tion or creation of a new rhythm or trope for the one used by the old poet; such changes are of minor importance. No doubt our contemporary poets have done away with many conventions. They no longer employ inversions of words and phrases, nor cultivate the stock poetical terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic license. They no longer tolerate clichés such as whenas, o'er, whatime, dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, main, taen, athwart, e'en, forsooth, alack, oh thou, didst, hath, perchance, methinks, steed, gleeds, prithee, trow, 'neath, 'gainst, ween, wist, espy, twixt. But it took them a long time to discover what the prose writers always knew; namely, that distorted speech should be avoided in literature. But the avoidance of clichés does not make a poet.

Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy Lowell are artificial in substance and manner, labored and uninspired, dull and bookish, and lacking in human interest, ecstasy and ideas. Their technique may be different from that of the old poets, but these new writers often have no ideas, reveal no poetic personality, and convey no emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, and as a result they fall below even the old New England poets whom they despise. A poet like Longfellow may be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of such human interest as Evangeline, presents an idea against war as in The Arsenal at Springfield, or draws on his personal life in such fine lyrics as My Lost Youth, The Bridge, The Day is Done, he moves us and we know we are reading poetry, though it has not the emancipating and stimulating effect of some of the work of Walt Whitman, Lafcadio Hearn, by the way, condemned the tendency to depreciate Longfellow.

Many of our free verse writers produce no great poetry, even though they write in a medium that is the proper language of poetry. The opponents of the free verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's productions, are often right; these productions are not poetry because they lack ecstasy and ideas. Much of the work in the old forms produced to-day has more ecstasy, and hence it is poetry.

Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence to-day is outside the scope of this volume.

There has been much comment about the fact that we need and indeed are getting an American or national poetry. Now one of the things that Whitman has overdone was this demand for poetry that is distinctly American. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man first. A great idea like a passage in the Song of Myself could have been written by and can be appreciated by the people of another nation. A cry of sympathy for the sufferings of animals and man such as you find in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is not an American but a human note.

You can translate a love poem from the Greek, Latin, German, French or Italian into English prose, and if you remove the proper names or other unessential adjuncts, no expert or scholar will be able to tell what nationality the poem represents. No one has better shown the hollowness of the claimants for nationalism than James Russell Lowell in two essays on nationality in literature, one written in sympathetic review of Longfellow's Kavanagh and collected in The Round Table, and another in review of Piatt's poems, collected in The Function of the Poet.

Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely national poetry. True, there are national traits and char

acteristics, modes of thought and feeling peculiar to different peoples, that enter into and distinguish every literature, but these do not usually make one literature so national as to be incomprehensible to other nations. When this does happen, the product has no universal appeal and hence is not great poetry. Again poetry may have local color; it may be steeped in national traditions, it may express a racial philosophy but it is then of value only in so far as it represents the mode of thinking and feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in the soil, be an indigenous product, depict native customs or a provincial life; it may depict certain types of heroes, and glory in the country of its birth, and describe its richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is universal, though it may be colored by national traits, though one nation may feel more keenly, or indulge a certain emotion more frequently than others. The heart and the head, the emotions and the mind, rule in writing. The Old Testament and Shakespeare are no longer national products for they speak to the whole world. They have the local color and the ideas of their time and depict a certain phase of life, but we all feel in reading these books that they are written about ourselves and to ourselves. "We have spoken too much about nationalist art, forgetting that though the roots may lie in nationality and personality, the results, independent of school and nation, should overleap boundaries and enter the universal heart." (Isaac Goldberg, Studies in Spanish-American Literature.)

Poetry then grows out of the soil, but like imported fruit tastes as well to the man a thousand miles away as to the native.

The literature of a country however should be indi

vidualistic, not imitative. Whitman is an American poet in the sense of recording his own individualty, while Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a Whitman rather than a Lowell who could have written the following passages, which appear in the famous Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever man and woman exist—but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of the ages are worthy the grand idea-to them it is confided, and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it.

I do not mean that the author of that bold poem in the first Bigelow Paper, against the recruiting sergeant, and of the lecture on Democracy, was not, in spite of his dislike of Whitman, in accord with the above quoted passage. Nor do I mean that he could not have learned to write a passage like that from the nation which gave us such fine prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's Areopagitica, Locke's Letters on Toleration, Jeremy Taylor's Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, Mill's Liberty and Morley's Compromise. But Whitman was the first American poet who taking his cue from American political documents embodied in his poetry views of political and individual liberty, as the fruit of democracy. Even Whitman stopped short of championing economic liberty. Some of his present-day disciples do champion it. But Whitman's plea for liberty does not make him a national poet, for European poets have also sung of liberty.

CHAPTER X

LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE

UNCONSCIOUS

ARISTOTLE'S best known contribution to literary criticism is his statement that tragedy has the effect of a catharsis upon the reader and helps him to discharge emotions of pity and fear that overburden him. We have considerably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose or verse, in dialogue or narrative. We believe that perusing literature in general relieves the reader of all nerveracking emotions and produces a homeopathic effect upon him by the aesthetic voicing of his unconscious feelings.

Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, gives us a good survey of several Italian commentators who correctly interpreted Aristotle's view of the purgation of the emotions of fear and pity as aesthetic, and not ethical. The first of these critics was Robortelli (1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him, while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity and fear, holding men in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These men anticipated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth century, who destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that Aristotle had in mind the moral purification and reformation of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously thought that this was Aristotle's meaning.