkish fort:

 "Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3 seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour shambles wounds refuge oasis. "

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, justas a heap of bits of colored glass might make material for a rose-window. But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the shining fragmentswill never fashion themselves into a whole. 

5. _Predominant Tone-Feeling_

If each poem is composed in its own "key, " as we say of music, with itsown scale of "values, " as we say of pictures, it is obvious that theseparate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominanttone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, likeNature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or, to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into acup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the blackcoffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yetthe presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to beabsorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreignsubstances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring, although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poeticdiction assume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire toemploy expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs"and "porringers, " and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implementsused in various trades. _Othello_ was hissed upon its first appearance onthe Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork"and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian associations and areconsequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but "knife" has awider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevensonconfess his romantic longing to "knife a man"?

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations of this law ofconnotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history, in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which itreceives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It islike an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of manyvibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune fromit. When Wordsworth writes of

 "The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills, "

he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effectthat is peculiarly "Wordsworthian. " Diction is obviously only a part of agreater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordanceof all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, andconversely a knowledge of the poet's personality and of his governingideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favoritewords--like Marlowe's "black, " Shelley's "light, " Tennyson's "wind, "Swinburne's "fire. " Each of these words becomes suffused with the wholepersonality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out ofits context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot beadequately _felt_ without some recognition of the particular sensationaland emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-huntersthus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error ofword-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of their ownindependently of the life breathed into them by living men. I recall aconversation at Bormes with the French poet Angellier. He was complaininghumorously of his friend L. , a famous scholar whose big book was "carryingall the treasures of French literature down to posterity like acold-storage transport ship. " "But he published a criticism of one of mypoems, " Angellier went on, "which proved that he did not understand thepoem at all. He had studied it too hard! The words of a poem arestepping-stones across a brook. If you linger on one of them too long, youwill get your feet wet! You must cross, _vite_!" If the poets lead us fromone mood to another over a bridge of words, the words themselves are notthe goal of the journey. They are instruments used in the transmission ofemotion. 

6. _Specific Tone-Color_

It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot beascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and notabsolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have acertain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possibleplace in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess specialqualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is tocharacterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense ofthat word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color. " A piano and aviolin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the qualityof the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it isusually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone ortimbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal ofingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of "bright" and "dark" vowels, smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound hasits special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit acertain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman:[Footnote: "The Symbolic Value of Sounds, " in _Hamlet and Other Essays_, by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904. ]

 "Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:

 [short i] (little) [long i] (I) [short oo] (wood) [short e] (met) [long u] (due) [long ow] (cow) [short a] (mat) [short ah] (what) [long o] (gold) [long e] (mete) [long ah] (father) [long oo] (gloom) [ai] (fair) [oi] (boil) [aw] (awe) [long a] (mate) [short u] (but)

 "The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror, and from the trivial to the solemn and awful. "

Robert Louis Stevenson in his _Some Technical Elements of Style inLiterature_, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words, have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying"tone-qualities. " Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds innature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or lessremote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or ofmuscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquidconsonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated withmuscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mindexperiences. Lines like Tennyson's famous

 "The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees"

thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the pasthistory of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerableindividuals, and it is to this fact that the "transmission value" of thelines is due. 

Imitative effects are easily recognized, and need no comment:

 "Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings"

 "The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm"

 "The wind that'll wail like a child and the sea that'll moan like a man. "

Suggestive effects are more subtle. Sometimes they are due primarily tothose rhythmical arrangements of words which we shall discuss in the nextchapter, but poetry often employs the sound of single words to awaken dimor bright associations. Robert Bridges's catalogue of the Greek nymphs in"Eros and Psyche" is an extreme example of risking the total effect of astanza upon the mere beautiful sounds of proper names. 

 "Swift to her wish came swimming on the waves His lovely ocean nymphs, her guides to be, The Nereids all, who live among the caves And valleys of the deep, Cymodocè, Agavè, blue-eyed Hallia and Nesaea, Speio, and Thoë, Glaucè and Actaea, Iaira, Melitè and Amphinomè, Apseudès and Nemertès, Callianassa, Cymothoë, Thaleia, Limnorrhea, Clymenè, Ianeira and Ianassa, Doris and Panopè and Galatea, Dynamenè, Dexamenè and Maira, Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira, Amphithoë, Oreithuia and Amathea. "

Names of objects like "bobolink" and "raven" may affect us emotionally bythe quality of their tone. Through association with the sounds of thehuman voice, heard under stress of various emotions, we attribute joyousor foreboding qualities to the bird's tone, and then transfer theseassociations to the bare name of the bird. 

Names of places are notoriously rich in their evocation of emotion. 

 "He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice, And died in Padua. "

Here the fact of illness and death may be prosaic enough, but the verynames of "Venice" and "Padua" are poetry--like "Rome, " "Ireland, ""Arabia, " "California. "

 "Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold. "

Who knows precisely where that "guarded mount" is upon the map? And whocares? "The sailor's heart, " confesses Lincoln Colcord, [Footnote: _The New Republic_, September 16, 1916. ]"refutes the prose of knowledge, and still believes in delectable andsounding names. He dreams of capes and islands whose appellations aremusic and a song. .. . The first big land sighted on the outward passage isJava Head; beside it stands Cape Sangian Sira, with its name like abattle-cry. We are in the Straits of Sunda: name charged with the headylanguor of the Orient, bringing to mind pictures of palm-fringed shoresand native villages, of the dark-skinned men of Java clad in brightsarongs, clamoring from their black-painted dugouts, selling fruit andbrilliant birds. These waters are rich in names that stir the blood, likeKrakatoa, Gunong Delam, or Lambuan; or finer, more sounding than all therest, Telok Betong and Rajah Bassa, a town and a mountain--Telok Betong atthe head of Lampong Bay and Rajah Bassa, grand old bulwark on the Sumatrashore, the cradle of fierce and sudden squalls. "

It may be urged, of course, that in lines of true poetry the sense carriesthe sound with it, and that nothing is gained by trying to analyse thesounds apart from the sense. Professor C. M. Lewis[Footnote: _Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906. ]asserts bluntly: "When you say Titan you mean something big, and when yousay tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of eitherword that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you puttogether a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they willattract special attention to the words in which they occur, and thesignificance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified;but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphantterrible Titan, ' it is not the sound of the consonants that makes thesignificance. When Tennyson speaks of the shrill-edged shriek ofa mother, his words suggest with peculiar vividness the idea of a shriek;but when you speak of stars that shyly shimmer, the same sounds onlyintensify the idea of shy shimmering. " This is refreshing, and yet it isto be noted that "Titan" and "tittle" and "shrill-edged shriek" and "shylyshimmer" are by no means identical in sound: they have merely certainconsonants in common. A fairer test of tone-color may be found if we turnto frank nonsense-verse, where the formal elements of poetry surely existwithout any control of meaning or "sense":

 "The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!

 "'T was brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "

 "It seems rather pretty, " commented the wise Alice, "but it's rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!"

This is precisely what one feels when one listens to a poem recited in alanguage of which one happens to be ignorant. The wonderful colored wordsare there, and they seem somehow to fill our heads with ideas, only we donot know what they are. Many readers who know a little Italian or Germanwill confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffersonly a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precisemeaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel thepredominant mood--as when we listen to a song sung in a language of whichwe are wholly ignorant--we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas. For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils ofemotional association due to the sound alone. Garrick ridiculed--anddoubtless at the same time envied--George Whitefield's power to make womenweep by the rich overtones with which he pronounced "that blessed wordMesopotamia. "

The capacities and the limitations of tone-quality in itself may be seenno less clearly in parodies. Swinburne, a master technician in words andrhythm, occasionally delighted, as in "Nephelidia, "[Footnote: Quoted in Carolyn Wells, _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904. ]to make fun of himself as well as of his poetic contemporaries:

 "Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses, -- 'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die. '"

Or, take Calverley's parody of Robert Browning:

 "You see this pebble-stone? It's a thing I bought Of a bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day. I like to dock the smaller parts o' speech, As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur--"

The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of thesepoets--whether it be

 "A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses"

or

 "A bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day"--

is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been writtenin dead earnest. Poe's "Ulalume" is a masterly display of tone-colortechnique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all, is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It iscertain, however, that a poet's words possess a kind of physicalsuggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance. In nonsense-verse and parodies we have a glimpse, as it were, at the bodyof poetry stripped of its soul. 

7. _"Figures of Speech"_

To understand why poets habitually use figurative language, we must recallwhat has been said in Chapter III about verbal images. Under the heat andpressure of emotion, things alter their shape and size and quality, ideasare transformed into concrete images, diction becomes impassioned, plainspeech tends to become metaphorical. The language of any excited person, whether he is uttering himself in prose or verse, is marked by "tropes";i. E. "turnings"--images which express one thing in the terms of anotherthing. The language of feeling is characteristically "tropical, " andindeed every man who uses metaphors is for the moment talking like apoet--unless, as too often happens both in prose and verse, the metaphorhas become conventionalized and therefore lifeless. The born poetthinks in "figures, " in "pictured" language, or, as it has been called, in"re-presentative" language, [Footnote: G. L. Raymond, _Poetry as a Representative Art_, chap. 19. ]since he represents, both to his own mind and to those with whom he iscommunicating, the objects of poetic emotion under new forms. If he wishesto describe an eagle, he need not say: "A rapacious bird of the falconfamily, remarkable for its strength, size, graceful figure, andextraordinary flight. " He represents these facts by making a picture:

 "He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. 

 "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. "[Footnote: Tennyson, "The Eagle. " ]

Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, andreflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is"troped"; i. E. Turned into figures which re-present the fundamental idea:

 "Come, Captain Age, With your great sea-chest full of treasure! Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin Disclose the carved ivory And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl, Riches of wisdom and years. Unfold the India shawl, With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue, Weave of a lifetime. I shall be warm and splendid With the spoils of the Indies of age. "[Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, "Come, Captain Age. "]

It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to useunornamented language, "not elevated, " as Wordsworth said, "above thelevel of prose. " Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poeticbeauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain wordsare spoken. The drama is full of such instances. "I loved you not, " saysHamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: "I was the more deceived. " Nofigure of speech could be more moving than that. 

I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolatesandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:

 "She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; This memory of what hath been, And nevermore will be. "

I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for thefirst time the perfection of their beauty. 

But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the useof figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristicand habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotionalprose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor's account of thefight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:

 "Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front, in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron--the town class, Birmingham, etc. --each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we looked and reduced speed they opened fire, _and the clear 'bang-bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink_. .. . 

 "The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance _like a wildcat mad with wounds_. 

 "Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not care a d----, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession, _like elephants walking through a pack of dogs_, came the Lion, Queen Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and grim and _uncouth as some antediluvian monsters_. How solid they looked! How utterly _earthquaking_!"

The use and the effectiveness of figures depend primarily, then, upon themood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employedin prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employingmetaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and therhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and allthe other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether heis studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequateexamples of these various classes of figures, and they need not berepeated here. 

8. _Words as Permanent Embodiment of Poetic Feeling_

We have seen that the characteristic vocabulary of poetry originates inemotion and that it is capable of transmitting emotion to the hearer orreader. But how far are words capable of embodying emotion in permanentform? Poets themselves, in proud consciousness of the enduring characterof their creations, have often boasted that they were building monumentsmore enduring than bronze or marble. When Shakspere asserts this in hissonnets, he is following not only an Elizabethan convention, but auniversal instinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delusion? Here arewords--mere vibrating sounds, light and winged and evanescent things, assuming a meaning value only through the common consent of those whointerchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year, often passing wholly from the living speech of men, decaying when racesdecay and civilizations change. What transiency, what waste and oblivionlike that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves!

Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact thatcertain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass, and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men aswell as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet. 

Some thoughts and feelings, then, eternalize themselves in human speech;most thoughts and feelings do not. Wherein lies the difference?If most words are perishable stuff, what is it that keeps other words fromperishing? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragilematerial, "fame's great antiseptic, style"? Or is it by virtue of somesecret passionate quality imparted to words by the poet, so that theapparently familiar syllables take on a life and significance which isreally not their own, but his? And is this intimate personalized qualityof words "style, " also, as well as that more external "style" revealed inclear and orderly and idiomatic arrangement? Or does the mystery ofpermanence reside in the poet's generalizing power, by which he is able toexpress universal, and hence permanently interesting human experience? Andtherefore, was not the late Professor Courthope right when he declared, "Itake all great poetry to be not so much what Plato thought it, theutterance of individual genius, half inspired, half insane, as theenduring voice of the soul and conscience of man living in society"?

Answers to such questions as these depend somewhat upon the "romantic" or"classic" bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress thesignificance of the personality of the individual poet. The classic schoolof criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualitiesrevealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and fashions ofcriticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeedinggenerations change in taste, the great poets continue as before toparticularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" byturns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in theirunending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, ingiving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a moreimportant fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theorythey may have invoked or followed. 

For many a time, surely, their triumphs are a contradiction of theirtheories. To take a very familiar example, Wordsworth's theory of poeticdiction shifted like a weathercock. In the Advertisement to the _LyricalBallads_ (1798) he asserted: "The following poems are to be considered asexperiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how farthe language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society isadapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. " In the Preface of the secondedition (1800) he announced that his purpose had been "to ascertain howfar, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real languageof men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and thatquantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationallyendeavour to impart. " But in the famous remarks on poetic diction whichaccompanied the third edition (1802) he inserted after the words "Aselection of language really used by men" this additional statement of hisintention: "And at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring ofthe imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind inan unusual aspect. " In place of the original statement about theconversation of the middle and lower classes of society, we are nowassured that the language of poetry "if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors andfigures. .. . This selection will form a distinction . .. And will entirelyseparate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinarylife. "

What an amazing change in theory in four years! Yet it is no moreremarkable than Wordsworth's successive emendations in the text of hispoems. In 1807 his blind Highland boy had gone voyaging in

 "A Household Tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes; This carried the blind Boy. "

In 1815 the wash-tub becomes

 "The shell of a green turtle, thin And hollow--you might sit therein, It was so wide and deep. "

And in 1820 the worried and dissatisfied artist changes that unluckyvessel once more into the final banality of

 "A shell of ample size, and light As the pearly car of Amphitrite That sportive dolphins drew. "

Sometimes, it is true, this adventurer in poetic diction had rather betterfortune in his alterations. The much-ridiculed lines of 1798 about thechild's grave--

 "I've measured it from side to side, 'T is three feet long and two feet wide"--

became in 1820:

 "Though but of compass small and bare To thirsty suns and parching air. "

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth forsook gradually his earlyexperiments with matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly grotesque figures. Revolt against conventional eighteenth-century diction had given him ablessed sense of freedom, but he found his real strength later in subduingthat freedom to a sense of law. Archaisms, queernesses, flatlynaturalistic turns of speech gave place to a vocabulary of simple dignityand austere beauty. Wordsworth attained his highest originality as anartist by disregarding singularity, by making familiar words reveal newpotencies of expression. 

For after all, we must come back to what William James called the long"loop-line, " to that reservoir of ideas and feelings which stores up theexperience of individuals and of the race, and to the words which mosteffectively evoke that experience. Two classes at Columbia University, afew years ago, were asked to select fifty English words of basicimportance in the expression of human life. In choosing these words, theywere to aim at reality and strength rather than at beauty. When the twolists were combined, they presented these seventy-eight different words, which are here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom, country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge, disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith, fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief, happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy, justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon, mortal, nature, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace, pleasure, pride, regret, sea, sigh, sleep, solitude, song, sorrow, soul, spirit, spring, star, suffer, tears, tender, time, virtue, weep, whisper, wind and youth. [Footnote: See Nation, February 23, 1911. ]

Surely these words, selected as they were for their significance, are notlacking in beauty of sound. On the contrary, any list of the mostbeautiful words in English would include many of them. But it is themeaning of these "long-loop" words, rather than their formal beauty alone, which fits them for the service of poetry. And they acquire in thatservice a "literary" value, which is subtly blended with their "sound"value and logical "meaning" value. They connote so much! They suggest morethan they actually say. They unite the individual mood of the moment withthe soul of mankind. 

And there is still another mode of union between the individual and therace, which we must attempt in the next chapter to regard more closely, but which should be mentioned here in connection with the permanentembodiment of feeling in words, --namely, the mysterious fact of rhythm. Single words are born and die, we learn them and forget them, they altertheir meanings, they always say less than we really intend, they areimperfect instruments for signaling from one brain to another. Yet thesecrumbling particles of speech may be miraculously held together and builtinto a tune, and with the tune comes another element of law, order, permanence. The instinct for the drumbeat lies deep down in our bodies; itaffects our mental life, the organization of our emotions, and ourresponse to the rhythmical arrangement of words. For mere ideas and wordsare not poetry, but only part of the material for poetry. A poem does notcome into full being until the words begin to dance. 

CHAPTER V

RHYTHM AND METRE

 "Rhythm is the recurrence of stress at intervals; metre is the regular, or measured, recurrence of stress. " M. H. SHACKFORD, _A First Book of Poetics_

 "Metres being manifestly sections of rhythm. " ARISTOTLE, _Poetics_, 4. (Butcher's translation)

 "Thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers. " MILTON

_1. The Nature of Rhythm_

And why must the words begin to dance? The answer is to be perceived inthe very nature of Rhythm, that old name for the ceaseless pulsing or"flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct forrhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects. We hear the ticking of the clock as tíck-tock, tíck-tock, or elsetick-tóck, tick-tóck, although psychologists assure us that the clock'swheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it issimply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which createsthe impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, andin the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that itis we who impose or make-up the rhythm, in our human instinct fororganizing the units of attention. We cannot help it, as long as our ownpulses beat. No two persons catch quite the same rhythm in the sounds ofthe animate and inanimate world, because no two persons have absolutelyidentical pulse-beats, identical powers of attention, an identicalpsycho-physical organism. We all perceive that there is a rhythm in aracing crew, in a perfectly timed stroke of golf, in a fisherman's fly-casting, in a violinist's bow, in a close-hauled sailboat fighting withthe wind. But we appropriate and organize these objective impressions insubtly different ways. 

When, for instance, we listen to poetry read aloud, or when we read italoud ourselves, some of us are instinctive "timers, "[Footnote: See W. M. Patterson, _The Rhythm of Prose_. Columbia UniversityPress, 1916. ]paying primary attention to the spaced or measured intervals of time, although in so doing we are not wholly regardless of those points of"stress" which help to make the time-intervals plainer. Others of us arenatural "stressers, " in that we pay primary attention to the "weight" ofwords, --the relative loudness or pitch, by which their meaning orimportance is indicated, --and it is only secondarily that we think ofthese weighted or "stressed" words as separated from one another byapproximately equal intervals of time. Standing on the rocks at Gloucesterafter an easterly storm, a typical "timer" might be chiefly conscious ofthe steady sequence of the waves, the measured intervals betweentheir summits; while the typical stresser, although subconsciously awareof the steady iteration of the giant rollers, might watch primarily theirfoaming crests, and listen chiefly to their crashing thunder. The point tobe remembered is this: that neither the "timing" instinct nor the"stressing" instinct excludes the other, although in most individuals oneor the other predominates. Musicians, for instance, are apt to benoticeable "timers, " while many scholars who deal habitually with words intheir varied shifts of meaning, are professionally inclined to be"stressers. "

_2. The Measurement of Rhythm_

Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questionsof prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse;the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize aboutthe nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whosearrangement we call rhythm. No one disputes, again, that the only arbiterin matters of prosody is the trained ear, and not the eye. Infinitelydeceptive is the printed page of verse when regarded by the eye. Verse maybe made to look like prose and prose to look like verse. Capital letters, lines, rhymes, phrases and paragraphs may be so cunningly orconventionally arranged by the printer as to disguise the real nature ofthe rhythmical and metrical pattern. When in doubt, close your eyes!

We agree, then, that in all spoken language--and this is as true of proseas it is of verse--there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked, and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals. But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation tocertainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poemis written in a definite metre? In one sense "yes. " No one doubts that the_Odyssey_ is written in "dactylic hexameters, " i. E. , in lines made up ofsix "feet, " each one of which is normally composed of a long syllable plustwo short syllables, or of an acceptable equivalent for that particularcombination. But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's_Evangeline_ is also written in "dactylic hexameters, " trouble begins forthe few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes andlisten carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to adozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called"hexameters, " you are listening to two very different arrangements oftime-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really notin the same "measure" or "metre" at all. For the Greek poet was, as ametrist, thinking primarily of quantity, of the relative "timing" of hissyllables, and the American of the relative "stress" of his syllables. [Footnote: "Musically speaking--because the musical terms are exact andnot ambiguous--true dactyls are in 2-4 time and the verse of _Evangeline_is in 3-8 time. " T. D. Goodell, _Nation_, October 12, 1911. ]

That illustration is drearily hackneyed, no doubt, but it has a doublevalue. It is perfectly clear; and furthermore, it serves to remind us ofthe instinctive differences between different persons and different racesas regards the ways of arranging time-intervals so as to create therhythms of verse. The individual's standard of measurement--his poeticfoot-rule, so to speak--is very elastic, --"made of rubber" indeed, as theexperiments of many psychological laboratories have demonstrated beyond aquestion. Furthermore, the composers of poetry build it out of veryelastic units. They are simply putting syllables of words together into arhythmical design, and these "airy syllables, " in themselves mere symbolsof ideas and feelings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely correctsound-scales. They cannot be measured in time by any absolutely accuratewatch-dial, or exactly estimated in their meaning, whether that be literalor figurative, by any dictionary of words and phrases. But this is onlysaying that the syllables which make up the units of verse, whether theunits be called "foot" or "line" or "phrase, " are not dead, mechanicalthings, but live things, moving rhythmically, entering thereby into thepulsing, chiming life of the real world, and taking on more fullness oflife and beauty in elastic movement, in ordered but infinitely flexibledesign, than they ever could possess as independent particles. 

_3. Conflict and Compromise_

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythmand metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values ofsound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert toconsiderations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon theold antinomy--or it may be, harmony--between "form" and "significance, "between the "outside" and the "inside" of the work of art. For words, surely, have one kind of value as _pure sound_, as "cadences" made up ofstresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllableis artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which youperceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, alanguage of which you know not a single word; and you may experience amodification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the"sense" of a richly musical passage in Swinburne, and delighting your earby its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as_meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stressand turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight indifferent sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence. "Meaning" values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in amechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, notabsolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and onemust be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a wordrefuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure, so that we "wrench" the accent a trifle, or make it "hover" over twosyllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant thatlovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises. [Footnote: Compare the passage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted fromAlden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter. ]They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expectedmeasure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat asclosely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course acompromise between the line as laid by the compass, and the actual factsof wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus thatthe sailor "makes it, " triumphantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise, outof deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary wordsand rebellious moods, out of

 "Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped, "

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend intothat larger living whole--the dancing, singing crowd of sounds andmeanings which make up a poem. 

_4. The Rhythms of Prose_

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verserhythm, and to consider what Dryden called "the other harmony" of prose. For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast andlearned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the Greeks andRomans, and Saintsbury's _History of English Prose Rhythm_ is a monumentalcollection of wonderful prose passages in English, with the scansion of"long" and "short" syllables and of "feet" marked after a fashion thatseems to please no one but the author. But in truth the task of inventingan adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing aworking agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almostinsuperable. Those of us who sat in our youth at the feet of Germanmasters were taught that the distinction between verse and prose wassimple: verse was, as the Greeks had called it, "bound speech" and prosewas "loosened speech. " But a large proportion of the poetry published inthe last ten years is "free verse, " which is assuredly of a "loosened"rather than a "bound" pattern. 

Apparently the old fence between prose and verse has been broken down. Or, if one conceives of indubitable prose and indubitable verse as forming twointersecting circles, there is a neutral zone, [Illustration: Prose / Neutral Zone / Verse]

which some would call "prose poetry" and some "free verse, " and which, according to the experiments of Dr. Patterson[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, already cited. ]may be appropriated as "prose experience" or "verse experience" accordingto the rhythmic instinct of each individual. Indeed Mr. T. S. Omond hasadmitted that "the very same words, with the very same natural stresses, may be prose or verse according as we treat them. The difference is inourselves, in the mental rhythm to which we unconsciously adjust thewords. "[Footnote: Quoted in B. M. Alden, "The Mental Side of Metrical Form, "_Modern Language Review_, July, 1914. ]Many familiar sentences from the English Bible or Prayer-Book, such as thewords from the _Te Deum_, "We, therefore, pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood, " have a rhythm which maybe felt as prose or verse, according to the mental habit or mood orrhythmizing impulse of the hearer. 

Nevertheless it remains true in general that the rhythms of prose are moreconstantly varied, broken and intricate than the rhythms of verse. Theyare characterized, according to the interesting experiments of Dr. Patterson, by syncopated time, [Footnote: "For a 'timer' the definition of prose as distinguished fromverse experience depends upon a predominance of syncopation overcoincidence in the coordination of the accented syllables of the text withthe measuring pulses. " _Rhythm of Prose_, p. 22. ]whereas in normal verse there is a fairly clean-cut coincidence betweenthe pulses of the hearer and the strokes of the rhythm. Every one seems toagree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and"syncopated" tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse. There is, unquestionably, a natural "iambic" roll in English prose, due tothe predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in ournative tongue, but when Dickens--to cite what John Wesley would call "aneminent sinner" in this respect--inserts in his emotional prose line afterline of five-stress "iambic" verse, we feel instinctively that thepresence of the blank verse impairs the true harmony of the prose. [Footnote: Observe, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter, the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. Ingersoll's "Addressover a Little Boy's Grave. "]Delicate writers of English prose usually avoid this coincidence ofpattern with the more familiar patterns of verse, but it is impossible toavoid it wholly, and some of the most beautiful cadences of English prosemight, if detached from their context, be scanned for a few syllables asperfect verse. The free verse of Whitman, Henley and Matthew Arnold isfull of these embedded fragments of recognized "tunes of verse, " mingledwith the unidentifiable tunes of prose. There has seldom been a morecurious example of accidental coincidence than in this sentence from aprosaic textbook on "The Parallelogram of Forces": "And hence no force, however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line whichshall be absolutely straight. " This is precisely the "four-stressediambic" metre of _In Memoriam_, and it even preserves the peculiar rhymeorder of the _In Memoriam_ stanza:

 "And hence no force, however great, Can draw a cord, however fine, Into a horizontal line Which shall be absolutely straight. "

We shall consider more closely, in the section on Free Verse in thefollowing chapter, this question of the coincidence and variation ofpattern as certain types of loosened verse pass in and out of the zonewhich is commonly recognized as pure prose. But it is highly importanthere to remember another fact, which professional psychologists in theirlaboratory experiments with the notation of verse and prose havefrequently forgotten, namely, the existence of a type of ornamented prose, which has had a marked historical influence upon the development ofEnglish style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Romanrhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightenedits rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color, cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highlycolored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in herpolyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Medieval Latin took over all of thesedevices from Classical Latin, and in its varied oratorical, liturgical andepistolary forms it strove to imitate the various modes of _cursus_("running") and _clausula_ ("cadence") which had characterized the rhythmsof Isocrates and Cicero. [Footnote: A. C. Clark, _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913. Morris W. Croll, "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose, " _Studies inPhilology_. January, 1919. Oliver W. Elton, "English Prose Numbers, " in _Essays and Studies_ bymembers of the English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913. ]From the Medieval Latin Missal and Breviary these devices of prose rhythm, particularly those affecting the end of sentences, were taken over intothe Collects and other parts of the liturgy of the English Prayer-Book. They had a constant influence upon the rhythms employed by the translatorsof the English Bible, and through the Bible the cadences of this ancientornamented prose have passed over into the familiar but intricateharmonies of our "heightened" modern prose. 

While this whole matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here, it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of Englishprose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries, requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases andclauses, and to "the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetoricalemphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody. "[Footnote: New York _Nation_, February 27, 1913. ]For that sonority and cadence and balance which constitute a harmoniousprose sentence cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illiteratescientist in his laboratory for acoustics; the "literary" value of words, in all strongly emotional prose, is inextricably mingled with the baresound values: it is thought-units that must be delicately "balanced" aswell as stresses and slides and final clauses; it is the elevation ofideas, the nobility and beauty of feeling, as discerned by the trainedliterary sense, which makes the final difference between enduring proseharmonies and the mere tinkling of the "musical glasses. "[Footnote: This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews, _The Writing and Reading of Verse_, chap. 5. New York, 1918. ]The student of verse may very profitably continue to exercise himself withthe rhythms of prose. He should learn to share the unwearied enthusiasm ofProfessor Saintsbury for the splendid cadences of our sixteenth-centuryEnglish, for the florid decorative period of Thomas Browne and JeremyTaylor, for the eloquent "prose poetry" of De Quincey and Ruskin andCharles Kingsley, and for the strangely subtle effects wrought by Paterand Stevenson. But he must not imagine that any laboratory system oftapping syncopated time, or any painstaking marking of macrons (-) breves(u) and caesuras (||) will give him full initiation into the mysteries ofprose cadences which have been built, not merely out of stressed andunstressed syllables, but out of the passionate intellectual life of manygenerations of men. He may learn to feel that life as it pulsates inwords, but no one has thus far devised an adequate scheme for itsnotation. 

_5. Quantity, Stress and Syllable_

The notation of verse, however, while certainly not a wholly simplematter, is far easier. It is practicable to indicate by conventionalprinter's devices the general rhythmical and metrical scheme of a poem, and to indicate the more obvious, at least, of its incidental variationsfrom the expected pattern. It remains as true of verse as it is of prosethat the "literary" values of words--their connotations or emotionalovertones--are too subtle to be indicated by any marks invented by aprinter; but the alternation or succession of long or short syllables, ofstressed or unstressed syllables, the nature of particular feetand lines and stanzas, the order and interlacing of rhymes, and even thedevices of tone-color, are sufficiently external elements of verse toallow easy methods of indication. 

When you and I first began to study Virgil and Horace, for instance, wewere taught that the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built heir versesupon the principle of _Quantity_. The metrical unit was the foot, made upof long and short syllables in various combinations, two short syllablesbeing equivalent to one long one. The feet most commonly used were theIambus [short-long], the Anapest [short-short-long], the Trochee[long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long]. Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot wascalled a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four, a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked likea fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in thefirst line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since thetime of St. Augustine:

 _Arma vi¦rumque ca¦no Tro¦jae qui ¦ primus ab¦oris_. 

Or perhaps it was Horace's

 _Maece¦nas, atavis ¦¦ edite reg¦ibus_. 

We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: thatthere were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing placeswith dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, sothat a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with adactyl, or _vice versa_; that syllables might be omitted at the beginningor the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this "cutting-off"was called _catalexis_; that syllables might even be added at thebeginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called_hypermetric_; and that we must be very watchful about pauses, particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occurabout the middle of a line, called a _caesura_. But the magic password toadmit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after allthe word _Quantity_. 

If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between thisRoman system of versification and the system which governed modern Englishpoetry--even such rude playground verse as

 "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, Catch a nigger by the toe"--

we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plainone, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in itsverse the principles of _Stress_. Instead of looking for "long" and"short" syllables, we had merely to look for "stressed" and "unstressed"syllables. It was a matter, not of quantity, but of accent; and if weremembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, inretaining the technical names of classical versification. Only we must becareful that by "iambus, " in English poetry, we _meant_ an unstressedsyllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with"trochee, " "dactyl, " "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent andnot quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speakof _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter, " and _Evangeline_ in"dactylic hexameter, " etc. The trick was to count stresses and notsyllables, for was not Coleridge's _Christabel_ written in a metre whichvaried its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yetmaintained its music by regularity of stress?

Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when wewent to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excitedover prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between_Quantity_ and _Stress_ would seem to indicate. For we were now told thatthe Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to dowith their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time whenthe Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a naturaldactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a strongerstress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, hadstubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures;that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent andverse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy acertain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitativeprinciple dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their versesaloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, theverse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something ofthe charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm. In a word, we were now taught--if I may quote from a personal letter of adistinguished American Latinist--that "the almost universal belief thatLatin verse is a matter of quantity only is a mistake. Word-accent was notlost in Latin verse. "

And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantitywere not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept, perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accentedverse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries, _Mílle Fráncos mílle sémel Sármatás occídimús_. [Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, _Foreign Sources of Modern EnglishVersification_. Halle, 1898. ]

Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselvesabout trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons;they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the"goose-step. " Their

 _Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus_

which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse, [Footnote: _History of English Poetry_, vol. 1, p. 73. ]seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like

 _"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup--Hep--Hep!"_

Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Romanpublic acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, itsear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from theGreeks. 

Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was stilla third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending onQuantity or Stress, but merely _Syllabic_, or syllable-counting. This wasimmemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europein the Dark Ages. 

Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript poem of the ninth century:[Footnote: _Foreign Sources_, etc. , p. 3. ]

 _"Beatissimus namque Dionysius ¦ Athenis quondam episcopus, Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam ¦ propter praedicandi gratiam_, " etc. 

"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. Nofurther regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived. Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music. "Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development ofversification, --particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neitherquantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables inthe libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medievalLatin hymns, like _Dies ire_, were written, the Syllabic principle ofversification, like the Quantitative principle, dropped out of sight, and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system, heavily ornamented with rhymes. [Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's _Classical Heritage of theMiddle Ages_ printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter. ]Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in Frenchprosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent Englishpoetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be fromconsiderations of quantity and stress, in certain English songs writtenfor music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre"(8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre"(7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenientillustration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone. 

_6. The Appeal to the Ear_

At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of _Quantity, Stress_ and _Syllable_, our instructors were sensible enough to make anappeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principlein Germanic poetry, --although not denying that considerations of quantityand number of syllables might have something to do with the effect, --theyread aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that _Song of theBattle of Brunanburh_ which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modernEnglish words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though theAnglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresseswithout difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor, while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears, followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could allperceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaboratedverse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunninglyreckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable longand strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like abrook. Whether we called the metre of the _Prologue_ rhymed couplets ofiambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressedverse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the"blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton, and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and"syllable, " all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant andnot quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, tobe richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be, to the other!

I have taken too many pages, perhaps, in thus sketching the rudimentaryeducation of a college student in the elements of rhythm and metre, and inshowing how the theoretical difficulties of the subject--which areadmittedly great--often disappear as soon as one resolves to let the eardecide. A satisfied ear may soothe a dissatisfied mind. I have quoted froma letter of an American scholar about quantity being the "controlling"element of cultivated Roman verse, and I now quote from a personal letterof an American poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading poetry as itwas meant to be read": "My point is _not_ that English verse has noquantity, but that the controlling element is not quantity but accent. Thelack of fixed _syllabic _quantity is just what I emphasize. This lackmakes definite _beat _impossible: or at least it makes it absurd toattempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities'and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarrassing to theprofessor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make itfit the verse. And when he has done all this, the student, if he has agood ear, forthwith forgets it all, and reads the verse as it was meant tobe read, as a succession of musical bars (without pitch, of course), inwhich the accent marks the rhythm, and pauses and _rests _often take theplace of missing syllables. To this ingenuous student I hold out my handand cast in my lot with him. He is the man for whom English poetry iswritten. "

It may be objected, of course, that the phrase "reading poetry as it wasmeant to be read" really begs the question. For English poets have oftenamused themselves by composing purely quantitative verse, which they wishus to read as quantitative. The result may be as artificial as thepainfully composed Latin quantitative verse of English schoolboys, but thething can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quantity are well known, andshould be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter:

 "High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me, "

and of his pentameter:

 "All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel. "

Here the English long and short syllables--as far as "long" and "short"can be definitely distinguished in English--correspond precisely to therules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whoseinvestigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, hasrecently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitativehexameters. [Footnote: _Ibant Obscuri_. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917. ]Here are half a dozen lines:

 "Midway of all this tract, with secular arms an immense elm Reareth a crowd of branches, aneath whose lofty protection Vain dreams thickly nestle, clinging unto the foliage on high: And many strange creatures of monstrous form and features Stable about th' entrance, Centaur and Scylla's abortion, And hundred-handed Briareus, and Lerna's wild beast. .. . "

These are lines interesting to the scholar, but they are somehow"non-English" in their rhythm--not in accordance with "the genius of thelanguage, " as we vaguely but very sensibly say. Neither did the stressed"dactylic" hexameters of Longfellow, written though they were by a skilfulversifier, quite conform to "the nature of the language. "

_7. The Analogy with Music_

One other attempt to explain the difficulties of English rhythm and metremust at least be mentioned here, namely the "musical" theory of theAmerican poet and musician, Sidney Lanier. In his _Science of EnglishVerse_, an acute and very suggestive book, he threw over the whole theoryof stress--or at least, retained it as a mere element of assistance, as inmusic, to the marking of time, maintaining that the only necessary elementin rhythm is equal time-intervals, corresponding to bars of music. According to Lanier, the structure of English blank verse, for instance, is not an alternation of unstressed with stressed syllables, but a seriesof bars of 3/8 time, thus:

[Illustration: Five bars of 3/8 time, each with a short and a long note. ]

Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists have followed Lanier's generaltheory, without always agreeing with him as to whether blank verse iswritten in 3/8 or 2/4 time. Alden, in a competent summary of these variousmusical theories as to the basis of English verse, [Footnote: _Introduction to Poetry_, pp. 190-93. See also Alden's _EnglishVerse_, Part 3. "The Time-Element in English Verse. "]quotes with approval Mr. T. S. Omond's words: "Musical notes are almostpure symbols. In theory at least, and no doubt substantially in practice, they can be divided with mathematical accuracy--into fractions of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc. --and the ideal of music is absolute accordance withtime. Verse has other methods and another ideal. Its words are concretethings, not readily carved to such exact pattern. .. . The perfection ofmusic lies in absolute accordance with time, that of verse is continualslight departures from time. This is why no musical representations ofverse ever seem satisfactory. They assume regularity where none exists. "

_8. Prosody and Enjoyment_

It must be expected then, that there will be different preferences inchoosing a nomenclature for modern English metres, based upon thedifferences in the individual physical organism of various metrists, andupon the strictness of their adherence to the significance of stress, quantity and number of syllables in the actual forms of verse. Adherentsof musical theories in the interpretation of verse may prefer to speak of"duple time" instead of iambic-trochaic metres, and of "triple" time foranapests and dactyls. Natural "stressers" may prefer to call iambic andanapestic units "rising" feet, to indicate the ascent of stress as onepasses from the weaker to the stronger syllables; and similarly, to calltrochaic and dactylic units "falling" feet, to indicate the descent ordecline of stress as the weaker syllable or syllables succeed thestronger. Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one maylegitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising, "

 "And never lifted up a single stone";

trochaic as "duple falling, "

 "Here they are, my fifty perfect poems";

anapestic as "triple rising, "

 "But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him begood";

and dactylic as "triple falling";

 "Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them. "

If a line is felt as "metrical, " i. E. Divided into approximately equaltime-intervals, the particular label employed to indicate the nature ofthe metre is unimportant. It may be left to the choice of each student ofmetre, provided he uses his terms consistently. The use of the traditionalterminology "iambic, " "trochaic, " etc. , is convenient, and is open to noobjection if one is careful to make clear the sense in which he employssuch ambiguous terms. 

It should also be added, as a means of reconciling the apparently warringclaims of stress and quantity in English poetry, that recentinvestigations in recording through delicate instruments the actualtime-intervals used by different persons in reading aloud the same linesof poetry, prove what has long been suspected, namely, the closeaffiliation of quantity with stress. [Footnote: "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse, " by Ada F. Snell, _Pub. OfMod, Lang. Ass_. , September, 1918. ]Miss Snell's experiments show that the foot in English verse is made up ofsyllables 90 per cent of which are, in the stressed position, longer thanthose in the unstressed. The average relation of short to long syllables, is, in spite of a good deal of variation among the individual readers, almost precisely as 2 to 4--which has always been the accepted ratio forthe relation of short to long syllables in Greek and Roman verse. If oneexamines English words in a dictionary, the quantities of the syllablesare certainly not "fixed" as they are in Greek and Latin, but the momentone begins to read a passage of English poetry aloud, and becomesconscious of its underlying type of rhythm, he fits elastic units of"feet" into the steadily flowing or pulsing intervals of time. The "foot" becomes, as it were, a rubber link in a moving bicycle chain. The revolutions of the chain mark the rhythm; and the stressed orunstressed or lightly stressed syllables in each "link" or foot, accommodate themselves, by almost unperceived expansion and contraction, to the rhythmic beat of the passage as a whole. 

Nor should it be forgotten that the "sense" of words, theirmeaning-weight, their rhetorical value in certain phrases, constantlyaffects the theoretical number of stresses belonging to a given line. Inblank verse, for instance, the theoretical five chief stresses are oftenbut three or four in actual practice, lighter stresses taking their placein order to avoid a pounding monotony, and conversely, as in Milton'sfamous line, "Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of death, "

the rhetorical significance of the monosyllables compels an overloading ofstresses which heightens the desired poetic effect. Corson's _Primer ofEnglish Verse_ and Mayor's _English Metres_ give numerous examples fromthe blank verse of Milton and Tennyson to illustrate the constantsubstitution and shifting of stresses in order to secure variety of musicand suggestive adaptations of sound to sense. It is well known thatShakspere's blank verse, as he developed in command of his artisticresources, shows fewer "end-stopped" lines and more "run-on" lines, withan increasing proportion of light and weak endings. But the same principleapplies to every type of English rhythm. As soon as the dominantbeat--which is commonly, but not always, apparent in the opening measuresof the poem--once asserts itself, the poet's mastery of technique isrevealed through his skill in satisfying the ear with a verbal music whichis never absolutely identical in its time-intervals, its stresses or itspitch, with the fixed, wooden pattern of the rhythm he is using. 

For the human voice utters syllables which vary their duration, stress andpitch with each reader. Photographs of voice-waves, as printed by Verrier, Scripture, and many other laboratory workers, show how great is thedifference between individuals in the intervals covered by the upward anddownward slides or "inflections" which indicate doubt or affirmation. Andthese "rising" and "falling" and "circumflex" and "suspended" inflections, which make up what is called "pitch-accent, " are constantly varied, likethe duration and stress of syllables, by the emotions evoked in reading. Words, phrases, lines and stanzas become colored with emotional overtonesdue to the feeling of the instant. Poetry read aloud as something sensuousand passionate cannot possibly conform exactly to a set mechanical patternof rhythm and metre. Yet the hand-woven Oriental rug, though lacking thegeometrical accuracy of a rug made by machinery, reveals a more vital andintimate beauty of design and execution. Many well-known poets--Tennysonbeing perhaps the most familiar example--have read aloud their own verseswith a peculiar chanting sing-song which seemed to over-emphasize thefundamental rhythm. But who shall correct them? And who is entitled to saythat a line like Swinburne's

 "Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway"

is irregular according to the foot-rule of traditional prosody, when it isprobable, as Mr. C. E. Russell maintains, that Swinburne was herecomposing in purely musical and not prosodical rhythm?[Footnote: "Swinburne and Music, " by Charles E. Russell, _North AmericanReview_, November, 1907. See the quotation in the "Notes andIllustrations" for this chapter. ]

Is it not true, furthermore, as some metrical sceptics like to remind us, that if we once admit the principle of substitution and equivalence, ofhypermetrical and truncated syllables, of pauses taking the place ofsyllables, we can very often make one metre seem very much like another?The question of calling a given group of lines "iambic" or "trochaic, " forinstance, can be made quite arbitrary, depending upon where you begin tocount syllables. "Iambic" with initial truncation or "trochaic" with finaltruncation? Tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee? Do you count waves from crest tocrest or from hollow to hollow? When you count the links in a bicyclechain, do you begin with the slender middle of each link or with one ofthe swelling ends? So is it with this "iambic" and "trochaic" matter. Professor Alden, in a suggestive pamphlet, [Footnote: "The Mental Side of Metrical Form, " already cited. ]confesses that these contrasting concepts of rising and falling metre arenothing more than concepts, alterable at will. 

But while the experts in prosody continue to differ and to dogmatize, thelover of poetry should remember that versification is far older than thescience of prosody, and that the enjoyment of verse is, for millions ofhuman beings, as unaffected by theories of metrics as the stars areunaffected by the theories of astronomers. It is a satisfaction to themind to know that the stars in their courses are amenable to law, eventhough one be so poor a mathematician as to be incapable of grasping andstating the law. The mathematics of music and of poetry, while heighteningthe intellectual pleasure of those capable of comprehending it, isadmittedly too difficult for the mass of men. But no lover of poetryshould refuse to go as far in theorizing as his ear will carry him. Hewill find that his susceptibility to the pulsations of various types ofrhythm, and his delight in the intricacies of metrical device, will beheightened by the mental effort of attention and analysis. The danger isthat the lover of poetry, wearied by the quarrels of prosodists, andforgetting the necessity of patience, compromise and freedom fromdogmatism, will lose his curiosity about the infinite variety of metricaleffects. But it is this very curiosity which makes his ear finer, even ifhis theories may be wrong. Hundreds of metricists admire and envyProfessor Saintsbury's ear for prose and verse rhythms whiledisagreeing wholly with his dogmatic theories of the "foot, " and hissystem of notation. There are sure to be some days and hours when thereader of poetry will find himself bored and tired with the effort ofattention to the technique of verse. Then he can stop analysing, close hiseyes, and drift out to sea upon the uncomprehended music. 

 "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. "

CHAPTER VI

RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

 "Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife, Murmur in the house of life. " EMERSON

 "When this verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare, & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensible part of the verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator, such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd Fetters the Human Race!" WILLIAM BLAKE

_1. Battles Long Ago_

As we pass from the general consideration of Rhythm and Metre to some ofthe special questions involved in Rhyme, Stanza and Free Verse, it may bewell to revert to the old distinction between what we called forconvenience the "outside" and the "inside" of a work of art. In the fieldof music we saw that this distinction is almost, if not quite, meaningless, and in poetry it ought not to be pushed too far. Yet it isuseful in explaining the differences among men as they regard, now theexternal form of verse, and now its inner spirit, and as they askthemselves how these two elements are related. Professor Butcher, in his_Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, [Footnote: Page 147. ]describes the natural tendencies of two sorts of men, who are quite aspersistent to-day as ever they were in Greece in looking at one side onlyof the question:

 "We need not agree with a certain modern school who would empty all poetry of poetical thought and etherealize it till it melts into a strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know of what, but in such a way that the echoes of the real world, its men and women, its actual stir and conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned. The poetry, we are told, resides not in the ideas conveyed, not in the blending of soul and sense, but in the sound itself, in the cadence of the verse. Yet, false as this view may be, it is not perhaps more false than that other which wholly ignores the effect of musical sound and looks only to the thought that is conveyed. Aristotle comes perilously near this doctrine. "

But it is not Aristotle only who permits himself at times to undervaluethe formal element in verse. It is also Sir Philip Sidney, with his famous"verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry" and "it is not rimingand versing that maketh a poet. " It is Shelley with his "The distinctionbetween poets and prose writers in a vulgar error. .. . Plato wasessentially a poet--the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melodyof his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. .. . Lord Bacon was a poet. " It is Coleridge with his "The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the _Theoria Sacra_ of Burnet, furnish undeniableproofs that poetry of the highest kind may be written without metre. "

In such passages as these, how generous are Sidney, Shelley, and Coleridgeto the prose-men! And yet these same poet-critics, in dozens of otherpassages, have explained the fundamental justification of metre, rhyme andstanza as elements in the harmony of verse. Harmony may be attained, it istrue, by rhythms too complicated to be easily scanned in metrical feet, and by measures which disregard rhyme and stanza; and poets, as well ascritics, by giving exclusive attention to a single element in harmony, areable to persuade themselves for the moment that all other elements arerelatively negligible. Milton, in his zeal for blank verse, attackedrhyme, in which he had already proved himself a master, quite as fiercelyas any of our contemporary champions of free verse. Campion, a trainedmusician, argued for a quantitative system of English prosody during thevery period when he was composing, in the accentual system, some of themost exquisite songs in the language. Daniel, whose _Defense of Rhyme_(1603) was a triumphant reply to Campion's theory, gave courteouspraise to his opponent's practice. Dryden, most flexible-minded ofcritics, argues now for, and now against the use of rhymed heroic coupletsin the drama, fitting his theories to the changing currents ofcontemporary taste as well as to the varying, self-determined technique ofhis own plays. "Never wholly out of the way, nor in it, " was Dryden'shappy phrase to describe the artist's freedom, a freedom always consciousof underlying law. 

_2. Rhyme as a Form of Rhythm_

However theory and practice may happen to coincide or to drift apart, thefundamental law which justifies rhyme and stanza seems to be this: ifrhythm is a primary fact in poetry, and metre is, as Aristotle called it, sections of rhythm, any device of repeating identical or nearly identicalsounds at measured intervals is an aid to rhythmical effect. Rhyme is thusa form, an "externalizing" of rhythm. It is structural as well asdecorative, or rather, it is _one way_ of securing structure, of buildingverse. There are other devices, of course, for attaining symmetricalpatterns, for conveying an impression of unity in variety. The "parallel"structure of Hebrew poetry, where one idea and phrase is balanced againstanother, "I have slain a man to my wounding-- And a young man to my hurt--"

or the "envelope" structure of many of the Psalms, where the initialphrase or idea is repeated at the close, after the insertion ofillustrative matter, thus securing a pattern by the "return" of the mainidea--the closing of the "curve"--may serve to illustrate the universalityof the principle of balance and contrast and repetition in thearchitecture of verse. For Hebrew poetry, like the poetry of manyprimitive peoples, utilized the natural pleasure which the ear takes inlistening for and perceiving again an already uttered sound. Rhymeis a gratification of expectation, like the repetition of a chord in music[Footnote: "Most musical compositions are written in quite obvious rhymes;and the array of familiar and classical works that have not only rhymesbut distinct stanzaic arrangements exactly like those of poetry is worthremembering. Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' and Rubinstein's 'Romance in EFlat' will occur at once as examples in which the stanzas areunmistakable. " C. E. Russell, "Swinburne and Music, " _North AmericanReview_, November, 1907. ]or of colors in a rug. It assists the mind in grasping the sense-rhythm, --the design of the piece as a whole. It assists the emotions through thestimulus to the attention, through the reinforcement which it gives to thepulsations of the psycho-physical organism. 

 "And _sweep_ through the _deep_ While the stormy tempests blow, While the battle rages long and loud And the stormy tempests blow. "

The pulses cannot help quickening as the rhymes quicken. 

But in order to perform this structural, rhythmical purpose it is notnecessary that rhyme be of any single recognized type. As long as theear receives the pleasure afforded by accordant sound, any of the varioushistorical forms of rhyme may serve. It may be Alliteration, theletter-rhyme or "beginning-rhyme" of Old English poetry:

 "_H_im be _h_ealfe stod _h_yse unweaxen, _C_niht on ge_c_ampe, se full _c_aflice. "

Tennyson imitates it in his "Battle of Brunanburh":

 "Mighty the Mercian, Hard was his hand-play, Sparing not any of Those that with Anlaf, Warriors over the Weltering waters Borne in the bark's-bosom, Drew to this island-- Doomed to the death. "

This repetition of initial letters survives in phrases of prose like"dead and done with, " "to have and to hold, " and it is utilized in modernverse to give further emphasis to accentual syllables. But masters ofalliterative effects, like Keats, Tennyson and Verlaine, constantly employalliteration in unaccented syllables so as to color the tone-quality of aline without a too obvious assault upon the ear. The unrhymed songs of_The Princess_ are full of these delicate modulations of sound. 

In Common rhyme, or "end-rhyme" (found--abound), the accented vowel andall succeeding sounds are repeated, while the consonants preceding theaccented vowel vary. Assonance, in its stricter sense, means therepetition of an accented vowel (blackness--dances), while the succeedingsounds vary, but the terms "assonance" and "consonance" are often employedloosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or groupof lines. Complete or "identical" rhymes (fair--affair), which werelegitimate in Chaucer's time, are not now considered admissible inEnglish. "Masculine" rhymes are end-rhymes of one syllable; "feminine"rhymes are end-rhymes of two syllables (uncertain--curtain); internal or"middle-rhymes" are produced by the repetition at the end of a line of arhyme-sound already employed within the line. 

 "We were the _first_ that ever _burst_ Into that silent sea. "

In general, the more frequent the repetitions of rhyme, the quicker is therhythmic movement of the poem, and conversely. Thus, the _In Memoriam_stanza attains its peculiar effect of retardation by rhyming the firstline with the fourth, so that the ear is compelled to wait for theexpected recurrence of the first rhyme sound. 

 "Beside the river's wooded reach, The fortress and the mountain ridge, The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach. "

This gives a movement markedly different from that secured by rearrangingthe same lines in alternate rhymes:

 "Beside the river's wooded reach, The fortress and the mountain ridge, The breaker breaking on the beach, The cataract flashing from the bridge. "

If all the various forms of rhyme are only different ways of emphasizingrhythm through the repetition of accordant sounds, it follows that thevarying rhythmical impulses of poets and of readers will demand now agreater and now a less dependence upon this particular mode of rhythmicalsatisfaction. Chaucer complained of the scarcity of rhymes in English ascompared with their affluence in Old French, and it is true that rhymingis harder in our tongue than in the Romance languages. We have hadmagicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-soundsends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back to blankverse or on to free verse. The Spenserian stanza, which calls for onefourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunninglyinterlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear ofthe average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that thereare born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery ismultiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are oftencareless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at anyrhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-consciousartists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymesuntil the life and freshness disappear. For sheer improvising clevernessof rhyme Byron is still unmatched, but he often contents himself withapproximate rhymes that are nearly as bad as some of Mrs. Browning's andWhittier's. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the followinglines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the "solemn ennui"of the trailing peacocks;

 I "From out the temple's pillared portico, Thence to the gardens where blue poppies blow The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow, Trailing their solemn ennui as they go, Trailing their melancholy and their woe. 

 II "Trailing their melancholy and their woe, Trailing their solemn ennui as they go The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow From out the gardens where blue poppies blow Thence to the temple's pillared portico. "[Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom, " The International, September, 1915. ]

Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle, " it is rather, as Samuel Johnsonsaid of all versification, a "joining music with reason. " Its blending ofdecorative with structural purpose is in truth "a dictate of nature, " or, to quote E. C. Stedman, "In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, thefittest assonance, consonance, time, even rime, . .. _come of themselveswith imaginative thought_. "

_3. Stanza_

There are some lovers of poetry, however, who will grant this theoreticaljustification of rhyme as an element in the harmony of verse, withoutadmitting that the actual rhyming stanzas of English verse show"spontaneous minstrelsy. " The word "stanza" or "strophe" means literally"a resting-place, " a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform groupof rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his _English Verse_ as "the largestunit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much onrhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and along one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original ideawas to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written. ""Normally, then, " Alden adds in his _Introduction to Poetry_, "all thestanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, andthe rime-scheme of the corresponding verses. " The question arises, therefore, whether those units which we call "stanzas" are arbitrary orvital. Have the lines been fused into their rhymed grouping by passionatefeeling, or is their unity a mere mechanical conformation to a pattern? InTheodore Watts-Dunton's well-known article on "Poetry" in the_Encyclopaedia Brittanica_[Footnote: Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his _Poetry and theRenascence of Wonder_. E. P. Dutton, New York. ]the phrases "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" are used to represent thetwo principles at issue:

 "In modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeper--by the law which impels the soul, in a state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, etc. , for the purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless of any demands of stanza. .. . If a metrical passage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably--it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expression. "

This distinction between "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" is highlysuggestive and not merely in its application to the metres of the famousregular and irregular odes of English verse. It applies also to theinfinite variety of stanza-patterns which English poetry has taken overfrom Latin and French sources and developed through centuriesofexperimentation, and it affords a key, as we shall see in a moment, tosome of the vexed questions involved in free verse. 

Take first the more familiar of the stanza forms of English verse. Theyare conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspondwith each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated. 

Thus the rhymed couplet

 "Around their prows the ocean roars, And chafes beneath their thousand oars"

may be marked as "four-stress iambic, " rhyming _aa_; the heroic couplet

 "The zeal of fools offends at any time, But most of all the zeal of fools in rhyme"

as five-stress iambic, rhyming _aa_. The familiar measure of Englishballad poetry, "The King has written a braid letter, And signed it wi' his hand, And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence, Was walking on the sand"

is alternating four-stress and three-stress iambic, rhyming _ab cb_. The_In Memoriam_ stanza, "Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song"

is four-stress iambic, rhyming _ab ba_. 

The Chaucerian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c c_:

 "'Loke up, I seye, and telle me what she is Anon, that I may gone aboute thi nede: Know iche hire ought? for my love telle me this; Thanne wolde I hopen the rather for to spede. ' Tho gan the veyne of Troilus to blede, For he was hit, and wex alle rede for schame; 'Aha!' quod Pandare, 'here bygynneth game. '"

Byron's "ottava rima" rhymes _a b a b a b c c_:

 "A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head--and there is London Town!"

The Spenserian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c b c c_, with an extra foot inthe final line:

 "Hee had a faire companion of his way, A goodly lady clad in scarlot red, Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay; And like a Persian mitre on her hed Shee wore, with crowns and owches garnished, The which her lavish lovers to her gave: Her wanton palfrey all was overspred With tinsell trappings, woven like a wave, Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave. "

In considering these various groups of lines which we call stanzas it isclear that we have to do with thought-units as well as feeling-units, andthat both thought-units and feeling-units should be harmonized, ifpossible, with the demands of beauty and variety of sound as representedby the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural "size" of poeticthoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, justas Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigramsize, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrainsizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought istoo scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteenlines demanded by the traditional sonnet form. They are sometimes onlyquatrain ideas, blown up big with words to fill out the fourteenlines, or, on the contrary, as often with the Elizabethans, they are wholeodes or elegies, remorselessly packed into the fashionable fourteen-linelimit. No one who has given attention to the normal length of phrases andsentences doubts that there are natural "breathfuls" of wordscorresponding to the units of ideas; and when ideas are organized byemotion, there are waves, gusts, or ripples of words, matching the wavesof feeling. In the ideal poetic "pattern, " these waves of idea, feelingand rhythmic speech would coincide more or less completely; we should havea union of "emotional law" with "stanzaic law, " the soul of poetry wouldfind its perfect embodiment. 

But if we turn the pages of any collection of English poetry, say the_Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, we find somethingvery different from this ideal embodiment of each poetic emotion in a formdelicately moulded to the particular species of emotion revealed. Wediscover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns--like similar metricalpatterns--are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings, --letus say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The"common metre" of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould intowhich almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured. If "trochaic"measures do not always trip it on a light fantastic toe, neither do"iambic" measures always pace sedately. Doubtless there is a certaingeneral fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose:the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedlyexcellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalledfor painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less availablefor pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balancedupon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too;Byron's _ottava rima_ has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it istrue, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood;the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and thecouplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin throwndown on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses byinstinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose, and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess. But thesignificant point is this: "stanzaic law" makes for uniformity, for theendless repetition of the chosen pattern, which must still be recognizedas a pattern, however subtly the artist modulates his details; and inadjusting the infinitely varied material of thought and feeling, phraseand image, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic design, there are boundto be gaps and patches, stretchings and foldings of the thought-stuff, --for even as in humble tailor-craft, this many-colored coat of poetry mustbe cut according to the cloth as well as according to the pattern. Howmany pages of even the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ are free from sometouch of feebleness, of redundancy, of constraint due to the remorselessrequirements of the stanza? The line must be filled out, whether or notthe thought is quite full enough for it; rhyme must match rhyme, even ifthe thought becomes as far-fetched as the rhyming word; the stanza, inshort, demands one kind of perfection as a constantly repeated musicaldesign, as beauty of form; and another kind of perfection as theexpression of human emotion. Sometimes these two perfections of "form" and"significance" are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we haveour "Ode to a Nightingale, " or "Ode to Autumn" as the result. (And perhapsthe best, even in this kind, are but shadows, when compared with theabsolute union of truth and beauty as the poetic idea first took rhythmicform in the brain of the poet. )

Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such"dictates of nature" as these poems, but with approximations. Eachstanzaic form has its conveniences, its "fatal facility, " its naturalfitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought overand over into music. Intellectual readers will always like theepigrammatic "snap" of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largelybecause of his choice of stanza, the "poet's poet. " Perhapsthe very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poeticactivity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delightof rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Shelley said, "the mindin creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like aninconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness, " why may it not be thebreath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, whichquickens its drooping flame? And few poets, furthermore, will admit thatthey are really in bondage to their stanzas. They love to dance in thesefetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, theynevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield's"Chaucerian" stanzas are really not so much Chaucer's as Masefield's. 

Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only theunsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complainof its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixedstanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greaterpoets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act ofemploying it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dancemusic. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention, technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against thearguments of extreme advocates of free verse is to point out thatrhyme and stanza are natural structural devices for securing certaineffects. There are various types of bridges for crossing different kindsof streams; no one type of bridge is always and everywhere the best. To doaway with rhyme and stanza is to renounce some modes of poetic beauty; itis to resolve that there shall be one less way of crossing the stream. Anadvocate of freedom in the arts may well admit that the artist may bridgehis particular stream in any way he can, --or he may ford it or swim it orgo over in an airplane if he chooses. But some method must be found ofgetting his ideas and emotions "across" into the mind and feelings of thereaders of his poetry. If this can adequately be accomplished withoutrecourse to rhyme and stanza, very well; there is _Paradise Lost_, forinstance, and _Hamlet_. But here we are driven back again upon thecountless varieties of artistic intention and craftsmanship and effect. Each method--and there are as many methods as there are poets and farmore, for craftsmen like Milton and Tennyson try hundreds of methods intheir time--is only a medium through which the artist is endeavoring toattain a special result. It is one way--only one, and perhaps not the bestway--of trying to cross the stream. 

_4. Free Verse_

Recalling now the discussion of the rhythms of prose in the previouschapter, and remembering that rhyme and stanza are special forms ofreinforcing the impulse of rhythm, what shall be said of free verse? Itbelongs, unquestionably, in that "neutral zone" which some readers, in Dr. Patterson's phrase, instinctively appropriate as "prose experience, " andothers as "verse experience. " It renounces metre--or rather endeavors torenounce it, for it does not always succeed. It professes to do away withrhyme and stanza, although it may play cunningly upon the sounds of likeand unlike words, and it may arrange phrases into poetic paragraphs, which, aided by the art of typography, secure a kind of stanzaic effect. It cannot, however, do away with the element of rhythm, with ordered time. The moment free verse ceases to be felt as rhythmical, it ceases to befelt as poetry. This is admitted by its advocates and its opponentsalike. The real question at issue then, is the manner in which free versemay secure the effects of rhythmic unity and variety, without, on the onehand, resorting to the obvious rhythms of prose, or on the other hand, without repeating the recognized patterns of verse. There are manycompetent critics who maintain with Edith Wyatt that "on an earth wherethere is nothing to wear but clothes, nothing to eat but food, there isalso nothing to read but prose and poetry. " "According to the results ofour experiments, " testifies Dr. Patterson, "there is no psychologicalmeaning to claims for a third _genre_ between regular verse and prose, except in the sense of a jumping back and forth from one side of the fenceto the other. "[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, p. 77. ]And in the preface to his second edition, after having listened to MissAmy Lowell's readings of free verse, Dr. Patterson remarks: "What isachieved, as a rule, in Miss Lowell's case, is emotional prose, emphatically phrased, excellent and moving. _Spaced prose_, we may callit. "

Now "spaced prose" is a useful expression, inasmuch as it calls attentionto the careful emphasis and balance of phrases which up so much of therhetorical structure of free verse, and it also serves to remind us of thepart which typography plays in "spacing" these phrases, and stressing forthe eye their curves and "returns. " But we are all agreed thattypographical appeals to the eye are infinitely deceptive in blurring thedistinction between verse and prose, and that the trained ear must be theonly arbiter as to poetical and pseudo-poetical effects. Ask a lover ofWalt Whitman whether "spaced prose" is the right label for "Out of theCradle Endlessly Rocking, " and he will scoff at you. He will maintain thatfollowing the example of the rich broken rhythms of the English Bible, theexample of Ossian, Blake, and many another European experimenter duringthe Romantic epoch, Whitman really succeeded in elaborating a mode ofpoetical expression, nearer for the most part to recitative than toaria, yet neither pure declamation nor pure song: a unique embodiment ofpassionate feeling, a veritable "neutral zone, " which refuses to letitself be annexed to either "prose" or "verse" as those terms areordinarily understood, but for which "free verse" is precisely the rightexpression. _Leaves of Grass_ (1855) remains the most interesting of allexperiments with free verse, written as it was by an artist whose naturalrhythmical endowment was extraordinary, and whose technical curiosity andpatience in modulating his tonal effects was unwearied by failures andundiscouraged by popular neglect. But the case for free verse does not, after all, stand or fall with Walt Whitman. His was merely the mostpowerful poetic personality among the countless artificers who haveendeavored to produce rhythmic and tonal beauty through new structuraldevices. 

Readers who are familiar with the experiments of contemporary poets willeasily recognize four prevalent types of "free verse":

(a) Sometimes what is printed as "free verse" is nothing but prosedisguised by the art of typography, i. E. Judged by the ear, it is made upwholly of the rhythms of prose. 

(b) Sometimes the prose rhythms predominate, without excluding a mixtureof the recognized rhythms of verse. 

(c) Sometimes verse rhythms predominate, and even fixed metrical feet areallowed to appear here and there. 

(d) Sometimes verse rhythms and metres are used exclusively, although innew combinations which disguise or break up the metrical pattern. 

A parody by F. P. A. In _The Conning Tower_ affords a convenientillustration of the "a" type:

ADD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Peoria, Ill. , Jan. 24. --The Spoon River levee, which protected thousandsof acres of farm land below Havana, Ill. , fifty-five miles south of here, broke this morning. 

A score or more of families fled to higher ground. The towns of Havana, Lewiston and Duncan Mills are isolated. Two dozen head of cattle arereported drowned on the farm of John Himpshell, near Havana. --AssociatedPress dispatch. 

 Edgar Lee Masters wrote a lot of things About me and the people who Inhabited my banks. All of them, all are sleeping on the hill. Herbert Marshall, Amelia Garrick, Enoch Dunlap, Ida Frickey, Alfred Moir, Archibald Highbie and the rest. Me he gave no thought to-- Unless, perhaps, to think that I, too, was asleep. Those people on the hill, I thought, Have grown famous; But nobody writes about me. I was only a river, you know, But I had my pride, So one January day I overflowed my banks; It wasn't much of a flood, Mr. Masters, But it put me on the front page And in the late dispatches Of the Associated Press. 

It is clear that the quoted words of the Associated Press dispatch fromPeoria are pure prose, devoid of rhythmical pattern, devoted to a plainstatement of fact. So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Notuntil the borrowed fourth line:

 "All of them, all are sleeping on the hill, "

do we catch the rhythm (and even the metre) of verse, and F. P. A. Ishere imitating Mr. Masters's way of introducing a strongly rhythmical andeven metrical line into a passage otherwise flatly "prosaic" in itstime-intervals. But "free verse" adopts many other cadences of Englishprose besides this "formless" structure which goes with matter-of-factstatement. It also reproduces the neat, polished, perhaps epigrammaticsentence which crystallizes a fact or a generalization; the more emotionaland "moving" period resulting from heightened feeling, and finally thefrankly imitative and ornamented cadences of descriptive and highlyimpassioned prose. Let us take some illustrations from Sidney Lanier's_Poem Outlines_, a posthumously published collection of some of hissketches for poems, "jotted in pencil on the backs of envelopes, on themargins of musical programmes, or little torn scraps of paper. "

 "The United States in two hundred years has made Emerson out of a witch-burner. "

This is polished, graphic prose. Here is an equally graphic, but moreimpassioned sentence, with the staccato rhythm and the alliterativeemphasis of good angry speech:

 _To the Politicians_

 "You are servants. Your thoughts are the thoughts of cooks curious to skim perquisites from every pan, your quarrels are the quarrels of scullions who fight for the privilege of cleaning the pot with most leavings in it, your committees sit upon the landings of back-stairs, and your quarrels are the quarrels of kitchens. "

But in the following passage, apparently a first draft for some lines in_Hymns of the Marshes_, Lanier takes a strongly rhythmical, heavilypunctuated type of prose, as if he were writing a Collect:

 "The courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the small, the life of the fiddler-crab, and the household of the marsh-hen; and more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marsh-grass, which is as if filth bred heaven: This a man seeth upon the marsh. "

In that rhapsody of the marsh there is no recognizable metrical scheme, inspite of the plainly marked rhythm, but in the following symbolic sketchthe imitation of the horse's ambling introduces an element of regularmetre:

 "Ambling, ambling round the ring, Round the ring of daily duty, Leap, Circus-rider, man, through the paper hoop of death, --Ah, lightest thou, beyond death, on this same slow-ambling, padded horse of life. "

And finally, in such fragments as the following, Lanier uses a regularmetre of "English verse"--it is true with a highly irregular third line--

 "And then A gentle violin mated with the flute, And both flew off into a wood of harmony, Two doves of tone. "

It is clear that an artist in words, in jotting down thoughts and imagesas they first emerge, may instinctively use language which is subtlyblended of verse and prose, like many rhapsodical passages in the privatejournals of Thoreau and Emerson. When duly elaborated, these passagesusually become, in the hands of the greater artists, either one thing orthe other, i. E. Unmistakable prose or unmistakable verse. But it remainstrue, I think, that there is another artistic instinct which impelscertain poets to blend the types in the endeavor to reach a new and hybridbeauty. [Footnote: Some examples of recent verse are printed in the "Notes andIllustrations" for this chapter. ]

Take these illustrations of the "b" type--i. E. Prose rhythms predominant, with some admixture of the rhythms of verse:

 "I hear footsteps over my head all night. They come and go. Again they come and again they go all night. They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and Night and the Infinite. For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, in their wild pilgrimage after destined goals. Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head. Who walks? I do not know. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker. One--two--three--four; four paces and the wall. "[Footnote: From Giovanitti's "The Walker. "]

Or take this:

 "Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind, extinct, The Crusaders' streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise, Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone, Palmerin, ogre, departed, vanish'd the turrets that Usk from its waters reflected, Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad, all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation; Pass'd! Pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now void, inanimate, phantom world, Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths, Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly dames, Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on, Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page, And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme. "[Footnote: Whitman, "Song of the Exposition. "]

Here are examples of the "c" type--i. E. Predominant verse rhythms, withoccasional emphasis upon metrical feet:

 "Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me. 

 "Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he, ) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us. 

 * * * * * "Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

 "Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, _We have not struck_, he composedly cries, _we have just begun our part of the fighting_. 

 * * * * *

 "One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. 

 "Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us. "[Footnote: Whitman. "Song of Myself. "]

Read William Blake's description of the Bastille, in his recently printedpoem on "The French Revolution":

 "'Seest thou yonder dark castle, that moated around, keeps this city of Paris in awe? Go, command yonder tower, saying: "Bastille, depart! and take thy shadowy course; Overstep the dark river, thou terrible tower, and get thee up into the country ten miles. And thou black southern prison, move along the dusky road to Versailles; there Frown on the gardens--and, if it obey and depart, then the King will disband This war-breathing army; but, if it refuse, let the Nation's Assembly thence learn That this army of terrors, that prison of horrors, are the bands of the murmuring kingdom. "'

 "Like the morning star arising above the black waves, when a shipwrecked soul sighs for morning, Thro' the ranks, silent, walk'd the Ambassador back to the Nation's Assembly, and told The unwelcome message. Silent they heard; then a thunder roll'd round loud and louder; Like pillars of ancient halls and ruins of times remote, they sat. Like a voice from the dim pillars Mirabeau rose; the thunders subsided away; A rushing of wings around him was heard as he brighten'd, and cried out aloud: 'Where is the General of the Nation?' The walls re-echo'd: 'Where is the General of the Nation?'"

And here are passages made up exclusively of the rhythms and metres ofverse, in broken or disguised patterns ("d" type):

 "Under a stagnant sky, Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom, The River, jaded and forlorn, Welters and wanders wearily--wretchedly--on; Yet in and out among the ribs Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls, Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories, Lingers to babble, to a broken tune (Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!) So melancholy a soliloquy It sounds as it might tell The secret of the unending grief-in-grain, The terror of Time and Change and Death, That wastes this floating, transitory world. "[Footnote: W. E. Henley, "To James McNeill Whistler. " ]

Or take this:

 "They see the ferry On the broad, clay-laden Lone Chorasmian stream;--thereon, With snort and strain, Two horses, strongly swimming, tow The ferry-boat, with woven ropes To either bow Firm-harness'd by the mane; a chief, With shout and shaken spear, Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern The cowering merchants in long robes Sit pale beside their wealth Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops, Of gold and ivory, Of turquoise-earth and amethyst, Jasper and chalcedony, And milk-barr'd onyx-stones. The loaded boat swings groaning In the yellow eddies; The Gods behold them. "[Footnote: Arnold, "The Strayed Reveller. "]

_5. Discovery and Rediscovery_

It is not pretended that the four types of free verse which have beenillustrated are marked by clear-cut generic differences. They shade intoone another. But they are all based upon a common sensitiveness to theeffects of rhythmic prose, a common restlessness under what is felt to bethe restraint of metre and rhyme, and a common endeavor to break down theconventional barrier which separates the characteristic beauty of prosespeech from the characteristic beauty of verse. In this endeavor toobliterate boundary lines, to secure in one art the effects hithertosupposed to be the peculiar property of another, free verse is only onemore evidence of the widespread "confusion of the genres" which markscontemporary artistic effort. It is possible, with the classicists, tocondemn outright this blurring of values. [Footnote: See, for instance, Irving Babbitt, _The New Laokoon_. HoughtonMifflin Company, 1910. ]One may legitimately maintain, with Edith Wyatt, that the traditionalmethods of English verse are to the true artist not oppressions butliberations. She calls it "a fallacious idea that all individual and allrealistic expression in poetry is annulled by the presence of distinctivemusical discernment, by the movement of rhyme with its keen heightening ofthe impulse of rhythm, by the word-shadows of assonance, by harmonies, overtones and the still beat of ordered time, subconsciously perceived butprecise as the sense of the symphony leader's flying baton. To readers, towriters for whom the tonal quality of every language is an intrinsic valuethese faculties of poetry serve not at all as cramping oppressions, but asgreat liberations for the communication of truth. "[Footnote: _New Republic_, August 24, 1918. ]But many practitioners of free verse would reply that this is not a matterfor theorizing, but of individual preference, and that in their endeavorto communicate new modes of feeling, new aspects of beauty, they have aright to the use of new forms, even if those new forms be compounded outof the wreck of old ones. This argument for freedom of experiment isunanswerable; the true test of its validity lies in the results secured. That free verse has now and then succeeded in creating lovely floweringhybrids seems to me as indubitable as the magical tricks which Mr. Burbankhas played with flowers and fruits. But the smiling Dame Nature sets herinexorable limits to "Burbanking"; she allows it to go about so far, andno farther. Freakish free verse, like freakish plants and animals, getspunished by sterility. Some of the "imagist" verse patterns are uniquelyand intricately beautiful. Wrought in a medium which is neither whollyverse nor wholly prose, but which borrows some of the beauty peculiar toeach art, they are their own excuse for being. And nevertheless they maynot prove fertile. It may be that they have been produced by "pushing amedium farther than it will go. "

It must be admitted, furthermore, that a great deal of contemporary freeverse has been written by persons with an obviously incomplete commandover the resources of expression. Max Eastman has called it "Lazy Verse, "the product of "aboriginal indolence"; and he adds this significantdistinction, "In all arts it is the tendency of those who are ungrown toconfuse the expression of intense feeling with the intense expression offeeling--which last is all the world will long listen to. " Shakspere, Milton, Keats are masters of concentrated, intensest expression: theirverse, at its best, is structural as an oak. Those of us who have readwith keen momentary enjoyment thousands of pages of the "New Verse, "are frequently surprised to find how little of it stamps itself upon thememory. Intense feeling has gone into these formless forms, verycertainly, but the medium soaks up the feeling like blotting-paper. Inorder to live, poetry must be plastic, a stark embodiment of emotion, andnot a solution of emotion. 

That fragile, transient fashions of expression have their own evanescenttype of beauty no one who knows the history of Euphuism will deny. Andmuch of the New Verse is Euphuistic, not merely in its self-consciouscleverness, its delightful toying with words and phrases for their ownsake, its search of novel cadences and curves, but also in its naivepleasure in rediscovering and parodying what the ancients had discoveredlong before. "Polyphonic prose, " for instance, as announced andillustrated by Mr. Paul Fort and Miss Amy Lowell, is prose thatmakes use of all the "voices" of poetry, --viz. Metre, _vers libre_, assonances, alliteration, rhyme and return. "Metrical verse, " says MissLowell in the Preface to _Can Grande's Castle_, "has one set of laws, cadenced verse another; 'polyphonic prose' can go from one to the other inthe same poem with no sense of incongruity. .. . I finally decided to basemy form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The variationspermitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more readily intothose of _vers libre_, or even to take the regular beat of metre, shouldsuch a marked time seem advisable. .. . Rhyme is employed to give a richnessof effect, to heighten the musical feeling of a passage, but . .. Therhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences. .. . Return in'polyphonic prose' is usually achieved by the recurrence of a dominantthought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but stillgiving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of asimperative in all poetry. "

Now every one of these devices is at least as old as Isocrates. It was inthis very fashion that Euphues and his Friends delighted to serve andreturn their choicest tennis balls of Elizabethan phrase. But little DeQuincey could pull out the various stops of polyphonic prose even morecleverly than John Lyly; and if one will read the admirable description ofSt. Mark's in _Can Grandel’s Castle_, and then re-read Ruskin'sdescription of St. Mark's, he will find that the Victorian's orchestrationof many-voiced prose does not suffer by comparison. 

Yet though it is true enough of the arts, as Chaucer wrote suavely longago, that "There nys no newe thing that is not olde, " we must rememberthat the arts are always profiting by their naive rediscoveries. It ismore important that the thing should seem new than that it should reallybe new, and the fresh sense of untried possibilities, the feeling thatmuch land remains to be possessed, has given our contemporaries thespirits and the satisfactions of the pioneer. What matters it that a fewantiquaries can trace on old maps the very rivers and harbors which theNew Verse believed itself to be exploring for the first time? Poetry doesnot live by antiquarianism, but by the passionate conviction that allthings are made new through the creative imagination. 

 "Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!"

 PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

 "O hearken, love, the battle-horn! The triumph clear, the silver scorn! O hearken where the echoes bring. Down the grey disastrous morn, Laughter and rallying!" WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY

CHAPTER VII

THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

 "'Lyrical, ' it may be said, implies a form of musical utterance in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a powerfully concordant rhythm. " ERNEST RHYS, _Lyric Poetry_

That "confusion of the genres" which characterizes so much of contemporaryart has not obliterated the ancient division of poetry into three chieftypes, namely, lyric, epic and dramatic. We still mean by these words verymuch what the Greeks meant: a "lyric" is something sung, an "epic" tellsa story, a "drama" sets characters in action. Corresponding to thesegeneral purposes of the three kinds of poetry, is the difference whichWatts-Dunton has discussed so suggestively: namely, that in the lyric theauthor reveals himself fully, while in the "epic" or narrative poem theauthor himself is but partly revealed, and in the drama the author ishidden behind his characters. Or, putting this difference in another way, the same critic points out that the true dramatists possess "absolute"vision, i. E. Unconditioned by the personal impulses of the poet himself, whereas the vision of the lyrist is "relative, " conditioned by his ownsituation and mood. The pure lyrist, says Watts-Dunton, has one voice andsings one tune; the epic poets and quasi-dramatists have one voice but cansing several tunes, while the true dramatists, with their objective, "absolute" vision of the world, have many tongues and can sing in alltunes. 

_1. A Rough Classification_

Passing over the question of the historical origins of those variousspecies of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs andhero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and methodto the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds ofpoetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint, and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, theexpression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejectionnear Naples, " Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection, " Wordsworth's "She dweltamong the untrodden ways, " Tennyson's "Break--Break" will serve forillustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their visionis "relative" to the poet's actual circumstances. Yet in a "dramaticlyric" like Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" it isclear that the poet's vision is not occupied primarily with himself, butwith another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson's "SimeonStylites" or Browning's "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed'sChurch" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, butimaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning werecapable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupiedwith characters in action--the "world of men, " in short, and not thepersonal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet. 

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. Ina traditional ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens, " a modern ballad likeTennyson's "The Revenge, " or Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner, " is not thepoet's vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outsideof the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, likeTennyson's "Morte d'Arthur, " Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum, " Morris's"Sigurd the Volsung, " and certainly in the "Aeneid" and the "Song ofRoland, " the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in theobjective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn fromthe world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature asenfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Odeto Autumn, " Shelley's "Autumn, " in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper, "Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth, " we find poets absorbed in theexternal scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that theborn lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both theworld of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their ownunquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story theyare telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reasonthat we speak of "lyrical" passages even in the great objective dramas, passages colored with the passionate personal feelings of the poet. For hecannot be wholly "absolute" even if he tries: he will invent favoritecharacters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devisefavorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men andwomen, and his general theory of human life. 

_2. Definitions_

While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word "lyrical" hasbeen broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather thana mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the originalsignificance of the word. Derived from "lyre, " it meant first a songwritten for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whoseform suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, apoem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry. [Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine's _Elizabethan Lyric_, E. B. Heed's _English Lyrical Poetry_, Ernest Rhys's _Lyric Poetry_, F. E. Schelling's _The English Lyric_, John Drinkwater's _The Lyric_, C. E. Whitmore in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. _, December, 1918. ]"All songs, all poems following classical lyric forms; all short poemsexpressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music, are to be considered lyrics, " says Professor Reed. "The lyric is concernedwith the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his passions. .. . With the lyric subjective poetry begins, " says Professor Schelling. "Thecharacteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poeticenergy unassociated with other energies, " says Mr. Drinkwater. These aretypical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the_Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics_, while omitting to stressthe elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a workingrule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term"lyrical" "to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feelingor situation. " The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practicaldefinition when he remarked that the lyric "reflects a situation or adesire. " Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer, " CharlesKingsley's "Airlie Beacon" and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" (_OxfordBook of Verse_, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive illustrations ofScherer's dictum. 

_3. General Characteristics_

But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain generalcharacteristics which are indubitable. The lyric "vision, " that is to say, the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyricverse, making it "simple, sensuous, passionate" beyond other species ofpoetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness. 

To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise "_herrlich wie am erstenTag. _" "Thou know'st 'tis common, " says Hamlet's mother, speaking of hisfather's death, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" But to men of thelyrical temperament everything is "particular. " Age does not alter theirexquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's lines on "EarlySpring, " written at seventy-four, Browning's "Never the Time and thePlace" written at seventy-two, Goethe's love-lyrics written when he waseighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes thisfreshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the developmentof his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance athis particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before anameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for whichwe have a contemporary musical score:

 "Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu. "

But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy thatcuckoo's song, "Breaking the silence of the seas Beyond the farthest Hebrides. "

Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled, stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhapshe may have helped in the emancipation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge inthe English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. Thenew sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon theimaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited bythis rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences tomatch new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes allthings new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of the"Eternal Unity, " or Browning's conception of Immortality, afford the verystuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short, like falling in love, like having a child, like getting "converted, "[Footnote: See William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. ]gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hithertounrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly "particular" tohim. "As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so heflourisheth. " That was first a "lyric cry" out of the depths of some freshindividual experience. It has become stale through repetition, but many aman, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed, in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time. 

Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this class, "remarks Watts-Dunton, "it may be said that his mind to him 'a kingdom is, 'and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom. " Hecelebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physicalsensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when theytake their morning tub. Far from avoiding that "pathetic fallacy" whichRuskin analysed in a famous chapter, [Footnote: _Modern Painters_, vol. 3, chap. 12. ]and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only tothe mind itself, they revel in it. "Day, like our souls, is _fiercelydark_, " sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered, could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power ofdistinguishing between things as they actually were and things as theyappeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. "This goodly frame, the earth, seems _to me_ a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical rooffretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing _to me_ than afoul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!. .. And yet, _to me_, what is this quintessence of dust?"

Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individualidentifies himself with his family or tribe:

 "O Keith of Ravelstone, The sorrows of thy line!"

School and college songs are often, in reality, tribal lyrics. Thechoruses of Greek tragedies dealing with the guilt and punishment of afamily, the Hebrew lyrics chanting, like "The Song of Deborah, " thefortunes of a great fight, often broaden their sympathies so as toinclude, as in "The Persians" of Aeschylus, the glory or the downfall of arace. And this sense of identification with a nation or race implies noloss, but often an amplification of the lyric impulse. Alfred Noyes'ssongs about the English, D'Annunzio's and Hugo's splendid chants of theLatin races, Kipling's glorification of the White Man, lose nothing oftheir lyric quality because of their nationalistic or racial inspiration. Read Wilfrid Blunt's sonnet on "Gibraltar" (_Oxford Book of Verse_, No. 821):

 "Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules And Goth and Moor bequeath'd us. At this door England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze, And at the summons of the rock gun's roar To see her red coats marching from the hill!"

Are patriotic lyrics of this militant type destined to disappear, asTolstoy believed they ought to disappear, with the breaking-down of thebarriers of nationality, or rather with the coming of

 "One common wave of thought and joy, Lifting mankind again"

over the barriers of nationality? Certainly there is already a type ofpurely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinksin terms of "us men" rather than of "I myself. " It appeared long ago inthat rebellious "Titanic" verse which took the side of oppressed mortalsas against the unjust gods. Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo ofthis defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men. " The songs ofBurns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy, --pure personal egoism, then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then passion forScotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passesinto the glorious

 "It's comin' yet for a' that, That man to man the world o'er Shall brithers be for a' that. "

One other general characteristic of the lyric mood needs to be emphasized, namely, its _genuineness_. It is impossible to feign

 "the lyric gush, And the wing-power, and the rush Of the air. "

Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyricpoets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally truethat natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the birdsings. " Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command oftechnique, their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriotism, is theinevitable resultant from a real situation or desire. Sometimes, likechildren, they do not tell us very clearly what they are crying about, butit is easy to discover whether they are, like children, "making believe. "

_4. The Objects of the Lyric Vision_

Let us look more closely at some of the objects of the lyric vision; thesources or material, that is to say, for the lyric emotion. Goethe'soften-quoted classification is as convenient as any: the poet's vision, hesays, may be directed upon Nature, Man or God. 

And first, then, upon Nature. One characteristic of lyric poetry is theclearness with which single details or isolated objects in Nature may bevisualized and reproduced. The modern reflective lyric, it is true, oftendepends for its power upon some philosophical generalization from a singleinstance, like Emerson's "Rhodora" or Wordsworth's "Small Celandine. " Itmay even attempt a sort of logical or pseudo-logical deduction from givenpremises, like Browning's famous

 "Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing: The snail's on the thorn; God's in his Heaven-- _All's right with the world!_"

The imagination cannot be denied this right to synthesize and tointerpret, and nevertheless Nature offers even to the most unphilosophicalher endless profusion of objects that awaken delight. She does not insistthat the lyric poet should generalize unless he pleases. Moth and snailand skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye thatis quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish materialenough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating asingle object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagistsin painting a single aspect of some phenomenon--

 "Light as the shadow of the fish That falls through the pale green water--"

any aspect, in short, provided it affords the "romantic quiver, " thequick, keen sense of the beauty in things. What an art-critic said of thepainter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists whouse the forms of lyric verse: "He saw the world as a display of beautifulsurfaces which challenged his skill. It was enough to set him painting tonote the nacreous skin of a fish, or the satiny bloom of fruit, or thewind-smoothed dunes about Shinnecock, or the fine specific olive of awoman's face. .. . He took objects quite at their face value, and rarelyinvested them with the tenderness, mystery and understanding that comesfrom meditation and remembered feelings. .. . We get in him a fine, barevision, and must not expect therewith much contributary enrichment frommind and mood. "[Footnote: _The Nation_, November 2, 1916. ]Our point is that this "fine, bare vision" is often enough for a lyric. Ithas no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich accumulation ofharmonious images which marks Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" or Keats's "Eveof St. Agnes. "

The English Romantic poets were troubled about the incursion of scientificfact into the poet's view of nature. The awful rainbow in heaven might beturned, they thought, through the curse of scientific knowledge, into the"dull catalogue of common things. " But Wordsworth was wiser than this. Hesaw that if the scientific fact were emotionalized, it could still serveas the stuff of poetry. Facts could be transformed into truths. No aspectof Tennyson's lyricism is more interesting than his constant employment ofthe newest scientific knowledge of his day, for instance, in geology, chemistry and astronomy. He set his facts to music. Eugene Lee-Hamilton'spoignant sonnet about immortality is an illustration of the ease withwhich a lyric poet may find material in scientific fact, if appropriatedand made rich by feeling. [Footnote: Quoted in chap. VIII, section 7. ]

If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tendency to humanize its "barevision" of Nature, it is also clear that the lyric, as the most highlypersonalized species of poetry, exhibits an infinite variety of visions ofhuman life. Any anthology will illustrate the range of observation, thecomplexity of situations and desires, the constant changes in key, as thelyric attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take forexample, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion, expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation ofour literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopicshiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take thepassion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics ofSchiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionaryand Romantic verse, and still coloring--perhaps now more strongly thanever--the stream of twentieth-century poetry. Here is a type of lyricemotion where self-consciousness is lost, absorbed in the widerconsciousness of kinship, in the dawning recognition of the oneness of theblood and fate of all nations of the earth. 

The purest type of lyric vision is indicated in the third word of Goethe'striad. It is the vision of God. Here no physical fact intrudes or mars. Here thought, if it be complete thought, is wholly emotionalized. Suchtranscendent vision, as in the Hebrew lyrists and in Dante, is itselfworship, and the lyric cry of the most consummate artist among Englishpoets of the last generation is simply an echo of the ancient voices:

 "Hallowed be Thy Name--Hallelujah!"

If Tennyson could not phrase anew the ineffable, it is no wonder that mosthymn-writers fail. They are trying to express in conventionalizedreligious terminology and in "long and short metre" what can withdifficulty be expressed at all, and if at all, by the unconscious art ofthe Psalms or by a sustained metaphor, like "Crossing the Bar" or the"Recessional. " The medieval Latin hymns clothed their transcendent themes, their passionate emotions, in the language of imperial Rome. The modernsectaries succeed best in their hymnology when they choose simple ideas, not too definite in content, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in words oftender human association, in parables of longing and of consolation. 

_5. The Lyric Imagination_

The material thus furnished by the lyric poet's experience, thought andemotion is reshaped by an imagination working simply and spontaneously. The lyrist is born and not made, and he cannot help transforming theactual world into his own world, like Don Quixote with the windmills andthe serving-women. Sometimes his imagination fastens upon a single traitor aspect of reality, and the resultant metaphor seems truer than anylogic. 

 "Death lays his _icy hand_ on Kings. "

 "I wandered _lonely as a cloud_. "

Sometimes his imagination fuses various aspects of an object into acomposite effect:

 "A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night; It was the _plant and flower of light_. "

The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always catch at imagery. It maydeal directly with the fact, as in Burns's immortal

 "If we ne'er had met sae kindly, If we ne'er had loved sae blindly, Never loved, and never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. "

The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with passionate feeling, idealizesobjects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It isnever the dry clear light of noon. 

 "She was _a phantom_ of delight. "

 "Thy soul was _like a star_, and dwelt apart, Thou hadst a voice whose sound was _like the sea_, Pure as _the naked heavens_. .. . "

This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as asimplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictoryfacts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter ofimmaterialities. 

Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now littleinclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remainstrue that the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful"resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient onein lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that ouryounger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination orpassion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse. The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized theElizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrativeimagination, which may be, after all, only the "fancy" taking a deeperplunge. In the familiar song from _The Tempest_, for example, we have inthe second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in whichthe age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beautyof the last three lines of the stanza, --the lines that are graven uponShelley's tombstone in Rome:

 "Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. "

So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories, while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. Forthe deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the imaginativeconception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet'scontemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in Wordsworth's superb coupletin the "Ode to Duty":

 "Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong. "

And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic fromwhom an instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, wasas much perplexed by them as Jeffrey. 

_6. Lyric Expression_

Is it possible to formulate the laws of lyric expression? "I do not meanby expression, " said Gray, "the mere choice of words, but the whole dress, fashion, and arrangement of a thought. "[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 333. (Gosse ed. )]Taking expression, in this larger sense, as the final element in thatthreefold process by which poetry comes into being, and which has beendiscussed in an earlier chapter, we may assert that there are certaingeneral laws of lyric form. One of them is the law of brevity. It isimpossible to keep the lyric pitch for very long. The rapture turns topain. "I need scarcely observe, " writes Poe in his essay on "The PoeticPrinciple, " "that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of thiselevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychicalnecessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitlea poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout acomposition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at thevery utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, ineffect, and in fact, no longer such. "

In another passage, from the essay on "Hawthorne's 'Twice-Told Tales, '"Poe emphasizes this law of brevity in connection with the law of unity ofimpression. It is one of the classic passages of American literarycriticism:

 "Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem _too_ brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression. Without a certain continuity of effort--without a certain duration or repetition of purpose--the soul is never deeply moved. "

Gray's analysis of the law of lyric brevity is picturesque, and too littleknown:

 "The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon, --the verdure of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, assumed a style of graver colors, and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there, where it best became her. .. . To pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense). .. . "[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed. )]

It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be disassociated. The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric correspondsto the unity of action in the drama, and to the unity of effect in theshort story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon"some single thought, feeling, or situation. " The sonnets, for instance, that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought. This thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave passes into thesextet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an unexpectedway. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be asintegral as the sonnet's form. So must it be with any song. The variousdevices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form asingle emotional reflection of some situation or desire. 

Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity ofgrammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browningand Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness oftheir lyrics by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easilyintelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems havebeen loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but theintellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at the costof true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had anunerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas into "pure, perspicuousand musical form. "

 "Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented, well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk nonsense, or do you understand me?"[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed. )]

Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chieflythat restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master, insisted that there was a further lyric law, --the law of vagueness orindefiniteness. "I know, " he writes in his "Marginalia, " "thatindefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true musicalexpression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any verydeterminate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. Youdissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust itof its breath of faëry. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciableidea--a thing of the earth, earthy. "

This reads like a defence of Poe's own private practice, and yet manypoets and critics are inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, forinstance, goes quite as far as Poe. "The truth is that poetry, which isthe expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds itsappropriate material in _vague_ words--words of large import and with manymeanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test fordetermining the poetic fitness of words, a test which every true poetunconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in thedirection of what is commonplace or of what is technical, is alwaysunpoetical. "[Footnote: _What is Poetry_, p. 77. London and New York, 1900. ]This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagisttheory of "hardness and economy of speech; the exact word, " and it alsowould rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail, steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly delighted ourgeneration. No one who admires the splendid vitality of "McAndrew's Hymn"is really troubled by the slang and lingo of the engine-room. 

One of the most charming passages in Stedman's _Nature and Elements ofPoetry_ (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers thatfade, " the "airs that die, " "the snows of yester-year, " have in their veryfrailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written apoem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "TheParadox":

 "'T is evanescence that endures; The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life. "

But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed inprose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer, " or to remember what Duke Orsinosays in Twelfth Night:

 "Enough; no more: 'T is not so sweet now as it was before. "

7. _ Expression and Impulse_

A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related tothe lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a setlyric pattern. 

 "There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right. "

No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance. Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physicalorganization and his muscular habits. There are as many "styles" as thereare players, and yet each player strives for "style, " i. E. Economy andprecision and grace of muscular effort, and each will assert that thechief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through. " "Andevery single one of them is right. "

Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, aswe have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable "statesof soul. " Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula forit, something corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball"and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on _The ElizabethanLyric_, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to expressitself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. Ifthe poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself hemust first show us the urn. " Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskineattempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis:"Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the firstthe emotional stimulus is given--the object, the situation, or the thoughtfrom which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed toits utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual elementreasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into athought, a mental resolution, or an attribute. "[Footnote: _The Elizabethan Lyric_, p. 17. ]Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the _Golden Treasury_, and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyricis approximated in practice. My own impression is that the criticpostulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English songwill supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one maylook for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyricexpression into certain lines of order. 

Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the generalprinciples already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law ofspontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly inproportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of suchprestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language mustspring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric fallsinto verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must followemotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time withKreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heightenand not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms?The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technicalexpression is in reality very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh"and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled ina moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is thecommonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; theearliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws ofemotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all thesebecause it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, thepersonality of the poet. 

CHAPTER VIII

RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

 "_Milk-Woman_. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'? or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?" ISAAC WALTON, _The Complete Angler_

We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, thegeneral relationship of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic anddrama, i. E. Song, story and play, have obviously different functions toperform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A givenevent, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas, provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrativeor dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet, or the prevalent literary fashions of his day, may determine which generaltype of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in theElizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, andthere have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period whenthe theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form. But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certainpoetic minds. Many passages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance, while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwingcharacters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyricquality, by that passionate, personal feeling whose natural mode ofexpression is in song. In Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_, for instance, or VictorHugo's _Hernani_, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in whichwe feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves--not the imaginary Tamburlaineand Hernani--are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's"Sohrab and Rustum, " after finishing its tragic story of the son slain bythe unwitting father, closes with a lyric description of the majestic Oxusstream flowing on to the Aral sea. Objective as it all seems, this closeis intensely personal, permeated with the same tender stoicism whichcolors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Summer Night. " The device of using aNature picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten, by harmony orcontrast, the mood induced by the story itself, was freely utilizedby Tennyson in his _English Idylls_, such as "Audley Court, " "EdwinMorris, " "Love and Duty, " and "The Golden Year. " It adds the last touch ofpoignancy to Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man. " These descriptivepassages, though lacking the song form, are as purely lyrical in theirfunction as the songs in _The Princess _or the songs in _The Winter'sTale_. 

_1. The Blending of Types_

While the scope of the present volume, as explained in the Preface, precludes any specific study of drama and epic, the reader must bear inmind that the three main types of poetry are not separated, in actualpractice, by immovably hard and fast lines. Pigeonhole classifications ofdrama, epic and lyric types are highly convenient to the student forpurposes of analysis. But the moment one reads a ballad like "Edward, Edward" (_Oxford_, No. 373) or "Helen of Kirconnell" (_Oxford_, No. 387)the pigeon-hole distinctions must be subordinated to the actual fact thatthese ballads are a blend of drama, story and song. The "form" is lyrical, the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purelydramatic dialogue. 

Take a contemporary illustration of this blending of types. Mr. VachelLindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo. " He wasalready in a "national-theme mood, " he says, when he listened to a sermonabout missionaries on the Congo River. The word "Congo" began to haunthim. "It echoed with the war-drums and cannibal yells of Africa. " Then, for a list of colors for his palette, he had boyish memories of Stanley's_Darkest Africa_, and of the dances of the Dahomey Amazons at the World'sFair in Chicago. He had seen the anti-negro riots in Springfield, Illinois. He had gone through a score of negro-saloons--"barrel-houses"--on Eleventh Avenue, New York, and had "accumulated a jungle impressionthat remains with me yet. " Above all, there was Conrad's _Heart ofDarkness_. "I wanted to reiterate the word Congo--and the several refrainsin a way that would echo stories like that. I wanted to suggestthe terror, the reeking swamp-fever, the forest splendor, theblack-lacquered loveliness, and above all the eternal fatality of Africa, that Conrad has written down with so sure a hand. I do not mean to say, now that I have done, that I recorded all these things in rhyme. But everytime I rewrote 'The Congo' I reached toward them. I suppose I rewrote itfifty times in these two months, sometimes three times in one day. "

It is not often that we get so veracious an account of the makingof a poem, so clear a conception of the blending of sound-motives, color-motives, story-stuff, drama-stuff, personal emotion, into a singlewhole. 

Nor is there any clear separation of types when we strive to look back tothe primitive origins of these various forms of poetry. In the opinion ofmany scholars, the origins are to be traced to a common source in thedance. "Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological, can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epicimpulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainlyas incremental repetition. Separation of its elements, and evolution tohigher forms, made the dance an independent art, with song, and thenmusic, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself passed to lyrictriumphs quite apart from choral voice and choral act; epic went itsartistic way with nothing but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and thestory instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situation, theaction, even the chorus and the dance, but submitted them to the shapingand informing power of individual genius. "[Footnote: Gummere, _The Popular Ballad_, p. 106. ]In another striking passage, Professor Gummere asks us to visualize "athrong of people without skill to read or write, without ability toproject themselves into the future, or to compare themselves with thepast, or even to range their experience with the experience of othercommunities, gathered in festal mood, and by loud song, perfect rhythm andenergetic dance, expressing their feelings over an event of quite localorigin, present appeal and common interest. Here, in point of evolution, is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of the pyramid. "

_2. Lyrical Element in Drama_

We cannot here attempt to trace, even in outline, the course of thishistoric evolution of genres. But in contemporary types of both dramaticand narrative poetry, there may still be discovered the influence of lyricform and mood. We have already noted how the dramatist, for all of hissupposed objectivity, cannot refrain from coloring certain persons andsituations with the hues of his own fancy. Ibsen, for instance, injectshis irony, his love for symbolism, his theories for the reconstruction ofsociety, into the very blood and bone of his characters and into thestructure of his plots. So it is with Shaw, with Synge, with Hauptmann, with Brieux. Even if their plays are written in prose, these menare still "makers, " and the prose play may be as highly subjective inmood, as definitely individual in phrasing, as full of atmosphere, as ifit were composed in verse. 

But the lyric possibilities of the drama are more easily realized if weturn from the prose play to the play in verse, and particularly to thoseElizabethan dramas which are not only poetical in essence, but whichutilize actual songs for their dramatic value. No less than thirty-six ofShakspere's plays contain stage-directions for music, and his marvelouscommand of song-words is universally recognized. The English stage hadmade use of songs, in fact, ever since the liturgical drama of the MiddleAges. But Shakspere's unrivalled knowledge of _stage-craft_, as well ashis own instinct for harmonizing lyrical with theatrical effects, enabledhim to surpass all of his contemporaries in the art of using songs tobring actors on and off the stage, to anticipate following action, tocharacterize personages, to heighten climaxes, and to express motionsbeyond the reach of spoken words. [Footnote: These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Harvarddissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English Drama. ]The popularity of such song-forms as the "madrigal, " which was sungwithout musical accompaniment, made it easy for the public stage to caterto the prevalent taste. The "children of the Chapel" or "of Paul's, " whoserved as actors in the early Elizabethan dramas, were trained choristers, and songs were a part of their stock in trade. Songs for sheerentertainment, common enough upon the stage when Shakspere began to write, turned in his hands into exquisite instruments of character revelation andof dramatic passion, until they became, on the lips of an Ophelia or aDesdemona, the most touching and poignant moments of the drama. "Musicwithin" is a frequent stage direction in the later Elizabethan plays, andif one remembers the dramatic effectiveness of the Easter music, off-stage, in Goethe's _Faust_, or the horn in _Hernani_, one canunderstand how Wagner came to believe that a blending of music with poetryand action, as exhibited in his "music-dramas, " was demanded by the idealrequirements of dramatic art. Wagner's theory and practice need not berehearsed here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall theindisputable fact that in some of the greatest plays ever written, lyricforms have contributed richly and directly to the total dramatic effect. 

_3. The Dramatic Monologue_

There is still another _genre_ of poetry, however, where theinter-relations of drama, of narrative, and of lyric mood are peculiarlyinteresting. It is the dramatic monologue. The range of expressivenessallowed by this type of poetry was adequately shown by Browning andTennyson, and recent poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frostand Amy Lowell have employed it with consummate skill. The dramaticmonologue is a dynamic revelation of a soul in action, not a mere staticbit of character study. It chooses some representative and specificoccasion, --let us say a man's death-bed view of his career, as in "TheBishop orders his Tomb" or the first "Northern Farmer. " It is somethingmore than a soliloquy overheard. There is a listener, who, though withouta speaking part, plays a very real role in the dialogue. For the dramaticmonologue is in essence a dialogue of which we hear only the chiefspeaker's part, as in "My Last Duchess, " or in E. A. Robinson's "BenJonson Entertains a Man from Stratford. " It is as if we were watching andlistening to a man telephoning. Though we see and hear but one person, weare aware that the talk is shaped to a certain extent by the personalityat the other end of the line. In Tennyson's "Rizpah, " for example, thecharacteristics of the well-meaning, Bible-quoting parish visitordetermine some of the finest lines in the old mother's response. InBrowning's "Andrea del Sarto" the painter's wife, Lucrezia, says never aword, but she has a more intense physical presence in that poem than manyof the _dramatis personae_ of famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "SirGalahad" and "The Voyage of Maeldune" are splendid soliloquies and nothingmore. The first "Locksley Hall" is likewise a soliloquy, but in the second"Locksley Hall" and "To-Morrow, " where scraps of talk from the unseeninterlocutor are caught up and repeated by the speaker in passionaterebuttal, we have true drama of the "confrontation" type. We see a wholesoul in action. 

Now this intense, dynamic fashion of revealing character through narrativetalk--and it is commonly a whole life-story which is condensed within thefew lines of a dramatic monologue--touches lyricism at two points. Thefirst is the fact that many dramatic monologues use distinctively lyricmeasures. The six-stress anapestic line which Tennyson preferred for hislater dramatic monologues like "Rizpah" is really a ballad measure, and isseen as such to its best advantage in "The Revenge. " But in his monologuesof the pure soliloquy type, like "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad, " the metreis brilliantly lyrical, and the lyric associations of the verse arecarried over into the mood of the poem. And the other fact to beremembered is that the poignant self-analysis and self-betrayal of thedramatic monologue, its "egoism" and its ultimate and appallingsincerities, are a part of the very nature of the lyric impulse. Theserevealers of their souls may use the speaking, rather than the singingvoice, but their tones have the deep, rich lyric intimacy. 

4. _Lyric and Narrative_

In narrative poetry, no less than in drama, we must note the intrusion ofthe lyric mood, as well as the influence of lyric forms. Theoretically, narrative or "epic" poetry is based upon an objective experience. Something has happened, and the poet tells us about it. He has heard orread, or possibly taken part in, an event, and the event, rather than thepoet's thought or feeling about it, is the core of the poem. But as soonas he begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to "set it out" withvivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin ayarn, and not even Homer and Virgil--"objective" as they are supposed tobe---can draw a picture without betraying something of their attitude andfeeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama, their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popularepic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epicof art like _Jerusalem Delivered_ or _Paradise Lost_. We do not know whoput together in their present form such traditional tales as the _Lay ofthe Nibelungs_ and _Beowulf_, and the personal element in the narrative isonly obscurely felt, whereas _Jerusalem Delivered_ is a constantrevelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in_Paradise Lost_. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain, simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well asthe impression made by the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Those general traitsof epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like"breadth, " and "unity" and the sustained "grand" style, turn ultimatelyupon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mererhetorical abstractions. 

The narrative poet sees man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in anevent. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or todissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to theenvironing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying thevarieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting inhis verse his own mental attitude toward the situations which he depicts. He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beautiesand pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating "God's ways toman" he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a storyexactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly, to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. Hegives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination playsaround the noble and base elements in his story until their originalproportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristramstory, as told by Gottfried of Strassburg, by Malory, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays hisown personality through these instinctive processes of transformation ofhis material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over inBrowning's _Ring and the Book_: the main facts are conceded by eachwitness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to Hell. 

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet'spersonality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising anddramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making allhis characters talk "Browningese. " But Byron's tales in verse show thesame subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of hisheroes, like Poe's, are images of himself. No matter what the raw materialof his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly "Byronic" as hewrites them down. And all this is "lyricism, " however disguised. WilliamMorris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravelyaloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof. Yet the "tone" of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spiteof his objectivity. 

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, illustrates thislyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, ofenchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whetherthey dealt with "matter of France, " or "matter of Brittany, " whether abrief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagneor King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynardthe Fox, " all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, anopportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specificevent or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but thesense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight inbrocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense offact. "Time, " said Shelley, "which destroys the beauty and the use of thestory of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should investthem, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderfulapplications of the eternal truth which it contains. .. . A story ofparticular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that whichshould be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that whichis distorted. "

And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between "epic" quality and"lyric" quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozenstory-telling poems from the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, say "TheAncient Mariner, " "The Burial of Sir John Moore, " "La Belle Dame sansMerci, " "Porphyria's Lover, " "The Forsaken Merman, " "He Fell amongThieves. " Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyricquality is there which cannot be found in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and"The Ancient Mariner"? And does not each of the other poems release andexcite the lyric mood?

We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures arefrequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singingquality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facilecouplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor speciesof narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed intraditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it isfor story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a barof music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse ofWordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from theblank verse, say, of Tennyson's _Princess_--perhaps truly as different asthe metre of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is from that of _The Rape of the Lock_. The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrativematerial, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple orcomplex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet itappears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully asmuch through their intimate association with the moods of song as throughtheir specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative. 

_5. The Ballad_

The supreme illustration of this blending of story and song is the ballad. The word "ballad, " like "ode" and "sonnet, " is very ancient and has beenused in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells astory, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from _ballare_, to dance, it means first of all, a "dance-song, " and is the same word as"ballet. " Solomon's "Song of Songs" is called in the Bishops' Bible of1568 "The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon. " But in Chaucer's time a"ballad" meant primarily a French form of lyric verse, --not a narrativelyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used looselyfor "song. " Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottishpopular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually toimply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individualauthorship, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as tothe precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the compositionand perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child, the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, andProfessors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized theelement of "communal" composition, and illustrated it by many types ofsong-improvisation among savage races, by sailors' "chanties, " and negro"work-songs. " It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowdcarries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual, a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is alsoeasy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, suchas Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines andstanzas get altered as they are passed from lip to lip of unletteredpeople during the course of centuries. But the actual historicalrelationship of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as werecollected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate. [Footnote: See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance, " _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. _, vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang's article on"Ballads" in Chambers' _Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit. _, ed. Of 1902. ]

"All poetry, " said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory ofcommunal composition of ballads, "springs from the same poetic impulse, and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made, whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted tooral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet, have given birth to that distinction of 'popular' and 'artistic, ' orwhatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly allwriters on poetry since Aristotle. " Avoiding questions that are still incontroversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the"popular" ballads as they are shown in Child's collection. [Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge Poets"(Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L. Kittredge. ]They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authorship. "This song was made by Billy Gashade, " asserts the author of the immenselypopular American ballad of "Jesse James. " But we do not know what "BillyGashade" it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or JohnnyArmstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them. In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do notmoralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from theuse of set, conventional phrases. They do not "motivate" the storycarefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they "flashthe story at you" by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. Theyleap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure;they omit to assign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guesswho is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as ifthey hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of"commonplaces, " that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which areconveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens ofdifferent ballads. They are not afraid of repetition, --indeed the theoryof choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain, as in a sailor's "chanty. " One of their chief ways of building a situationor advancing a narrative is through "incremental repetition, " as Gummeretermed it, i. E. The successive additions of some new bits of fact as thebits already familiar are repeated. 

 "'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me! A silken sark I will give to thee. '

 "'A silken sark I can get me here, But I'll not dance with the Prince this year. '

 "'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me, Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!'

 "'Silver-clasped shoes, '" etc. 

American cowboy ballads show the same device:

 "I started up the trail October twenty-third, I started up the trail _with the 2-U herd_. "

Strikingly as the ballads differ from consciously "artistic" narrative intheir broken movement and allusive method, the contrast is even moredifferent if we consider the naive quality of their refrains. Sometimesthe refrain is only a sort of musical accompaniment:

 "There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell, (_Chorus of Whistlers_) There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell And he had a bad wife, as many knew well. (_Chorus of Whistlers_)"

Or, "The auld Deil cam to the man at the pleugh, _Rumchy ae de aidie_. "

Sometimes the words of the choral refrain have a vaguely suggestivemeaning:

 "There were three ladies lived in a bower, _Eh vow bonnie_ And they went out to pull a flower, _On the bonnie banks of Fordie_. "

Sometimes the place-name, illustrated in the last line quoted, isdefinite:

 "There was twa sisters in a bower, _Edinburgh, Edinburgh_, There was twa sisters in a bower, _Stirling for aye_ There was twa sisters in a bower, There came a knight to be their wooer, _Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay_. "

But often it is sheer faëry-land magic:

 "He's ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair, _Binnorie, O Binnorie_! And wi' them strung his harp sae rare _By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie_. " (_Oxford_, No. 376. )

It is through the choral refrains, in fact, that the student of lyricpoetry is chiefly fascinated as he reads the ballads. Students of epicand drama find them peculiarly suggestive in their handling of narrativeand dramatic material, while to students of folklore and of primitivesociety they are inexhaustible treasures. The mingling of dance-motivesand song-motives with the pure story-element may long remain obscure, butthe popular ballad reinforces, perhaps more persuasively than any type ofpoetry, the conviction that the lyrical impulse is universal andinevitable. As Andrew Lang, scholar and lover of balladry, wrotelong ago: "Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people and flit fromage to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all theclass that continues nearest to the state of natural man. The whole soulof the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resoundsin the shells cast up on the shores. Ballads are a voice from secretplaces, from silent peoples and old times long dead; and as such they stirus in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can neverattain. "[Footnote: _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_, article "Ballads. "]

_6. The Ode_

If the ballad is thus an example of "popular" lyricism, with a narrativeintention, an example of "artistic" lyricism is found in the Ode. Herethere is no question of communal origins or of communal influence uponstructure. The ode is a product of a single artist, working not naively, but consciously, and employing a highly developed technique. Derived fromthe Greek verb meaning "to sing, " the word "ode" has not changed itsmeaning since the days of Pindar, except that, as in the case of the word"lyric" itself, we have gradually come to grow unmindful of the originalmusical accompaniment of the song. Edmund Gosse, in his collection of_English Odes_, defines the ode as "any strain of enthusiastic and exaltedlyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively withone dignified theme. " Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode, Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, " Tennyson's elegiacand encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, " Lowell's"Harvard Commemoration Ode, " are among the most familiar examples of thegeneral type. 

English poetry has constantly employed, however, both of the two metricalspecies of odes recognized by the ancients. The first, made up of uniformstanzas, was called "Aeolian" or "Horatian, "--since Horace imitated thesimple, regular strophes of his Greek models. The other species of ode, the "Dorian, " is more complex, and is associated with the triumphal odesof Pindar. It utilizes groups of voices, and its divisions into so-called"strophe, " "antistrophe" and "epode" (sometimes called fancifully "wave, ""answering wave" and "echo") were determined by the movements of thegroups of singers upon the Greek stage, the "singers moving to one sideduring the strophe, retracing their steps during the antistrophe (whichwas for that reason metrically identical with the strophe), and standingstill during the epode. "[Footnote: See Bronson's edition of the poems of Collins. AthenaeumPress. ]

It must be observed, however, that the English odes written in strictlyuniform stanzas differ greatly in the simplicity of the stanzaic pattern. Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, "Collins's "Ode to Evening, " Shelley's "To a Skylark, " and Wordsworth's"Ode to Duty" are all in very simple stanza forms. But Collins's "Ode onthe Superstitions of the Highlands, " Shelley's "Ode to Liberty" andColeridge's "Ode to France" follow very complicated patterns, though allthe stanzas are alike. The English "Horatian" ode, then, while exhibitingthe greatest differences in complexity of stanzaic forms, is"homostrophic. "

To understand the "Pindaric" English ode, we must remember that a fewscholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure inreproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of"turn, " "counterturn" and "pause. " Ben Jonson's "Ode to Sir Lucius Caryand Sir H. Morison" (_Oxford_, No. 194) has been thought to be the firststrictly Pindaric ode in English, and Gray's "Bard" and "Progress ofPoesy" (_Oxford_, Nos. 454, 455) are still more familiar examples of thistype. But the great popularity of the so-called "Pindaric" ode in Englishin the seventeenth century was due to Cowley, and to one of those periodicloyalties to lawlessness which are characteristic of the English. ForCowley, failing to perceive that Pindar's apparent lawlessness wasdue to the corruption of the Greek text and to the modern ignorance of therules of Greek choral music, made his English "Pindaric" odes an outletfor rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, thefreer the lyric pattern! But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed overimagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grewdeclamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official, " the lastrefuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous inhonor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted longafter the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and Cowley had becomeneglected. 

With the revival of Romantic imagination, however, came a new interest inthe "irregular" ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and flows withoutapparent restraint, subject only to what Watts-Dunton termed "emotionallaw. " Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" moves inobedience to its own rhythmic impulses only, like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"and Emerson's "Bacchus. " Metrical variety can nowhere be shown more freelyand gloriously than in the irregular ode: there may be any number of linesin each strophe, and often the strophe itself becomes dissolved intosomething corresponding to the "movement" of a symphony. Masterpieces likeWilliam Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" and Francis Thompson's"Hound of Heaven" reveal of course a firm intellectual grasp upon theunderlying theme of the ode and upon the logical processes of itsdevelopment. But although we may follow with keen intellectualdelight these large, free handlings of a lyrical theme, there are fewreaders of poetry whose susceptibility to complicated combinations ofrhyme-sound allows them to perceive the full verbal beauty of the greatirregular odes. Even in such regular strophes as those of Keats's "GrecianUrn, " who remembers that the rhyme scheme of the first stanza is unlikethat of the following stanzas? Or that the second stanza of the "Ode to aNightingale" runs on four sounds instead of five? Let the reader test hisear by reading aloud the intricate sound-patterns employed in such elegiesas Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" (_Oxford_, No. 751) or Swinburne's "Ave atqueVale" (_Oxford_, No. 810), and then let him go back to "Lycidas"(_Oxford_, No. 317), the final test of one's responsiveness to theblending of the intellectual and the sensuous elements in poetic beauty. If he is honest with himself, he will probably confess that neither hisear nor his mind can keep full pace with the swift and subtle demands madeupon both by the masters of sustained lyric energy. But he will alsobecome freshly aware that the ode is a supreme example of that union ofexcitement with a sense of order, of liberty with law, which gives Verseits immortality. 

_7. The Sonnet_

The sonnet, likewise, is a lyric form which illustrates the delicatebalance between freedom and restraint. Let us look first at its structure, and then at its capacity for expressing thought and feeling. 

Both name and structure are Italian in origin, "sonetto" being thediminutive of "suono, " sound. Dante and Petrarch knew it as a speciallyric form intended for musical accompaniment. It must have fourteenlines, neither more nor less, with five beats or "stresses" to the line. Each line must end with a rhyme. In the arrangement of the rhymes thesonnet is made up of two parts, or rhyme-systems: the first eight linesforming the "octave, " and the last six the "sestet. " The octave is made upof two quatrains and the sestet of two tercets. There is a main pause inpassing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minorpauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from thefirst tercet to the last. 

Almost all of Petrarch's sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave, _a b b a a b b a_; for the sestet, either _c d e c d e_ or _c d c d c d_. This strict "Petrarchan" form has endured for six centuries. It has beenadopted by poets of every race and language, and it is used to-day aswidely or more widely than ever. While individual poets have constantlyexperimented with different rhyme-schemes, particularly in the sestet, theonly really notable invention of a new sonnet form was made by theElizabethans. Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) declares that"Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey, having travelledinto Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style ofthe Italian poesie, . .. Greatly polished our rude and homely manner ofvulgar poesie. .. . Their conceits were lofty, their style stately, theirconveyance cleanly, their terms proper, their metre sweet andwell-proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously theirMaster Francis Petrarch. "

This is charming, but as a matter of fact both Wyatt and Surrey, withnatural English independence, broke away from the strict Petrarchan rhymeform. Wyatt liked a final couplet, and Surrey used a rhyme-scheme whichwas later adopted by Shakspere and is known to-day as the "Shaksperean"form of sonnet: namely, three quatrains made up of alternate rhymes--aseparate rhyme-scheme for each quatrain--and a closing couplet. The rhymesconsequently run thus: _a b a b c d c d e f e f g g_. To the Petrarchanpurist this is clearly no sonnet at all, in spite of its fourteenfive-beat, rhyming lines. For the distinction between octave and sestethas disappeared, there is a threefold division of the first twelve lines, and the final couplet gives an epigrammatic summary or "point" whichPetrarch took pains to avoid. 

The difference will be still more clearly manifest if we turn from acomparison of rhyme-structure to the ordering of the thought in thePetrarchan sonnet. Mark Pattison, a stout "Petrarchan, " lays down theserules in the Preface to his edition of Milton's Sonnets:[Footnote: D. Appleton & Co. , New York, 1883. ]

 "a. A sonnet, like every other work of art, must have its unity. It must be the expression of one, and only one, thought or feeling. 

 "b. This thought or mood should be led up to, and opened in the early lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain; in the second quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of it. 

 "c. After the second quatrain there should be a pause, not full, nor producing the effect of a break, as of one who had finished what he had got to say, and not preparing a transition to a new subject, but as of one who is turning over what has been said in the mind to enforce it further. 

 "d. The opening of the second system, strictly the first tercet, should turn back upon the thought or sentiment, take it up and carry it forward to the conclusion. 

 "e. The conclusion should be a resultant, summing the total of the suggestion in the preceding lines, as a lakelet in the hills gathers into a still pool the running waters contributed by its narrow area of gradients. 

 "f. While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point. By this the sonnet is distinguished from the epigram. In the epigram the conclusion is everything; all that goes before it is only there for the sake of the surprise of the end, or _dénouement_, as in a logical syllogism the premisses are nothing but as they necessitate the conclusion. In the sonnet the emphasis is nearly, but not quite, equally distributed, there being a slight swell, or rise, about its middle. The sonnet must not advance by progressive climax, or end abruptly; it should subside, and leave off quietly. "

Miss Lockwood, in the Introduction to her admirable collection of Englishsonnets, [Footnote: _Sonnets, English and American_, selected by Laura E. Lockwood. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916. ]makes a still briefer summary of the thought-scheme of the regular Italiansonnet: it "should have a clear and unified theme, stated in the firstquatrain, developed or proved in the second, confirmed or regarded from anew point of view in the first tercet, and concluded in the second tercet. It had thus four parts, divided unevenly into two separate systems, eightlines being devoted to placing the thought before the mind, and six todeducing the conclusion from that thought. "

A surprisingly large number of sonnets are built upon simple formulas like"As"--for the octave--and "So"--for the sestet--(see Andrew Lang's "TheOdyssey, " _Oxford_, No. 841); or "When" and "Then" (see Keats's "When Ihave fears that I may cease to be, " _Oxford_, No. 635). A situation plus athought gives a mood; or a mood plus an event gives a mental resolve, etc. The possible combinations are infinite, but the law of logical relationbetween octave and sestet, premise and conclusion, is immutable. 

Let the reader now test these laws of sonnet form and thought by readingaloud one of the most familiarly known of all English sonnets--Keats's "OnFirst Looking into Chapman's Homer":

 "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien. "

Read next another strictly Petrarchan sonnet, where the thought divisionsof quatrains and tercets are marked with exceptional clearness, EugeneLee-Hamilton's disillusioned "Sea-Shell Murmurs":

 "The hollow sea-shell that for years hath stood On dusty shelves, when held against the ear Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear The faint far murmur of the breaking flood. 

 "We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood In our own veins, impetuous and near, And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear And with our feelings' every shifting mood. 

 "Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell, The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be. 

 "Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well, -- The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave A world unreal as the shell-heard sea. "

And now read aloud one of the best-known of Shakspere's sonnets, where hefollows his favorite device of a threefold statement of his centralthought, using a different image in each quatrain, and closing with apersonal application of the idea:

 "That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by. This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. "

Where there is beauty such as this, it is an impertinence to insist thatShakspere has not conformed to the special type of beauty represented inthe Petrarchan sonnet. He chose not to conform. He won with other tactics. If the reader will analyse the form and thought of the eighty sonnets inthe _Oxford Book_, or the two hundred collected by Miss Lockwood, he willfeel the charm of occasional irregularity in the handling of both thePetrarchan and the Shaksperean sonnet. But he is more likely, I think, tobecome increasingly aware that whatever restraints are involved inadherence to typical forms are fully compensated by the rich verbal beautydemanded by the traditional arrangement of rhymes. 

For the sonnet, an intricately wrought model of the reflective lyric, requires a peculiarly intimate union of thinking and singing. It may be, as it often was in the Elizabethan period, too full of thought to allowfree-winged song, and it may also be too full of uncontrolled, unbalancedemotion to preserve fit unity of thought. Conversely, there may not beenough thought and emotion to fill the fourteen lines: the idea not beingof "sonnet size. " The difficult question as to whether there is such athing as an "average-sized" thought and lyrical reflection upon it hasbeen touched upon in an earlier chapter. The limit of a sentence, saysMark Pattison, "is given by the average capacity of human apprehension. .. . The limit of a sonnet is imposed by the average duration of anemotional mood. .. . May we go so far as to say that fourteen lines is theaverage number which a thought requires for its adequate embodiment beforeattention must collapse?"

The proper distribution of thought and emotion, that is, the balance ofthe different parts of a sonnet, is also a very delicate affair. It islike trimming a sailboat. Wordsworth defended Milton's frequent practiceof letting the thought of the octave overflow somewhat into the sestet, believing it "to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity inwhich the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly toconsist. " Most lovers of the sonnet would differ here with these mastersof the art. Whether the weight of thought and feeling can properly beshifted to a final couplet is another debatable question, and critics willalways differ as to the artistic value of the "big" line or "big" wordwhich marks the culmination of emotion in many a sonnet. The strange orviolent or sonorous word, however splendid in itself, may not fit thecurve of the sonnet in which it appears: it may be like a big red applecrowded into the toe of a Christmas stocking. 

Nor must the sonnet lean towards either obscurity--the vice of Elizabethansonnets, or obviousness--the vice of Wordsworth's sonnets after 1820. Theobscure sonnet, while it may tempt the reader's intellectual ingenuity, affords no basis for his emotion, and the obvious sonnet provides nostimulus for his thought. Conventionality of subject and treatment, like the endless imitation of Italian and French sonnet-motives andsonnet-sequences, sins against the law of lyric sincerity. In no lyricform does mechanism so easily obtrude itself. A sonnet is either, likeMarlowe's raptures, "all air and fire, " or else it is a wooden toy. 

CHAPTER IX

RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

 "Unless there is a concurrence between the contemporary idioms and rhythms of a period, with the individual idiom of the lyrist, half the expressional force of his ideas will be lost. " ERNEST RHYS, Foreword to _Lyric Poetry_

We have been considering the typical qualities and forms of lyric poetry. Let us now attempt a rapid survey of some of the conditions which havegiven the lyric, in certain races and periods and in the hands of certainindividuals, its peculiar power. 

_1. Questions that are involved_

A whole generation of so-called "scientific" criticism has come and gonesince Taine's brilliant experiments with his formula of "race, period andenvironment" as applied to literature. Taine's _English Literature_remains a monument to the suggestiveness and to the dangers of his method. Some of his countrymen, notably Brunetière in the _Evolution de la PoésieLyrique en France au XIX Siècle_, and Legouis in the _Défense de la PoésieFrançaise_, have discussed more cautiously and delicately than Tainehimself the racial and historic conditions affecting lyric poetry invarious periods. 

The tendency at present, among critics of poetry, is to distrust formulasand to keep closely to ascertainable facts, and this tendency is surelymore scientific than the most captivating theorizing. For one thing, whilerecognizing, as the World War has freshly compelled us to recognize, theactuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the oldendeavors to classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Staël attemptedto do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor todistinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic andpolitical divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the thingitself: we remember that "Spanish" architecture is Arabian, and a gooddeal of "Gothic" is Northern French. We confess that we are only at thebeginning of a true science of ethnology. "It is only in their degree ofphysical and mental evolution that the races of men are different, "says Professor W. Z. Ripley, author of _Races in Europe_. The lateProfessor Josiah Royce admitted: "I am baffled to discover just what theresults of science are regarding the true psychological and moral meaningof race differences. .. . All men in prehistoric times are surprisinglyalike in their minds, their morals and their arts. .. . We do notscientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type reallyare. "[Footnote: See Royce's _Race-Questions_. New York, 1908. ]

I have often thought of these utterances of my colleagues, as I haveattempted to teach something about lyric poetry in Harvard classroomswhere Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Irish, French, German, Negro, Russian, Italian and Armenian students appear in bewildering and stimulatingconfusion. Precisely what is their racial reaction to a lyric of Sappho?To an Anglo-Saxon war-song of the tenth century? To a Scotch ballad? Toone of Shakspere's songs? Some specific racial reaction there must be, one imagines, but such capacity for self-expression as the studentcommands is rarely capable of giving more than a hint of it. 

And what real response is there, among the majority of contemporarylovers of poetry, to the delicate shades of feeling which color theverse of specific periods in the various national literatures? We all usecatch-words, and I shall use them myself later in this chapter, in theattempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pass, forinstance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the "Augustan"to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to thetemper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundredprofessional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, tolive in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in theirhyper-sensitized responsiveness to its voices a sort of consolation prizefor their isolation from the present? Race-mindedness is common, no doubt, but difficult to express in words: historic-mindedness, though morecapable of expression, is necessarily confined to a few. Is the responseto the poetry of past epochs, then, chiefly a response of the individualreader to an individual poet, and do we cross the frontiers of race andlanguage and historic periods with the main purpose of finding a man afterour own heart? Or is the secret of our pleasure in the poetry of alienraces and far-off times simply this: that nothing human is really alien, and that poetry through its generalizing, universalizing power, reveals tous the essential oneness of mankind?

_2. Graphic Arts and the Lyric_

A specific illustration may suggest an answer. An American collector ofJapanese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmanshipthat mastery of line and composition which are a part of the universallanguage of the graphic arts. Any human being, in fact, who has developeda sensitiveness to artistic beauty will receive a measure of delight fromthe work of Japanese masters. A few strokes of the brush upon silk, a bitof lacquer work, the decoration of a sword-hilt, are enough to set his eyedancing. But the expert collector soon passes beyond this generalenthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of specialartists, --a Motonobu, let us say, or a Sesshiu. The collector finds hispleasure in their individual handling of artistic problems, their uniquefaculties of eye and hand. He responds, in a word, both to thecosmopolitan language employed by every practitioner of the fine arts, andto the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certainJapanese draughtsman of the eighteenth century. 

And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the attitude ofan American lover of poetry toward those specimens of Japanese and Chineselyrics which have recently been presented to us in English translations. The American's ignorance of the riental languages cuts him off from anyappreciation of the individual handling of diction and metre. A LafcadioHearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form ofJapanese verse known as the _hokku_. Here is a _hokku_ by Basho, one ofthe most skilled composers in that form. Hearn prints it with thetranslation, [Footnote: _Kwaidan_, p. 188. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904. ]and explains that the verses are intended to suggest the joyous feeling ofspring-time:

 "Oki, oki yo! Waga tomo ni sen Néru--kocho!"

(Wake up! Wake up!--I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly. )An Occidental reader may recognize, through the translation, the charm ofthe poetic image, and he may be interested in a technical lyric formhitherto new to him, but beyond this, in his ignorance of Japanese, hecannot go. Here is a lyric by Wang Ch'ang-Ling, a Chinese poet of theeighth century:

 _Tears in the Spring_[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_, London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng. ]

 "Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery At the first call of Spring the fair young bride, On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar, Climbs the Kingfisher's Tower. Suddenly She sees the bloom of willows far and wide, And grieves for him she lent to fame and war. "

And here is another spring lyric by Po Chü-I (A. D. 772-846), as clear andsimple as anything in the Greek Anthology:

 _The Grass_[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_, London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng. ]

 "How beautiful and fresh the grass returns! When golden days decline, the meadow burns; Yet autumn suns no hidden root have slain, The spring winds blow, and there is grass again. 

 "Green rioting on olden ways it falls: The blue sky storms the ruined city walls; Yet since Wang Sun departed long ago, When the grass blooms both joy and fear I know. "

The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator, recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by theChinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lostto him. 

I have purposely chosen these Oriental types of lyric because theyrepresent so clearly the difference between the universal language of thegraphic arts and the more specialized language of poetry. The latter isstill able to convey, even through translation, a suggestion of theemotions common to all men; and this is true of the verse which lieswholly outside the line of that Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition which hasaffected so profoundly the development of modern European literature. Yetto express "_ce que tout le monde pense_"--which was Boileau's version ofHorace's "_propria communia dicere_"--is only part of the function oflyric poetry. To give the body of the time the form and pressure ofindividual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language ofone's race and epoch;--this, no less than the other, is the task and theopportunity of the lyric poet. 

_3. Decay and Survival_

To appreciate the triumph of whatever lyrics have survived, even whensheltered by the protection of common racial or cultural traditions, onemust remember that the overwhelming majority of lyrics, like the majorityof artistic products of all ages and races and stages of civilization, areirretrievably lost. Weak-winged is song! A book like Gummere's _Beginningsof Poetry_, glancing as it does at the origins of so many nationalliteratures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races thathave never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of theprodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of theactual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preservedby sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possessis only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tearsleaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds. How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song ofDeborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of thelyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyricverse gathered up in the _Greek Anthology_ tantalize us with theirreminder of what has been lost beyond recall. 

Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equallyimpressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that havesurvived. The Hebrew lyric, in its diction, its rhythmical patterns, andabove all in its flaming intensity of spirit, bears the marks of racialpurity, of mental vigor and moral elevation. It became something even moresignificant, however, than the spiritual expression of a chosen race. TheEast met the West when these ancient songs of the Hebrew Psalter wereadopted and sung by the Christian Church. They were translated, in thefourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleemanknew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy ofthe European world. It influenced Tyndale's English version of the Psalms, and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modernEnglish lyric. There is scarcely a page of the _Oxford Book of EnglishVerse_ which does not betray in word or phrase the influence of theHebrew Psalter. 

Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in termsof bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, itsdislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, arecharacteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were takenover by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualitiesof the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or"classic" restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage. It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out, [Footnote: See his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, chap. 9, andparticularly the passage quoted in the "Notes and Illustrations" to chap. V of this volume. ]that the Greek and Roman classical metres became in time inadequate toexpress the new Christian spirit "which knew neither clarity nor measure. ""The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of themean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for theunlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, andabstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful orcharming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with thejoy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what wasbeyond the grave, --these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry. "

_4. Lyrics of Western Europe_

The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to showthemselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise ofthe vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace thesigns of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard orItalian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their owntongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored withthe love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament, " "Widsith, ""The Wanderer, " "The Sea-farer, " or the battle-songs of Brunanburh andMaldon in the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, _Select Translations from Old EnglishPoetry_ (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, _Early English Poems_(New York, 1911). ]The last strophe of "Deor's Lament, " our oldest English lyric, ends withthe line:

 _"Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg"_ _"That he surmounted, so this may I!"_

The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line ofthe _Odyssey_, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to readafter it Masefield's "To-morrow":

 "Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through, Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few, And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew; _But to-morrow, By the living God, we 'II try the game again_!"

When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line atthe battle of Hastings, "singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and ofOliver and the vassals who fell at Roncevaux, " he typified the comingtriumphs of French song in England. [Footnote: See E. B. Reed, _English Lyrical Poetry_, chap. 2. 1912. ]French lyrical fashions would have won their way, no doubt, had there beenno battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had beenblessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding ofthe island outpost of "Germania" by the tide of European civilization. _Chanson_ and _carole_, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the _ballade_, _rondel_ and _Noël_, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns ofFrench monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace anddelicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provençal and thenFrench, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow andgrimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly intothe light and color and gayety of Southern France. [Footnote: See the passage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes andIllustrations" for this chapter. ]In place of Caedmon's terrible picture of Hell--"ever fire or frost"--orDunbar's "Lament for the Makers" (_Oxford_, No. 21) with its refrain:

 "_Timor Mortis conturbat me, _"

or the haunting burden of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" (_Oxford_, No. 381), "This ae nighte, this ae nighte, _--Every nighte and alle, _ Fire and sleet and candle-lighte, _And Christe receive thy saule_, "

we now find English poets echoing _Aucassin and Nicolette_:

 "In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only to have Nicolette, my sweet lady that I love so well. For into Paradise go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower continually before the altars and in the crypts; and such folk as wear old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst and of cold, and of little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them I have naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars, and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go. And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers or three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold and the silver, the cloth of vair and cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady. "

_5. The Elizabethan Lyric_

The European influence came afresh to England, as we have seen, with those"courtly makers" who travelled into France and Italy and brought back thenew-found treasures of the Renaissance. Greece and Rome renewed, as theyare forever from time to time renewing, their hold upon the imaginationand the art of English verse. Sometimes this influence of the classics hasworked toward contraction, restraint, acceptance of human limitations andof the "rules" of art. But in Elizabethan poetry the classical influencewas on the side of expansion. In that release of vital energy whichcharacterized the English Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greece and Romeand the artistic contacts with France and Italy heightened the confidenceof Englishmen, revealed the continuity of history and gave new faith inhuman nature. It spelled, for the moment at least, liberty rather thanauthority. It stimulated intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Literarycriticism awoke to life in the trenchant discussions of the art of poetryby Gascoigne and Sidney, by Puttenham, Campion and Daniel. The very titlesof the collections of lyrics which followed the famous _Tottel'sMiscellany_ of 1557 flash with the spirit of the epoch: _A Paradise ofDainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A Handfullof Pleasant Delights, The Phoenix Nest, England's Helicon_, Davison's_Poetical Rhapsody. _

Bullen, Schelling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of theElizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shownhow the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood, how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, howthe diffusion of the passion for song through all classes of the communitygave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere "dildido"lines. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of theElizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars haveinvestigated the relation of the song-books--especially the songs composedby musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion--to the form and quality ofthe surviving lyric verse. But one does not need a knowledge of theElizabethan lute and viol, and of the precise difference between a"madrigal" and a "catch" or "air" in order to perceive the tunefulnessof a typical Elizabethan song:

 "I care not for these ladies, That must be woode and praide: Give me kind Amarillis, The wanton countrey maide. Nature art disdaineth, Here beautie is her owne. Her when we court and kisse, She cries, Forsooth, let go: But when we come where comfort is, She never will say No. "

It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free, even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Itschildlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword, and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it isalways spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempoand cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally asSpenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly "Elizabethan. " Spenser's"vine-like" luxuriance, Marlowe's soaring energy, Donne's grave realisticsubtleties, illustrate indeed that note of individualism which is neverlacking in the great poetic periods. This individualism betrays itself inalmost every song of Shakspere's plays. For here is English race, surely, and the very echo and temper of the Renaissance, but with it all there isthe indescribable, inimitable _timbre_ of one man's singing voice. 

_6. The Reaction_

If we turn, however, from the lyrics of Shakspere to those of Ben Jonsonand of the "sons of Ben" who sang in the reigns of James I and Charles I, we become increasingly conscious of a change in atmosphere. The moment ofexpansion has passed. The "first fine careless rapture" is over. Classical"authority" resumes its silent, steady pressure. Scholars like to rememberthat the opening lines of Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes"are a transcript from the Greek. In his "Ode to Himself upon the Censureof his _New Inn_" in 1620 Jonson, like Landor long afterward, takesscornful refuge from the present in turning back to Greece and Rome:

 "Leave things so prostitute, And take the Alcaic lute; Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre; Warm thee by Pindar's fire. "

The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoraland madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of thecouplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of theElizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the handsof ingenious recluses like George Herbert. The popular metre of theCaroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain:

 "Yet this inconstancy is such As thou too shalt adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much Loved I not Honour more. "

The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne wished and secured a widermetrical liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated patterns of thedevotional lyric of the seventeenth century that are of greatest interestto the poets of our own day. But contemporary taste, throughout thegreater portion of that swiftly changing epoch, preferred verse thatshowed a conservative balance in thought and feeling, in diction andversification. Waller, with his courtier-like instinct for what wasacceptable, took the middle of the road, letting Cowley and Quarlesexperiment as fantastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell, too, aPuritan writing in the Restoration epoch, composed as "smoothly"as Waller. Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor metrical experiments, celebrated his quiet garden pleasures and his dalliance with amorousfancies in verse of the true Horatian type. "Intensive rather thanexpansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictivein its range and appeal": that is Professor Schelling's expert summary ofthe poetic tendencies of the age. 

And then the lyric impulse died away in England. Dryden could bemagnificently sonorous in declamation and satire, but he lacked thesinging voice. Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers, " could never, for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in thefirst quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason, of good sense, of "correctness. " The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant inDryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favoritemeasure. The poets played safe. They took no chances with "enthusiasm, "either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within therestraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigorand grace. But it was speech, not song. 

7. _The Romantic Lyric_

The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics ofCollins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more inEnglish skies. New windows were opened in the House of Life. Men lookedout again with curiosity, wonder and a sense of strangeness in thepresence of beauty. They saw Nature with new eyes; found a new richness inthe Past, a new picturesque and savor in the life of other races, particularly in the wild Northern and Celtic strains of blood. Life grewagain something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the "good sense" ofthe Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Insteadof the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, thefar-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusualfantastic light. The mood of poetry changed from tranquil sentiment toexcited sentiment or "sensibility, " and then to sheer passion. The formsof poetry shifted from the conventional to the revival of old measureslike blank verse and the Spenserian stanza, then to the invention of newand freer forms, growing ever more lyrical. Poetic diction rebelledagainst the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigidpersonifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specificand the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then, dissatisfied, to the heightened language of passion. If one reads Cowper, Blake, Burns and Wordsworth, to say nothing of poets like Byron andShelley who wrote in the full Romantic tide of feeling, one finds thatthis poetry has discovered new themes. It portrays the child, the peasant, the villager, the outcast, the slave, the solitary person, even the idiotand the lunatic. There is a new human feeling for the individual, and forthe endless, the poignant variety of "states of soul. " Browning, by andby, is to declare that "states of soul" are the only things worth a poet'sattention. 

Now this new individuality of themes, of language, of moods, assisted inthe free expression of lyricism, the release of the song-impulse of the"single, separate person. " The Romantic movement was revelatory, in adouble sense. "Creation widened in man's view"; and there was equally arevelation of individual poetic energy which gave the Romantic lyric anextraordinary variety and beauty of form. There was an exaggeratedindividualism, no doubt, which marked the weak side of the whole movement:a deliberate extravagance, a cultivated egoism. Vagueness has itslegitimate poetic charm, but in England no less than in Germany or Francelyric vagueness often became incoherence. Symbolism degenerated intomeaninglessness. But the fantastic and grotesque side of Romanticindividualism should not blind us to the central fact that a richpersonality may appear in a queer garb. Victor Hugo, like his youngfriends of the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Parisstare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyricmarvels as the _Odes et Ballades_ may be forgiven for its eccentricities. William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, likeWhitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world. 

Yet a lyrist like Keats, it must be remembered, betrayed his personalitynot so much through any external peculiarity of the Romantic temperamentas through the actual texture of his word and phrase and rhythm. Examinehis brush-work microscopically, as experts in Italian painting examine thebrushstrokes and pigments of some picture attributed to this or thatmaster: you will see that Keats, like all the supreme masters of poeticdiction, enciphered his lyric message in a language peculiarly his own. Itis for us to decipher it as we may. He used, of course, particularly inhis earlier work, some of the stock-epithets, the stock poetic"properties" of the Romantic school, just as the young Tennyson, in hisvolume of 1827, played with the "owl" and the "midnight" and the "solitarymere, " stock properties of eighteenth-century romance. Yet Tennyson, likeKeats, and for that matter like Shakspere, passed through this imitativephase into an artistic maturity where without violence or extravagance oreccentricity he compelled words to do his bidding. Each word bears thefinger-print of a personality. 

Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest, throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alienraces. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon aperiod of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intensenationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in thatintellectual "United States of Europe, " about 1750--when nationalisticdifferences were minimized, "enlightenment" was supreme and "propriacommunia dicere" was the literary motto--there was nevertheless a rapidlygrowing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circleof Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northernmythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began theirfruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when hetranslated Burger's "Lenore. " Goethe read Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_. Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of generaleighteenth-century "enlightenment, " but rather in quest of some peculiarrevelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism, Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as CatholicFrance sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-valueswas evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, inHugo's _Les Orientales_ and in Leconte de Lisle's _Poèmes Barbares_. Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzesin Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvorák writes anAmerican national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communicationbetween races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristicsmore intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did notrange far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling. 

_8. The Explorer's Pleasure_

This explorer's pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races wasnever more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that onelearns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches one's owncapacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that anyrace or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another. Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can beonly a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near inmiles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each other'smode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same"fringe. " No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one realmother tongue, and it is only in one's mother tongue that a lyricsings with all its over-tones. And nevertheless, life offers few purerpleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songsuttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like ourown. 

 "This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone, It seems to me there are other men in other lands yearning and thoughtful, It seems to me I can look over and behold them in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan, talking other dialects, And it seems to me if I could know those men I should become attached to them as I do to men in my own lands, O I know we should be brethren and lovers, I know I should be happy with them. "

9. _A Test_

If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alienvoices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now readaloud--or better, recite from memory--three of the best-known Englishpoems: Milton's "Lycidas, " Gray's "Elegy" and Wordsworth's "Ode toImmortality. " The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and thethird in 1817. Each is a "central" utterance of a race, a period and anindividual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; eachis lyrical, elegiac--a song of mourning and of consolation. "Lycidas" isthe last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome ofclassical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political andpersonal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Gray's "Elegy" there is theundertone of passionate sympathy for obscure lives: passionate, butrestrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling inhis great "Ode"; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to theimagination. This elegy, like the others, is a "lyric cry" of a man, anage, and a race; "enciphered" like them, with all the cunning of which theartist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the languageof the English lyric. 

There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled byrepetition, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations ofcommentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, periodand personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely notover-commented upon to-day:

 "From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass Like little ripples down a sunny river; Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass, Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever. "

Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in thatquatrain!

Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and readthis amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New Englandrecluse, Emily Dickinson:

 "This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, And Lads and Girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls. This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion, Where Bloom and Bees Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit, Then ceased like these. "

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

 "And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the happiness and virtue of mankind. " PLATO'S _Republic_, Book 10

 "A man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. " CARLYLE _to_ EMERSON, _August 29, 1842_

Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall notattempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of assessing theartistic value of living poets. "Poets are not to be ranked likecollegians in a class list, " wrote the wise John Morley long ago. Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is itpossible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smallerscale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly bybooks like Miss Lowell's _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, Mr. Untermeyer's _New Era in American Poetry_, Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, and Mr. Lowes's _Convention and Revolt_. I wish rather to remind thereader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a casewhich has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Plato'sday to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines ofdefence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse inAmerica and England is illustrating certain general tendencies which notonly sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit ofthe defenders of lyric poetry. 

1. _Plato's Moralistic Objection_

Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle whichis just now being waged, [Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P. Sherman's _Contemporary Literature_. Holt, 1917. ]than the passage from Plato's _Republic_ which furnishes the motto for thepresent chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which eachgeneration must face as best it may: "Poetry feeds and waters the passionsinstead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead ofruling them. " "Did we not imply, " asks the Athenian Stranger in Plato's_Laws_, "that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what isgood or evil?" "There is also, " says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a thirdkind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into adelicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric andall other members. " This Platonic notion of lyric "inspiration" and"possession" permeates the immortal passage of the _Ion_:

 "For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they 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 their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us; for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and 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 to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own Words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art: only when they make that to which the Muse impels them are their inventions inspired; and then one of them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. "[Footnote: Plato's _Ion_, Jowett's translation. ]

The other Platonic notion about poetry being "imitation" colors thewell-known section of the third book of the _Republic_, which warnsagainst the influence of certain effeminate types of lyric harmony:

 "I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity--expressive of entreaty or persuasion, of prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again, of willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty and advice; and which represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by success, but acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event. These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave. "

So runs the famous argument for "the natural rhythms of a manly life, " andconversely, the contention that "the absence of grace and rhythm andharmony is closely allied to an evil character. " While it is true that thebasis for this argument has been modified by our abandonment of the Greekaesthetic theories of "inspiration" and "imitation, " Plato's moralisticobjection to lyric effeminacy and lyric naturalism is widely shared bymany of our contemporaries. They do not find the "New Poetry, " lovely asit often is, altogether "manly. " They find on the contrary that some of itis what Plato calls "dissolute, " i. E. Dissolving or relaxing the fibres ofthe will, like certain Russian dance-music. I asked an American composerthe other day: "Is there anything at all in the old distinction betweensecular and sacred music?" "Certainly, " he replied; "secular musicexcites, sacred music exalts. " If this distinction is sound, it is plainthat much of the New Poetry aims at excitement of the senses for itsown sake--or in Plato's words, at "letting them rule, instead of rulingthem as they ought to be ruled. " Or, to use the severe words of acontemporary critic: "They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, nothought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabricof the reason. "

However widely we may be inclined to differ with such moralistic judgmentsas these, it remains true that plenty of idealists hold them, and it isthe idealists, rather than the followers of the senses, who have kept thelove of poetry alive in our modern world. 

_2. A Rationalistic Objection_

But the Philistines, as well as the Platonists, have an indictment tobring against modern verse, and particularly against the lyric. They findit useless and out of date. Macaulay's essay on Milton (1825) is one ofthe classic expressions of "Caledonian" rationalism:

 "We think that as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. .. . Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical. .. . In proportion as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals, and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems. .. . In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones, but little poetry. " In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay renews the charge: "Poetry requires not an examining but a believing freedom of mind. .. . As knowledge is extended and as the reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay. "

Even Macaulay, however, is a less pungent and amusing advocate ofrationalism than Thomas Love Peacock in _The Four Ages of Poetry_. [Footnote: Reprinted in A. S. Cook's edition of Shelley's _Defense ofPoetry_. Boston, 1891. ]

A few sentences must suffice:

 "A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. .. . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one of the comforts and utilities of life, of which we have witnessed so many and so rapid advances. .. . We may easily conceive that the day is not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and this not from any decrease either of intellectual power or intellectual acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair. "

No one really knows whether Peacock was wholly serious in this diatribe, but inasmuch as it produced Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_ "as anantidote"--as Shelley said--we should be grateful for it. Both Peacock andMacaulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their statements as to theuselessness of poetry, as compared with the value of intellectual exertionin other fields, is wholly in the spirit of twentieth-century rationalism. Few readers of this book may hold that doctrine, but they will meet it onevery side; and they will need all they can remember of Sidney and Shelleyand George Woodberry "as an antidote. "

3. _An Aesthetic Objection_

In Aristotle's well-known definition of Tragedy in the fifth section ofthe _Poetics_, there is one clause, and perhaps only one, which has beenaccepted without debate. "A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of anaction that is serious, complete in itself, _and of an adequatemagnitude_. " Does a lyric possess "an adequate magnitude?" As theembodiment of a single aspect of feeling, and therefore necessarily brief, the lyric certainly lacks "mass. " As an object for aestheticcontemplation, is the average lyric too small to afford the highest andmost permanent pleasure? "A long poem, " remarks A. C. Bradley in his_Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, [Footnote: London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on "TheLong Poem in the Age of Wordsworth. "]"requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one, and it would beeasy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highestvalue which the mere brevity of a short one excludes. " Surely the lyric, like the short story, cannot see life steadily and whole. It reflects, aswe have seen, a single situation or desire. "Short swallow-flights ofsong"; piping "as the linnet sings"; have not the lyric poets themselvesconfessed this inherent shortcoming of their art in a thousand similes?Does not a book of lyrics often seem like a plantation of carefully tendedlittle trees, rather than a forest? The most ardent collector ofbutterflies is aware that he is hunting only butterflies and not big game. Mr. John Gould Fletcher's _Japanese Prints_ is a collection of thedaintiest lyric fragments, lovely as a butterfly's wing. But do suchlyrics lack "adequate magnitude"?

It seems to the present writer that this old objection is a real one, andthat it is illustrated afresh by contemporary poetry, but that it is notso much an argument against the lyric as such, as it is an explanation ofthe ineffectiveness of certain lyric poems. This defect is not primarilythat they lack "magnitude, " but rather that they lack an adequate basis inour emotional adjustment to the fact or situation upon which they turn. The reader is not prepared for the effect which they convey. The art ofthe drama was defined by the younger Dumas as the art of preparation. Nowthe lyrics which are most effective in primarily dramatic compositions, let us say the songs in "Pippa Passes" or Ariel's songs in _The Tempest_, are those where the train of emotional association or contrast has beencarefully laid and is waiting to be touched off. So it is with themarkedly lyrical passages in narrative verse--say the close of "Sohrab andRustum. " When a French actress sings the "Marseillaise" to a theatreaudience in war-time, or Sir Harry Lauder, dressed in kilts, singsto a Scottish-born audience about "the bonny purple heather, " or amarching regiment strikes up "Dixie, " the actual song is only the releaseof a mood already stimulated. But when one comes upon an isolated lyricprinted as a "filler" at the bottom of a magazine page, there is no trainof emotional association whatever. There is no lyric mood waiting torespond to a "lyric cry. " To overcome this obstacle, Walter Page and othermagazine editors, a score of years ago, made the experiment of printingall the verse together, instead of scattering it according to theexigencies of the "make-up. " Miss Monroe's _Poetry_, _Contemporary Verse_, and the other periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry, easily avoid thishandicap of intruding prose. One turns their pages as he turns leaves ofmusic until he finds some composition in accordance with his mood of themoment. The long poem or the drama creates an undertone of feelingin which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforcedas it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, onthe other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even thelyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles, "requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with oneanother, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creationof lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during thelast decade, by that very variety of technical experimentation, thatincreased range and individualism of lyric effort, which have renewed theinterest in American poetry. 

4. _Subjectivity as a Curse_

I have often thought of a conversation with Samuel Asbury, a dozen yearsago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, hehad lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me bythe almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon theyounger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, tomorbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his _Texas Nativist_, [Footnote: Published by the author at College Station, Texas. ]that more objective forms of poetry, particularly epic and dramatichandling of local and historic American material, was far healthier stufffor a poet to work with. 

This objection to the lyric as an encourager of subjective excitement, ofegoistic introspection, like the other objections already stated, is oneof old standing. Goethe remarked that the subjectivity of the smallerpoets was of no significance, but that they were interested in nothingreally objective. But though this indictment of over-individualism hasoften been drawn, our own times are a fresh proof of its validity. If therevelation of personality unites men, the stress upon mere individualityseparates them, and there are countless poets of the day who glory intheir eccentric individualism without remembering that it is only througha richly developed personality that poetry gains any universal values. "Nothing in literature is so perishable as eccentricity, with regard towhich each generation has its own requirements and its own standard oftaste; and the critic who urges contemporary poets to make their work asindividual as possible is deliberately inviting them to build theirstructures on sand instead of rock. "[Footnote: Edmond Holmes, _What is Poetry_, p. 68. ]Every reader of contemporary poetry is aware that along with itsexhilarating freshness and force there has been a display of singularityand of silly nudity both of body and mind. Too intimate confidences havebeen betrayed in the lyric confessional. It is a fine thing to see aVarsity eight take their dip in the river at the end of an afternoon'sspin. Those boys strip well. But there are middle-aged poets who stripvery badly. Nature never intended them to play the role of Narcissus. Dickens wrote great novels in a room so hung with mirrors that he couldwatch himself in the act of composition. But that is not the best sort ofwriting-room for lyric poets, particularly in a decade when acuteself-consciousness, race-consciousness and even coterie-consciousness areexploited for commercial purposes, and the "lutanists of October" are dulyphotographed at their desks. 

5. _Mere Technique_

There is one other count in the old indictment of the lyric which is sureto be emphasized whenever any generation, like our own, shows a newtechnical curiosity about lyric forms. It is this: that mere techniquewill "carry" a lyric, even though thought, passion and imagination belacking. This charge will inevitably be made from time to time, and notmerely by the persons who naturally tend to stress the content-value ofpoetry as compared with its form-value. It was Stedman, who was peculiarlysusceptible to the charm of varied lyric form, who remarked of some ofPoe's lyrics, "The libretto (i. E. The sense) is nothing, the score is allin all. " And it must be admitted that the "libretto" of "Ulalume, " forinstance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry whovalue the "score" very highly. In a period marked by enthusiasm for newexperiments in versification, new feats of technique, the borderlandbetween real conquests of novel territory and sheer nonsense versebecomes very hazy. The _Spectra_ hoax, perpetrated so cleverly in 1916 byMr. Ficke and Mr. Witter Bynner, fooled many of the elect. [Footnote: See Untermeyer's _New Era_, etc. , pp. 320-23. ]I have never believed that Emerson meant to decry Poe when he referred tohim as "the jingle-man. " Emerson's memory for names was faulty, and he wastrying to indicate the author of the

 "tintinnabulation of the bells. "

That Poe was a prestidigitator with verse, and may be regarded solely witha view to his professional expertness, is surely no ground for disparaginghim as a poet. But it is the kind of penalty which extraordinary technicalexpertness has to pay in all the arts. Many persons remember Paganini onlyas the violinist who could play upon a single string. Every "_amplificolorimperii_"--every widener of the bounds of the empire of poetry, likeVachel Lindsay with his experiments in chanted verse, Robert Frost withhis subtle renderings of the cadences of actual speech, Miss Amy Lowellwith her doctrine of "curves" and "returns" and polyphony--runs the riskof being regarded for a while as a technician and nothing more. Ultimatelya finer balance is struck between the claims of form and content: theideas of a poet, his total vision of life, his contribution to the thoughtas well as to the craftsmanship of his generation, are thrown into thescale. Victor Hugo is now seen to be something far other than the mereamazing lyric virtuoso of the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826. Walt Whitmanultimately gets judged as Walt Whitman, and not merely as the inventorof a new type of free verse in 1855. A rough justice is done at last, nodoubt, but for a long time the cleverest and most original manipulators ofwords and tunes are likely to be judged by their virtuosity alone. 

_6. The Lines of Defence_

The objections to lyric poetry which have just been rehearsed are ofvarying degrees of validity. They have been mentioned here because theystill affect, more or less, the judgment of the general public as itendeavors to estimate the value of the contemporary lyric. I have littleconfidence in the taste of professed admirers of poetry who can find nopleasure in contemporary verse, and still less confidence in the taste ofour contemporaries whose delight in the "new era" has made them deaf tothe great poetic voices of the past. I am sorry for the traditionalist whocannot enjoy Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edgar LeeMasters and Carl Sandburg. He is, in my opinion, in a parlous state. Butthe state of the young rebel who cannot enjoy "Lycidas" and "The Progressof Poesy" and the "Ode to Dejection" is worse than parlous. It ishopeless. 

It is not for him, therefore, that these final paragraphs are written, butrather for those lovers of poetry who recognize that it transcends allpurely moralistic and utilitarian, as it does all historical and technicalconsiderations, --that it lifts the reader into a serene air where beautyand truth abide, while the perplexed generations of men appear anddisappear. Sidney and Campion and Daniel pleaded its cause for theElizabethans, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it against theGeorgian Philistines, Carlyle, Newman and Arnold championed it throughevery era of Victorian materialism. In the twentieth century, critics likeMackail and A. C. Bradley and Rhys, poets like Newbolt and Drinkwater andMasefield--to say nothing of living poets and critics among our owncountrymen--have spoken out for poetry with a knowledge, a sympathy and aneloquence unsurpassed in any previous epoch. The direct "Defence ofPoetry" may safely be left to such men as these. 

I have chosen, rather, the line of indirect vindication of poetry, andparticularly of the lyric, which has been attempted in this book. We haveseen that the same laws are perpetually at work in poetry as in all theother arts; that we have to do with the transmission of a certain kind offeeling through a certain medium; that the imagination remoulds thematerial proffered by the senses, and brings into order the confused andbroken thoughts of the mind, until it presents the eternal aspect ofthings through words that dance to music. We have seen that the study ofpoetry leads us back to the psychic life of primitive races, to theorigins of language and of society, and to the underlying spirit ofinstitutions and nationalities, so that even a fragment of surviving lyricverse may be recognized as a part of those unifying and dividingforces that make up the life of the world. We have found poetry, furthermore, to be the great personal mode of literary expression, arevelation of noble personality as well as base, and that this personalmode of expression has continued to hold its own in the modern world. Thefolk-epic is gone, the art-epic has been outstripped by prose fiction, andthe drama needs a theatre. But the lyric needs only a _poet_, who cancompose in any of its myriad forms. No one who knows contemporaryliterature will deny that the lyric is now interpreting the finer spiritof science, the drift of social progress, and above all, the instincts ofpersonal emotion. Through it to-day, as never before in the history ofcivilization, the heart of a man can reach the heart of mankind. It isinconceivable that the lyric will not grow still more significantwith time, freighted more and more deeply with thought and passion andtouched with a richer and more magical beauty. Some appreciation of it, nomatter how inadequate, should be a part of the spiritual possessions ofevery civilized man. '

 "Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen; Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt! Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenrothl"

 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

I add here some suggestions to teachers who may wish to use this book inthe classroom. In connection with each chapter I have indicated the moreimportant discussions of the special topic. There is also some additionalillustrative material, and I have indicated a few hints for classroomexercises, following methods which have proved helpful in my ownexperience as a teacher. 

I have tried to keep in mind the needs of two kinds of college courses inpoetry. One of them is the general introductory course, which usuallybegins with the lyric rather than with the epic or the drama, and whichutilizes some such collection as the _Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Bookof English Verse_. Any such collection of standard verse, or any of theanthologies of recent poetry, like those selected by Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse or Mr. W. S. Braithwaite, should be constantly in use in theclassroom as furnishing concrete illustration of the principles discussedin books like mine. 

The other kind of course which I have had in mind is the one dealing withthe works of a single poet. Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, are among the poets most frequently chosen for this sort ofstudy. I have found it an advantage to carry on the discussion of thegeneral principles of poetic imagination and expression in connection withthe close textual study of the complete work of any one poet. It is hopedthat this book may prove helpful for such a purpose. 

CHAPTER I

This chapter aims to present, in as simple a form as possible, some of thefundamental questions in aesthetic theory as far as they bear upon thestudy of poetry. James Sully's article on "Aesthetics" in the_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Sidney Colvin's article on "The FineArts, " afford a good preliminary survey of the field. K. Gordon's_Aesthetics_, E. D. Puffer's _Psychology of Beauty_, Santayana's _Sense ofBeauty_, Raymond's _Genesis of Art Form_, and Arthur Symons's _SevenArts_, are stimulating books. Bosanquet's _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_ iscommended to those advanced students who have not time to read hisvoluminous _History of Aesthetic_, just as Lane Cooper's translation of_Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_ may be read profitably before taking upthe more elaborate discussions in Butcher's _Aristotle's Theory of Poetryand Fine Art_. In the same way, Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ is a goodpreparation for Croce's monumental _Aesthetics_. The student shouldcertainly make some acquaintance with Lessing's _Laokoon_, and he willfind Babbitt's _New Laokoon_ a brilliant and trenchant survey of the oldquestions. 

It may be, however, that the teacher will prefer to pass rapidly over theground covered in this chapter, rather than to run the risk of confusinghis students with problems admittedly difficult. In that case theclassroom discussions may begin with chapter II. I have found, however, that the new horizons which are opened to many students in connection withthe topics touched upon in chapter I more than make up for some temporarybewilderment. 

CHAPTER II

The need here is to look at an old subject with fresh eyes. Teachers whoare fond of music or painting or sculpture can invent many illustrationsfollowing the hint given in the Orpheus and Eurydice passage in the text. Among recent books, Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_ and Max Eastman's_Enjoyment of Poetry_ are particularly to be commended for theirunconventional point of view. See also Fairchild's pamphlet on _Teachingof Poetry in the High School_, and John Erskine's paper on "The Teachingof Poetry" (_Columbia University Quarterly_, December, 1915). AlfredHayes's "Relation of Music to Poetry" (_Atlantic_, January, 1914) ispertinent to this chapter. But the student should certainly familiarizehimself with Theodore Watts-Dunton's famous article on "Poetry" inthe _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, now reprinted with additions in his_Renascence of Wonder_. He should also read A. C. Bradley's chapter on"Poetry for its Own Sake" in the _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, Neilson's_Essentials of Poetry_, Stedman's _Nature and Elements of Poetry_, as wellas the classic "Defences" of Poetry by Philip Sidney, Shelley, Leigh Huntand George E. Woodberry. For advanced students, R. P. Cowl's _Theory ofPoetry in England_ is a useful summary of critical opinions coveringalmost every aspect of the art of poetry, as it has been understood bysuccessive generations of Englishmen. 

CHAPTER III

This chapter, like the first, will be difficult for some students. Theymay profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester's chapteron "Imagination" in his _Literary Criticism_, Neilson's discussion of"Imagination" in his _Essentials of Poetry_, the first four chapters ofFairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's _BiographiaLiteraria_, and Wordsworth's Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815. Seealso Stedman's chapter on "Imagination" in his _Nature and Elements ofPoetry_. 

Under section 2, some readers may be interested in Sir William RowanHamilton's account of his famous discovery of the quaternion analysis, oneof the greatest of all discoveries in pure mathematics:

 "Quaternions started into life, or light, full grown, on Monday, the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking with Lady Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to Brougham Bridge, which my boys have since called the Quaternion Bridge. That is to say, I then and there felt the galvanic circuit of thought _close_, and the sparks which fell from it were the _fundamental equations between i, j, k; exactly such_ as I have used them ever since. I pulled out on the spot a pocket-book, which still exists, and made an entry on which, _at the very moment_, I felt that it might be worth my while to expend the labor of at least ten (or it might be fifteen) years to come. But then it is fair to say that this was because I felt a _problem_ to have been at that moment _solved_--an intellectual want relieved--which had _haunted_ me for at least ifteen years before_. Less than an hour elapsed before I had asked and obtained leave of the Council of the Royal Irish Academy, of which Society I was, at that time, the President--to _read_ at the _next General Meeting_ a _Paper_ on Quaternions; which I accordingly _did_, on November 13, 1843. "

The following quotation from Lascelles-Abercrombie's study of Thomas Hardypresents in brief compass the essential problem dealt with in thischapter. It is closely written, and should be read more than once. 

 "Man's intercourse with the world is necessarily formative. His experience of things outside his consciousness is in the manner of a chemistry, wherein some energy of his nature is mated with the energy brought in on his nerves from externals, the two combining into something which exists only in, or perhaps we should say closely around, man's consciousness. Thus what man knows of the world is what has been _formed_ by the mixture of his own nature with the streaming in of the external world. This formative energy of his, reducing the in-coming world into some constant manner of appearance which may be appreciable by consciousness, is most conveniently to be described, it seems, as an unaltering imaginative desire: desire which accepts as its material, and fashions itself forth upon, the many random powers sent by the world to invade man's mind. That there is this formative energy in man may easily be seen by thinking of certain dreams; those dreams, namely, in which some disturbance outside the sleeping brain (such as a sound of knocking or a bodily discomfort) is completely formed into vivid trains of imagery, and in that form only is presented to the dreamer's consciousness. This, however, merely shows the presence of the active desire to shape sensation into what consciousness can accept; the dream is like an experiment done in the isolation of a laboratory; there are so many conflicting factors when we are awake that the events of sleep must only serve as a symbol or diagram of the intercourse of mind with that which is not mind--intercourse which only takes place in a region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the irradiations of the world. Perception itself is a formative act; and all the construction of sensation into some orderly, coherent idea of the world is a further activity of the central imaginative desire. Art is created, and art is enjoyed, because in it man may himself completely express and exercise those inmost desires which in ordinary experience are by no means to be completely expressed. Life has at last been perfectly formed and measured to man's requirements; and in art man knows himself truly the master of his existence. It is this sense of mastery which gives man that raised and delighted consciousness of self which art provokes. "

CHAPTER IV

I regret that Professor Lowes's brilliant discussion of "Poetic Diction"in his _Convention and Revolt_ did not appear until after this chapter waswritten. There are stimulating remarks on Diction in Fairchild andEastman, in Raleigh's _Wordsworth_, in L. A. Sherman's _Analytics ofLiterature_, chapter 6, in Raymond's _Poetry as a Representative Art_, andin Hudson Maxim's _Science of Poetry_. Coleridge's description ofWordsworth's theory of poetic diction in the _Biographia Literaria_ isfamous. Walt Whitman's _An American Primer_, first published in the_Atlantic_ for April, 1904, is a highly interesting contribution to thesubject. 

No theoretical discussion, however, can supply the place of a close study, word by word, of poems in the classroom. It is advisable, I think, tofollow such analyses of the diction of Milton, Keats and Tennyson by ascrutiny of the diction employed by contemporary poets like Edgar LeeMasters and Carl Sandburg. 

The following passages in prose and verse, printed without the authors'names, are suggested as an exercise in the study of diction:

1. "The falls were in plain view about a mile off, but very distinct, and no roar--hardly a murmur. The river tumbling green and white, far below me; the dark, high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid, spiritual, silent. Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture--a remembrance always afterward. "

2. "If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a coming wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide themselves in their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of the blood perceive, by properties within itself, that hands are raised to waste and spill it; and in the veins of men run cold and dull as his did, in that hour!"

3. "On a flat road runs the well-train'd runner, He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs, He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs, With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd. "

4. "The feverish heaven with a stitch in the side, Of lightning. "

5. "Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things. "

6. "Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels. "

7. "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; their dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupefied, however he came there: Thrust out past service from the devil's stud. "

8. "For the main criminal I have no hope Except in such a suddenness of fate. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have scarce conjectured there was earth Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: But the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, Through her whole length of mountain visible: There lay the city thick and plain with spires, And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, And Guido see, one instant, and be saved. "

CHAPTER V

A fresh and clear discussion of the principles governing Rhythm andMetre may be found in C. E. Andrews's _Writing and Reading of Verse_. The well-known books by Alden, Corson, Gummere, Lewis, Mayor, Omond, Raymond and Saintsbury are indicated in the Bibliography. Note alsothe bibliographies given by Alden and Patterson. 

I have emphasized in this chapter the desirability of compromise in somehotly contested disputes over terminology and methods of metricalnotation. Perhaps I have gone farther in this direction than some teacherswill wish to go. But all classroom discussion should be accompanied byoral reading of verse, by the teacher and if possible by pupils, and themoment oral interpretations begin, it will be evident that "a satisfiedear" is more important than an exact agreement upon methods of notation. 

I venture to add here, for their suggestiveness, a few passages aboutRhythm and Metre, and finally, as an exercise in the study of theprevalence of the "iambic roll" in sentimental oratory, an address byRobert G. Ingersoll. 

1. "Suppose that we figure the nervous current which corresponds toconsciousness as proceeding, like so many other currents of nature, in_waves_--then we do receive a new apprehension, if not an explanation, ofthe strange power over us of successive strokes. .. . Whatever things occupyour attention--events, objects, tones, combinations of tones, emotions, pictures, images, ideas--our consciousness of them will be heightened bythe rhythm as though it consisted of waves. " EASTMAN, _The Enjoyment of Poetry_, p. 93. 

2. "Rhythm of pulse is the regular alternation of units made up of beatand pause; rhythm in verse is a measured or standardized arrangement ofsound relations. The difference between rhythm of pulse and rhythm inverse is that the one is known through touch, the other through hearing;as rhythm, they are essentially the same kind of thing. Viewed generallyand externally, then, verse is language that is beaten into measuredrhythm, or that has some type of uniform or standard rhythmicalarrangement. " FAIRCHILD, _The Making of Poetry_, p. 117. 

3. "A Syllable is a body of sound brought out with an independent, single, and unbroken breath (Sievers). This syllable may be _long_ or _short_, according to the time it fills; compare the syllables in _merrily_ withthe syllables in _corkscrew_. Further, a syllable may be _heavy_ or_light_ (also called _accented_ or _unaccented_) according as it receivesmore or less force or _stress_ of tone: compare the two syllables of_treamer_. Lastly, a syllable may have increased or diminished _height-_oftone, --_pitch: cf. _ the so-called 'rising inflection' at the end of aquestion. Now, in spoken language, there are infinite degrees of length, of stress, of pitch. .. . 

"It is a well-known property of human speech that it keeps up a ceaselesschange between accented and unaccented syllables. A long succession ofaccented syllables becomes unbearably monotonous; a long succession ofunaccented syllables is, in effect, impossible. Now when the ear detectsat regular intervals a recurrence of accented syllables, varying withunaccented, it perceives _Rhythm_. Measured intervals of time are thebasis of all verse, and their _regularity_ marks off poetry from prose; sothat Time is thus the chief element in Poetry, as it is in Music and inDancing. From the idea of measuring these time-intervals, we derive thename Metre; Rhythm means pretty much the same thing, --'a flowing, ' aneven, measured motion. This rhythm is found everywhere in nature: the beatof the heart, the ebb and flow of the sea, the alternation of day andnight. Rhythm is not artificial, not an invention; it lies at the heart ofthings, and in rhythm the noblest emotions find their noblest expression. " GUMMERE, _Handbook of Poetics_, p. 133. 

4. "It was said of Chopin that in playing his waltzes his left hand keptabsolutely perfect time, while his right hand constantly varied the rhythmof the melody, according to what musicians call _tempo rubato_, 'stolen' ordistorted time. Whether this is true in fact, or even physically possible, has been doubted; but it represents a perfectly familiar possibility ofthe mind. Two streams of sound pass constantly through the inner ear ofone who understands or appreciates the rhythm of our verse: one, neveractually found in the real sounds which are uttered, is the absoluterhythm, its equal time-intervals moving on in infinitely perfectprogression; the other, represented by the actual movement of the verse, is constantly shifting by quickening, retarding, strengthening orweakening its sounds, yet always hovers along the line of the perfectrhythm, and bids the ear refer to that perfect rhythm the succession ofits pulsations. " ALDEN, _An Introduction to Poetry_, p. 188. 

5. "Many lines in Swinburne cannot be scanned at all except by the Laniermethod, which reduces so-called feet to their purely musical equivalentsof time bars. What, for instance, can be made by the formerly acceptedsystems of prosody of such hexameters as

 'Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway?'

The usual explanation of this line is that Mr. Swinburne, carelessly, inadvertently, or for some occult purpose, interjected one line of fivefeet among his hexameters and the scansion usually followed is byarrangement into a pentameter, thus:

 'Full-sailed | wide-winged | poised softly | forever | asway, '

the first two feet being held to be spondees, and the third and fourthamphibrachs. It has also been proposed to make the third foot a spondee oran iambus, and the remaining feet anapaests, thus:

 'Full-sailed | wide-winged | poised soft- | ly forev- | er asway. '

"The confusion of these ideas is enough to mark them as unscientific andworthless, to say nothing of the severe reflection they cast on the poet'sworkmanship. We have not so known Mr. Swinburne, for, if there be anythinghe has taught us about himself it is his strenuous and sometimes absurdparticularity about immaculate form. He would never overlook a line offive feet in a poem of hexameters. But--as will, I think, appear later andconclusively--the line is really of six feet, and is not iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, the spurious spondaic that some writers have tried tomanufacture for English verse, or anything else recognized in Coleridge'simmortal stanza, or in text-books. It simply cannot be scanned byclassical rules; it cannot be weighed justly, and its full meaningextracted, by any of the 'trip-time' or 'march-time' expedients of otherinvestigators. It is purely music; and when read by the method of musicappears perfectly designed and luminous with significance. Only a poetthat was at heart a composer could have made such a phrase, basedupon such intimate knowledge of music's rhythmical laws. " C. E. RUSSELL, "Swinburne and Music" _North American Review_, November, 1907. 

6. Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has kindly allowed me to quote this passagefrom his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, pp. 246, 247:

"Classic metres expressed measured feelings. Hexameters had given voice tomany emotions beautifully, with unfailing modulation of calm or storm. They had never revealed the infinite heart of God, or told the yearning ofthe soul responding; nor were they ever to be the instrument of thesesupreme disclosures in Christian times. Such unmeasured feelings could notbe held within the controlled harmonies of the hexameter nor withinsapphic or alcaic or Pindaric strophes. These antique forms of poetrydefinitely expressed their contents, although sometimes suggesting furtherunspoken feeling, which is so noticeable with Virgil. But characteristicChristian poetry, like the Latin mediaeval hymn, was not to express itsmeaning as definitely or contain its significance. Mediaeval hymns arechildlike, having often a narrow clearness in their literal sense; andthey may be childlike, too, in their expressed symbolism. Theirsignificance reaches far beyond their utterance; they suggest, they echo, and they listen; around them rolls the voice of God, the infinitude ofHis love and wrath, heaven's chorus and hell's agonies; _dies irae, diesilla_--that line says little, but mountains of wrath press on it, fromwhich the soul shall not escape. 

"Christian emotion quivers differently from any movement of the spirit inclassic measures. The new quiver, the new shudder, the utter terror, andthe utter love appear in mediaeval rhymed accentual poetry:

 Desidero te millies, Mê Jesu; quando venies? Me laetum quando facies, Ut vultu tuo saties?

 Quo dolore Quo moerore Deprimuntur miseri, Qui abyssis Pro commissis Submergentur inferi. 

 Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuae viae; Ne me perdas ilia die. * * * * * Lacrymosa dies illa Qua resurget ex fa villa, Judicandus homo reus; Huic ergo parce, Deus! Pie Jesu, Domine, Dona eis requiem. 

"Let any one feel the emotion of these verses and then turn to some pieceof classic poetry, a passage from Homer or Virgil, an elegiac couplet or astrophe from Sappho or Pindar or Catullus, and he will realize thedifference, and the impossibility of setting the emotion of a mediaevalhymn in a classic metre. "

7. "_Friends_: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet Iwish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life anddeath are equal things, all should be brave enough to meet what all thedead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and pollutedby the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds andblossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, thepatriarchs and babes sleep side by side. 

"Why should we fear that which will come to all that is?

"We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing--life ordeath. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or thedoor of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate--the child dying in itsmother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he whojourneys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the lastslow steps with staff and crutch. 

"Every cradle asks us, 'Whence?' and every coffin, 'Whither?' The poorbarbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions asintelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearfulignorance of the one is just as consoling as the learned and unmeaningwords of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life hastouched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain andtears. It may be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If thosewe press and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps that lovewould wither from the earth. Maybe this common fate treads from out thepaths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate, and I hadrather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life wherelove is not. Another life is naught, unless we know and love again theones who love us here. 

"They who stand with aching hearts around this little grave need have nofear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is and is to be tells usthat death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest. We know that throughthe common wants of life--the needs and duties of each hour--their griefswill lessen day by day, until at last this grave will be to them a placeof rest and peace--almost of joy. There is for them this consolation. Thedead do not suffer. And if they live again, their lives will surely be asgood as ours. We have no fear. We are all children of the same mother, andthe same fate awaits us all. 

"We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope forthe dead. " ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, "Address over a Little Boy's Grave. "

CHAPTER VI

I have not attempted in this chapter to give elaborate illustrations ofthe varieties of rhyme and stanza in English poetry. Full illustrationswill be found in Alden's _English Verse_. A clear statement of thefundamental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's _VerseWriting_. 

Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, _Convention and Revolt_, chapters 6 and 7, and by Andrews, _Writing and Reading of Verse_, chapters5 and 19. Miss Amy Lowell has written fully about it in the Prefaces to_Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ and _Can Grande's Castle_, in the finalchapter of _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, in the Prefaces to_Some Imagist Poets_, and in the _North American Review_ for January, 1917. Mr. Braithwaite's annual _Anthologies of American Verse_ give a fullbibliography of special articles upon this topic. 

An interesting classroom test of the difference between prose rhythm andverse rhythm with strongly marked metre and rhyme may be found incomparing Emerson's original prose draft of his "Two Rivers, " as found involume 9 of his Journal, with three of the stanzas of the finished poem:

"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the ram, butsweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thouthrough the land. 

"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, andflows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and through men and women. 

"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream inwinter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happyare they who can hear it. "

 "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain; But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through Concord plain. 

 "Thou in thy narrow banks are pent; The stream I love unbounded goes Through flood and sea and firmament; Through light, through life, it forward flows. 

 "I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through love and thought, through power and dream. "

I also suggest for classroom discussion the following brief passages fromrecent verse, printed without the authors' names:

1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him;the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundredporches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;two horses are company for him; he never argues. "

2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments-- there is a girl who looks at me strangely as much as to say, You are a young man, and I am a young woman, and what are you going to do about it? And I look at her as much as to say, I am going to keep the teacher's desk between us, my dear, as long as I can. "

3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast. 

"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smilewith kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes. 

"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?

"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in myhands. 

"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower whichonly the spirit may touch?"

4. "Child, I smelt the flowers, The golden flowers . .. Hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet, And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me, and I knew that they and you and I were one. They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes. For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary; And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great river may gain no moss, And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you dress it up in Blank Prose. Child, I smelt the flowers. "

CHAPTER VII

Recent criticism has been rich in its discussions of the lyric. JohnDrinkwater's little volume on _The Lyric_ is suggestive. See also C. E. Whitmore's article in the _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. _, December, 1918. Rhys's_Lyric Poetry_, Schelling's _English Lyric_, Reed's _English LyricalPoetry_ cover the whole field of the historical English lyric. A few bookson special periods are indicated in the "Notes" to chapter ix. 

An appreciation of the lyric mood can be helped greatly by adequate oralreading in the classroom. For teachers who need suggestions as to oralinterpretation, Professor Walter Barnes's edition of Palgrave's _GoldenTreasury_ (Row, Petersen & Co. , Chicago) is to be commended. 

The student's ability to analyse a lyric poem should be tested by frequentwritten exercises. The method of criticism may be worked out by theindividual teacher, but I have found it useful to ask students to test apoem by some or all of the following questions:

(a) What kind of experience, thought or emotion furnishes the basis forthis lyric? What kind or degree of sensitiveness to the facts of nature?What sort of inner mood or passion? Is the "motive" of this lyric purelypersonal? If not, what other relationships or associations are involved?

(b) What sort of imaginative transformation of the material furnished bythe senses? What kind of imagery? Is it true poetry or only verse?

(c) What degree of technical mastery of lyric structure? Subordination ofmaterial to unity of "tone"? What devices of rhythm or sound to heightenthe intended effect? Noticeable words or phrases? Does the author's powerof artistic expression keep pace with his feeling and imagination?

CHAPTER VIII

For a discussion of narrative verse in general, see Gummere's _Poetics_and _Oldest English Epic_, Hart's _Epic and Ballad_, Council's _Study ofPoetry_, and Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer. "

For the further study of ballads, note G. L. Kittredge's one volumeedition of Child's _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, Gummere's_Popular Ballad_, G. H. Stempel's _Book of Ballads_, J. A. Lomax's _CowboySongs and other Frontier Ballads_, and Hart's summary of Child's views in_Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. _, vol. 21, 1906. The _Oxford Book of English Verse_, Nos. 367-389, gives excellent specimens. 

All handbooks on _Poetics_ discuss the Ode. Gosse's _English Odes_ andWilliam Sharp's _Great Odes_ are good collections. 

For the sonnet, note Corson's chapter in his _Primer of English Verse_, and the Introduction to Miss Lockwood's collection. There are otherwell-known collections by Leigh Hunt, Hall Caine and William Sharp. Special articles on the sonnet are noted in Poole's _Index_. 

The dramatic monologue is well discussed by Claude Howard, _The DramaticMonologue_, and by S. S. Curry, _The Dramatic Monologue in Tennyson andBrowning_. 

CHAPTER IX

The various periods of English lyric poetry are covered, as has beenalready noted, by the general treatises of Rhys, Reed and Schelling. OldEnglish lyrics are well translated by Cook and Tinker, and by Pancoast andSpaeth. W. P. Ker's _English Literature; Mediaeval_ is excellent, as is C. S. Baldwin's _English Mediaeval Literature_. John Erskine's _ElizabethanLyric_ is a valuable study. Schelling's introduction to his Selectionsfrom the Elizabethan Lyric should also be noted, as well as his similarbook on the Seventeenth-Century Lyric. Bernbaum's _English Poets of theEighteenth Century_ is a careful selection, with a scholarly introduction. Studies of the English poetry of the Romantic period are very numerous:Oliver Elton's _Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830_, is one of thebest. Courthope's _History of English Poetry_ and Saintsbury's _History ofCriticism_ are full of material bearing upon the questions discussed inthis chapter. 

Professor Legouis's account of the change in atmosphere as one passes fromOld English to Old French poetry is so delightful that I refrain fromspoiling it by a translation:

"En quittant _Beowulf_ ou la _Bataille de Maldon_ pour le _Roland_, on al'impression de sortir d'un lieu sombre pour entrer dans la lumière. Cetteimpression vous vient de tous les côtés à la fois, des lieux décrits, dessujets, de la manière de raconter, de l'esprit qui anime, del'intelligence qui ordonne, mais, d'une façon encore plus immédiate etplus diffuse, de la différence des deux langues. On reconnaît sans doutegénéralement à nos vieux écrivains ce mérite d'être clairs, mais on esttrop habitué à ne voir dans ce don que ce qui découle des tendancesanalytiques et des aptitudes logiques de leurs esprit. Aussi plusieurscritiques, quelques-uns français, ont-ils fait de cet attribut une manièrede prétexte pour leur assigner en partage la prose et pour leur retirerla faculté poétique. Il n'en est pas ainsi. Cette clarté n'est paspurement abstraite. Elle est une véritable lumière qui rayonne même desvoyelles et dans laquelle les meilleurs vers des trouvères--les seuls quicomptent--sont baignés. Comment dire l'éblouissement des yeux longtempsretenus dans la pénombre du _Codex Exoniensis_ et devant qui passentsoudain avec leurs brillantes syllables 'Halte-Clerc, ' l'épée d'Olivier, 'Joyeuse' celle de Charlemagne, 'Monjoie' l'étendard des Francs? Avanttoute description on est saisi comme par un brusque lever de soleil. Ilest tels vers de nos vieilles romances d'où la lumière ruisselle sansmême qu'on ait besoin de prendre garde à leur sens:

 "'Bele Erembors a la fenestre au jor Sor ses genolz tient paile de color, '[Footnote: "Fair Erembor at her window in daylight Holds a coloured silk stuff on her knees. "]

ou bien

 "'Bele Yolanz en chambre coie Sor ses genolz pailes desploie Coust un fil d'or, l'autre de soie. .. . "[Footnote: "Fair Yoland in her quiet bower Unfolds silk stuffs on her knees Sewing now a thread of gold, now one of silk. "]

C'est plus que de la lumière qui s'échappe de ces mots, c'est de la couleur et de la plus riche. "[Footnote: Emile Legouis, _Défense de la Poésie Française_, p. 44. ]

CHAPTER X

While this chapter does not attempt to comment upon the work of livingAmerican authors, except as illustrating certain general tendencies of thelyric, I think that teachers of poetry should avail themselves of thepresent interest in contemporary verse. Students of a carefully chosenvolume of selections, like the _Oxford Book_, should be competent to passsome judgment upon strictly contemporary poetry, and I have found themkeenly interested in criticizing the work that is appearing, month bymonth, in the magazines. The temperament and taste of the individualteacher must determine the relative amount of attention that can be givento our generation, as compared with the many generations of the past. 

APPENDIX

Believing as I do that a study of the complete work of some modern poetshould accompany, if possible, every course in the general theory ofpoetry, I venture to print here an outline of topical work upon the poetryof Tennyson. Tennyson's variety of poetic achievement is so great, and histechnical resources are so remarkable, that he rewards the closest study, even on the part of those young Americans who cannot forget that he was a"Victorian":

TOPICAL WORK UPON TENNYSON

I

THE METHOD OF CRITICISM

[The scheme here suggested for the study of poetry is based upon themethods followed in this book. The student is advised to select some onepoem, and to analyse its content and form as carefully as possible, inaccordance with the outline printed below. The thought and feeling of thepoem should be thoroughly comprehended as a whole before the work ofanalysis is begun; and after the analysis is completed, the student shouldendeavor again to regard the poem synthetically, i. E. , in its totalappeal to the aesthetic judgment, rather than mechanically and part bypart. ]

FORM / CONTENT

A "IMPRESSION"

_Of Nature. _ What sort of observation of natural phenomena is revealedin this poem? Impressions of movement, form, color, sound, hours of theday or night, seasons of the year; knowledge of scientific facts, etc. ?

_Of Man. _ What evidence of the poet's direct knowledge of men? Ofknowledge of man gained through acquaintance with Biblical, classical, foreign or English literature? Self-knowledge?

_Of God. _ Perception of spiritual laws? Religious attitude? Is thispoem consistent with his other poems?

B "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION"

Does the "raw material" presented by "sense impressions" undergo areal "change in kind" as it passes through the mind of the poet?

Do you feel in this poem the presence of a creative personality?

What evidence of poetic instinct in the selection of characteristictraits? In power of representation through images? In idealization?

C "EXPRESSION"

What is to be said of the range and character of the poet's vocabulary?Employment of figurative language? Selection of metre? Use of rhymes?Modification of rhythm and sound to suggest the idea conveyed? Imitativeeffects?

In general, is there harmony between form and content, or is thereevidence of the artist's caring for one rather than the other?

II

TENNYSON'S LYRIC POETRY

[Write a criticism of the distinctively lyrical work of Tennyson, basedupon an investigation at first hand of the topics suggested below. Do notdeal with any poems in which the narrative or dramatic element seems toyou the predominant one, as those forms of expression will be made thesubject of subsequent papers. ]

A. "IMPRESSION" (i. E. , experience, thought, emotion). 

_General Characteristics. _

Does the freshness of the lyric mood seem in Tennyson's case dependentupon any philosophical position? Upon sensitiveness to successiveexperiences?

Is his lyric egoism a noble one? How far does he identify himself with hisrace? With humanity?

Is his lyric passion always genuine? If not, give examples of lyrics thatare deficient in sincerity. Is the lyric passion sustained as the poetgrows old?

_Of Nature. _

What part does the observation of natural phenomena--such as form, color, sound, hours of the day or night, seasons, the sky, the sea--play in thesepoems? To what extent is the lyrical emotion called forth by the detailsof nature? By her composite effects? Give instances of the poetic use ofscientific facts. 

_Of Man. _

What human relationships furnish the themes for his lyrics? In the love-lyrics, what different relationships of men and women? To what extent doeshe find a lyric motive in friendship? In patriotism? How much of his lyricpoetry seems to spring from direct contact with men? From introspection?From contact with men through the medium of books? How clearly do hislyrics reflect the social problems of his own time? In his later lyricsare there traces of deeper or shallower interest in men and women? Ofgreater or less faith in the progress of society?

_Of God. _

Mention lyrics whose themes are based in such conceptions as freedom, duty, moral responsibility. Does Tennyson's lyric poetry reveal a sense ofspiritual law? Is the poet's own attitude clearly evident?

B. "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION. "

What evidence of poetic instinct in the selection of characteristictraits? In power of representation through images? Distinguish betweenlyrics that owe their poetic quality to the Imagination, and those createdby the Fancy. (Note Alden's discussion of this point; "Introduction toPoetry, " pp. 102-112. ) How far is Tennyson's personality indicated bythese instinctive processes through which his poetical material istransformed?

C. "EXPRESSION. "

What may be said in general of his handling of the lyric form: as tounity, brevity, simplicity of structure? Occasional use of presentativerather than representative language? Choice of metres? Use of rhymes?Modification of rhythm and sound to suit the idea conveyed? Evidence ofthe artist's caring for either form or content to the neglect of theother? Note whatever differences may be traced, in all these respects, between Tennyson's earlier and later lyrics. 

III

TENNYSON'S NARRATIVE POETRY

[Write a criticism of the distinctively narrative work of Tennyson, basedupon the questions suggested below. ]

A. "IMPRESSION" (i. E. , experience, thought, emotion). 

_General Characteristics. _

After classifying Tennyson's narrative poetry, how many of his themes seemto you to be of his own invention? Name those based, ostensibly at least, upon the poet's own experience. To what extent do you find his narrativework purely objective, i. E. , without admixture of reflective or didacticelements? What themes are of mythical or legendary origin? Of those havinga historical basis, how many are drawn from English sources? Does his useof narrative material ever show a deficiency of emotion; i. E. , could thestory have been better told in prose? Has he the story-telling gift?

_Of Nature. _

How far does the description of natural phenomena, as outlined in TopicII, A, enter into Tennyson's narrative poetry? Does it always have asubordinate place, as a part of the setting of the story? Does it overlaythe story with too ornate detail? Does it ever retard the movement unduly?

_Of Man. _ (Note that some of the points mentioned under _GeneralCharacteristics_ apply here. )

What can you say of Tennyson's power of observing character? Of conceivingcharacters in complication and collision with one another or withcircumstances? Give illustrations of the range of human relationshipstouched upon in these poems. Do the later narratives show an increasedproportion of tragic situations? Does Tennyson's narrative poetry throwany light upon his attitude towards contemporary English society?

_Of God. _ (See Topic II, A. )

B. "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION. "

Adjust the questions already suggested under Topic II, B, to narrativepoetry. Note especially the revelation of Tennyson's personality throughthe instinctive processes by which his narrative material is transformed. 

C. "EXPRESSION. "

What may be said in general of his handling of the narrative form, i. E. , his management of the setting, the characters and the plot in relation toone another? Have his longer poems, like the "Idylls, " and "The Princess, "the unity, breadth, and sustained elevation of style that are usuallyassociated with epic poetry? What can you say of Tennyson's mastery ofdistinctly narrative metres? Of his technical skill in suiting rhythm andsound to the requirements of his story?

IV

TENNYSON'S DRAMAS

[Reference books for the study of the technique of the drama are easilyavailable. As preparatory work it will be well to make a careful study ofTennyson's dramatic monologues, both in the earlier and later periods. These throw a good deal of light upon his skill in making charactersdelineate themselves, and they reveal incidentally some of his methods ofdramatic narrative. For this paper, however, please confine your criticismto "Queen Mary, " "Harold, " "Becket, " "The Cup, " "The Falcon, " "The Promiseof May, " and "The Foresters. " In studying "Becket, " compare Irving's stageversion of the play (Macmillan). ]

A. Classify the themes of Tennyson's dramas. Do you think that thesethemes offer promising dramatic material? Do you regard Tennyson'sprevious literary experience as a help or a hindrance to success in thedrama?

_Nature. _ Apply what is suggested under this head in Topics I, II, andIII, to drama. 

_Man. _ Apply to the dramas what is suggested under this head in Topics IIand III, especially as regards the observation of character, theconception of characters in collision, and the sense of the variety ofhuman relationships. Do these plays give evidence of a genuine comicsense? What tragic forces seem to have made the most impression uponTennyson? Give illustrations, from the plays, of the conflict of theindividual with institutions. 

_God. _ Comment upon Tennyson's doctrine of necessity and retribution. Doeshis allotment of poetic justice show a sympathy with the moral order ofthe world? Are these plays in harmony with Tennyson's theology, asindicated elsewhere in his work? Do they contain any clear exposition ofthe problems of the religious life?

B. Compare Topic II, B. In the historical dramas, can you trace theinfluence of the poet's own personality in giving color to historicalpersonages? Compare Tennyson's delineation of any of these personages withthat of other poets, novelists, or historians. Do you think he has thepower of creating a character, in the same sense as Shakespeare had it?How much of his dramatic work do you consider purely objective, i. E. , untinged by what was called the lyric egoism?

C. What may be said in general of Tennyson's handling of the dramaticform? Has he "the dramatic sense"? Of his management of the web ofcircumstance in which the characters are involved and brought intoconflict? Comment upon his technical skill as displayed in the different"parts" and "moments" of his dramas. Does his exhibition of action fulfilldramatic requirements? Is his vocabulary suited to stage purposes? Giveinstances of his purely lyric and narrative gifts as incidentallyillustrated in his dramas. Instance passages that cannot in your opinionbe successfully acted. In your reading of these plays, or observation ofany of them that you have seen acted, are you conscious of the absence ofany quality or qualities that would heighten the pleasure they yield you?Taken as a whole, is the form of the various plays artistically inharmony with the themes employed?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This list includes the more important books and articles in English whichhave been discussed or referred to in the text. There is an excellentbibliography in Alden's _Introduction to Poetry_, and Patterson's _Rhythmin Prose_ contains a full list of the more technical articles dealing withrhythms in prose and verse. 

ALDEN, RAYMOND M. _English Verse_. New York, 1903. _An Introduction to Poetry_. New York, 1909. "The Mental Side of Metrical Form, " in _Mod. Lang. Review_, July, 1914. 

ALEXANDER, HARTLEY B. _Poetry and the Individual_. New York, 1906. 

ANDREWS, C. E. _The Writing and Reading of Verse_. New York, 1918. 

ARISTOTLE. _Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, edited by S. H. Butcher. New York, 1902. _On the Art of Poetry_, edited by Lane Cooper. Boston, 1913. 

BABBITT, IRVING. _The New Laokoon_. Boston and New York, 1910. 

BERNBAUM, ERNEST, _editor_. _English Poets of the 18th Century_. New York, 1918. 

BOSANQUET, BERNARD. _A History of Aesthetic_. New York, 1892. _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_. London, 1915. 

BRADLEY, A. C. _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_. London, 1909. 

BRAITHWAITE, WILLIAM S. , _editor_. _The Book of Elizabethan Verse_. Boston, 1907. _Anthology of Magazine Verse 1913-19_. New York, 1915. 

BRIDGES, ROBERT. _Ibant Obscurae_. New York, 1917. 

BUTCHER, S. H. (See Aristotle. )

CHILD, F. G. _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, 5 vols. , 1882-1898. 

CLARK, A. C. _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913. 

COLERIDGE, S. T. _Biographia Literaria_. Everyman edition. 

CONNELL, F. M. _A Text-Book for the Study of Poetry_. Boston, 1913. 

COOK, ALBERT S. , _editor_. _The Art of Poetry_. Boston, 1892. 

COOK, A. S. , _and_ TINKER, C. B. _Select Translations from Old English Poetry_. Boston, 1902. 

CORSON, HIRAM. _A Primer of English Verse_. Boston, 1892. 

COURTHOPE, WILLIAM J. _A History of English Poetry_. London, 1895. _Life in Poetry: Law in Taste_. London, 1901. 

COWL, R. P. _The Theory of Poetry in England_. London, 1914. 

CROCE, B. _Aesthetics_. London, 1909. 

CROLL, MORRIS W. "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose, " in _Studies in Philology_, January, 1919. See also Croll and Clemons, Preface to _Lyly's Euphues_. New York, 1916. 

DRINKWATER, JOHN. _The Lyric_. New York (n. D. ). 

EASTMAN, MAX. _Enjoyment of Poetry_. New York, 1913. 

ELTON, OLIVER W. "English Prose Numbers, " in _Essays and Studies_, by members of the English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913. 

ERSKINE, JOHN. _The Elizabethan Lyric_. New York, 1916. 

FAIRCHILD, ARTHUR H. R. _The Making of Poetry_. New York, 1912. 

GARDINER, J. H. _The Bible as English Literature_. New York, 1906. 

GATES, LEWIS E. _Studies and Appreciations_. New York, 1900. 

GAYLEY, C. M. , _and_ SCOTT, F. N. _Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism_. Boston, 1899. 

GORDON, K. _Aesthetics_. New York, 1909. 

GOSSE, EDMUND W. _English Odes_. London, 1881. 

GUMMERE, FRANCIS B. _A Handbook of Poetics_. Boston, 1885. _The Beginnings of Poetry_. New York, 1901. _The Popular Ballad_. Boston and New York, 1907. _Democracy and Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1911. 

HART, WALTER M. _Epic and Ballad_. Harvard Studies, etc. , vol. 11, 1907. See his summary of Child's views in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. _, 21, 1906. 

HAYES, ALFRED. "Relation of Music to Poetry, " in _Atlantic_, January, 1914. 

HEARN, LAFCADIO. _Kwaidan_. Boston and New York, 1904. 

HOLMES, EDMOND. _What is Poetry?_ New York, 1900. 

HUNT, LEIGH. _What is Poetry?_ edited by Albert S. Cook. Boston, 1893. 

JAMES, WILLIAM. _Psychology. _ New York, 1909. 

KITTREDGE, G. L. , _editor_. _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_. Boston, 1904. 

LA FARGE, JOHN. _Considerations on Painting_. New York, 1895. 

LANIER, SIDNEY. _Science of English Verse_. New York, 1880. _Poem Outlines_. New York, 1908. 

LEGOUIS, ÉMILE. _Défense de la Poésie Française_. London, 1912. 

LEWIS, CHARLTON M. _The Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification_, Halle, 1898. _The Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906. 

LIDDELL, M. H. _Introduction to Scientific Study of English Poetry_. New York, 1912. 

LOCKWOOD, LAURA E. , _editor_. _English Sonnets_. Boston and New York, 1916. 

LOMAX, JOHN A. _Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads_. New York, 1916. 

LOWELL, AMY. _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_. New York, 1917. _Men, Women and Ghosts_. New York, 1916. _Can Grande's Castle_. New York, 1918. 

LOWES, JOHN L. _Convention and Revolt in Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1919. 

LYLY, JOHN. _Euphues_, edited by Croll, M. W. , and Clemons, H. New York, 1916. 

MACKAIL, J. W. _The Springs of Helicon_. New York, 1909. 

MARSHALL, HENRY R. _Aesthetic Principles_. New York, 1895. 

MAYOR, J. B. _Chapters on English Metre_. London, 1886. 

MILL, J. S. "Thoughts on Poetry, " in _Dissertations_, vol. 1. 

MOORE, J. ROBERT. "The Songs in the English Drama" (Harvard Dissertation, unpublished). 

MORSE, LEWIS K. , _editor_. _Melodies of English Verse_. Boston and New York, 1910. 

NEILSON, WILLIAM A. _Essentials of Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1912. 

NEWBOLT, SIR HENRY. _A New Study of English Poetry_. New York, 1919. 

OMOND, T. S. _A Study of Metre_. London, 1903. 

PALGRAVE, FRANCIS T. _The Golden Treasury_. London, 1882. 

PANCOAST, H. S. And SPAETH, J. D. _Early English Poems_. New York, 1911. 

PATTERSON, WILLIAM M. _The Rhythm of Prose_. New York, 1916. 

PATTISON, MARK, _editor. _ _Milton's Sonnets_. New York, 1883. 

PHELPS, WILLIAM L. _The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_. Boston, 1893. 

POUND, LOUISE. "The Ballad and the Dance, " _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass_. , September, 1919. 

QUILLER-COUCH, A. T. , _editor_. _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. Oxford, 1907. 

RALEIGH, WALTER. _Wordsworth_. London, 1903. 

RAYMOND, GEORGE L. _Poetry as a Representative Art_. New York, 1886. _The Genesis of Art-Form_. New York, 1893. _Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music_. New York, 1895. 

REED, EDWARD B. _English Lyrical Poetry_. New Haven, 1912. 

RHYS, ERNEST. _Lyric Poetry_. New York, 1913. 

RHYS, ERNEST, _editor_. _The New Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics_. New York (n. D. ). 

RIBOT, T. _Essay on the Creative Imagination_. Chicago, 1906. 

RUSSELL, C. E. "Swinburne and Music, " in _North American Review_, November, 1907. 

SAINTSBURY, GEORGE. _History of English Prosody_. London, 1906-10. _History of English Prose Rhythm_. London, 1912. 

SANTAYANA, GEORGE. _The Sense of Beauty_. New York, 1896. _Interpretation of Poetry and Religion_. New York, 1900. 

SCHEMING, F. E. , _editor_. _A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics_. Boston, 1895. _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_. Boston, 1899. 

SCHELLING, F. E. _The English Lyric_. Boston and New York, 1913. 

SHACKFORD, MARTHA H. _A First Book of Poetics_. Boston, 1906. 

SHELLEY, PERCY B. _A Defense of Poetry_, edited by Albert S. Cook. Boston, 1891. 

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SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP. _The Defense of Poesy_, edited by Albert S. Cook. Boston, 1890. 

SNELL, ADA F. "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse, " in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass_. , September, 1918. 

SPINGARN, J. E. _Creative Criticism_. New York, 1917. 

STEDMAN, EDMUND C. _The Nature and Elements of Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1892. 

STEMPEL, G. H. _A Book of Ballads_. New York, 1917. 

STEWART, J. A. _The Myths of Plato_. London, 1905. 

SYMONS, ARTHUR. _The Seven Arts_. London, 1906. 

TAYLOR, HENRY O. _The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_. New York, 1901. 

TOLMAN, A. H. _Hamlet and Other Essays_. Boston, 1904. 

TOLSTOY, L. _What is Art_? New York (n. D. ). 

UNTERMEYER, LOUIS. _The New Era in American Poetry_. New York, 1919. 

WATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE. _Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder_. New York, (n. D. ). 

WELLS, CAROLYN. _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904. 

WHITMORE, C. E. Article on the Lyric in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass_. , December, 1918. 

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WILKINSON, MARGUERITE. _The New Voices_. , New York, 1919. 

INDEX

Abercrombie, LascellesAccentAdams, F. P. , free verse parody byAesthetics, and poetryAlden, R. M. _Introduction to Poetry_Aldington, RichardAlexander, Hartley B. _Poetry and the Individual_AlliterationAndrews, C. E. _Writing and Reading of Verse_Angellier, AugusteAnglo-Saxon lyrical verseAristotle _Poetics_ definition of TragedyArnold, Matthew "The Strayed Reveller"Artistic imaginationArtistic production the impulse toAsbury, SamuelAssonance

Babbitt, Irving _New Laokoon_Ballad, theBaumgarten, A. G. BeautyBeddoes, Thomas LovellBlake, WilliamBlunt, Wilfrid sonnet on GibraltarBoethius _De Consolatione Philosophiae_Bosanquet, Bernard _History of AEsthetic_Bradley, A. C. Bridges, RobertBrooke, StopfordBrownell, BakerBrowning, Robert _The Ring and the Book_Bryant, F. E. Burns, RobertButcher, S. H. _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_Bynner, WitterByron "ottava rima"

Calverley, C. S. Parody of BrowningCampion, ThomasCarlyle, ThomasChase, W. M. Chaucer, GeoffreyChaucerian stanza, theChild, F. J. _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_Chinese lyricsChopin, FrédéricChurch musicClark, A. C. _Prose Rhythm in English_Cleghorn, Sarah N. "Come, Captain Age"Colcord, LincolnColeridge, S. T. _Biographia Literaria_ _Kubla Khan_ _Christabel_Colvin, Sidney, "The Fine Arts, "Content and formCoquelin, E. H. A. Corson, Hiram_Counsel upon the Reading of Books_Courthope, W. J. , _History of English Poetry_Cowley, Abraham, Pindaric ode in EnglishCranmer-Byng, L. , _The Lute of Jade_Creative imaginationCroce, B. Croll, Morris W. 

Dances and poetryDaniel, SamuelDebussy, ClaudeDickens, CharlesDickinson, EmilyDolmetsch, ArnoldDrama lyrical element in dramatic monologueDrinkwater, JohnDryden, JohnDuran, Carolus

Ear, the, appeal toEastman, Max, _Enjoyment of Poetry_Elizabethan lyric, theElton, Oliver W. Emerson, R. W. Enjoyment of VerseErskine, JohnEuphuism"Eye-minded" or "ear-minded, "

Fairchild, A. H. R. , _Making of Poetry_Feeling, and imagination conveyed by wordsFeet, in verseFeminine rhymesFigures of speechFine arts "form" and "signficance" in the man inFirkins, O. W. FitzGerald, EdwardFletcher, John GouldForm, in the artsFort, PaulFree verse four types ofFrench song in EnglandFromentin, E. Frost, RobertFuturist poets

Gardiner, J. H. Gates, Lewis E. Genius and inspirationGiovanitti, ArturoGluck, C. W. , operaGoetheGoodell, T. D. Gosse, Edmund, definition of the odeGraphic arts and the lyricGray, ThomasGreek poetryGummere, F. B. , _Handbook of Poetics_

Hamilton, Sir W. R. , quaternionsHamletHardy, ThomasHawthorne, Nathaniel _Wonder-Book_ _Scarlet Letter_Hearn, LafcadioHebrew lyric, theHebrew poetryHenley, W. E. Herford, C. H. Hexameters EnglishHolmes, Edmond, _What is Poetry?_Holmes, Justice Oliver WendellHoraceHoratian ode, EnglishHudson, W. H. Hugo, Victor

Images, verbal selection and control of visual auditory tactile motorImagination, or imaginations the poet's and feeling creative and artistic poetic lyricImagist poetsImagist verse_In Memoriam_ stanza, theIndividualism in poetryIngersoll, Robert G. Inspiration

James, HenryJames, William an illustration fromJapanese lyricsJapanese printsJohnson, SamuelJonson, Ben

Keats, JohnKipling, Rudyard

La Farge, John, _Considerations on Painting_Lamb, CharlesLandor, Walter SavageLang, AndrewLanier, Sidney, musical theory of verse _Poem Outlines_Latin poetsLee-Hamilton, EugeneLegouis, Emile, _Défense de la Poésie FrançaiseLeighton, Sir FrederickLessing, _Laokoon_Lewis, C. M. Lindsay, Vachel "The Congo, ""Literary" languageLocke, JohnLockwood, Laura E. Lopere, Frederic A. Lowell, AmyLowes, J. L. Lyric, the field of classification definitions general characteristics objects of the lyric vision imagination expression relationships and types of lyrical element in drama and narrative and graphic arts Japanese and Chinese decay and survival Hebrew Greek and Roman of Western Europe the Elizabethan the Romantic present status of objections toMacaulay, T. B. Marinetti, F. T. Marquis, DonMasculine rhymesMasefield, JohnMasters, Edgar LeeMatthews, BranderMeredith, GeorgeMetre, and rhythm_Midsummer Night's Dream_Mill, John StuartMillet, J. F. Milton, JohnMonroe, HarrietMoody, William VaughnMoore, J. RobertMorris, WilliamMoving pictureMurray, GilbertMusic and poetry

Narrative poetryNeilson, W. A. Newbolt, Sir HenryNonsense-verse

Ode, theOmond, T. S. Orpheus and Eurydice, myth of

Page, Walter H. Palgrave, F. T. "Parallelogram of Forces, The"Pattern-instinct, thePatterson, W. M. , _Rhythm of Prose_Pattison, MarkPeacock, Thomas LovePersian carpet theory of paintingPindaric ode, EnglishPlatoPlay-instinct, thePoe, Edgar Allan"Poet, the" and other men his imagination his wordsPoetry some potencies of nature of and aesthetics an art the province of imagist Hebrew Greek and music three main types and dances of alien races _See also_ Lyric. Polyphonic prosePope, AlexanderPound, LouiseProsody and enjoymentPuttenham, George, _Arte of English Poesie_

Quantity

Racial differencesRaleigh, Prof. WalterRaymond, G. L. Real effectsReed, E. B. , _English Lyrical Poetry_Renan, ErnestRhyme, as a form of rhythmRhys, ErnestRhythm, and metre nature of measurement of of prose rhyme andRibot, Th. , _Essay on the Creative Imagination_Ripley, W. Z. Robinson, Edwin ArlingtonRomantic lyric, theRoyce, JosiahRuskin, JohnRussell, C. E. , "Swinburne and Music, "

Saintsbury, George, _History of English Prose Rhythm_Santayana, GeorgeSchelling, F. E. Scherer, EdmondScott, Sir WalterSea, a quiet, in the artsShackford, M. H. Shakspere, WilliamShelley, Percy ByssheSherman, Stuart P. Sidney, Sir PhilipSignificance, in the artsSize of poetic thoughtsSmith, L. W. Snell, Ada F. Sonnet, the Petrarchan ShakspereanSouth, RobertSpace-artsSpaced proseSpectra hoax, theSpencer, HerbertSpenser, Edmund, the "poet's poet"Spenserian stanza, theStanzaStanzaic lawStedman, E. C. Stevenson, R. L. Stewart, J. A. , _The Myths of Plato_Story, W. W. Stress, in verse"Stressers, "Subjectivity and the lyricSwinburne, A. S. Syllabic principle of versification

Taine, H. A. TassoTaylor, Henry OsbornTeasdale, SaraTechniqueTennyson, AlfredThinking without wordsThompson, FrancisThoreau, H. D. Time-arts"Timers"Tolman, A. H. TolstoyTone-colorTone-feelingTynan, Katharine, "Planting Bulbs"

Verbal imagesVoice-waves, photographs of

Walton, IsaacWatts, G. F. Watts-Dunton, TheodoreWells, CarolynWhistler, JamesWhitefield, GeorgeWhitman, WaltWhitmore, C. E. Whitney, W. D. WhittlingWilkinson, Florence, _New Voices_Words, the poet's how they convey feeling as current coin an imperfect medium unpoetic embodiment of poetic feeling sound-values and meaning-valuesWordsworth, WilliamWyatt, Edith