Part 5

Proper conception and appreciation of the poetic, whether in objects of nature or in the mirror of words reflecting the human heart, presupposes a delicate and divinely wrought nature tuned to the touch of the Maker’s hand. Only such a beauty-loving soul finds responsive a chord to the soul of beauty that dwells in the bodying words of poetry. The finer the soul, the finer the music. To possess this light-receiving and radiant Divinity is to possess at once both the highest attainment of human culture and aspiration and the greatest gift of God. It is thus at the same time both a growing seed and the seed’s growth. That is, the poetic soul is both a gift divine and a cultivation of it consecrated to the Divine Giver. Or, in other words, the poet is both born and made. _Poeta nascitur non fit_--the poet is born, not made--is true in this sense and in no other; for the feelings, the gifts of the poet, are the gifts of every human soul in greater or less degree. Else the proverb is not true, and we must say, _Poeta nascitur et fit_; which would, no doubt, be equally misunderstood. But _Poeta nascitur non fit_ is true; and if, instead of being translated literally, it is rendered in an explanatory way, it means simply:--“The poet possesses the same faculties that others do; but the poetic faculty in him at birth is more highly developed than it is in others, and is consequently susceptible of a higher degree of cultivation. If the poetic faculty is naturally slight or insignificant at birth, no amount of cultivating and polishing can create, or make, a poet of its possessor.” This is the ancient meaning, and the only sensible meaning, the meaning accepted by all who understand the subject.

To see it from a different angle. The true poet has both genius and talent--or rather, genius has the poet and compels the poet to have talent. Genius is the divine gift; talent is the cultivation. Genius--poetic genius--, the highest harmonious union of the feelings, is the part of the poet that is born; talent, the ability to reveal that genius, is the part that is cultivated, or made. Genius is power; talent is skill. The man of poetic genius cannot help writing; the man of poetic talent can help it, but won’t. That’s the main difference.

If you can’t help writing, nine chances out of nine you are a poet, and are unconscious of your great power from the simple fact that it is natural to you. If you can help writing, don’t write; for you are evidently no poet, though you may have talent, and may believe (very likely will) from the unnaturalness of it that you are great.

The genius which forces the poet to write is the same genius that is ever reaching out of the poem and beckoning us upwards. Thus much for the present as to what constitutes the poet.

Now as to poetry. Though we cannot hope to arrive at the seat of its mysterious fountain of inspiration and bind its hidden springs of immortality, we shall nevertheless, in earnest search, by upward, honest, toilsome flight, at least behold the beauty-embodying mountain heights whence its rivers of eternal glory flow, and whither the soul must ever soar to drink of its purest living waters;--waters that purify mortality and reflect Divinity, and make the soul bathed in them and drunken of them better know its own vastness, grandeur, and divinity.

Until the soul by this upward flight shall have beheld itself thus divinely reflected in the immortal streams of poetry, it can never feel and know its own vastness, its infinitude. Likewise, until it shall have bathed in and drunk of these mighty purifying waters of goodness, truth, and beauty, the soul can never know the divinity and immortality of poetry. Thus, if the soul know not the one, it cannot know the other; the two knowledges are reciprocal.

It may be said æsthetically and as nearly scientifically as it can well be said, that poetry is naturally rhythmical and metrical imaginative language interpreting the Divine in the human heart. This defines at once, as nearly as can well be defined in a single sentence, the Form (or mechanism), the Spirit, and the Mission of poetry.

Form we can define and anatomize, just as we can define and anatomize the human body. The spirit of poetry we cannot define and anatomize, just as we cannot define and anatomize the human soul. Form alone cannot constitute a poem, just as body alone cannot constitute a man. Spirit alone may constitute poetry (in the abstract) though not a concrete poem, just as the soul alone may constitute life though not a living man. Just as both body and soul are necessary to constitute a man, so also both form and spirit are necessary to constitute any of his visible art-creations, as a poem.

FORM.

The requisites of form are rhythm and metre. The accidents of form are rhyme (consonance), assonance, stanza, alliteration, onomatopœia, etc., etc.

Rhythm has to do with the kind of feet in a line, while metre has to do with the number of feet in a line. Rhythm corresponds with the regular rise and fall of the waves of the sea, each wave-length being counted a poetic foot. Metre corresponds with the swell of the sea, composed of several successive waves. Thus metre is, after all, a kind of rhythm,--the larger ebb and flow of rhythm.

The accidents of form, such as rhyme, stanza, alliteration, etc., we find worthily and advantageously used in much true poetry, as well as worthlessly used in the tawdry puppet-shows of mere mechanicians;--those persons who, having nothing to say, yet attempting to say something, mistake rhyme for sense, a tickling jingle for meaning, their desire to create for the creative power. They do not rightly read nor well heed the trite epigrammatic precept, “When you have nothing to say, say it.”

But these accidents of form, I say, are sometimes material aids to the thought; indeed, always are when used not for their own sakes but for the meaning’s sake. Notwithstanding this fact, many of our greatest poems, such as Paradise Lost and others on the epic order, as well as many not epic, lack these accidents either wholly or in part.

On the other hand, rhythm and metre are found in all poetic forms, and are the only two elements of the form of poetry that are thus found. Hence, rhythm and metre are not only essentials but they are the only essentials of form, and constitute the complete body in which the spirit of poetry naturally and inevitably clothes itself. They are, therefore, just as necessary to poetry in its concrete or visible forms as the spirit is.

But since rhythm and metre are thus essential to a poem, it is the common custom to call anything poetry that has this external appearance of the poetic.

This is a misapplication of terms. There is so much trash masquerading in the poetic garb that this misapplication inevitably throws ridicule upon true poetry.

Rhythm, when carried to excess and when used not for the meaning’s sake, the feeling’s sake, but for the rhythm’s sake alone, becomes simply jingle; quite invariably a rhyming jingle at that.

Metre, in company with rhythm and rhyme, is often diverted from its true purpose and used solely to jiggle some fact or some epigram into the memory, as illustrated by “Thirty days,” etc., and by all other didactic metrical arrangements, as mentioned farther on.

But rhymes and jingles and metrical arrangements are not poetry. They are simply members of the form, the dancing legs and arms of the body, sometimes possessed of life with an indwelling guiding spirit, and sometimes whittled out of wood and set in motion by an inspiring string. These senseless puppets, or jumping-jacks, sometimes, indeed often, tickle the mob by their lively antics; but the great final judgment of humanity relegates them to the rubbish-heap and forgets their ephemeral and unlovely existence.

It is, I say, a misnomer to dignify such by the name of poetry. The proper name is verse. Whatever is rhythmical and metrical, whether it has any of the accidents of form or not, is verse. Hence, all poetry is verse, but not all verse is poetry. Indeed, not one ten-thousandth part of verse is poetry; for the requisite of verse is simply form,--the body into which the spirit must enter ere it becomes poetry. To illustrate,--

“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,” etc.,

has the form of poetry without the slightest touch of the poetic spirit; thus constituting verse, simple and pure. It requires no penetration to perceive that it is not poetry, though I doubt not that nine hundred ninety-nine out of every thousand have called that stanza in the usual loose way “a verse of poetry.”

But it is not only not poetry, but it is also not a verse, though it is _verse_; for a verse is but one line of the poetic form, while _verse_ is the form itself. It is not poetry because it has merely form without spirit. As well call the dead body a man (which indeed we sometimes do in the same loose way) as call such by the name of poetry.

But the body of a man without the soul is a dead man; that is, not a man at all. So also the body of one of his visible art-creations, as of poetry, without the spirit, is dead art, a dead poem;--no poem at all.

Is it not so? Only look at our thousands of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and whatnotlies, where millions of these poetry-bodies lie buried, smelling too much of mortality; then turn to the time-glorified tomes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burns, Milton, Homer, Virgil, and their eternal co-endurers for a breath of heaven. Let this be the final answer.

Rhythm, it may be said (taking it beyond the realms of concrete poetry), is the music of Nature. It is Nature’s natural expression, if I may so speak. All her motions are rhythmical, have ripples and waves; even at rest her forms lie in the rhythmic order.

Wherever billows beat the crags, or ripples kiss the sands; wherever winds go soughing through the pines, or zephyrs toss a curl; wherever snows may drive to drifts, or wheat-fields billow green and gold; wherever drifting clouds, or dreaming skies, or bordering trees are hung dependent on the smooth lake’s waters; wherever birds may sing, or flowers bloom, or rivers run; wherever thunders wake, or hills and valleys sleep;--there is rhythm, there is music, there is Nature’s perfect harmony.

Nor is it different in man, Nature’s crown triumphant. In throes of pain or woe’s distress; in joys that iris happy tears; in sorrow’s mournful cadences; in laughter’s lilting melody; in peace and bounteous plenty, or in war and woeful famine; in love or hate, or life or death;--through all of man’s existence, there again is rhythm, Passion’s only melody, the music of the soul.

True, in the calms of life, although ’tis there, we little feel this rhythm,--this adjusting process by which man inevitably seeks to put the heart in tune while here for higher harmonies hereafter. But when the soul’s deep feeling is aroused, then listen to its rhythmic ebb and flow like gently wimpling waters or like the surging beat, beat, beat upon the sands.

Hear the lonesome cadences of sorrow crying up to heaven; listen to the joyousness that tinkles through the melody of laughter; hark the sharp, quick, fierce beat in the surge of righteous anger; hear the tender, mellow music from the soothing lips of Love,--divine, immortal Love--and dream of other worlds and better things as you listen thus transported.

When these passions of the soul would express themselves in words, the words, too, fashioned by the spirit that enters them, must inevitably move in rhythm, and, in the greater wave-lengths, fit themselves to metre. This feeling, or passion, that enters rhythmic words--that unswervingly seeks rhythm as the only form in which it can express itself--is the spirit of poetry. Thus it is that poetry comes about; thus it is that poetry is spontaneous and not the result of long meditation; thus it is that poetry is the natural outlet of highly-wrought or great feeling.

SPIRIT.

As in man, so in all art of man, the soul within fashions the body without. True beauty is soul-beauty; that beauty that is in the heart and is felt by the heart, without which there can be no physical beauty.

Whatever in the world is beautiful, is beautiful just in proportion to the beauty of the soul that sees it. Thus if we would find beauty, we must first have it. The white-flecked blue of the skies of June; the wren or peewee pouring fourth its perfume-drunken melodies from among the apple-blossoms; the stretch of plain or towering height of mountain; the scenes of hill or valley, wood or meadow, lake or river; the Apollo Belvedere; the great Transfiguration; Paradise Lost;--nature’s various forms and reproductions--have no beauty to the heart whose cavities are empty. But to the full soul, the soul of beauty, they are perpetual springs of life, where Divinity is ever mirrored forth; for the soul gives what it gets, and gets what it gives, and the getting is proportioned to the giving. Give, and we get; keep, and we lose.

But what is it in an Apollo, a Transfiguration, a Paradise Lost that feeds this soul-hunger; that possesses this beauty?--The marble of the Apollo? Hard by lies the rough, unchiseled Parian marble; but it has no beauty.--The painted canvas of the Transfiguration? Sitting before it, there are yearly hundreds of canvases and brushes and paints and paintings; but they lack the beauty.--The words, the rhythm, the metre, the music of Paradise Lost? Millions of productions, from musty tomes in the British Museum to the upper left-hand corner of the “patent inside” of a newspaper, have all these; but no beauty.

What then? That same indefinable something which in man we call the soul, and in art, the spirit; that which the admiring soul instinctively feels and recognizes.

Had the sculptor never touched his chisel to the marble, nor the painter his brush to the canvas, nor the poet his pen to the paper, that same spirit, yet not bodied, would have existed within his own soul, but never would have been beheld by others. To be seen by other eyes, it must needs take on a visible body, a concrete form, in which it shall dwell.

Thus all forms of Nature and all forms of Art, whatsoever, are the mere bodying expressions of the spirit that inhabits them. Form is necessary, but only as a medium through which the spirit may reveal itself visibly.

The intuitive and unconscious recognition of this principle, that the soul within fashions the body it inhabits,--the grandest principle of all God’s great laws, the foundation of them all, illimitable as the immortal Giver--is the door-way through which he who thus recognizes must inevitably enter Nature and Art to enjoy the full communion of the soul within, and to interpret the beauties of that soul’s divinity to us.

He who thus enters is possessed of genius. In other words, he has a great soul and lives close to Nature’s heart. We of lesser genius, or of less loving souls (for a great soul is one that loves greatly) commune with the indwelling spirit less freely. If we approach Nature or Art consciously and try to unlock some side-door by the key of the intellect, we shall probably find only cast-off garments; nay, many of us may find that the door will not open and we must content ourselves with a peep through the key-hole. Indeed, do not the multitude behold the elegant structures of Nature and Art wonderingly for but a moment, without even so much as attempting the key-hole, and then plod on, unconscious that there is an indwelling soul that has thus fashioned its earthly home?

This same great foundation-principle of Nature is likewise the fundamental law of poetry and of all other art. For art, at best, is nature wrought by man. What else can it be? It is fashioned by simply a lesser Divinity, the soul of man, consequently less perfectly, and follows the same law. Or better yet, art is nature wrought through the instrumentality of man by the great Divinity that works in him. Art is simply a name used to designate a specific manifestation or kind of nature;--that kind that comes through man, and has, not life, but spirit; not life, but the picture, the show, the mirrored image of life: a sort of record of the soul, and a lamp for its future guidance.

He who, by means of rhythmic words inspirited, can paint this picture, represent this show, mirror this image of life, historicize this record of the soul, light this lamp and hold it above the heads of the trampling ages for the guidance of humanity, is the great poet.

Just in proportion to the greatness of such a soul will be the spirit that imbues his creations. It cannot create a new form unless it first implants some germ from its own spiritual self. Not only must there be the spirit as the prime essential of poetry, the soul within that fashions the rhythmical and metrical form it inhabits, but that spirit must partake of that divinity that is in every human heart;--that divine flower, deep-rooted in the soil of God, sometimes blossoming to an angel-image, sometimes painting the glories of heaven on its petals, sometimes breathing its deepest-drawn perfumes up from its muse-beloved blooms to the throne above.

Would the soul create a statue, it must see “an angel in that marble” ere it give the angel form; would it paint a picture, it must behold within itself the transfiguration ere it live transfigured on the canvas; would it write a poem, it must be a paradise of eternal love and beauty ere it breathe immortal glory into words.

It is this soul within that comes out of the maker of the statue, the maker of the picture, the maker of the melody, the maker of the poem, and enters his creations, that distinguishes true art from mere mechanism of art.

It is this same soul within that renders the artist, not a chiseler of stone, a painter of canvas, a placer of notes, a rhymer of words, but a maker, a creator, in his own lesser realm of nature.

It is this same intangible soul, just within yet just beyond the touch of our finger-tips as we reach out farther and farther into the dim unknown, this same indefinable spirit of beauty, shining through the form that it inhabits, permeating it inscrutably, that somehow passes out of the poem into the heart of the admirer, then slips out of his heart into the poem again, and so on and on, again and again, ever lifting the admiring soul as the poem itself is lifted higher still and ever higher.

MISSION.

This practical age, “this nineteenth century with its knife and glass,” ever botanizing and anatomizing, analyzing and scrutinizing in every possible way, is constantly asking, “What is it good for?”; “Of what use is it?” And whatever the knife and glass cannot explain to the fact-loving intellect; whatever the age cannot thus analyze and convert into ready cash or daily bread, it is wont to relegate to the Lethean Limbo of Uselessness.--As if the mind of man were constituted of intellect, pocket, and stomach, and whatever did not go to the filling of these were useless.

It is well and just and right, indeed, that any age should thus inquire, especially as to material things, so long as it does not dwarf other faculties by giving all sustenance to one. To ask concerning poetry, “What is it good for?”, “Of what use is it?”, is simply to ask in a different form, “What is the soul good for?”; “Of what use is a God!” There is nothing in God’s universe that does not have utility.

But to examine specifically and logically, and thus to discover somewhat of the mission, the utility of poetry.

In order to do this, we must naturally refer to the human mind, since thence poetry is brought forth and there it is perceived.

There are three great divisions of the mind; namely, Intellect, Sensibilities, or Feelings, and Will.

The intellect is that power of the mind by which we think and know. The sensibilities, or feelings, constitute that power of the mind by which we feel. The will is that power of the mind by which we resolve to do or not to do. These explanations are sufficient for our present purpose.

Therefore, whatever furnishes food for the intellect, the knowing-power of the mind, must be of the nature of knowledge, didactic. Whatever ministers to the feelings must waken emotion. Whatever gives action to the will must rouse resolution.

All literature is for the mind. But since there are three departments of the mind, and since literature is produced by and for the mind, there must naturally be three divisions of literature that each mental power may receive sustenance. That is, there should be that literature for the intellect in which knowledge predominates. For the sensibilities, there should be that literature in which feeling, emotion, is the primary and essential element. For the will, there should be that literature that has for its chief end the rousing of resolution.

On examination of the literary products of the world, we find that this philosophy is sustained. For the intellect, we have treatises (as on the sciences, mathematics, etc.), histories, biographies, novels, romances, essays, etc., etc. The primary object of these is to furnish knowledge; to satisfy the intellect. They are in the highest sense didactic, although, of course, just as the literature for each faculty does, they incidentally furnish some food for the other powers.

This intellective literature is the kind that is most largely cultivated at the present. In fact, it is cultivated almost to the exclusion of the other two.

For the will, we have sermons, lectures, orations, speeches, addresses, harangues, etc.; a class of literature that is small when compared with the preceding. These two departments of the mind monopolize the whole domain of prose.

That other department of literature, in which feeling is the dominating and pervading principle, must, by its very nature, act upon that same power of the mind that produced it; namely, the sensibilities.

Poetry is the literature of feeling, and consequently finds its province here. It is the mission of poetry, therefore, as suggested by the latter part of the definition, to minister to the feelings, to interpret the Divine in the human heart. It is this that all writers on the subject and that all poets mean when they say it is the mission of poetry to give pleasure.

But what shall be the limit of that word “pleasure”? Herein lies the chief cause of great differences of opinion, especially with those who hold that there is such a thing as didactic poetry. Or rather, what is the true meaning of “pleasure” as thus used? The very essence of pleasure, as opposed to pain, is that it gratify some emotion and set it at perfect rest.

What emotions when gratified are at perfect rest? The answer at once forces itself upon us, only the better emotions. That poetry does minister to and satisfy the higher and nobler feelings, and that what does not do this is not poetry, even the meanest heart that it touches fully knows.

The attempted gratification of hate, or of any desire whatsoever to give pain to any one, as illustrated in Pope’s _Dunciad_, Dryden’s _Absalom and Achitophel_, Butler’s _Hudibras_, Byron’s _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, and all such, never sets the mind of the writer at rest, nor gives enjoyment to the reader. Indeed, who now ever reads these, the world’s greatest illustrations of witty bitterness and venom, couched in verse and unjustifiably designated as poetry?

These are accounted “great works.” But who, let me ask, ever reads any of these “great works,” or ever heard of them, except in some text on Literature? Or, having read them, who loves them, or their authors for having written them? None. No, not one.