The Beginnings of Poetry

Survival of primitive and communal poetry as it can be detected in the ballads and the popular rimes of Europe, in the songs of those savage tribes which seem to come nearest to...

From this brief raid upon the territory of poetic style, we return to the fortunes of improvisation and its defeat at the hands of a more deliberate art.[1142] Among the countle...

For the purposes of this book, poetry is rhythmic utterance, rhythmic speech, with mainly emotional origin. One must not write a book on poetry without essaying that _iter teneb...

That primitive horde with its uncouth but rhythmic dance, its well timed but seemingly futile song, has now, let us hope, found its justification as the source of poetry. Not li...

In carrying loads, in cutting, and the like tasks, the Lhoosai in southeast India “clear the lungs with a continuous _hau! hau!_ _uttered in measured time by all_; without makin...

It is the object of the following pages neither to defend poetry nor to account for it, but simply to study it as a social institution. Questions of its importance, of the place...

The study of rhythm threw one fact of primitive life into very strong relief,—the predominance of masses of men over individual effort,[250] and the almost exclusive reign of co...

Nobody will deny that the modern man does more thinking and less singing than the man, say, of Shakspere’s time; and nobody will deny that thinking needs solitude, while singing...

F. Michel, _Le Pays Basque_, Paris, 1857, pp. 214 f. The same is true of the Poles. See Talvj (here spelled Talvi) _Historical View of the Languages and Literatures of the Slavi...

of account. He recognizes in the first column of this table the representation of self, the personal impulse, but not as a social expression by social consent; these forms of pl...

We have Dr. Johnson’s word for it that one does well “to see great works in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there be any more de...

The making of communal poetry a closed account. Elements of the European ballad. Who made it. The “I” of ballads. Style of ballads. Incremental repetition. Variation. Siberian s...

Science and theories of poetic origins. Invention and imitation. Comparative literature and the art of borrowing. The war against instinct. Instinct not set aside. The dualism i...

Definitions of poetry. The line between poetry and prose. Summary of the dispute. Rhythm fundamental and essential in poetry. Proofs from ethnology, psychology, and the history...