Part 3 (1/2)
Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of _Tristram Shandy_ a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a poet more because of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ than the _Deserted Village_.
Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry without absolutely being poetry, instancing _Robinson Crusoe_, _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _Decameron_.
Heine spoke of _Don Quixote_ as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called _Wilhelm Meister_ poetry. Brandes regards Lord Beaconsfield a poet.
Matthew Arnold characterized Chateaubriand, Senancour and Guerin poets.
Balzac considered himself a poet and Ibsen in mentioning his prose dramas often used the word ”poems.”
The habit of calling productions in metre or rhythm poetry has been so strongly ingrained in us that we denominate every lengthy performance in verse a poem _in toto_. Before Poe, Coleridge said that ”a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry.” Poe gave us the reasons for this proposition and demonstrated to us that a long epic poem is but a series of short poems connected by uninspired pa.s.sages in metre. The same thing may be said of literary verse performances of moderate length. To those who object to using the word ”poem” in connection with any prose composition one may reply that these, like verse productions, are also often made up of poetical parts here and there; they simply lack regular rhythm and this is not a sufficient line of demarcation as to what const.i.tutes poetry and what does not.
There are many short stories in verse which are known as poems while there are many poetical tales and sketches in prose which no one finds to be poetry, although they often contain more of it than many specimens in measure. I think Poe's _Eleonora_ with its description of the Valley of Many Colored Gra.s.s and Hawthorne's _Haunted Mind_ are greater poems, though in prose, than most of Holmes' and Bryant's verse poems are. I see no reason why we should not designate as poetry, prose tales where ecstasy and emotion predominate. Kipling's _Brushwood Boy_ or Bret Harte's _Outcasts of Poker Flat_ is as poetical, I believe, as any tale in Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The same laws of emotional appeal are working in the one as in the other; a similar artistic stamp is printed on all these stories. In fact, Longfellow's tales are inferior in the quality and quant.i.ty of poetry to the stories specified.
His compositions could easily be arranged in prose and the stories of Kipling or Harte could be transposed into metrical verse. The transfer would not affect the poetry in either of them.
It is a confused system of literary cla.s.sification which does not permit calling these tales of Harte and Kipling poetry, but crowns the same writers' doggerel verses like _The Heathen Chinee_ and _Fuzzy Wuzzy_ with the t.i.tle ”poems.”
To bring sharply before the reader's mind the idea that a piece in verse is often not poetry and that a prose pa.s.sage frequently is a poem, I will quote at random two pa.s.sages.
One is from a work that is rich with poetry and written by one of England's greatest poets and yet the particular section, though in metre, is but a dry statement of facts. I quote from Wordsworth's _Michael_, one of the finest things in English literature, yet unpoetical in the first part:
Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen, And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men.
Here are unpoetical lines which might have been written in prose, but Wordsworth had to give us some preliminary information so that we could follow his story. Incidentally, he has the reputation for having much prosy material in the body of his work.
The other pa.s.sage I quote is purposely a translation from a foreign novel and yet it has not lost any of its poetry. The paragraph, of which I give part, is a poem and part of a larger one in prose. It is from D'Annunzio's _Triumph of Death_ and describes the music in Wagner's ”Tristan and Isolde”:
And in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed.
The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more restless poignant anxiety pa.s.sed over all the instruments and expressed a continual and ever vain effort to attain the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every grasp, although it shone ever so near, etc.
I shall show more fully that our definitions of what is poetry and what is a poem have been faulty. The error is so perceptible that it is surprising that so few critics have detected it. Meanwhile I will give my definitions:
_Poetry is not a department of literature in the sense that the novel or the essay or the drama is, but is an atmosphere which bathes literature whenever ecstasy and emotion are present. It is not a distinct division of art as literature, music or painting is, for poetry is the very essence of all these arts whether it is transmitted by words, sounds or colors. It is the ecstatic emotional spirit which pervades all good literature (or any of the arts) whether in verse or prose, in their finest parts. It is an aesthetic quality which gives tone to a literary work or any portion or portions of it. It may exist without figures of speech, rhyme, metre or rhythm.[52:A] Its most natural language is prose or free verse._ Let us have no more such cla.s.sification of literature as fiction, drama, essay, criticism, _poetry_, etc. There is fiction in verse and there is prose fiction; there are verse dramas and prose plays, etc., and any of these may be steeped in poetry. However, the customary lyric verse may be comprised under the heading of poetry not because of the measure, but on account of the poetic emotion that usually characterizes it. Let us also not speak of the arts like music, painting, sculpture and poetry when instead of the last we mean literature, for poetry is a quality of all the arts including literature. Poetry is the spirit of ecstasy and emotion which pervades the arts like music, painting, sculpture and literature, and hence it may be found in every branch of literature whether in verse or prose, like the drama, fiction and the essay.
We are now in a position to define what a poem is. Critics are agreed that it must consist of the artistic expression of words which arouse the reader's emotion, but they have insisted that these words be rhythmically arranged. I think if the latter limitation is withdrawn, all our confusion as to what is a poem will disappear. _A poem is any literary composition, whether in verse or prose, which as a whole is an imaginative creation, a vehicle of emotion, an expression of ecstasy; or that portion or every portion of such a composition where the emotion or ecstasy has been concentrated. It does not follow that the work as a whole is necessarily poetry. Its most natural language is prose or free verse._
Poems may therefore be found in imaginative philosophical works like Plato's _Symposium_, _Phaedrus_, _Republic_ and other dialogues, Bacon's _Essays_, Schopenhauer's _World as Will and Idea_, Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, Emerson's _Essays_, in critical works like Pater's _Renaissance_, Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, Wilde's _Intentions_, in histories like Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French Revolution_, in autobiographies like St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and Rousseau's _Confessions_, in letters like Madame Lespina.s.se's and Mrs.
Browning's, in diaries like those of Amiel, in novels by Balzac, d.i.c.kens, Hawthorne, Hardy, Tolstoy, etc.
Some of the best poetry is found in the world's prose fiction. For example, _The Scarlet Letter_ has as good poetry in it as the _Aeneid_.
Like the old epic, it is made up of great poems connected by extended portions that belongs to general literature, sections that have not enough emotion to be regarded as poetry nor are yet arid or pa.s.sionless enough to be termed science. But the story of Hester Prynne is poetry as truly as the tale of Dido, and undoubtedly you cannot refuse the appellation poetry to the chapter in Hawthorne's novel which describes how Arthur Dimmesdale gets up in the pulpit and confesses to the congregation his part in Hester Prynne's guilt. The _Aeneid_ is really a novel in verse.
We are not often moved by metrical writing as we are by the last part of the chapter in _David Copperfield_ ent.i.tled, ”A Greater Loss,” where we see the agonizing grief of the elder Pegotty and of Ham over the elopement of Emily, Ham's betrothed. You recall the love scene telling of the meeting of Richard and Lucy in Meredith's novel _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, only as poetry. This is how the pa.s.sage, which being rhythmical besides, begins:
Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters.
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and the planes and the beeches lucid green, and the pine stems redder gold; leaving the brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded barks, where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline, and the bramble shoots wander amid moist rich herbage, etc.
If the sphere of poetry has thus been widened to include many compositions in prose formerly excluded, it has, on the other hand, been narrowed by omitting much in verse that was formerly admitted into the domain of the Muses. I refer especially to the whole body of unecstatic philosophical, scientific and theological discourses in verse which usurp a name not belonging to them; I refer to much descriptive and narrative verse that lacks the poetic glow; I would exclude nearly all of the so-called ”light,” ”occasional” and ”humorous” verse. Winnow the voluminous verse writers and but a modic.u.m of poetry remains.
Critics as a rule agree that neither rhythm nor metre makes a literary performance poetical if the author's soul does not enter into the work, but they refuse to countenance the corollary that when unrhythmical prose is used as a medium for the singer's poetical sentiments the result should also be called poetry. It is an easy matter to arrange any fine poetical prose in blank verse or irregular rhythmical lines. Just a few slight verbal changes are necessary. The new product then fulfills the conditions of the old theory which demands metre or rhythm. Does it become poetry because of these unimportant changes? No, these do not work so miraculous an effect upon the writing. It acquires no higher qualities than it had before in prose.