Part 2 (2/2)
”Hebrew poetry is Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.
'Ecstasy affords The occasion and expediency determines the form.'”
MARIANNE MOORE in _Others_ (1916).
CHAPTER III
ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY
Aristotle was the first critic who placed little stress on the importance of metre in poetry. If the critics had followed him, instead of merely referring to his _Poetics_ and trying to discover the ”borderland between prose and poetry,” there probably would have been little confusion as to what is poetry. He saw there was poetry in the prose mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and in the dialogues of Socrates, though these were not cla.s.sified as poetry. Incidentally he found little poetry in Empedocles, who in spite of his metre was primarily a physicist. The pa.s.sage from the _Poetics_ is worth quoting entire for it contains the nucleus of all arguments for prose poetry. I quote from S.
H. Butcher's translation:
For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegaic, or any similar metre. People, do, indeed, add the word ”make” or ”poet” to the name of the metre, and speak of elegaic poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, _as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that ent.i.tles them all indiscriminately to the name_.[42:A] Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as Chaeremon did in his _Centaur_, which is a medley composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet.
He also says: ”The Poet or maker should be the maker of plots rather than of verse; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates is actions.”
Aristotle's idea that metre is an unessential element in determining poetry has never really taken root in literary criticism. It was voiced by men like Erasmus and Savonarola, and was again restated by the Italian critic Castelvetro, who in his commentary on Aristotle's _Poetics_ (1570) said that verse is not the essence of poetry, that it does not distinguish it but clothes it, and that therefore matter and not metre is the test of poetry. He believes like Aristotle, that metre aids poetry, but that the imitation or creation itself determines it.
George Saintsbury in his scholarly and fascinating _History of Criticism in Europe_ cannot forgive Aristotle for this ”pestilent heresy,” as he calls it. He severely berates Wordsworth and Coleridge for having supported it. He attacks all the critics who countenance it. He adulates Dante's treatise _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ as an antidote to the heresy, because Dante wants the rhythm (as well as the diction) of poetry to be different from that of prose.
But we are learning to-day that metre is not only an unnecessary element in poetry, but often an artificial, hampering enc.u.mbrance, frequently vitiating the poetical quality of a poem.
Yet Professor Saintsbury has given us in his _History of English Prose Rhythm_ some of the finest emotional and rhythmical pa.s.sages from English prose writers. He chose the selections primarily for their rhythm and not for their emotional qualities, yet most of the pa.s.sages are poems. His book practically convinces one that nearly all the great English writers of prose wrote not only rhythmical prose, but emotional or ecstatic prose, or poetry. Professor Saintsbury finds the essence of prose rhythm, in variety and divergence, and he divides prose into three kinds, according to the rhythm. These are hybrid verse-prose, pure highly rhythmed prose, and prose in general. In the first cla.s.s he includes much of the Bible, especially where the parallelisms are present, Anglo Saxon poetry, Ossian, Blake's _Prophetic Books_ and Walt Whitman. He no doubt would include free verse here. But this so-called ”hybrid verse prose” is really highly rhythmed prose generally arranged in verse form. There is no real distinction between the two forms.
Poetry in prose, however, does not depend on the rhythm. The only effect on the reader of reading the chapter on ”Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry” in Professor Gummere's book _The Beginnings of Poetry_ is to convince him that the learning ama.s.sed there does not prove the professor's thesis. For example Gummere cites Bagehot's statement, ”the exact line which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer's Field_ or _Enoch Arden_ from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ and _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence,” and thus comments: ”Adam Bede remains prose, and Enoch Arden is commonly set down as poetry and there an end.” This impatient remark does not do away with the fact that the story of Hetty's troubles after she had met Arthur Dimmesdale, and the scene of the interview with her in prison by Dinah Morris are two examples that fulfill every definition of poetry, even to irregular rhythm. Some of the free verse poets have given us compositions made up of the outbursts of people in distress, with their story in simple language like Hetty Sorrel's tale.
My contention then is that what decides whether a composition is poetry is not the rhythm but the ecstasy. The academic critics have found an argument for rhythm in the fact that when a man is moved, the expression of his emotions tends towards rhythmical language. This is certainly very often true, but the rhythmical character of language in these cases is entirely different from that in verse, for in verse you have a patterned regular rhythm obeying an artificial law of accents, a continued series of rise and ebb of the voice that must not break down for hundreds and even thousands of monotonous lines. In the rhythm of the natural language of emotion you have no rules or fetters on how the accents should be distributed. You have rhythmical and unrhythmical lines, regular and irregular arrangements of accents, all thrown together. No pattern is present, and no uniformity or similarity of any kind is kept up. This is the language of poetic prose.
If I say that rhythm is not necessary in poetry, I merely mean that no patterned or strong rhythm is necessary, for all prose is more or less irregularly rhythmical. Often the prose rhythm is more marked than the rhythm of metre, as you may find out by comparing pa.s.sages from Whitman or Pater with let us say some of the blank verse of Wordsworth.
Professor Patterson claimed that all prose has rhythm, and he called prose ”syncopated rhythm.” He rightly pointed out that pa.s.sages of prose have a rhythm which in nowise differs from the rhythm of free verse. He refuses to regard free verse, as some seek to do, as a third medium for poetic expression. He shows that the arrangement of free verse into irregular lines merely calls attention to the rhythms. All prose may be arranged as free verse and all free verse as prose. Since such is the case, all literature of ecstasy in prose has rhythm besides ecstasy and should certainly be called poetry. Dr. Patterson made one error, however, to which Dr. Cary F. Jacob calls attention in her _Foundations and Nature of Verse_. Prose may have rhythm but it has no continuity of progress in the rhythms, which must eventually break down; it has no intention of continuous rhythmic flow. But poetry, I urge, may exist in prose without a continuity of progress of rhythms or even without rhythm at all--(after all, in spite of Dr. Patterson, there is unrhythmical prose).
The view that rhythm is vital to poetry is fallacious. Accentuation at unequal intervals of time no more creates or heightens poetic fervor than, as was formerly supposed, measured stress on syllables did so. If the prime motive of an unrhythmical prose work, in whole or part, is the communication of an emotion or the ecstatic treatment of an idea, that production is emphatically a poem; or at least some portions of it are separately ent.i.tled to that name. If you deny it you will be compelled to maintain that the able unrhythmical prose translations we have of the Greek and Latin poets contain no poetry. In fact the best way to judge if a composition in verse is poetry is, as Goethe and Hearn said, to translate it into the prose of another language; if poetic emotions are not then revealed, rest a.s.sured that they were never present in the original work. When the rhyme, metre and rhythm have been abstracted and the poetic fire still glows almost undiminished, we have the best proof, first that its existence did not depend upon the use of verbal measures and sounds, and secondly, that the poetry is not lost even when transferred into the prose of another tongue.
The first question the reader will now ask is: ”Well, what then const.i.tutes the difference between prose and poetry if you take away the distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of rhythm?” And some misguided critics a.s.sert that the term prose poetry is a hybrid and a contradiction in terms. The embarra.s.sment of the former and the misconception of the latter will disappear if they remember that the opposite of prose is not poetry, but verse or metre. As Coleridge said, science is the proper ant.i.thesis of poetry. An unemotional presentation of dull facts is, however, the real ant.i.thesis.
Poetry is absolutely independent of any adornment it may be given, such as rhyme, metre, or, as I am especially trying to show, rhythm; even though it is true that emotional language may tend to become rhythmical.
Verse is simply an ordering of words so that the modulation by the voice especially attracts the ear by the regularity of stress. We have stories, dramas and essays in different measures of verse just as we have them in prose. Description, narration, exposition, even argument and exclamation, appear in verse as well as in prose. There are, as it has always been recognized, innumerable products in verse that from the nature of their contents are dest.i.tute of the attributes of poetry.
Humorous and didactic efforts, mere jokes or commonplace sermons, do not become poetical because they are put in metre or rhythm. Abstract philosophy, concrete science and barren theology remain arid and unemotional discourses even in the epics of Dante and Milton. A bare and not particularly interesting statement of facts or a procession of dull and plat.i.tudinous ideas is, even in verse, anything but poetry. In the range of the world's metrical writings the poems are few and far between.
On the other hand, it has always been recognized that there were prose compositions that partook of the nature of poetry or were replete with poetical parts. It was difficult to cla.s.sify this literature, for the extreme beauty and emotion which pervaded it lifted it above ordinary prose and yet because of the absence of measure it was not cla.s.sified as poetry. The first English critic who perceived that the authors of such work were really poets and should be designated by their appropriate name was Sir Philip Sidney. He showed that verse was but an ornament and did not make poetry, and that there were many poets, among whom he named Xenophon, who never versified. Sh.e.l.ley, however, has given the widest vogue to the feeling that the distinction between poets and prose writers was a vulgar error. He maintained that philosophers like Bacon and Plato, historians like Herodotus, Plutarch and Livy, authors of revolutions in opinion such as Jesus and Rousseau, were poets.
Coleridge held that the object of poetry was to communicate pleasure, and remarked: ”But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romance. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, ent.i.tle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. . . .
The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the _Theoria Sacra_ of Burnet, furnish undeniable proof that poetry of the highest kind may last without metre, and even without the contradistinguis.h.i.+ng objects of a poem.”
”There are also prose poets,” said Emerson in his essay on ”Poetry and Imagination” in _Letters and Social Aims_. ”Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had the magnanimity to say, 'If Burke and Bacon were not poets (measured lines not being necessary to const.i.tute one), he did not know what poetry meant.' And every good reader will easily recall expressions or pa.s.sages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets.”
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