"all" prose have the same effect upon the responsive mechanism of the human soul, if they both arouse ecstasy, it matters not if you refuse to call the prose passage poetry; its effect is however that of poetry. It stirs and moves you to rapture, it is a product of the author's unconscious, it speaks from soul to soul, it is beautiful in its expressiveness, it has a rhythm of its own. I shall not be concerned if you refuse to call this emotional prose passage poetry, but it does belong to the literature of ecstasy, and ecstasy was and is the first condition of poetic composition. The poetry in verse is but part of the literature of ecstasy. I shall hence deal in this volume largely with emotional or impassioned prose; for it belongs to the literature of ecstasy, although it is often termed poetic prose, or sometimes disparagingly, prose poetry. Under this term I shall include not only the so-called "fine writing" but emotional passages in the language of the average man, dialogues from prose dramas, novels and short stories, and I shall also regard criticism, essays and works on science and philosophy highly charged with feeling as part of the province of the literature of ecstasy. This work becomes thus a treatise on poetics, and will present a new definition of poetry which will include all emotional prose writing. A very important phase of the subject will take in the connection between poetry or the literature of ecstasy, and various spheres of human thought, such as ethical and social questions. The dea will be shown to be an important factor in the literature of ecstasy, for ecstasy does not preclude the intellectual and moral activities. The notion of art for art's sake thus assumes a rather trivial aspect. Any idea whether scientific or philosophic, moral or social, if ecstatically presented, becomes itself literature of ecstasy, or poetry. Exp Croce Should the reader conclude to accept the prose literature of ecstasy as poetry, he will find there was much poetry in the world's prose literature that he has never recognized as such. He will also be compelled to admit that much of what has been called poetry, because written in verse, does not properly belong to poetry, as not being of the literature of ecstasy. He will also see that the artificial classifications of the different kinds of poetry, such as epic, dramatic, pastoral, satirical, the ode, the sonnet, the ballad, the didactic poem, the idyl, the elegy, etc., were based on fallacies and were confusing and erroneous. There is only one species of poetry, the utterance of the ecstatic state, and this is always personal, whether in verse or prose, and hence, has a lyrical quality. If the poet gives the utterances of other people in ecstatic states, these also are lyrics. Hence every composition whether in verse or prose, that records ecstasy here and there, is lyrical in those parts where the ecstasy is de-. picted. The distinction between prose and verse will be more clearly defined, if we refer to the poetry that is written in both these forms as poetry in verse, and poetry in prose. Sidney, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Whitman, all of whom, besides being great poets themselves, were probably the greatest critics of poetry in the English language, took cognizance of the fact that the great emotional prose writers of the world were poets. But most of the critics have resented this attitude and have gone on in the unjust classifications that recognize as a poet the petty rhymster, who is often barren of both emotions and ideas. They also deny the glorious epithet of poet to many great prose masters of the delineation of human passions. The question of free verse, naturally will come in for consideration. I shall show that it is really rhythmical prose arranged so as to call attention to the rhythms. I believe, however, that the free verse writers have a right to make such linear arrangement. The bulk of the poetry of the future may very likely be written in free. verse forms, or in prose. If much of the free verse of to-day fails in being poetry, it is not because of the form, but because there is no ecstasy in it, or in the poet's soul. Most of the poetry of the Bible is really in free verse; it is poetry, however, not because of the free verse, but because it presents universal phases of human ecstasy. I have expressly ignored most of the great authors who wrote epics and dramas in verse, and also most of the great English verse poets, for I wish to arrive at a conception of poetry chiefly from prose examples. Most critics have assumed that they could never learn what poetry was unless they gave examples from men like Homer and Shakespeare, Sophocles and Dante, Spenser and Milton. I rarely quote from them, not because I do not recognize the greatest poetry in these authors, but because I wish to show that one may arrive at a true conception of the nature of poetry by illustrations from prose writers of ecstatic literature alone. Although I feel that the artificial verse forms hamper instead of beautify the expression of the poet's emotions, I do not think that such forms ever will be, nor need be utterly abandoned. Man will always love a ringing, rhyming ballad or song. I have devoted a chapter to the poetry of the most poetical nation, the Arabs; their poets produced the anomaly of utilizing the most artificial metres, and yet never lost sight of the fact that ecstasy was the very life of the poem. Probably no poets in the world have pro duced such exquisite love poetry as the Arabs; they have also had great influence on modern European poetry, for it is being recognized that modern romantic fiction, especially in its employment of the tenderness of the love sentiment as a frequent theme, was transplanted from them. Poetry is the soul of literature, and we should cease limiting the term to rhythmical or patterned productions, and apply it to emotional writing in general. No term for the word poet in any language that I am acquainted with includes in its etymological significance the idea of rhythm or metrical pattern. The Hebrew word for poet is one who utters prophecies or parables; the Greek word signifies a "maker"; the Latin word "seer," the Arabian word "one who knows." Critics of the Bible have especially recognized that the chief characteristic of both the true and the false prophet (Nabi) was the ecstatic state; the Bible itself is of course authority for this fact. The inferior prophet was one, however, in whom the ecstatic state was hypnotically produced, in whom the rational and moral faculties were suspended; the great prophets were those in whom a powerful sense of social justice was illuminated by the ecstatic state; hence the prophecies of the Bible are not orations wherein rhetoric is a factor, but genuine literature of ecstasy, or poetry in rhythmical prose, using parallelism. I need not continue to give analyses of the Greek "poetes," the Latin "vates," or the Arabian "shair," for it has been usually conceded that these words all refer in their primary significance to the imaginative work, or ecstatic state of the author, and not to the mere dabbler in verse forms. With theories of poetry being a product of the uncon scious, as developed by Freud and his disciples, or as being expression as advanced by Croce, my task does not become so utterly devoid of reason as may appear at first sight. One must not forget that the critics of poetry have formed their conceptions of poetry by deducing rules from the verse poems of the world's literature. Instead of looking ahead, they have always looked back. Whenever a new great poet appeared, like Wordsworth, Whitman or Ibsen for instance, they had to modify their theories, and to revise their books on poetics and rhetoric. If the productions of Homer and Æschylus had been entirely different, we no doubt would have had other conceptions of poetry prevailing. Yet it is only by mere accident that Homer dealt with gods, wars, mythical events and employed dactylic hexameter. It is again also by pure chance that Eschylus used various metres, made Prometheus and the Furies living beings, was sponsor for a philosophy of divine punishment and often indulged in artificial diction. Had these poets written novels instead, conveying just as much genius and ecstasy as they did in their verse works, the critics of poetry would have deduced an entirely different conception of it. To Democritus belongs the honor of having first recognized among the Greeks that ecstasy is the condition of the poet. To Plato goes the distinction for having fully developed this theory. Aristotle accepted also the view that poetry is ecstasy. The author of the ancient treatise On the Sublime perceived that the characteristic of poetic genius is in the arousing of the ecstatic state. He says, in a passage which deserves citation: "For it is not to persuasion (i. e., rhetoric) but to ecstasy that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer." But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the prose form of poetry, but with poetry as |