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ENJOYMENT OF 
 POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 MAX gASTMAN 
 
 FOBUEBLT ASSOCIATE IN PHILOSOPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVEB8ITT, 
 OF "COLOBS OF LIFE — POEMS AND SONGS AND SONMETS," 
 " ^OCBNALISM VEBSUS ABT," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 MCMXXI 
 
OOPTBXQBT. 1913, 1921, BT 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 0<«)yright. 1918. by Alft-ed A. Knopf, M. C. 
 
 PubUshed April, 1913 
 
 Reprinted August, October, 1913 
 
 December, 1913; December, 1914 
 
 November, 1915; June. 1916 
 
 March, 1918 
 
 Bevtoed Edltton PubUshed. August, I92i 
 
fW 
 
 
 PREFACE AND SUMMARY 
 
 The purpose of this book is to increase enjoy- 
 ment. That the poetic in every-day perception 
 and conversation should be known for what it is, 
 and not separated from the poetic in literature, 
 is to my mind essential to the full appreciation 
 of either. And that poetry in general should be 
 cut off from those unhealthy associations that a 
 leisure-class decadence has given to the word, is 
 of value to the enterprise of enjoying life. 
 
 I have drawn the distinction between the poetic 
 and the practical as it appears in my own expe- 
 rience, with little respect for academic or literary 
 classifications. In this way I believed I should 
 stay closer to my chief purpose; I should also be 
 more likely to contribute to scientific truth. 
 
 It seems to me that a study of books must be 
 either science — ^that is, the chemistry and physics 
 of their make-up, and the psychology of their 
 author and his readers — or else history, an ac- 
 count of the general conditions and consequence 
 of their production. Otherwise it is practically 
 nothing at all. And most of what we call " lit- 
 
vi PREFACE AND SUMMARY 
 
 erary" comment and criticism is indeed neither 
 science nor history. I hope that my book will 
 promote a tendency away from this kind of ex- 
 ercise. 
 
 A misfortune incident to all education is the fact 
 that those who elect to be teachers are scholars. 
 They esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining 
 other values, but as a value in itself; and hence 
 they put an undue emphasis upon what is formal 
 and nice about it, leaving out what is less pleasing 
 to the instinct for classification but more needful 
 to the art of life. This misfortune is especially 
 heavy in the study of literature. Indeed, the 
 very separation of the study of literature from 
 that of the subjects it deals with, suggests the 
 barren and formal character of it. As usually 
 taught for three years to postgraduates in our 
 universities, it is not worth spending three weeks 
 upon. The best lovers of literature know this, 
 and the academic world will some day know it 
 and will cast about for a real science which they 
 may teach to those who are going to read litera- 
 ture to the young. That science will be psychol- 
 ogy in its widest sense. For psychology is a 
 knowledge that is general without being merely 
 formal. It will reveal and explain, not the scho- 
 lastic conventions about literary structure, nor 
 the verbiage of commentators, but the substantial 
 
PREFACE AND SUMMARY vii 
 
 values that are common to the material of all lit- 
 erature. I hope that my book may add impetus 
 to this change in education. 
 
 Perhaps, also, by emphasizing the fact that 
 things are, and continue to be, what the poet 
 calls them, whatever else they may be or be 
 named by the scientist, it will add some strength 
 to that affirmatively sceptical philosophy upon 
 which it is founded. 
 
 But these aims are all secondary. The chief 
 purpose is to extend to others the service of a 
 distinction which has made the world more enjoy- 
 able to me. 
 
 In chapter one I have shown how this distinc- 
 tion first appears in the attitudes of different peo- 
 ple, or the same people in different moods, toward 
 their experience — toward actions, things, emo- 
 tions, images, ideas. I have shown that the 
 poetic attitude prevails in childhood. 
 
 In chapter two I have shown how the distinc- 
 tion appears wherever names are newly applied, in 
 the origin and growth of language, in slang, in 
 expletives, in conversation, in books, and in the 
 disputes of metaphysics. 
 
 In chapter three I have pointed out the two 
 acts, choice and comparison, which are discover- 
 able in every new application of a name, and dis- 
 
viii PREFACE AND SUiMlVIARY 
 
 tinguished practical choice and comparison from 
 poetic. 
 
 In chapter four I have explained why choice 
 and why comparison assist the poetic impulse, 
 the impulse to realize. 
 
 In chapter five I have shown that realization is 
 often more poignant in the absence than in the 
 presence of things. 
 
 In chapter six I have explained how choice and 
 comparison appear in pure poetry, which is the 
 verbal realization of things in their absence, and 
 in poetic discourse. I have related the "figures 
 of speech," so called, to the common poetic use 
 of modifiers, they all being examples either of 
 choice or comparison. 
 
 In chapter seven I have shown what I beheve to 
 be the primitive and basic relation of rhythm to 
 the mood of realization. 
 
 In chapters eight, nine, ten, and eleven I have 
 explained in detail how the technique of poetry 
 applies to the realization of distinguishable ele- 
 ments in imagined experience — actions, things, 
 emotions, ideas. I have introduced examples of 
 poetry that has given me the greatest enjoyment, 
 and I have illustrated the application of psycho- 
 logical, instead of rhetorical, concepts to its 
 analysis. 
 
 In chapter twelve I have set forth values which 
 
PREFACE AND SUMMARY ix 
 
 poetry may have, not as a realization of other 
 things, but as a thing to be reaHzed for itself. 
 I have done this briefly, because it contributes 
 little to what is already contained in other books. 
 
 In chapter thirteen I have related the knowl- 
 edge of poetry to the art of enjoying it. I have 
 dwelt separately upon the poetry of experience and 
 that of imagination through language, and I have 
 stated that the best path to the enjoyment of 
 the latter lies through the creation of it. 
 
 In chapter fourteen I have given the general 
 principles that I think relate to the creation of 
 rhythmical English. 
 
 In chapter fifteen I have praised poetry for its 
 practical value, pointing out both its accidental 
 value as an enhancer of meanings, and the value 
 that pertains to its own essence. I have sug- 
 gested that the latter will increase in proportion 
 as we draw more perfectly the line between 
 knowledge and mythology, and compel ourselves 
 to resort for exaltation to an enthusiastic welcome 
 of the world as it is or as it may be, and for relig- 
 ion to a consciousness of the final mystery of its 
 being. 
 
NOTE TO THE NINTH EDITION 
 
 For this edition of "Enjoyment of Poetry" I 
 have revised the text; and I have added to it an 
 essay on Ideals of Poetry, which formed the 
 preface of "Colors of Life," a volume of my own 
 poems published by Alfred A. Knopf. 
 
 M. E. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Poetic People 3 
 
 II. Names Practical and Poetic ... 20 
 
 III. The Technique of Names .... 37 
 
 IV. The Technique or Poetic Names . . 47 
 V. Imaginative Realization 59 
 
 VI. Choice and Comparison in Poetry . . 66 
 
 VII. Wine and Sleep and Poetry ... 89 
 
 VIII. Realization of Action 98 
 
 IX. Realization of Things 113 
 
 X. Emotional Realization 124 
 
 XI. Realization of Ideas 136 
 
 XII. Poetry Itself 154 
 
 XIII. To Enjoy Poetry 168 
 
 XIV. To Compose Poetry 178 
 
 XV. The Practical Value of Poetry . . 189 
 
 Ideals of Poetry 203 
 
 Notes 231 
 
 ziii 
 
ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 POETIC PEOPLE 
 
 A SIMPLE experiment will distinguish two types 
 of human nature. Gather a throng of people and 
 pour them into a ferry-boat. By the time the 
 boat has swung into the river you will find that 
 a certain proportion have taken the trouble to 
 climb upstairs, in order to be out on deck and 
 see what is to be seen as they cross over. The 
 rest have settled indoors, to think what they 
 will do upon reaching the other side, or perhaps 
 lose themselves in apathy or tobacco smoke. 
 But leaving out those apathetic, or addicted to 
 a single enjoyment, we may divide all the alert 
 passengers on the boat into two classes — those 
 who are interested in crossing the river, and those 
 who are merely interested in getting across. And 
 we may divide all the people on the earth, or all 
 the moods of people, in the same way. Some of 
 them are chiefly occupied with attaining ends, 
 and some with receiving experiences. The dis- 
 tinction of the two will be more marked when we 
 name the first kind practical, and the second 
 poetic, for common knowledge recognizes that a 
 3 
 
4 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 person poetic or in a poetic mood is impractical, 
 and a practical person is intolerant of poetry. 
 
 We can see the force of this intolerance too, 
 and how deeply it is justified, if we make clear 
 to our minds just what it means to be practical, 
 and what a great thing it is. It means to be con- 
 trolled in your doings by the consideration of 
 ends yet unattained. The practical man is never 
 distracted by things, or aspects of things, which 
 have no bearing on his purpose, but, ever seizing 
 the significant, he moves with a single mind and 
 a single emotion toward the goal. And even when 
 the goal is achieved you will hardly see him pause 
 to rejoice in it; he is already on his way to an- 
 other achievement. For that is the irony of his 
 nature. His joy is not in any conquest or destina- 
 tion, but his joy is in going toward it. To which 
 joy he adds the pleasure of being praised as a 
 practical man, and a man who will arrive. 
 
 In a more usual sense, perhaps, a practical man 
 is a man occupied with attaining certain ends 
 that people consider important. He must stick 
 pretty close to the business of feeding and pre- 
 serving life. Nourishment and shelter, money- 
 making, maintaining respectability, and if pos- 
 sible a family — ^these are the things that give 
 its conmaon meaning to the word "practical." An 
 acute regard for such features of the scenery, 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 5 
 
 and the universe, as contribute or can be made 
 to contribute to these ends, and a systematic neg- 
 lect of all other features, are the traits of mind 
 which this word popularly suggests. And it is 
 because of the vital importance of these things to 
 almost all people that the word "practical" is a 
 eulogy, and is able to be so scornful of the word 
 "poetic." 
 
 " It is an earnest thing to be alive in this world. 
 With competition, with war, with disease and 
 poverty and oppression, misfortune and death 
 on-coming, who but fools will give serious atten- 
 tion to what is not significant to the business?*' 
 
 "Yes — but what is the use of being alive in 
 the world, if life is so oppressive in its moral 
 character that we must always be busy get- 
 ting somewhere, and never simply realizing where 
 we are? What were the value of your eternal 
 achieving, if we were not here on our holiday 
 to appreciate, among other things, some of the 
 things you have achieved?" 
 
 Thus, if we could discover a purely poetic 
 and a purely practical person, might they reason 
 together. But we can discover nothing so sat- 
 isfactory to our definitions, and therefore let us 
 conclude the discussion of the difference be- 
 tween them. It has led us to our own end — a 
 clearer understanding of the nature of poetic peo- 
 
6 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 pie, and of all people when they are in a poetic 
 mood. They are lovers of the qualities of things. 
 They are not engaged, as the learned say that all 
 life is, in becoming adjusted to an environment, 
 but they are engaged in becoming acquainted 
 with it. They are possessed by the impulse to 
 realize, an impulse as deep, and arbitrary, and un- 
 explained as that "will to live" which lies at the 
 bottom of all the explanations. It seems but 
 the manifestation, indeed, of that will itself in 
 a concrete and positive form. It is a wish to 
 experience life and the world. That is the es- 
 sence of the poetic temper.^ 
 
 Children are poetic. They love to feel of 
 things. I suppose it is necessary to their preser- 
 vation that they should be, for by random exer- 
 cise of their organs of feeling they develop them 
 
 * There is a poetic attitude to the practical life, and no 
 poet is complete without it. It is expressed in these words 
 of Peter Kropotkin: 
 
 "Struggle! To struggle is to Uve, and the fiercer the 
 struggle the intenser the life." 
 
 But it is not that attitude which keeps the majority 
 struggling, or keeps any man incessantly struggling. They 
 are not concerned to receive the experience of struggle, 
 but they are concerned to achieve their ends. This gen- 
 eral tendency to achieve, to adjust — a primary impulse of 
 life — is set off against the tendency to receive, to realize — a 
 different and also, I believe, a primary impulse of Hfe. 
 Like all things in the world these impulses are rarely 
 found pure, but they can be analyzed out and isolated for 
 purposes of understanding. 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 7 
 
 and make them fit for their practical function. 
 But that is not the chief reason why they are 
 poetic; the chief reason is that they are not prac- 
 tical. They have not yet felt the necessity, or 
 got addicted to the trick, of formulating a pur- 
 pose and then achieving it. Therefore this naive 
 impulse of nature, the impulse toward realization, 
 is free in them. Moreover, it is easy of satisfac- 
 tion. It is easy for children to taste the qualities 
 of experience, because experience is new, and its 
 quahties are but loosely bound together into what 
 we call "things." Each is concrete, particular, 
 imique, and without an habitual use. 
 
 Babies have no thought, we may say, but to 
 feel after and find the world, bringing it so far as 
 possible to their mouths where it becomes poig- 
 nant. They become absorbed in friendship with 
 the water they bathe in. The crumple noise of 
 paper puts them in ecstasy, and later all smells 
 and sounds, brightness, and color, and form, and 
 motion, delight them. We can see them discover 
 light by putting their hands before their eyes and 
 taking them away quickly, and again, at a later 
 age, discover sound by stopping their ears and 
 opening them again. 
 
 Who does not remember in his own childhood 
 testing the flavors of things — of words, perhaps, 
 saying them over and over until he had defeated 
 
S ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 his own wish, for they became pulpy and ridicu- 
 lous in his mouth? Anything which invades the 
 sense like cinnamon, or sorrel, or neat flowers, or 
 birds' eggs, or a nut, or a hom, is an object 
 of pecuUar affection. It is customary in books 
 about children to say that they care little for the 
 actual quahties of an object, and are able to deal 
 with it as though it were anything that they 
 choose to imagine. But I think only the positive 
 part of this statement is true. Undoubtedly their 
 imaginations are active in more various direc- 
 tions, and they draw the distinction between the 
 real and the ideal in perception less clearly than 
 grown-up people do. But the most pronounced 
 characteristic of children is that they are per- 
 fectly free to feel the intrinsic qualities of things 
 as they merely are. What we call objects are 
 for the most part practically determined co-ordi- 
 nations of qualities. And what we call the actual 
 quality of an object, is usually the quality which 
 indicates its vital use. When we say actual, 
 therefore, we really mean practical. But so far 
 as actuality from the stand-point of the things is 
 concerned, the children come nearer to it, and 
 care more about it, than we do. To us a derby 
 hat is for covering the head, and that is about all 
 it is; but to them it is hard, smooth, hollow, deep, 
 funny, and may be named after the mixing-bowl 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 9 
 
 and employed accordingly. And so it is with all 
 things. The child loves a gem with its pure and 
 serene ray, as the poet loves it, for its own sake. 
 
 Nor is it only such quahties as may be said to 
 give pleasure that he seeks, unless pleasiure be 
 defined as seeking, for he wants all experience. 
 He wants all that he can stand. He is exploring 
 the whole world of sense, and not rarely upsets 
 his stomach, and his entire system, in a zest for 
 the reception of sensations that are instinctively 
 abhorred. Two children of our neighborhood will 
 wear to their graves the brand of a red-hot scarf- 
 pin as a testimony to that first love of expe- 
 rience. They did not want torture, I suppose, 
 but they wanted to see what it is to be tortured. 
 And so it was in varying degrees with us all. It 
 seems to me, when I look back, as if we were 
 forever out behind the barn finding out what 
 something or other was "like." 
 
 It has been a vast problem for those concerned 
 with aesthetic and other theories, why people love 
 tragedy when they are not in it. But if their 
 theories would only allow that these organisms 
 of ours, which have been gnashing and struggling 
 together God knows what billions of years for a 
 chance to live, have really an interest in living, 
 there could be no problem. The problem is, see- 
 ing this wild zest for life, and life so tragic — the 
 
10 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 problem is, why people do not love tragedy when 
 they are in it. And in truth they do. From the 
 pure sweetness of early romantic sorrow to the 
 last bitter comfort of an old man bereft, who 
 mutters to his soul, "This is a part of the full 
 experience of a man!" — from first to last, up to 
 the cannon's mouth and down to the midnight 
 grave, the poetic impulse survives. We love to 
 taste life to the full. 
 
 In energetic but idle hours it survives joyfully. 
 And in youth these were the predominant hours. 
 At all times we were ready for exuberant realiza- 
 tion. We were not indifferent to the morning. 
 We did not wake at the greeting of a last night's 
 proposition in conmierce or knowledge, but at 
 the smile of the sun. The stuff of our thoughts 
 was not sentences and numbers, but grass and 
 apples and brown honey. Such excellent ob- 
 jects parading before our minds in a thousand 
 combinations and colors left us no time to develop 
 these general conclusions with which we are now 
 filled. We could not banish our prairie thoughts 
 from the school-room, though they liked it as lit- 
 tle as we, and the hour of recess was the horn* of 
 life. And in the hours of life how greedy we were I 
 Every sense was open with indiscriminate ma- 
 terial flowing in. Our eyes trained for every 
 seeing, our ears catching the first murmur of a 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 11 
 
 new experience, we ran after the world in our 
 eagerness, not to learn about it, but to taste the 
 flavor of its being. 
 
 "Oh, the wild joys of livingl the leaping from rock up to 
 
 rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool 
 
 silver shock 
 Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear. 
 And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
 And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust 
 
 divine, 
 And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full 
 
 draught of wine. 
 And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes 
 
 teU 
 That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and 
 
 well. 
 How good is man's life, the mere livingl how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joyl" 
 
 This agility and fervor of realization extends 
 early to the exercise of all the senses. And then 
 as we grow a little older it comes inward, and we 
 tremble to catch our own emotions on the wing. 
 Fear, for instance, is a being of intense fascina- 
 tion, and even so impelling a power as the in- 
 stinct of self-preservation is suspended by the 
 poetic impulse — suspended in order that its own 
 very nature may be experienced in feeling. Can 
 you not remember the keen edge of a venture into 
 the barn-yard, a tumultuous dash across to the 
 
12 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 com-crib which offered a refuge impregnable to 
 those mild-mannered cows? Anger is a mod- 
 erate pleasure to most healthy persons, but in 
 youth it is a thing to thirst after and brag of. 
 It is life itself. Mulishness is an engaging state 
 of being. Cruelty and mercy have often the 
 same original charm. 
 
 I remember discovering insolence with exactly 
 the same happy spirit of gratification with which 
 I see babies discover fight. I was profoundly in- 
 terested in Nancy Hanks, who had broken the 
 world's record by trotting a mile in 2.04. I be- 
 lieve that I was Nancy Hanks most of the time, 
 and anybody who wanted to converse with me or 
 put me in a good-humor would begin upon that 
 topic. But at last I became aware that I could 
 do something quite different from being gratified 
 by all their talk, and I was carried away by the 
 discovery. My opportunity came during supper, 
 at the gracious hands of a maiden aunt: 
 
 "Do you know who Nancy Hanks was named 
 after?" 
 
 "No," I shouted, "I don't know and I don't 
 care a dam — see? " 
 
 My memory of the punishment which followed, 
 and how I became aware that there are limits to 
 profitable exploration in such fields, is dim, but 
 of the excited pleasure of the adventure, and 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 13 
 
 my underlying friendliness toward the old lady 
 throughout, I am quite certain. 
 
 They are great days when we first discern these 
 powerful creatures in us, unnamed and meaning- 
 less monsters to challenge forth. Ghost-terror, 
 and dizziness and sickness at the sight of blood, 
 are among them. Imagine the mind of a young 
 man who knows that there lies a pile of corpses 
 the other side of a smouldering factory wall, and 
 he both hastens to them and flees away from them, 
 until finally this lust after the intense conquers, 
 and he goes and gazes his fill. Do not call that 
 morbid, but an act of exuberant vitality. For 
 there is high-spiritedness in those that are young, 
 not for sensation only, but for emotion. And 
 this too they carry with them, some more and 
 some less, throughout life. Rancor and magna- 
 nimity, lust and romance, rapture and even 
 melancholy — drink them to the dregs, for they 
 are what it is to be. 
 
 "No, nol go not to Lethe " 
 
 It is not only things of the sense and body that 
 a child loves for their own sake, but at a certain 
 age he learns to watch with wonder the paintings 
 of his mind. When he is condemned into his 
 crib, and has to face the loss of the whole lovely 
 world in sleep, then this is the last resource. As 
 
14 ENJOYIMENT OF POETRY 
 
 long as God lets him he will devote his somnoles- 
 cent power to sensuous memory or anticipation, 
 or just the circus-antics of grotesque and vivid- 
 colored creatures that dance in before him un- 
 bidden, uncreated, unexplained. Even if some- 
 times he does honestly try to think, he finds that 
 he cannot very long cling to the meaning of his 
 thought, because he is all curious to examine those 
 garments of imagery that it wears. 
 
 To most adults, I suppose, it is a bare mechan- 
 ical or rational process to count from one to a 
 himdred; but to an alert child it hardly ever is. 
 It is a winding and bending over a plain, over a 
 prairie, a slow climb, a drip-drip, or an odd march 
 of marionettes, or perhaps it is just the queer 
 sound of the words at his ear. At any rate, the 
 engrossing thing is to estimate the unique char- 
 acter of the process and of each member in it. 
 Eight is a jolly fat man. Six is sitting down. 
 Some people say that they never had any of these 
 pleasures, that they have no mind's eye at all. 
 They cannot see six sit down. Let them try to 
 comfort themselves with the idea that they are 
 more scientific than the rest, not having vivid 
 images to confuse their meanings in the serious 
 business of reaching a conclusion. They are like 
 the people on the ferry-boat who stay downstairs 
 where there are few distractions and they can be 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 15 
 
 perfectly sure to get across. Luckier than they 
 are the people who can enjoy the scenery of spec- 
 ulation, who bring with them out of childhood 
 a clear and spirited fancy. 
 
 "—Great Godl I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 The final appearance of the poetic impulse, its 
 intellectual appearance, is also at its height in 
 youth. It is well known that at a certain period, 
 if they are healthy and have a little self-depend- 
 ence, young persons fall in love with all kinds 
 of unusual ideas. They come forward with an 
 amazing belief, a wise or foolish theory, which 
 they attach to for its own sake, and not out of 
 regard for its practical or real consequence. They 
 take a taste of Atheism, Anarchism, Asceticism, 
 Hindoo Philosophy, Pessimism, Christianity, or 
 anything that offers a good flavor of radical faith. 
 This is only the same zest for experience. And 
 it will need but a glance at life and literature to 
 prove that such attachment to ideas, with small 
 regard for their meaning in conduct, is not con- 
 fined to the young. It is a poetic pleasure that 
 people bring with them perhaps farther than any 
 
16 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 of the others. For most of these pleasures, and 
 especially the more simple and innocent, they 
 soon leave behind, as though it were somehow 
 unworthy to be childlike and love things for their 
 own sake. 
 
 We have a superstition prevaihng in our homes 
 that the first thing to do upon the appearance of 
 a child, is to bring it up. And we see children 
 brought up in the utmost haste by persons who 
 have purchased their own maturity at a cost of 
 all native and fresh joy in anything available. 
 But could we only reaHze how far the youthful 
 pleasure in every poignant reahzation is above the 
 accidents of fortune, we should take as great 
 pains to preserve that, as to erect the man in our 
 offspring. We should ourselves long to be born 
 again, and maintain for the future a more equable 
 union of the practical and poetic in our character. 
 
 That such a union is attainable, the lives of 
 the greatest show. It is possible to keep through- 
 out a life* not wholly disordered, or idle, or cast 
 loose from the general drift of achievement, a 
 spirit fresh to the world. The thought brings 
 us back to iEschylus, a man of heroic proportions 
 who achieved, in an age of turmoil and war, a life 
 filled wonderfully with realizations that were final, 
 the fruit of evolution, and yet not wanting the 
 excellence of great action directed toward a fur- 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 17 
 
 ther end. With the participation of that poetic 
 hero in the campaign of defence against the Per- 
 sians, and in the battles of Salamis and Marathon, 
 it seems as if Nature had indeed achieved her aim. 
 There experience was at its height, but purpose 
 was unshaken. The Httle hbrary and piazza 
 poets and esteemers of poetry in these days of 
 art, will do well to remember the great Greek, 
 who died the most renowned literary genius of 
 his age but had carved upon his proud tomb only 
 this boast, that "The grove of Marathon could 
 bear witness to his good soldierhood, and the 
 long-haired Mede who felt it." 
 
 It would be foolish indeed to question whether 
 or not the poetic are capable of purposeful achieve- 
 ment, and the practical capable of intense expe- 
 rience, for we are all, except those lost in apathy, 
 in some degree both poetic and practical. But the 
 example of the hero proves that it is possible 
 for a man, who can think clearly and command 
 the differences that lie within him, to be both 
 poetic and practical in a high degree. 
 
 If we could but free our minds from a con- 
 tamination with certain modern people who teach 
 themselves that they are presided over by a 
 pretty demon called an Artistic Temperament, we 
 should not only cease cherishing by suggestion 
 the tickle-brain condition into which they decay. 
 
18 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 but we should have for ourselves a sounder esti- 
 mate of the place and dignity of the poetic. It 
 is not an attribute of special, exotic, or disordered 
 types, but a universal quality of our nature. No 
 live man is without an arbitrary passion for some 
 experience. Indeed, the defect of many of those 
 most scornful of poetry is not that they are 
 strong in the practical life, but that the attach- 
 ment to some single state of being has got the 
 better of them. There are fifty thousand mor- 
 phine-takers in Paris, and all over the face of the 
 earth how many million chewers, and breathers, 
 and swallowers of what, far from being of prac- 
 tical value, is both costly and deleterious, bear- 
 ing unconscious witness to the poetry of human 
 nature. 
 
 The greatly poetic differ from them only in the 
 healthy variety of their loves, prevailing every- 
 where and always. They are those who live 
 variously as well as vividly in the present. This 
 alone distinguishes them from the millions. This 
 alone distinguishes them from all those excluded 
 by our experiment at the beginning, who confine 
 their enjoyment to smoke while they are cross- 
 ing the river. They are not without realization. 
 But it is only the childlike and the poetic who 
 make the innumerable intimate acquaintances 
 that are to be made, who welcome all living 
 
POETIC PEOPLE 19 
 
 qualities and perfect them, and finally, perhaps, 
 in a supreme moment of morning sunshine and 
 mist over the city, realize what we may call the 
 essence of crossing a ferry. Their breast thrills, 
 and their eyes drink with rapture the million 
 moving and dancing details of that pageant of 
 life 
 
 " — the white sails of schooners and sloops, — ^the ships 
 
 at anchor, 
 The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars. 
 The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the 
 
 slender seq^entine pennants. 
 The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their 
 
 pilot-houses, 
 The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous 
 
 whirl of the wheels. 
 The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset. 
 The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, 
 
 the frolicsome crests and glistening. 
 The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray 
 
 walls of the granite storehouses by the docks. 
 On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely 
 
 flank'd on each side by the barges — ^the hay-boat, 
 
 the belated lighter, 
 On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chim- 
 neys burning high and glaringly into the night, 
 Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and 
 
 yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into 
 
 the clefts of streets." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 NAIVIES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 
 
 It is not in words that the distinction of the 
 poetic from the practical begins. It Ues not in 
 books but in the protoplasm. And no doubt, if 
 we knew enough, we need not begin even with 
 people, but we could trace this cleavage of two 
 motives back into the very birth of alertness in 
 matter, and there see the one current scorning 
 the other as to-day. For poetry is an attitude 
 of the body. Both anteceding and transcending 
 speech or idea, it is a way of experiencing realities. 
 
 And yet the realities that men experience, are 
 in their nature very much determined by words; 
 their names are a part of them. And this it is 
 important for those who estimate poetry to under- 
 stand. It is important for them to understand 
 the nature of what we call "things" — that they 
 are all, as we perceive them, unions of an external 
 impression \\dth something that memory contrib- 
 utes. A mere glimmer of flame through the air, 
 for instance, and we have an oriole flying; an odd- 
 shaped parallelogram with a white blotch upon 
 it, and we perceive the polished, square surface of 
 20 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 21 
 
 a table. Stand too near an oil painting and you 
 can see how few daubs are required, so they be 
 the right ones, to present to us an entire pano- 
 rama of external reality. Nature herself pre- 
 sents, at any one time, little more than those same 
 few daubs, and her whole triumphal evolution 
 would be to us only a rank flux and confusion of 
 fragmentary qualities if we did not perpetually 
 amplify her intimations, and respond to them as 
 things. Perhaps no one ever saw a farm, or a 
 country, but a farm or a country can be both 
 perceived and dealt with if the mind is active. 
 
 Yet either to perceive it or deal with it, with- 
 out a name, is not easy. Names are a vital part 
 of the contribution that memory makes to things. 
 They determine and carry with them all the rest 
 — the imagery, the mood, the attitude, and ac- 
 tivity. The right word is magic; it evokes for 
 us out of the eternal fog whatever object is poten- 
 tial there, and puts us face to face in direct cur- 
 rent of communication with it. It does this as 
 no other power under the sun can do it. Is it 
 not a question whether there could really be such 
 a thing as a country until after there was a word 
 for it? Take off the name, and I am not sure 
 but the whole British Empire — that vast world- 
 power — would vanish like a speculation, and you 
 would have merely a number of people living some 
 
22 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 here and some there. Annihilate the word "love," 
 and you would alter for many the quahty of the 
 very fabric of their lives. Such is the importance 
 of names; they are close constituents of real 
 things. 
 
 And every real thing has, or may have, two 
 different kinds of names. It may have names 
 which indicate a suitable adjustment to it, and 
 names which engender a strong reaHzation of it. 
 The practical are always seeking the former 
 names, and the poetic are always seeking the lat- 
 ter, and the distinction between them is eternal. 
 It is rooted in the origin of tongues, and it branches 
 in the highest apprehensions of metaphysics. 
 Wherever a name is newly applied, we may ask 
 and answer the question, is it applied with a pre- 
 dominantly poetic or a predominantly practical 
 intent? ^ 
 
 Doubtless we have in ourselves experienced 
 something like the original birth of a poetic word. 
 
 *It will be understood that by names I do not mean 
 single terms only, much less nouns, hut any word or group 
 of words identified with an experience. Only five of the 
 nine parts of speech — nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, 
 adverbs — can alone be called names of things. The rest 
 are things in their own right, mental acts which serve in 
 the creation or manipulation of names. Horse is a name; 
 BO also is trot; so also is this horse thai trots as though his 
 fore and hind quarters were operated separately. But thai 
 and as though standing alone are not names. 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 23 
 
 We first got acquainted with cows by mooing, 
 and with the wind by howling up his chimney, 
 and sometimes still, when a blue-bottle circles 
 round us on a summer noon, if we have nothing 
 else to do we say "buzz," for no better reason 
 than because he said it. And in some such way 
 as this, thousands of years ago, upon the tongues 
 of idle but appreciative savages, many little words 
 and parts of words must have been born. Other 
 little words are reported to have jumped right 
 out of the mouths of these savages, when they 
 were surprised or shocked by anything. And 
 probably many of these too, when they were after- 
 ward applied to the object that produced them, 
 were applied with a poetic intent, an intent to 
 renew that experience for its own sake. But of 
 those words which arose — as it has been held that 
 all speech arose — out of a song or grunt of action 
 in unison, a kind of "yo-he-ho," naming the 
 action first and then extended to the object acted 
 upon, probably the majority were children of a 
 practical necessity. 
 
 It is not poetic to extend the name that is part 
 of an act to the object acted upon, because the 
 object is not like the act. I believe that this is 
 why the Teutonic languages retain, in defiance 
 of the dictates of utiHty, a certain number of 
 "strong verbs," or verbs which change their char- 
 
24 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 acter radically by the time they reach the past 
 participle, where they become names of an object. 
 To kill is a vivid act, but to die is quite opposite, 
 and therefore the associative flavor of the word 
 killed is wrong. It is very weak, and we always 
 want to help it; we want to say "killed dead" or 
 something like that. Shotj on the contrary, sounds 
 different from shoots and is fit to receive the im- 
 pact of it; it is a strong participle. The word 
 break is intact and active, and breaked would be 
 very much the same, but broken is in the con- 
 dition it describes. 
 
 These are producings and modellings of the 
 substance of words, but we must follow our dis- 
 tinction forward into another kind of creation — 
 the creation of names by the new application or 
 combination of old words. "Fire-water" is the 
 name that the American Indians invented for 
 whiskey. And it is, when you pause to receive 
 it, a very wonderful and quick metaphor. Yet 
 we can hardly say whether it illustrates better 
 the practical or poetic motive in word-making, 
 whether it was given in prudence or delight. In 
 the name that some Polynesian savages gave to 
 an explorer's watch which curiously pleased them, 
 we have surer signs of a poetic perception. 
 "Moon," they called it, and when they were 
 questioned why, they said that it was "round 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 25 
 
 and stayed awake all night." But for examples of 
 such poetry in the transfer and recombination 
 of words we need not go beyond what is obvious 
 in our own language to-day, for within its recent 
 history many names have been born, and still 
 older ones retain the quality of their birth. But- 
 tercup is a word of this kind. Blue-eyed grass, 
 golden-rod, fire-bird, dovetail, sky-scraper, ocean 
 greyhound, pinchpenny, rakehell, swashbuckler, spit- 
 fire, kill-joy, slipgibbet, are words of more or less 
 rapt appreciation; while on the other hand win- 
 ter squash, Canada fox, ball-and-socket, office build- 
 ing, steamboat, railroad, money-sawr, motor-cyclist, 
 justify themselves only by their utility. 
 
 Even the plainest-looking words will some- 
 times reveal, to one who likes them well enough 
 to look for it, a lucid perception out of which they 
 sprang. Sarcasm is "a tearing of the flesh." 
 And we may contrast it, for our purpose, with 
 irony, which means "saying little — saying less 
 than you mean," one conveying an acute expe- 
 rience, the other a practical analysis. Gymnasium 
 is "the place of nakedness." Retort is "a twist- 
 ing back." Enthusiast is "full of God." Night is 
 "death." And nightingale is "singer-in-the-night." 
 
 Such is the poetry which you find in the dic- 
 tionary, the unpremeditated art of men for ages 
 dead, whose utterance in a vivid moment rose to 
 
26 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 the heights of genius and could not be forgotten. 
 It is the supreme model for all poetry, vital, demo- 
 cratic, inevitable, embodying the native forms 
 under which man has beheld his visible world, 
 and the subtle work of analogy by which he has 
 blended that "v^ith the widening panorama of the 
 spirit. 
 
 The same process will go on forever. In our 
 own times every little while, out of a body of 
 names which all suffer the flavor of disreputa- 
 bility and are called slang, the language stoops 
 and picks up a gem. "You're a daisy," is an 
 expression peculiarly akin to much of the poetry 
 that already Hes hidden in the forms of words. 
 We can look forward to a time when in a changed 
 language the flower may have another name, but 
 still a man of that character will be a daisy, and 
 no one will know why. Squelch and groiLch and 
 butt in are words which might, either for practi- 
 cal or poetic reasons, be lifted into good repute. 
 In the dialect of special cliques or professions, 
 thieving, sailing, baseball, journaUsm, as well as 
 in general slang, new names of both these kinds 
 are continually bom. A hit, and a two-base hit, 
 and a home run are simply useful terms; but to 
 lean against the leather, to rap out a two-bagger, to 
 zip it to the fence, are superfluous and poetic ex- 
 pressions. 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 27 
 
 It is said that only those slang words which 
 fill a vacancy are taken up into reputable dis- 
 course, but in reality literature is ever on the 
 watch for terms which are peculiarly poignant or 
 akin to their objects, and ready at any day to ex- 
 change for them an equivalent synonym. Lurid 
 is a word exactly expressing the character of mod- 
 ern cheap newspapers, but it is not altogether 
 living, and so in the first flush of their realization 
 a new name came to the birth. They were yel- 
 low. And yet so strange is time, and so eternal 
 is the perfection of a metaphor which is perfect, 
 that if we turn back to the days when the word 
 lurid itself was born and when it too joyfully 
 lived, we find in it exactly the same poetry. It 
 is luridusy a Latin word for "ytVLow" 
 
 The enduring character of the poetic instinct 
 is further proven by the luxuriance and similar- 
 ity in all ages of the language of vituperation. 
 Poetry is the art of calling names, and, in the art 
 of calling people bad names, not Homer, nor 
 Shakespeare, who is the master, can excel the 
 folk-lore upon which he builds. For acute realiza- 
 tion of the vile qualities of men, and for scenic 
 effects of the same character, we need not turn 
 to our Hbraries. Though the scenic oath is scant 
 among Anglo-Saxons, the scantness is more than 
 compensated in southern Europe. Imagine a 
 
28 ENJOYiVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 race which put as much energy of genius into the 
 verbal reaUzation of the tragic or subHme as the 
 Spaniards or Neapolitans do into the nauseous 
 and irreverent — most of our poetry books would 
 have to hide their heads. And as it is, I believe 
 that their authors could better leam their art 
 here — in the language of loose wrath among the 
 unlettered — than an^nivhere else, unless perhaps 
 in the dictionary of etjTnology. 
 
 Some people think that the poetic are always 
 talking symbolism and endowing the sod with 
 spiritual meaning. They do that, to be sure, 
 because that is a great way to realize the sod and 
 the spirit, but they also do the opposite. They 
 daub the spirit. The most baneful degeneration 
 to which names lend their aid is a poetic one. 
 It is an excessive love of the imaginative realiza- 
 tion of what is normally repulsive. Millions of 
 so-called "stories" are current among men and 
 women and children of which the climax is not 
 hmnor but poetry, a vivid filth. And as the even- 
 ing progresses you can observe this corruption 
 creep into a group of story-tellers, while their 
 humor expires. This is the black rot of poetry. 
 
 Perhaps the reason why so many people will 
 resent our calHng these things, and others, poetic, 
 is that they have got poetry sentimentally at- 
 tached in their minds to a mysterious conception 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 29 
 
 of the beautiful. They think that it implies a 
 gush of harmonious numbers upon appropriate 
 occasions, having especial regard to cliffs, maid- 
 ens, hair, waves, pine-trees, the sea, the moon, 
 and the ethereal significance of each. And the 
 reason for this is that, excepting a few, the most 
 variously poetic people do not write poems. It 
 is usually only those of a certain romantic turn 
 who care to separate names from their objects, 
 and round them into the lyrical shape, and make 
 of them a new object. But these objects when 
 they are made are called poems, and thus the 
 whole meaning of the word poetic is influenced 
 by the preference their gentle authors have for 
 such topics. In few minds to-day does the word 
 poetic sit clear of this misfortune. But once 
 leam to apprehend as such the poetic in every- 
 day talk, and you will see that it is unlimited 
 either to any range of objects or to any sweet- 
 ness in handHng them. It is simply the giving 
 to any object, or thought, or event, or feeling, 
 the name that makes its nature shine forth to 
 you. 
 
 To call whiskey "fire-water" is poetic, but it is 
 also poetic, although with an admixture of humor, 
 to say that ApoUinaris is "the water that tastes 
 hke your foot's asleep." Both are true namea 
 And in such lively expressions, words which per- 
 haps never permanently unite with their object. 
 
30 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 but are called once or twice and then forgotten 
 forever — in them, poetry is living continually be- 
 fore us. 
 
 Imagine that there are two people walking 
 along the beach in leisure where the sea resounds. 
 "It sounds like eternity," says one. "Well," 
 says the other, "it sounds to me more like shov- 
 elling coal down a chute." The contrast is per- 
 haps sharp, but it is not extreme, for each has 
 sensed and conveyed to the other in language 
 the intrinsic quality of his experience. The 
 deeper difference Hes between them both and the 
 man who, walking by the sea, does not name it 
 for its sound at all, does not pause to receive the 
 sound into his mind, but names it brine — water 
 with a three and one-half per cent solution of 
 natural salts which he might precipitate with a 
 distillery and put to a profitable use. He is the 
 practical man. 
 
 The conversation of the poetic is acute and 
 exhilarating, waking you to the life and eminence 
 in reality of all things. The conversation of the 
 practical is instructive, interesting, sometimes full 
 of surprise and a feeling of supreme possibility. 
 For in its highest reach the practical application 
 of names is nothing less than the external sub- 
 stance of scientific knowledge. 
 
 Those who are engaged in the quest of such 
 knowledge, and who call it Pure Science, and 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 31 
 
 scom the application of its results to those pur- 
 poses recognized in the popular use of the word 
 "practical/* will resist the appellation. But, 
 nevertheless, their activity in the laboratory, or in 
 their own minds, comparing, classifying, naming, 
 is always directed toward an end, however arbi- 
 trary, which they have set before them, and is 
 subject to the test of their achieving or failing 
 to achieve that end. Wherever it is not mere 
 mythology, science is to some degree practical 
 in the accurate sense of the word. Even in those 
 discursive studies which appear to be but a de- 
 scription of the species that occupy the earth, 
 the classifications are made and the names applied 
 always with a view to conduct, even though that 
 conduct be merely mental. And it is only this 
 that distinguishes their language from the lan- 
 guage of the poetic. 
 
 Once more, imagine two people walking in lei- 
 sure, and this time along the roadside. It is sum- 
 mer and the yellow-birds are holding their 
 sprightly revels among the milkweed blossoms 
 there, dancing along before them as they go. 
 
 "Regular little biUterflies, aren't they?" says 
 one. 
 
 "Yes," says the other faintly, and then, with 
 emphasis: "It is the American goldfinch, you 
 know — a grosbeak,'' 
 
32 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 These are the two ways of being, as we say, 
 interested in the birds. They are the two ways 
 of being interested in everything in the world, 
 and calHng it by name. But in no other place 
 ^vill you find the opposition of poetic and prac- 
 tical terminology more exquisitely set forth 
 than in the bird-neighbor books and wild-flower 
 guides of modern times. There, side by side, you 
 may read them — on the one line, labels picked 
 from a language whose poetry is dead, and ap- 
 plied by earnest minds to serve the business of 
 intellectual manipulation and accurate reference, 
 and, on the other line, names bestowed in living 
 syllables by the hearts of rural people in happy 
 moments of carefree and vivid experience. Trail- 
 ing Arbutus, Bouncing Bet, Dragon's Blood, Beg- 
 gar's Buttons, Nose-bleed, Gay Feather, Heart-o'- 
 the-earth, Ruby-throat, Firetail, Hell Diver, 
 Solitary Vireo, Vesper Sparrow — these are the 
 words for those who care but to feel and cele- 
 brate the qualities of things. 
 
 And in the lavish persistence, and in the truth, 
 of these meadow names, holding their own against 
 so much Latin, there is a lesson in humility for all 
 science. It is about twenty-three hundred years 
 now that scientific people have been constructing 
 a world in systematic opposition to the world of 
 the poetic, until in certain conmiunities things 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 33 
 
 have become exceedingly strained, and commu- 
 nication between those Hving in the two worlds 
 is wellnigh impossible. Here is so simple and 
 commonly regarded an object as water, for in- 
 stance. The scientific have named it "HgO." 
 The poetic name it "wet** — ^not to say "bab- 
 bling," "wild," and so forth. Each professes to 
 name it with regard to its intrinsic and most real 
 and final nature, and hence arises the central 
 problem of modern philosophy, and the great 
 task of modern philosophy — to discover a mode 
 of sociability between the extremes of the poetic 
 and the practical world. 
 
 Is the right name of water wet, or is it HgO? 
 That is the great argument between them. And 
 only in our own times has it begun to be clear 
 that unto eternity neither side will ever give in, 
 and that the only thing for persons to do who are 
 in a hurry, or wish to be larger than either science 
 or poetry, is to confess that it is probably both. 
 Yet, after acknowledging this, those who came 
 from the poetic side of the argument might be 
 permitted to stipulate that, if there is to be any 
 doubt allowed as to the correctness of either name, 
 that doubt shall cHng to the scientific one. For 
 since science arises out of the impulse to alter and 
 achieve, and poetry out of the very love of the 
 actual, there is more danger that science will 
 
34 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 build too much intellectual stuff into things, than 
 that poetry will. Science inevitably ideahzes; 
 poetry is primarily determined to reaHze. The 
 poetic name points to the object, the practical 
 name points from the object. And if there were 
 to be a crisis between them, if all feeling and all 
 endeavor were suddenly to cease, and the dispas- 
 sionate material of each long-suffering reality 
 somehow to move forward and declare itself, I 
 think that the name this one would most surely de- 
 clare, upon that day of the death of metaphysics, 
 would be "wet.'' It might even be "babbling," 
 not to say "wild." 
 
 One thing is certain, however, and that is that 
 we need not soon anticipate such a day, nor hope 
 for the death of metaphysics. And in the mean- 
 time, which is forever, the key and the solution, 
 the only one that mortals will find, of the con- 
 flict within them between these two kinds of 
 names, is to decline to regard them as rivals, but, 
 taking their difference to be a difference between 
 two impulses of life, to avail themselves upon the 
 appropriate occasions of each. 
 
 "Effulgence of bright essence increate" is a 
 name that John Milton gave to hght. He gave 
 it, perhaps, in the pain and ecstasy of vivid re- 
 membrance, in blindness. At least he sought with 
 all hi^ power to convey, enriched by intellect. 
 
NAMES PRACTICAL AND POETIC 35 
 
 the naive sense of the being of light. In the same 
 century a different but equally supreme genius, 
 Isaac Newton, following the Greeks, gave to 
 light the name " corpuscular emission." He gave 
 it in his laboratory, in the mature activity of an 
 intense mind bent upon learning the terms in 
 which the world is to be dealt with. Now, both 
 these high efforts, Milton's as poetry and New- 
 ton's as science, may be said to have failed. 
 Milton did not convey a sense of the being of 
 light, fundamentally because light is not similar 
 to the Latin language; and Newton did not leam 
 entirely well to deal with light, because it is not 
 very similar to corpuscles. But does not this 
 make all the more obvious the folly of our be- 
 coming exercised over the conflict between them, 
 as though the world were not large enough and 
 time long enough to hold both Milton and New- 
 ton, and others who shall in part supersede or 
 excel them both? 
 
 Only when the practical usurps the empire of 
 the poetic, or the poetic denies an ultimate sanc- 
 tion to the practical, do they become rivals — 
 rivals for a supremacy that no real names can 
 have. For there is a large democracy in nature. 
 The world itself is not dogmatic. It both lends 
 its support to a number of practical assumptions, 
 and consents to be in some measure what any 
 
36 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 poetic mind perceives it. The mind, in truth, does 
 not impose itself upon a world of other things, but 
 is itself a part of things so far as they engender 
 experience. The poetic impulse is a love of that 
 experience for its own sake. Poetic creation 
 begins in us when we marry, with such love, the 
 images of memory to the impressions of sense, 
 and when to this union we set the seal of a vivid 
 and communicable name we are poets in the full 
 and divine sense. We are makers of a world. 
 For if there is any creation in all history, poetic 
 names are creators. And the man who lives his 
 life in apathy or expeditious indifference to them 
 — the world will never attain a full being in that 
 man's experience. 
 
CHAPTER m 
 THE TECHNIQUE OF NAMES 
 
 It is to be hoped that this too continuous itera- 
 tion of "poetic" and "practical" has begot a 
 degree of antagonism in the reader, because now 
 he will need some emotional momentum to carry 
 him through a heavy passage. We cannot fully 
 celebrate the possibilities of poetic names, until 
 we have made clear and easy to our understand- 
 ing the mental functions that all names in their 
 first appHcation perform. It is just this amount 
 of analytic psychology the lack of which, in lit- 
 erary critics and others who write books about 
 books, is so disastrous to our love of literature. 
 It is the thing that will some day save us from 
 them; therefore let us study and learn it. 
 
 Experience is a continuous process of choice 
 and comparison, selecting one thing and corre- 
 lating that in the mind with another. I believe 
 that choice and comparison are in some degree 
 present every time that any one is really con- 
 scious of anything. It is easy to show that choice 
 is always present; you have only to go some- 
 where, and stand still, and reflect how many 
 37 
 
38 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 things there are about you which you are not 
 seeing. Existence is too full for you. You see 
 only the things that your tastes and purposes 
 determine, and of these you see sharply only such 
 features as affect those tastes and purposes. 
 Other persons will see other things, and other 
 features of the same things. 
 
 Suppose that you are standing by the side of 
 the road, and a horse and wagon jogs by. You 
 see the horse and wagon, and you observe that it 
 is picturesque. The horse is shaggy, a strawberry 
 roan. But suppose that there is a farmer stand- 
 ing beside you, and he sees it too; he observes 
 that the horse is lazy, ewe-necked, pot-bellied, has 
 a ring-bone on the left hind foot, and other feat- 
 ures which relate to the purposes of agriculture. 
 How different is yoiu* perception from his, though 
 you are looking the same way and standing almost 
 in the same tracks! It might be, indeed, if you 
 chose to look a different way, and if you happened 
 to have that genius for concentrating yourself 
 upon what you do see which is called absent- 
 mindedness — it might be that you would never be 
 aware there was a horse there at all, or so much as 
 the noise of a wagon. Thales of Aliletus, the 
 father of philosophy, owes the half of his reputa- 
 tion to the fact that he once walked out into the 
 yard in a state of such rapt examination of the 
 
THE TECHNIQUE OF NAMES 39 
 
 stars that he fell into his own well, and imparted 
 a kind of ridiculous dignity to the pursuit of 
 scientific knowledge that it has never lost. 
 
 To show that comparison or correlation, as well 
 as choice, is present in consciousness, may be a 
 little more diflScult. But if we remember that 
 "shaggy" and "picturesque" are ideas which, 
 derived from other horses and other experiences, 
 were stored away in our minds, and that it is now 
 these ideas themselves which step forward and 
 select the features of this horse and join with it 
 to constitute a perception, and that without the 
 ideas no clear perception, and no clear horse, 
 could be — if we remember that, we shall see that 
 comparison is only a little hidden in the very act 
 of choice itself. In strawberry roan it is not even 
 hidden, for we have brought out into our memories 
 the very thing with which the horse is compared. 
 He is like a strawberry — ^in color, at least, some- 
 thing like a decayed strawberry. In picturesque 
 he is "like a picture." But in shaggy also, he is 
 " like other things that have given us the idea of 
 shagginess." Always the mind is thus fitting 
 materials chosen from the present into patterns 
 which it brings with it out of the past. And this 
 activity when it becomes explicit we call thought, 
 and when it becomes articulate we call it naming 
 things. 
 
40 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 Therefore, in every fresh application of a name 
 we can discern two acts: first, the choice of a 
 detail in the thing named, and second, com- 
 parison in that detail of the thing named with 
 other things. These two acts are always in a 
 certain sense one, for it is the memory that makes 
 the choice. Naming things is like cutting dough- 
 nuts: here is an undifferentiated mass of dough, 
 upon which the cutter, which remembers the char- 
 acter of other doughnuts, descends and makes 
 after that character a definite excerpt. Exactly 
 thus a word descends into a general impression 
 and selects out a clear experience. It selects an 
 experience similar to the ones which it remem- 
 bers. But since in this process sometimes the 
 act of selecting, and sometimes the act of re- 
 membering, is emphasized, we can divide names 
 accordingly into two classes. There are names 
 which predominantly choose, and names which 
 predominantly compare. The words shaggy and 
 lazyt for example, choose a feature of the horse, 
 but they leave those memories with which it is to 
 be compared, undefined. Pot-bellied and straw- 
 berry roan, on the other hand, not only choose 
 the part and the color, but they also declare the 
 comparison to a remembered pot and a remem- 
 bered strawberry. All names are of one or the 
 other of these two types. 
 
THE TECHNIQUE OF NAMES 41 
 
 With this much technical wisdom, then — if 
 anything technical can be called wisdom — let us 
 return to our distinction between the poetic name 
 and the practical. We observe that their tech- 
 nique so far is the same; they both of them choose 
 and compare. But practical names choose dif- 
 ferent features in an object from poetic names, 
 and they compare the object with different mem- 
 ories. 
 
 Poison-flower is a practical name which chooses; 
 it chooses the feature of its object which is of vital 
 importance to conduct. Scarlet-berry is a poetic 
 name for the same plant. Ruminant, as naming 
 a lamb, is also practically selective, although its 
 importance is for intellectual more than physical 
 conduct. Blunt and woolly , on the other hand, 
 gives you no scientific indication but a feeling of 
 the Iambus being here. 
 
 Undulations is the name which, since Newton's 
 attempt failed, the scientific have given to light. 
 It is a name which not only chooses from its ob- 
 ject features discovered with great labor and inge- 
 nuity, but compares that object with another in 
 which the same features are more simple and 
 obvious. It compares light to the motion of 
 waves in a disturbed fluid. It does this in order 
 to enable us to deal with light, and adjust our- 
 selves to it the better. But light may truly be 
 
42 ENJOYMExNT OF POETRY 
 
 compared to a great many other things. It may 
 be compared to the high notes of a flute, it may be 
 compared to knowledge, or to the idea of perfec- 
 tion, or to joy. If I call light "the joy of morn- 
 ing," I have a name which compares and corre- 
 lates two things as well as "undulation," but it 
 does so with a different motive and a different 
 result. It does not enable you to deal with light 
 any better, but it promotes your realization of its 
 intrinsic nature. It is with this aim that poetic 
 names choose and compare. 
 
 Homer could never seem to speak of dogs but 
 he would allude to their "white teeth," choosing 
 that sharp feature to generate a sense of their 
 presence. He would never say the sea, but it was 
 " the wine-dark sea," comparing it for intensifica- 
 tion with something else so richly luminous. The 
 feature of Hector is "the beamy helm," and the 
 inevitable comparison for Juno is "her ox-like 
 eyes." But we need not go to Homer, nor to any 
 poetry book, or book whatever, to find the world 
 enriched with names. People with this propen- 
 sity to stimulating choice and comparison, and 
 the gift of speech, are not wanting in any village 
 of the earth to-day. "Ye came over that hill 
 like a greased mouse," was Jerry Chambers's 
 greeting to an automobile party that stopped for 
 a drink of water at his well. And "Ain't this a 
 
THE TECHNIQUE OF NAMES 43 
 
 singin' mominT' is a word from the same source, 
 "You feel as if you was gettin' born I" 
 
 Poems did not arise in books, nor in closet 
 ecstasies either, but they arose upon the tongues 
 of vagrants. Souls whose way was to take a 
 wandering taste of all the toils and sorrows and 
 battles and festive delights of the people on the 
 earth, and talk and sing as they went — ^they were 
 the poets. And they were the teachers too, for in 
 those days there was no sense of the difference 
 between the words of poetry and those of prac- 
 tice. Beautiful unions of a brave attempt at 
 scientific nomenclature with insuppressible poetry 
 looking through occurred commonly then, as they 
 still occur and will always in the language of 
 childhood. 
 
 Children are often intolerant of poetry in books, 
 because they have it in the reality. They need 
 no literary assistance in getting acquainted with 
 the live quaUties of objects, or endowing them 
 with their true names. Their minds are like skies 
 full of floating imagery, and with this they evoke 
 the inmost essences out of common things, dis- 
 covering kinships in nature incredible to science 
 and intolerable to common sense. 
 
 The toast is a "zebra.** 
 
 "Nothing with a tail" is a snake. 
 
 The cat purring is a "bumblecat." 
 
44 EXJOY]MEXT OF POETRY 
 
 The white eggs in the incubator have "blos- 
 somed." 
 
 But education soon robs them of this quaintness. 
 They are taught that they must get understand- 
 ing, they must not hnger and behold. After edu- 
 cation has thus reduced them, however, and taken 
 away their many-colored world, they will often 
 recall with pathetic pleasure a few of the phrases 
 that fell from them in those lost days of contact 
 with things as they are. In the same way we 
 recall the names that were bestowed when all the 
 world was young, and men devoted to science 
 itself had not lost a sense of those first-hand reali- 
 ties whose enrichment will ultimately give to 
 science the only sanction that it can have. Hera- 
 cleitus the Dark, the greatest of the Greeks who 
 first devised momentous new words for the world 
 — ^imperious and passionate genius in the child- 
 hood of thought — ^he knew the world both as it 
 lives and as it may be dealt with, nor ever clearly 
 distinguished them, but his science is poetry and 
 his poetry is science, carrying both conviction 
 and fire of reahty into the hearts of men to the 
 end of time. 
 
 What shall be the true name of the soul? he 
 asks himself. The soul is Flame! That is the 
 hNdng principle, the poignant instant of all nat- 
 ure, union of change and constancy, both ter- 
 
THE TECHNIQUE OF NAMES 45 
 
 rible and beautiful, and, like thought, supremely 
 real. Not only a stirring epithet is this, to wake 
 you into poetry and life; it is also a vital union 
 of two things upon which the integrity of his 
 science and his working faith depends. You must 
 be temperate, he says, because of this flame sub- 
 stance that illumines you; you must be temper- 
 ate especially in drink — keep dry within. "A 
 dry soul is the wisest." 
 
 Such writings are no more. We are grown up 
 and sophisticated, and we have acquired the 
 knowledge of science and poetry. We call these 
 noble perceptions "mere figures of speech"; by 
 which we mean, or ought to mean, that they 
 create unions which, although contributing to 
 the wealth of immediate experience, cannot to 
 any extent be acted upon. Our ideal in maturity 
 is not to confuse with them the unions which 
 indicate conduct, nor ever to mistake the one 
 kind of speaking for the other. 
 
 In the pursuit of practical knowledge we apply 
 names which select in an experience the details 
 that are important, whether for our special pur- 
 pose or for general human purposes; and we unite 
 that experience through such names with other 
 experiences that are familiar and toward which 
 we have an established attitude or reaction. The 
 purpose of it all is adjustment. In the pursuit 
 
46 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 of poetic expression we apply names which select 
 in an experience details which are salient^ offering 
 a good focus for the receptive attention, and we 
 unite that experience through such names with 
 other experiences which are surprising or stimu- 
 lating, which give pause and alertness to the mind. 
 The purpose of this is reaUzation. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE TECHNIQUE OF POETIC NAMES 
 
 Terms are commonly supposed to perform the 
 two functions of indicating things and suggesting 
 their significance in human economy. But be- 
 sides indicating things, and without relating them 
 at all to human economy, they continually per- 
 form this third function of enriching the very ex- 
 perience of the things. Until this is understood, 
 the natural origin of poetry will not be understood. 
 We add the names to the things in order to en- 
 hance our participation in their being. Here is 
 the expression, from a nature utterly poetic, of 
 the state of mind which such a use of names ful- 
 fils: 
 
 "When I am in a room with people, if I ever 
 am free from speculating upon the creations of 
 my own brain, then not myself goes home to my- 
 self, but the identity of every one in the room 
 begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very 
 little time annihilated. Not only among men; 
 it would be the same in a nursery of children." 
 
 *'. . . if a sparrow come before my window, I 
 47 
 
48 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 take part in its existence, and pick about the 
 gravel." ^ 
 
 It is marvellous to know that mere words, with 
 their little acts of selecting and comparing, could 
 contribute anything to vivify the experience of 
 one so sensitive to reality. Yet it is true that he 
 could hardly look upon a thing he loved without 
 longing for the poetic name and searching it out, 
 whether in the language of others or in his own 
 mind. It is marvellous, indeed, because words 
 are such tiny dry bits of things compared with 
 the great flush objects that the worid is full of. 
 And yet if we remember how intimate and strong 
 a part these Httle words have played in the very 
 making of those objects what they are in our ex- 
 perience, we shall understand how it is that the 
 poetic love them. They love the appropriate 
 name — ^whether it be a name that selects or a 
 name that compares — because through it they 
 are able in a way to encompass with conscious- 
 ness the object to which it is applied. 
 
 As for the first kind, the selective poetic name, 
 its value for this purpose is simple to understand. 
 It guides the attention to a focus. And this ser- 
 vice, though it may seem slight in the proposal, 
 is in fact very great, and for the majority indis- 
 
 ^ Quoted from letters of John Keats. W. M. Rossetti's 
 ••Life/' pp. 154-155. 
 
TECHNIQUE OF POETIC NAMES 49 
 
 pensable to the acute realization of anything. 
 Even to that lucky few who are by nature awake 
 when their eyes are open, the living word is no 
 superfluity. He who can speak it, who can some- 
 times catch the humor of their sensibility and 
 crystallize it upon a point, is as dear to them as 
 he is tedious who can neither select a focus nor 
 remain silent, but spreads adjectives all over the 
 face of nature. 
 
 It is difficult to exemplify this gift, because in 
 life the applicability of the choicest name is so 
 often transient and specific. Some old white 
 horse may look exactly "as if he had been used 
 to scratch matches on," but this would be one 
 out of a million white horses. Certain water- 
 weeds in a swift stream may be called "yearning," 
 but not so all water-weeds in all streams. Per- 
 haps you have heard some one speak of the " suck- 
 ing utterance" of a person, or the "dancing" of a 
 voice, or the "shadowy haste" of a gray cat, and 
 while the suitability of the word at the moment 
 was so great as to make a little crisis in expe- 
 rience, it could hardly be reproduced after the 
 moment was gone. 
 
 And yet poetic words which are generally, or 
 again and again, applicable, abide in the memories 
 of some people, and come out at the appropriate 
 times to help them see. How many there must 
 
50 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 be wandering in the world who can never look at 
 minnows in a brook but they see them stay " their 
 wavy bodies 'gainst the streams," or listen to the 
 gray flies but they hear them wind their "sultry 
 horn." Doubtless there is a special passion for 
 the word in some, and others just as poetic are 
 less articulate in their modes of realization. But 
 the average man is so deeply social that some 
 part of the machinery of communication is present 
 in his simplest perception. The more aHve he is, 
 the more likely is a word hovering near his lips. 
 
 "MiUion-footed Manhattan" is not the name 
 to guide you in making your way to the metropo- 
 lis, but if it chances to echo perfectly in your 
 mind, it gives a gift to the journey. 
 
 '^Million-footed Manhattan, unpent, descends to her pave- 
 ments." 
 
 So of the minnows — ^when you watch them now, 
 those "wavy" bodies, and — 
 
 "How they ever wrestle 
 With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle 
 Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand" — 
 
 you know them as they existed for one with the 
 supreme gift of realization. You know them more 
 intimately, and you like them better. 
 
 "Here are sweet-peas," he said, "on tip-toe for 
 a flight"— a phrase which will give grace, better 
 
TECHNIQUE OF POETIC NAMES 51 
 
 than water, to your garden. For words make 
 the world grow — not, I think, because they ex- 
 press a feelmg, for that means that they relieve 
 you of it, but because they give to the feeling 
 locality and distinct body. It comes down like 
 dew out of the general air and alights here in a 
 bright drop. 
 
 Even without a word, it is thus that we make 
 what we love our own. Notice how specific you 
 become in the presence of a loved object, and how 
 all your tenderness or your delight seems to dis- 
 til itself and hang upon a certain motion of that 
 object, or a certain pencilling, or shining glance, 
 or shadow. It is no strange, ancient, or bookish 
 trick to greet things with epithets; it is the way 
 the mind always welcomes an experience. And 
 the more hot and electric its passion for that 
 experience, the more it narrows itself to a single 
 item and condenses there the whole ecstasy. In 
 the midst of such passion, to be able to select with 
 perfect intuition or judgment the item that will 
 support and enhance it, is the first half of the 
 poetic gift. 
 
 The second half, and that which is more sus- 
 ceptible of cultivation, is the power to evoke into 
 the clear light of thought those specific memories 
 of similar things that hover above every acute 
 perception. The chambers of all minds are 
 
52 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 stored with them; they are latent in every com- 
 mon nomi, or verb, or adjective, or adverb; so 
 natural to us that in childhood we have trouble 
 to distinguish them from the sensible reality, and 
 yet for most of us in maturity blurred into non- 
 existence by custom and the pressure of affairs. 
 But linger to taste the flavor of any moment in 
 your experience, and you will find vistas opening 
 backward into other experiences which clarify 
 and intensify it. They determine its being. 
 
 So essential is this union of two things similar 
 in difference to the very existence, or definition, 
 of human consciousness, that we cannot help 
 beheving it describes all consciousness, both in 
 its essence and in its origin. It is the comfort- 
 able fortune of a clam to be so limited in sensa- 
 tions that the experience of to-day is almost 
 exactly the same as the experience of yesterday, 
 and may be dealt 'with in the same manner. 
 Hence almost his whole life must be as unprovok- 
 ing to him as the Httle daily act of buttoning and 
 unbuttoning is to us. He is hardly ever roused 
 into awareness of his environment at all. Noth- 
 ing will rouse him, indeed, but an accident — the 
 discomfort of an unfamiliar sensation. This he 
 will have to attend to, and in some flickering 
 adumbration of genuine perception, decide to 
 which of the old sensations it is most similar, and 
 
TECHNIQUE OF POETIC NAMES 53 
 
 respond to it accordingly. His being conscious 
 in that moment depends upon the shock of dif- 
 ference and the need of similarity. It is an act 
 of uniting or identifying two things that are 
 similar although different. 
 
 And so is all consciousness, in a profound way 
 of speaking, a uniting of two things that are 
 similar in difference. In the practical or onward 
 course of evolution it was only thus, as a detector 
 of similitude, that consciousness ever arose. And 
 since we are all, by the continuing irony of nat- 
 ure, essentially practical and onward, it is still 
 only thus that consciousness appears in us. As 
 soon as we become genuinely aware of anything, 
 we are already receiving a hint or intimation of 
 its likeness to something else. We are uniting 
 the present with the past; for this function our 
 minds exist. 
 
 And therefore it is no great exaggeration to say 
 that one who cannot perform this function, and 
 who never responds to an intimation of similarity, 
 has no mind at all, but belongs among the mol- 
 lusks or the dead. Only we must not make the 
 mistake of identifying with one who does not 
 respond to any similarity, one whose response is 
 to abhor all those that are poetic, or presented 
 for the sake of consciousness itself. He is not 
 a clam but a practical man. A clam, indeed, 
 
54 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 would be more likely, upon the stimulus of some 
 boisterous morning current, to glance round 
 among certain irrelevant sensations of his just 
 to "see what they are like," than would the prac- 
 tical man to contemplate for the wink of an eye- 
 lash a poetic simiHtude. He calls them mere 
 metaphors, and thinks that in so doing he has 
 relegated them to a region as far off as possible 
 from the righteous business of scientific, effective, 
 or "real" identification. 
 
 Yet they are exactly the same thing, with the 
 same basis in reahty, only free from the domina- 
 tion of prospective conduct and employed for the 
 sake of reahty itself. They are correlations pro- 
 posed, without reference to action, by those who 
 desire consciousness for its own sake. It is as 
 though the poets, seeing that we are all so bhndly 
 practical — we are made like tops to go to sleep 
 running unless something upsets us — ^had deter- 
 mined to rouse us out of this too mechanical con- 
 dition, and show us the world. And they have 
 discovered an adroit and profound method for 
 accompUshing this. Instead of interrupting our 
 operations and making us wake only to the inter- 
 ruption, they insert into our minds direct the 
 very essence of wakefulness — similarity in dif- 
 ference — and make us wake to anything under 
 the sun that they choose. And that is the expla- 
 
TECHNIQUE OF POETIC NAMES 55 
 
 nation, if for so original a fact explanation is pos- 
 sible, of the value to poetic perception of the 
 names which compare. 
 
 It is customary in books about rhetoric and 
 prosody to state, as an elucidation of certain 
 figures of speech, that the cultivated mind takes 
 a peculiar delight in apprehending a similarity in 
 difference — a. statement which is accepted in si- 
 lence by the obedient pupil, and harbored in his 
 true heart as one more evidence of the triviahty 
 of the cultivated mind and the great fooHshness of 
 having one. But we ought to state the case in 
 this way: that mind, so far as we can distinguish 
 it, is similarity in difference, it is a state of 
 comparison, and what it takes delight in is the 
 experience of the nature of things. Such a state- 
 ment, besides approximating the truth, would 
 have the advantage of suggesting to the pupil 
 that his mind is probably a good deal more 
 poetic than that of his cultivated teacher. 
 
 Imagine that we hear, or rather we are seized 
 by, a loud and prolonged whistle-blast from across 
 the river. It ends abruptly, and while some are 
 trying in a maimdering way to say that the change 
 seemed very sharp, one whom we will call the 
 poet, or the namer, states that "you feel as if you 
 had been over there and got back." Will this 
 be a special delight to the cultivated only, or will 
 
56 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 it be the common pleasure of all those who are 
 fond of a sensation and want to get the full savor 
 of it? Whatsoever they were fond of, they would 
 love to have their vague, fumbling, and yet 
 unique, awareness of it suddenly set forth for 
 them articulate, and consummate, and clear, in a 
 climax of the essence of consciousness. And that 
 would be the manifestation not primarily of a love 
 of "similarity," but of a love of the qualities of 
 things. And that is the love that is fed by the 
 utterances of the poet or the child. 
 
 He will say that the clouds are like pop-corUf 
 and every one will pause and look up at the sky 
 with pleasure. Or he will say that sumach-trees 
 are like poor people, or that a pewee's note comes 
 to you through the air like an arrow. Or, even 
 in a more conventionalized and conmaon way, he 
 will call a man goatish, or half-baked, or off his 
 trolley; or he will say that he has butter-fingers, as 
 they do in base-ball. A boy gets jumped on by 
 the teacher; a girl is as gay as a merry-go-round. 
 These are all, in their various ways, utterances 
 of the poet among us, increasing our taste of the 
 reality by selective comparison. 
 
 He it is that all down the path of human ex- 
 perience has been speaking, and has established 
 such poetry in the heart of language. Nor can we 
 in any way better understand him, and these two 
 
TECHNIQUE OF POETIC NAMES 57 
 
 gifts of his, than by turning again to the dictionary 
 and looking into the story of the births of words. 
 Gymnasium, "the place of nakedness," was the 
 work of a poet who chose; and I think he chose 
 the best, as well as the most striking, feature 
 of his object. Sarcasm, "flesh-tearing," was the 
 creation of a poet who not only chose but also 
 compared. He united an experience which is 
 spiritual, with one which is different in being 
 physical but similar in the sheer quality of pain. 
 We said that he might call a man goatish, and 
 ages ago in the word capricious he has done so. 
 In the word insult he has said that he "got jumped 
 on." He has called men half-baked also, or at 
 least cooked too quick in the word precocious; and 
 in the word delirious he has called them, not off 
 their trolley, but what is the same thing in an 
 earlier state of civilization, aut of their furrow. 
 More beautifully in a word Hke moss-rose he has 
 made his choice and comparison, and in ruby^ 
 throat, and fire-tail, and all those names of flowers 
 and wild birds, uniting them always with some- 
 thing of invasive individuality, and usually with 
 something beautiful because they are beautiful. 
 
 Birds were the first minstrels, and their notes 
 slip like clear joy into the heart. Who has not a 
 "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" for the least of these 
 aerial beings! Feathered voices, who can thrill 
 
58 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 with tiny energy acres of the dull air, and set 
 quivering even in man's heaviest breast vague 
 hopes of an eternal spring. Commonly and of 
 old they have been named with words of subtle 
 discriminating affection, brief perfect utterances, 
 a poetry of the people. And rarest among them 
 all, perhaps, in adoring realism — rarest of all, to 
 one who knows at twilight the place of her wild 
 and tender rhapsody, the swamp-angel. 
 
 Crests of nature's loveliness, thus tuned, thus 
 dyed, and thus proportioned, the birds and blos- 
 soms have won out of all tribes a treasury of poetic 
 names. And they who have the genius or desire 
 to make poignant through language beings that 
 are less easily or less quickly loved, will not alter 
 the method here simply revealed. They will select 
 in each a certain part or quaUty, and in a strong 
 revery of the mind unite it with something they 
 remember that is different, but in that high qual- 
 ity the same. They will name it after that. And 
 a world that is sufficiently drab and monotonous 
 to one whose mental indolence is great, or who 
 has sophistication for an ideal, will be rich and 
 wonderful to them. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 IMAGINATIVE REALIZATION 
 
 In expectation and revery realization is often 
 more perfect than in the too obdurate presence of 
 things. And with this observation we pass into 
 a domain more commonly called poetic. Yet it 
 should be with regret that we take farewell of 
 reality, in the perception of which poetry arises, 
 and to the developed perception of which it de- 
 scends again for sanction and for praise. Ideally 
 poetry would always be a vivifying, through the 
 magic of imagery and syllable, of present expe- 
 rience in an adventurous world. But the limita- 
 tions of time and space and individuality are too 
 tight, and therefore, provided we are healthily 
 rooted in our own now and here, it becomes a 
 thing of joy and benefit to us that we can so 
 vividly remember and imagine, and through the 
 clear medium of poetic language realize in dreams 
 the experience of others. 
 
 Yet never let us pass to a consideration of 
 those dreams without a protest against the opin- 
 ion that makes their unreality the essence or the 
 excellence of them. On the contrary, their es- 
 59 
 
60 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 sence and their excellence is the contribution 
 which they make of poignancy and breadth and 
 life and celebration, to the actual wherewith each 
 dreamer re-engages. And no more than science 
 can hold sway over the minds of men except as it 
 contributes to their purposes or enlarges them, no 
 more can poetry strongly survive in any individual 
 except as it gives enrichment to the real presence 
 of the world before him. 
 
 That this gift of realization can be given in the 
 absence of things often better than in their pres- 
 ence, however melancholy it may be, and again 
 suggesting an irony in nature, is a very manifest 
 truth. Greedy people eat fast instead of slow, 
 because their heart's enjoyment lies always in the 
 next bite after the one that they have in their 
 mouths. If sensual stimulation were really equal 
 to their expectations, I suppose you could hardly 
 induce them to swallow at all. Such hyper- 
 eesthetic anticipation is a part of the onward or 
 practical mechanism of nature, and so it may be 
 explained. But reminiscence also is frequently 
 better than experience, as is shown in the wonder- 
 fully rich and adventurous past that most dul- 
 lards are able to enjoy. How dear to our hearts 
 are the scenes of our childhood, and with what 
 exquisite satisfaction we recall the old-fashioned 
 winters that are no more, and the reckless skaters 
 
IMAGINATIVE REALIZATION 61 
 
 we used to be in those days. In the city we com- 
 plete our love of the country and long to greet it 
 again; in the country, some afternoon under a 
 tree, we get the full flavor of our energetic life in 
 the city, and think we but half realized the great 
 drama we were taking part in all winter. 
 
 Here we are free from those practical necessi- 
 ties which were ever whipping us forward from 
 one thing to another; we can loiter over the 
 same course with a more discursive enthusiasm. 
 A man in the pressure of affairs bent upon taking 
 life poetically, is like a mule trying to browse 
 while he is driven; his mouthfuls will be hasty 
 and unsatisfying, and at the same time his prog- 
 ress slow. This is one of the reasons why the 
 poetic cultivate their power of reminiscence, and 
 even learn to enjoy the finest savors of an expe- 
 rience after it is past. 
 
 Not only do they outwit necessity by this 
 means, however, but they get free from a distrac- 
 tion which disintegrates the experience of any- 
 thing actual. Actual things are never isolated 
 and framed for our enjoyment as things are in 
 revery. Things in memory are finely focalized 
 and made seizable, unified, and indeed perfected, 
 by the narrowing of their space and time extent, 
 and the omission of whatever opposes or dero- 
 gates from the feature chosen to be the apex of 
 
1^ ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 our attention to them. For as in the perception 
 of things there is always a favored point, still 
 more in the remembrance. In fact, the mind does 
 not remember things at all, but retains mementos 
 of them — images, we say, of some little, perhaps 
 trivial, detail, about which clings a diffuse sense 
 of their presence. And even as a crucifix or a 
 warmed jewel can sometimes more than console 
 us for the absence of the thing we love best in 
 the world, so can these dyed fragments that the 
 mind collects revive the thrill of our bodies, re- 
 vive and concentrate it upon themselves, so that 
 they seem to equal or surpass the reality. 
 
 Perhaps it will be a fairer explanation, or at 
 least a truer statement, of this superiority of the 
 past, to say that in memory, since there is so lit- 
 tle left of the sense-quality of the object, there is 
 more room for emotion in our consciousness of 
 it. And this is true also of anticipation and pure 
 imagination. Our body joins in the apprehen- 
 sion of a thing better when the thing has no body 
 of its own. That is why ghosts are extremely 
 terrible, because they are almost never seen; but 
 when they are seen, if we can believe the reports 
 of those acquainted with them, their presence is 
 not half so effective. And naked bodies are like 
 ghosts in this respect. They are not seen often 
 enough. The carnal appetite is sometimes in- 
 
IMAGINATIVE REALIZATION 63 
 
 tolerable, like a scourge, until it comes into the 
 'bare presence of its object, when, whether satis- 
 fied or not, it becomes quite simple and manage- 
 able. So does anger in some people faint at the 
 encounter; and humiliation, and reverence, and 
 love, and wonder appear to die away before a 
 fact, as many proverbs attest.^ Palpable reality 
 is a kind of sedative, and as such it is often 
 avoided by those who wish to become and remain 
 excited over the quahties of things. 
 
 Not only can they realize many things better 
 in their absence, indeed, but they can enjoy the 
 reahzation of more things. Our zeal for being 
 is immensely extended in the thought of it. We 
 call that "adventure" in the retrospect which in 
 the event we called fright; we call that "pathos" 
 which we called pain; and we call that "life" 
 which was sharp agony to be shunned with all 
 our force. The quality of these experiences is 
 recalled and even intensified, but without that 
 organic oppressiveness which drowned the poetic 
 impulse. We are free to love them now with 
 the original love of being. 
 
 And this freedom that we have in revery is 
 
 * Absence makes the heart grow fonder. 
 
 No man is a hero to his valet. 
 
 Distance lends enchantment. 
 
 Familiarity breeds contempt. 
 
 A prophet is not without honor save in his own country. 
 
64 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 excelled only by the freedom of sympathetic 
 imagination, in which we transcend even these 
 limits of individuahty and drink in the experience 
 of others. Here our realization is both fine and 
 utterly catholic. If these others chance to be 
 quite outside the place and time of our H\ing, as 
 usually the poets are, we rejoice in the possession 
 of their utmost pains and passions. That enthu- 
 siasm of our childhood for every impress of the 
 existing world that was endurable and accessible 
 to us, is now extended to embrace all things that 
 ever presented themslves to the apprehension of 
 a man. K our stomachs are strong — or our 
 imaginations not too strong — we are attracted 
 to the contemplation in this way of things dis- 
 gusting and lecherous and full of murder, things 
 that issuing or appearing before us in soHds 
 and Hquids would sicken us to our entrails. We 
 are attracted to all vivid reahzation whatsoever, 
 as though we were some kind of blessed gods who, 
 having made the world, were satisfied that it was 
 good in every part. 
 
 This opportunity to behold and praise the uni- 
 verse we most of us owe to the power of poetic 
 words. For the faculty of creating realizations 
 is limited and unusual; and it is through the 
 names that others give to their own experience, 
 or to enlargements upon their experience, that 
 
IMAGINATIVE REALIZATION 65 
 
 usual persons are enabled to escape from the 
 prison of themselves and get tastes of the general 
 world. 
 
 While, therefore, poetic names are valuable to 
 the complete perception of a thing, and still more 
 to the clear memory or expectation of it, to that 
 free realization by imaginative sympathy in which 
 we make all human experience our own they are 
 absolutely essential. And their method in this 
 culminating fimction is exactly what it is in the 
 simplest apprehension to which they contribute. 
 In naming an imagined thing they select parts or 
 qualities upon which to rest the attention, and 
 then compare that thing with others imagined, 
 similar in those parts or qualities. "O you tem- 
 ples," says the poet, "fairer than lilies, pour'd 
 over by the rising sun!" And to the responsive 
 heart comes a sense or vision of these ancient 
 wonders, more poignant and more memorable, 
 perhaps, than if they had been actually seen and 
 examined, with no poet there to speak the magic 
 syllables. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 CHOICE AND COMPARISON IN POETRY 
 
 Poetic choice is not a choice of things to be 
 realized, remember, for to this end anything may- 
 be chosen. But poetic choice is a second choice, 
 within the thing to be realized, of a focus that will 
 intensify the realization. Suppose that we are 
 gazing with a kind of vague affection toward a 
 summer sky; any one by uttering the words "So 
 near!" or "The nearness of it!" can be pleasing to 
 us. These little words precipitate the thing we 
 had in solution. And theirs is the simplest artic- 
 ulate poetry, just that single naming of a quality 
 or part in the whole presence of a thing. 
 
 When, however, the thing is absent — when we 
 are not gazing at a summer sky at all, but still 
 the poet wishes us to realize it, he must say more 
 than a single word. He must say enough both 
 to indicate the sky as a whole, and then also the 
 focal part or quality. "The sky so near," he 
 must say, or "The nearness of the sky!" And 
 that is how poetic choice appears in what we may 
 call poetry proper, or imaginative realization 
 through language. Everywhere its words are 
 66 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 67 
 
 doing two things, they are indicating experiences 
 in general and then suggesting specific details. 
 
 "The old pond, aye! and the sound 
 Of a frog leaping into the water," 
 
 is the literal translation of a classic poem of Japan, 
 one that they say every Japanese has by heart. 
 I quote it because it reveals the act of poetic 
 choice so simply. The general environment, one 
 very full and rich with beautiful or moving de- 
 tails, is named, and then immediately the most 
 characteristic of these details. 
 
 "The end of autumn, and some rooks 
 Are perched upon a withered branch." 
 
 "Aye I New Year's day, with a clear sky, 
 And conversation among the sparrows I" 
 
 These little utterances — Hokku they are called 
 — consisting of seventeen syllables arranged in 
 lines of five, seven, and then five, are the char-- 
 acteristic poetry of Japan. They are without 
 rhyme or reason — ^just each a single act of poetic 
 choice or comparison, to stand or fall by its own 
 merits. And in most of them apparently the act 
 of choice is accomplished, as in the examples 
 above, by placing a general term first and then 
 the specific details in co-ordination. 
 
68 ENJOYTVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 The general term does not always stand in the 
 body of the work, but may appear as a title. 
 The following little motion-picture is the winning 
 poem from a public competition in which the 
 general term was proposed by the arbiter. I 
 quote from an English critic: 
 
 "The subject has been a 'Spring Breeze/ and 
 to imderstand the significance of the verse we 
 must remember that in Japan carpenters plane 
 their wood in the open air, and that the curhng 
 wood-sha\ing is the exact shape of the Japanese 
 letter 'no.' Here is the poem: 
 
 '"As I walked past the carpenter's, the no-letters chased 
 me down the lane.'" 
 
 Sometimes, however, the realization is all con- 
 veyed in a simple declarative sentence as though 
 it were information, and in these cases — as in our 
 own poems, where the impulse to reaUze is hardly 
 ever isolated — ^it b a little more difficult to trace 
 the poetic act. Here the chief detail of what we 
 might call a "sea-picture" appears as a soHtary 
 statement of fact: 
 
 "There, by the crescent moon, the shark 
 Has hid his head beneath the wave." 
 
 More often the chosen detail is subordinated 
 still further, and appears as an adjective, or ad- 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 69 
 
 verb, or phrase, or clause, modifying the gen- 
 eral term. 
 
 "Without a word of warning, there 
 In th' autumn sky, Mount Fuji stands." 
 
 "How carefully begin to bud 
 In winter the cameUia-trees." 
 
 These are rather serene and quiet pictures, 
 where the name of the detail is subsequent and 
 subordinate to the name of the thing. But as 
 the poetic impulse grows intense the detail is 
 more and more elevated, and the general term 
 sinks into subordination, or if it can be somehow 
 understood, it disappears altogether. 
 
 This is the tiny threnody of a Japanese mother, 
 Chiyo, at the loss of her child: 
 
 "Where may he have gone off to^iay,— 
 My dragon-fly hunter?" 
 
 She does not say, as the others would: 
 
 "My boy who used to chase dragon-flies." 
 
 No, she makes the detail, the dragon-fly chasing, 
 he the boy. That is the intenser art. 
 
 Here, in a different vein, is even a more incisive 
 etching: 
 
 "A show'r in spring, where an umbrella 
 And rail-coat walk along conversing." 
 
70 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 In this poem the detail of two covered peopk 
 walking down the street together is chosen from 
 the general aspect of the shower, and placed in a 
 subordinate phrase; but afterward, within that 
 detail, a more exquisite choice is made, and it is 
 made sharply. There is no mention of the people 
 at all, just those two parts of therrij the rain-coat 
 and the umbrella, walk along conversing! Such 
 effects are produced by a man who is not afraid 
 to let the poetic impulse dominate him, making 
 his logical import ridiculous. ' 
 
 **They have slain the servants with the edge of the sword." 
 
 **There came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote 
 the four comers of the house." 
 
 That is how choice utters itself when realiza- 
 tion is intense. And almost throughout our 
 English Bible it is intense. Poetry exists there 
 in the old stories and songs, poetry of the very 
 strongest, without metre, without metaphor, and 
 even where the translator has lost all rhythm of 
 speech. It exists in the choice of practically su- 
 perfluous but poignant details, which irresistibly 
 invade the mind. 
 
 "Woe unto them that devise iniquity. 
 And plot evil upon their beds." 
 
 "Bring out the prisoner from the dungeon, 
 And them that sit in darkness from the prison-house." 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 71 
 
 That parallelism of phrases, which is the struct- 
 ural feature of Hebrew verse, lets appear the 
 true motive of poetry almost as nakedly as the 
 Japanese Hokku. With them the whole poem 
 is mere realization; with the Hebrews there is a 
 practical intent, there is discourse, but that in- 
 tent being more than fulfilled in the first line, the 
 second, or the second two, are pure realization 
 of the subject discoursed of. And in them there- 
 fore this almost fanatical specification of the 
 minute detail. 
 
 "I will not suffer mine eyes to sleep. 
 Nor mine eyelids to slumber." 
 
 **Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice 
 over me: 
 Neither let them vnnk with the eye that hate me without 
 a cause." 
 
 "He heard my voice out of his temple; 
 And my cry before him came into his ears" 
 
 "All they that see me laugh me to scorn: 
 They shoot out the lip " 
 
 It is not really a long step from this flaming 
 poetry to the modern utterances of Walt Whit- 
 man, a mystic too, forever hinting at something 
 behind, or beyond, and yet in the depth of his 
 soul loving the inevitable and temporal qualities 
 of things here. 
 
72 ENJOYjVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 There is no better place to learn the difference 
 between poetry and practical language than in 
 his book, which is a grand mixture of the two. 
 Take those lines beginning "WTiat do you see, 
 Walt Whitman?" — you can mark off whole blocks 
 of them in which, being entirely satisfied with his 
 own vision and himself, he makes no effort to let 
 the reader see, he merely names things with their 
 practical names. And then you can choose other 
 lines and passages of supreme poetry, passages 
 in which, as he himself says, he builds not with 
 words but with materials: 
 
 "He puts things in their attitudes, 
 He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love." 
 
 Compare the two follo\^ing sets of lines and you 
 will feel this difference. You will feel the differ- 
 ence between words and things. 
 
 a) 
 
 **I see plainly the Himalayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, 
 Ghauts." 
 
 **I see the Brazilian vaquero; 
 I see the Bolivian ascending Moimt Sorata." 
 
 "You Japanese man or woman I You liver in Madagas- 
 car, Ceylon, Sumatra, Borneo 1 
 All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, 
 indifferent of place I" 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 73 
 
 (2) 
 "I see a great round wonder rolling through the air; 
 
 I see the shaded part on one side, where the sleepers are 
 
 sleeping — and the sunlit part on the other side, 
 I see the curious silent change of the light and shade." 
 
 "I see the battle-fields of the earth — grass grows upon 
 them, and blossoms and corn." 
 
 "I see the place of the innocent rich life and hapless fate 
 of the beautiful nocturnal son, the full-limb'd 
 Bacchus." 
 
 "You beautiful-bodied Persian, at full speed in the saddle, 
 shooting arrows to the mark I" 
 
 "You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive 
 Hp, grovelling, seeking your food I" 
 
 "You thoughtful Armenian, pondering by some stream of 
 the Euphrates I you peering amid the ruins of 
 Nineveh I" 
 
 **You Hottentot with clicking palate I You woolly-hair*d 
 
 hordes 1 
 You own'd persons dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops I 
 You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive 
 
 countenances of brutes I" 
 
 One reason why Walt Whitman, having this 
 gift of conveying realizations to the very highest, 
 mixed them with so much dead stuff, is that he 
 wanted his poetry to be Hke the world, to "tally 
 nature," as he says, and have passages not beau- 
 
74 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 tiful nor conventionally poetic. But this ambi- 
 tion might have been satisfied by introducing in 
 vivid reality things which are not usually intro- 
 duced. It does not demand that things should 
 be introduced without vivid reality. There are 
 no abstract passages in nature. There are no 
 catalogues of common names. Nature does not 
 exist in classes — blacksmiths, carpenters, oil- 
 works, white-lead works — but exists in the smoke 
 and sweat of individual specimens. Nature does 
 not signify by names but by qualities. And 
 when, like her, the poet enlivens with an act of 
 choice a certain member of his tedious proces- 
 sions, no matter what member it is, we are glad, 
 and loath to depart from it. The energy of such 
 a phrase is contagious, and for a little way on 
 both sides of it the procession moves. 
 
 "I see the camel, the wild steed, the bustard, the fat-tail'd 
 sheep, the antelope, and the burrowing wolf." 
 
 Observe how that "fat-tail'd" sheep emerges, 
 gives you a sensation, and then lends a bit of his 
 vitality to the whole parade. Leave that out 
 and there is no parade, it is merely a list. But 
 as it is, the camel and the wild steed both prick 
 up their ears to see that fattail coming, and there 
 is a real poetic quality in the whole line. 
 
 Turn from this poem, in which as in so much 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 75 
 
 of his writing Whitman lacks abandon, there is 
 too much of the conscious pulpiteer — turn from 
 it to those poems in which he forgets. The psalm 
 in realization of the death of Abraham Lincoln, 
 the "Song of the Open Road," " Crossing Brook- 
 lyn Ferry," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- 
 ing" — there where the poet loses himself in the 
 things he names, the poetry is not failing. It 
 is sustained, and moreover it is perfectly simple. 
 
 "Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and 
 hurrying tides, and the ships " 
 
 "The most excellent sun, so calm and haughty " 
 
 "The high-spread sky " 
 
 "The huge and thoughtful night " 
 
 "The fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still ** 
 
 These are all seen in the sorrow of his great 
 poem, just as in life a child first sees them, vividly 
 and wonderfully. 
 
 "Day come white or night come black " 
 
 is but the poet's, and the child's, way of saying 
 " day or night." It is the act of poetic choice at 
 its simplest, the salient quality being merely the 
 most obvious of all — ^too obvious to be named 
 anywhere but in the language of genius. 
 
 "Lithe and silent the Hindu appears." 
 
76 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 "The friendly and flowing savage." 
 "The sagging moon." 
 "Immense and silent moon." 
 "Over the hoarse sm-ging of the sea." 
 
 In these the choice of a quality is more subtle, 
 and in the last one more emphasized also, for the 
 quality begins to be elevated above the thing 
 again. It is not, "Over the sea with its hoarse 
 surge/' but 
 
 "Over the hoarse surging." 
 
 And he might have omitted the sea altogether, 
 as in this line he has omitted the flying: 
 
 "And every day the he-bird to-and-fro." 
 
 These highest degrees of the act of poetic choice, 
 letting the attribute or part supplant entirely the 
 customary name of the thing, have received from 
 scholars some long names — metonymy and synec- 
 doche — and have been classified by them in total 
 separation from the poetic use of adjectives and 
 adverbs and co-ordinate expressions. They have 
 been called "figures of speech." And a figure of 
 speech is defined as an indirect way of naming 
 things. 
 
 "Spring Shower — an umbrella and rain-coat walk along 
 conversing." 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 77 
 
 That is metonymy. Tell yourself that it is an 
 "indirect" way of naming things. 
 
 "They have slain the servants with the edge of the sword." 
 
 That is synecdoche, also an "indirect" way of 
 speaking. 
 
 The treatment in rhetorical theory of figures 
 of speech, appears to be one of the greatest blun- 
 ders that an over-spectacled scholarship ever ob- 
 truded upon the world. It is due, I believe, to 
 the fact that all discourse was assumed by Aris- 
 totle's scholastic successors to be practical in its 
 primary intent; and from the stand-point of a 
 practical intent it is indirect to say an umbrella 
 when your logical subject is a man. From the 
 stand-point of a poetic intent, however, an intent 
 to put a man before the eyes umbrella-foremost, it 
 is supremely direct. It excels exactly in direct- 
 ness the use of modifiers. 
 
 Yet that ancient classification and definition, 
 important or at least interesting to one who 
 studies the mechanics of connected speech, but 
 of the least possible significance in the psychology 
 of poetic inspiration or appreciation, is still forced 
 upon the novice as one of the keys to the enjoy- 
 ment of poetry. He must learn how lovely it 
 is to be indirect, and when you set out to go some- 
 where, instead of going there, to back up and 
 
78 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 turn round and go somewhere else. This is so 
 difficult for a plain man to learn that I think we 
 may set it down as the chief academic obstacle to 
 the enjojTnent of imaginative literature. "Fig- 
 ures of speech" — "metonymy," "synecdoche," 
 and other long-tailed monsters — are what bar the 
 entrance of a simple human into the realm of 
 poetry. 
 
 The reason for mentioning only two at this 
 point is that we have now arrived at a suitable 
 place to forget these two. It ought to be possible 
 to obliterate them entirely from the mind, mak- 
 ing room in their place for the simple truth that 
 if a speaker's impulse is poetic, words that sug- 
 gest salient parts or qualities of the things he 
 mentions will stand out over the general names of 
 the things. It is because he seeks to attain and 
 convey to us a sense of the actual existence of 
 those things. And for us things actually exist 
 always with some part or quahty thus predomi- 
 nant. 
 
 Some who have felt the poetry of the phrases 
 we quoted, will think that it lies rather in the 
 choice of words than in the choice of qualities. 
 We might state, for instance, that the moon is 
 "near the horizon and convex at the bottom" in- 
 stead of "sagging," that the savage "glides with 
 a continuous grace of movement," instead of 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 79 
 
 "flowing," and, while indicating the same qualities 
 that the poet did, we should not convey the same 
 realization. And that is entirely true, and it is 
 due to the fact that the act of choice is altogether 
 inseparable from the act of comparison. And 
 every word which comes forth to name an expe- 
 rience in the present, comes forth out of a past in 
 which it has been the name of other experiences. 
 And these it cannot forget. "Convex" com- 
 pares the moon to what? — to lenses, to spec- 
 tacles, to circles of paper. What does it re- 
 member? It remembers the school-room and the 
 laboratory. And what have they, the school- 
 room and laboratory, that they can bring as an 
 offering to the pure perception of the moon late- 
 risen upon a sorrowful evening? No, they are 
 to be shunned earnestly, and that is why it ap- 
 pears that realization depends as much upon the 
 choice of words as of qualities. It depends upon 
 the comparison of things, and words are the 
 bearers of comparison. 
 Suppose that we say, 
 
 "Day come light, or night come dark," 
 
 then we have nearly eliminated comparison, for 
 dark is a word that only remembers other nights, 
 and lighi remembers other days. Therefore, while 
 these words, by their very superfluity, bear wit- 
 
80 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 ness to the poetic impulse, the poetry that they 
 generate is very watery indeed. But "black" 
 and "white" have other memories, and much 
 incipient or potential comparison will therefore 
 enrich that day or night in which they choose the 
 quahty. 
 
 "The flowing savage" is a name which con- 
 tains choice and comparison in high equiHbrium. 
 To one who already knew and loved the fluid 
 motion of an Indian's body, it would be difficult 
 to say which is the more perfect, the instinct that 
 caught it, or the art that could just intimate 
 rivers, melodies — its true companions. 
 
 Every line of poetry is pregnant with such la- 
 tent comparisons; it is a kind of menace. And, 
 just as with rapture the act of choice overtops 
 the meaning, and the customary name is omitted, 
 so also with rapture the act of comparison. The 
 menace is fulfilled. Out of that imminence of 
 vague memories suddenly shoots down into your 
 very speech a concrete reality, and you utter, not 
 the name of your logical subject, but the name 
 of this other that is similar. 
 
 "The white arms out in the breakers tirdessly tossing." 
 
 "^th angry moans the fierce old Tnother incessantly 
 moaning." 
 
 "I will toss the new gladness and roughness among them." 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 81 
 
 Let this third example remind us that all we 
 have said applies to verbs and adverbs, as well 
 as to nouns and adjectives. "I will generate with 
 words, will stimulate hy my presence, a new glad- 
 ness and roughness," would be a more practical 
 expression, but toss comes forward inevitably and 
 the sentence lives. 
 
 When comparison becomes as overt as this, it 
 too is seized upon by the rhetoricians, cut off from 
 the use of poetic modifiers or co-ordinate expres- 
 sions, and called " metaphor." I am not sure but 
 the flowing savage contains a comparison sufficiently 
 manifest to fall under this misfortune. It might 
 be called a "trope," or some other word to sig- 
 nify a shunting off, or blockage, of the general 
 course of business. But I am sure that no essen- 
 tial difference for poetry exists between its use 
 and the use of any rich adjective, such as "lithe," 
 or, upon the other hand, the use of two names and 
 a particle, or copula, to express the comparison 
 between them — "The savage who moves like a 
 stream." 
 
 Say that a creature is pale — ^you have some 
 comparison with other pale things. Say that he 
 is ghastly, the other things emerge nearer; ghostly, 
 still nearer; ghost-like, ghost-pale, they are im- 
 minent; and pale as the ghosts of the dead, they 
 are upon you. 
 
82 ENJOYIMENT OF POETRY 
 
 This is an essentially homogeneous hst. But 
 every rhetorician will make two abrupt di\'isions 
 in it. Pale and ghastly he will let go as "direct," 
 "normal," "hteral" names. At ghostly he will 
 make a great leap over nothing, and call it a 
 "metaphor"; at ghost-like another leap, and call 
 it a "simile." Moreover, if you say, "This creat- 
 ure is like a ghost," he will call it simile; but if 
 you say, "He is a mere ghost," it is metaphor. 
 These distinctions, which have to do with the 
 small points of sentence structure, being pushed 
 forward as something to watch for in poetry, 
 greatly obstruct the natural love of it, and more- 
 over occupy the place of a distinction which 
 would really further its appreciation. 
 
 For there are, in the hterature of realization, 
 two ver}^ different kinds of comparison. There 
 are illuminating, or intensifying, comparisons, 
 where the things recalled only shed a light of 
 strong reality upon the subject of discourse. 
 Such are the metaphors we have been considering, 
 and also both the similes and metaphors in the 
 following lines: 
 
 "The words of his mouth were smoother than butter. 
 But war was in his heart; 
 His words were softer than oil. 
 Yet were they drawn swords." 
 
 "There is no faithfulness in their mouth; 
 Their throat is an open sepulchre ** 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 83 
 
 "But I am a worm, and no man ** 
 
 ** Rottenness entereth into my bones." 
 
 "My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my 
 bowels " 
 
 "I am poured out like water " 
 
 On the other hand, there are comparisons in 
 which the poetic impulse runs out into the things 
 recalled, and you have a little excursion of reali- 
 zation away from the subject of discourse. And 
 these we may call discursive or holiday compari- 
 sons, since they are so happily defiant of practical 
 progress. They occur most frequently in the 
 childhood of literature. 
 
 "The Lord is my shepherd; 
 I shall not want. 
 
 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: 
 He leadeth me beside the still waters. 
 He restoreth my soul " 
 
 "As for man, his days are as grass: 
 As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. 
 For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; 
 And the place thereof shall know it no Tnore" 
 
 Here for a moment man is quite forgotten in 
 the tragedy of that little flower; and before, I 
 think, the Lord was almost forgotten in a pastoral 
 idyl. 
 
 Such wandering in a simile from the original 
 
84 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 subject, while yet the original subject sustains 
 and dignifies your enjoyment, is a special expe- 
 rience. It is poetically different from the purely 
 illuminative use of comparison, because the reali- 
 zation lies for a moment in a new direction. 
 Therefore the distinction of these two — although 
 far less precise than the ones that the rhetorics 
 draw — is of true importance to us. 
 
 "Allegory" and "fable" and "parable," and 
 what has been called in Hebrew Hterature "direct 
 metaphor," are poetry of this kind. "Direct 
 metaphor" is simply an allegory with no overt 
 transfer of names, no explanation of its symbol- 
 ism. It is not more direct than other metaphors, 
 but it is more extended. One occurs in Eccle- 
 siastes beginning: 
 
 "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy 
 youth " 
 
 from which it has taxed the generations to ex- 
 tract the proper meaning. The same kind of 
 metaphor occiu^ in the poetry of primitive 
 people, and the same difficulty arises when we 
 try to enjoy, or even to perceive, the comparisons 
 in this poetry. We do not understand its meta- 
 phors, and even after they are explained we can- 
 not feel their appropriateness, because the objects 
 named have so different a flavor to our affections 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 85 
 
 from what they had to those who named them. 
 This is a "Song of the Spirit Dance" among the 
 Arapaho Indians: 
 
 "Wading passed I through 
 
 Yellow waters, 
 Wading passed I through 
 
 Yellow waters, 
 Ah, 'twas e'en, e'en the turtle lake — 
 
 Yellow waters — 
 Ah, 'twas e'en, e'en the turtle lake — 
 
 Yellow waters." 
 
 Dante has often this primitive quality. Allegory 
 and extended metaphor are so natural to his mind 
 that all his language, even in a prose translation, 
 has a strange sound to us. He seems, almost 
 like a bashful person, to shrink from naming 
 the real subject of discourse, always intimating 
 or indicating what it is by dwelling with a grave 
 expression upon something else. 
 
 Now all these formal uses of comparison, being 
 poetically different both in motive and effect, 
 ought to be separated from the merely illumina- 
 tive simile and metaphor. Only they ought not 
 to be separated from discursive simile, which is 
 the same thing in a far sweeter and more spon- 
 taneous form. The love of what lies at the other 
 side of a comparison happens to carry us away, 
 and we wander over there to look for a minute, 
 before going on with the main poem. 
 
86 ENJOYIMENT OF POETRY 
 
 "He shall feed his flocks like a shepherd. 
 He shall gather the lambs in his arm, 
 And carry them in his bosom, 
 And shall gently lead those that give stick" 
 
 Only from the point of view of practical dis- 
 course, of the pure effort to convey a meaning, 
 can any of this language be called indirect, or 
 out of the simple and natural. The moment the 
 poetic impulse is acknowledged, and to the ex- 
 tent that it is acknowledged, any true comparison 
 appears entirely direct and primitive. See it, as 
 we saw poetic choice, in the second member of a 
 parallelism, where the meaning is already satisfied: 
 
 "Whose confidence shall break asunder. 
 And whose trust is a spider's web." 
 
 Or see it in those verses from the Japanese, 
 which have no practical motive, but are the 
 atoms of poetry: 
 
 "FalPn flower returning to the branch, — 
 Behold I it is a butterfly. " 
 
 See it thus, and that sense of anything indirect, 
 anj^lhing "turning aside,'* in poetic comparison, 
 is impossible. Still more impossible if we look 
 again to the very origins of formal poetry. 
 
 "Beautiful, lo, the summer clouds. 
 Beautiful, lo, the summer clouds. 
 Blossoming clouds in the sky 
 Like unto shimmering flowers " 
 
CHOICE AND COMPARISON 87 
 
 is the substance of a dance song among the Zuni 
 Indians. And this is a Hopi lullaby: 
 
 "Puva, puva, puva/ 
 In the trail the beetles 
 On each other's backs are sleeping, 
 So on mine, my baby, thou 
 Puva, puva, puva." 
 
 Sometimes in our own literature this sense of a 
 whole poem as pure poetry is conveyed through 
 a device called apostrophe. And apostrophe, by 
 the irony of rhetoric, means "turning away." 
 It is turning away from the progress of your 
 argument in order to realize something you have 
 mentioned. But happily in certain cases there 
 is no argument, and there has been none, and so 
 there can be no turning away, but the whole poem 
 is a pure turning toward. An example from 
 William Blake is appropriate here, because, like 
 the other poems we have referred to, it makes its 
 appeal almost without the help of metrical music; 
 it is poetry through the perfection of poignant 
 choice and comparison. 
 
 "TO THE EVENING STAR 
 
 "Thou fair-haired Angel of the Evening, 
 Now whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light 
 Thy bright torch of love — thy radiant crown 
 Put on, and smile upon our evening bed I 
 
 1 "Puva" is a verb meaning sleep. 
 
88 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest the 
 
 Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew 
 
 On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes 
 
 In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on 
 
 The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes 
 
 And wash the dusk with silver. — Soon, full soon. 
 
 Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide. 
 
 And the lion glares through the dun forest. 
 
 The fleeces of our flocks are covered with 
 
 Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence I" 
 
 It will not appear, in this wrought harmony of 
 realizations, so easy a thing to choose and com- 
 pare poetically, as it may have appeared in the 
 analysis. It is not a thing that every one can do 
 well. The qualities that it requires are three, 
 and they are three that rarely lodge in the same 
 mind — sensitiveness, and self-knowledge, and 
 sympathy. For the poet must receive the being 
 of things with his whole nature, and yet he must 
 know the motions of his mind in receiving them, 
 and he must know the motions of all minds, lest 
 his poetry be private and inconmiunicable. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 WINE AND SLEEP AND POETRY 
 
 The joy of drunkenness to an Anglo-Saxon is 
 that it gives lustre to his trivial experiences. He 
 gets adventure without doing much. Having 
 lulled with the narcotic those hereditary inhibi- 
 tions which made him appear phlegmatic, he can 
 come into that state of receptive exaltation which 
 is native to the wine-souled Italian. Liberated 
 from the tyranny of his own opinions, liberated 
 from his self-esteem, his diflBdence, or prudence, or 
 good judgment, he is now able to taste life. And 
 it was really for this same virtue that wine was 
 anciently praised, for this purpose it was used — • 
 to heighten the flush of experience, and make one 
 return, as Plato said, "into the state of soul in 
 which he was when a young child.** 
 
 The revels of Dionysus — perfections in the 
 memory of some rural harvest carnival — reveal, 
 through a glamour of mysticism, just this extrem- 
 ity of enthusiasm for the flavor of the world. 
 Wild youths, and creatures with youth in them — 
 satyrs, and fauns, and msenads, the lynx, the 
 goat, the dolphin — a laughter of Bacchus falling 
 upon them, hale each other forth with roses and 
 
90 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 ivy-crowns and vine-leaves trailing, snakes and 
 torches and flutes and hallelujahs, to celebrate a 
 fervent progress through the world. A triumph 
 after no achievement, and a conscription leading 
 to no deeds; a festive and terriflc celebration of 
 being. 
 
 Over the light blue hills 
 There came a noise of revellers: the rills 
 Into the wide stream came of purple hue — 
 
 'Twas Bacchus and his crew I 
 The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills 
 From kissing cymbals made a merry din — 
 
 'Twas Bacchus and his kin 
 Like to a moving vintage down they came, 
 Crown'd with green leaves, and faces all on flame; 
 All madly dancing through the pleasant valley . .** 
 
 Akin to the spirituous insanity of these joyful 
 creatures, is a certain mood of the imagination 
 in somnolescence, or midnight waking. Do there 
 not sometimes, as you fall asleep, come swimming 
 before your eyes in vivid portraiture, shapes and 
 scenes and faces, grotesque or beautiful, but of 
 such speaking realness that they make you move? 
 Or do you ever wake at midnight to find your 
 soul naked to the touch of the world? Little 
 things that you care for, yesterday's, or to-mor- 
 row's, or a Hfetime's — they are too real. Some- 
 times the trees stand out this way before a storm. 
 Each being is as though it had non-being for a 
 
WINE AND SLEEP AND POETRY 91 
 
 background. In these hours none too sober, I 
 think we are not far from the well-springs of 
 poetry. Activity has ceased and the senses sleep, 
 but there is energy of perception under the eye- 
 lids, and the world re-creates itself with fervor 
 there. 
 
 Neither dreams nor the complete illusions of 
 hypnosis, but just on the moonlight verge of them 
 — the wakeful lethargy in which a creak of the 
 floor seems an earthquake, and things with the 
 special values of unreaKty acquire all the vividness 
 of the real — this is the condition in which imagi- 
 native realization can vie in its intensity with the 
 sensuous experience of a BacchanaHan. This is 
 the condition into which the poet must bring us. 
 He must lull us into our exaltation. And for this 
 purpose, like a mother to her child in the night, 
 he brings music. He cradles us in rhythm and 
 soothes us with a perpetual and half-monotonous 
 melody. 
 
 Music is wine to the imagination. And the es- 
 sence of music, originally and in this respect, is 
 rhythm, or the regular recurrence of a pleasant 
 stroke. The trance-engendering power of such 
 recurrence, however it may be explained, was an- 
 ciently known and is easily verified. Patting and 
 stroking are nature's anodynes. We rock our 
 babies to sleep, we smooth the foreheads of the 
 
92 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 fretful, and we love to slide into oblivion ourselves, 
 carrying with us the continual tirl of rain-drops 
 on a roof, or beneath us in the darkness the mur- 
 mur of a brook. Bernheim, the great scientific 
 magician, hypnotized his patients usually by mut- 
 tering "sleep — sleep — sleep," and stroking them 
 with his hand; then, without altering the cadence 
 of his voice, he could introduce imaginations into 
 their minds, and make them realize vividly the 
 presence of things even while they knew them to 
 be illusory. This is an experiment which almost 
 any two people may try, and in a few moments 
 they will feel an original connection between 
 rhythm and imaginative realization. 
 
 There is, perhaps, a yet more original and more 
 broad connection between rhythm and all reaKza- 
 tion. It seems as if there must be, because 
 rhythm is used, not only to lull the body and set 
 free the imagination, but also, like wine itself, to 
 excite the body to the last degree of the intensity 
 of real experience. These are the two primitive 
 uses of the recurrent stimulus, and somehow they 
 both survive in poetry. The very metrical mo- 
 notony that drowses us becomes, when we are lost 
 to coarser things, a turbulent and stimulating 
 stream along our veins. And no theory will ever 
 adequately unfold the magic of such utterance 
 that does not grant and reconcile these two effects. 
 
WINE AND SLEEP AND POETRY 93 
 
 Until such a theory is devised, and commands us 
 to the contrary, we can please our minds at least 
 with the following analogy: 
 
 Suppose that we figure the nervous current 
 which corresponds to consciousness as proceeding, 
 like so many other currents of nature, in waves — 
 then we do receive a new apprehension, if not an 
 explanation, of the strange power over us of suc- 
 cessive strokes. For to regulate a consciousness 
 would be to regulate waves, and how else would 
 that be accomplished than by a calculated rhyth- 
 mic impetus? It seems to me that, in the entire 
 lack of anything better deserving the name, we 
 might almost call this analogy explanation, for it 
 describes in physical terms what every one can 
 say mentally — that rhythm seems to chime in 
 with the very nature of his state of being and con- 
 trol it. Such an explanation will have this ad- 
 vantage too, that it does not demand an artificial 
 separation of emotion from sensation, or imagina- 
 tion from thought, but it allows for the rhythmic 
 elevation of all these kinds of experience. What- 
 ever things occupy our attention — events, ob- 
 jects, tones, combinations of tones, emotions, pict- 
 ures, images, ideas — our consciousness of them 
 will be heightened by the rhythm as though it 
 consisted of waves. And what is still more to the 
 credit of the analogy, this effect will be strong, if 
 
94 ENJOY^IEXT OF POETRY 
 
 not strongest, when the rhythm is not perceived 
 at all, but the attention is directed elsewhere. 
 
 Shelley has expressed in a fragment, which is 
 better information than poetry, a special pleasure 
 of his which rested upon this fact. 
 
 "How sweet it is to sit and read the tales 
 Of mighty poets, and to hear the while 
 Sweet music, which, when the attention fails, 
 Fills the dim pause " 
 
 Apparently he did not guess the truth, that the 
 music acted while his mind was engrossed even 
 more than in the pauses of the tale. But there 
 can be little doubt of it. Music upon the inat- 
 tentive ear is a most insidious stimulant. Per- 
 haps it is for this that we so often beat a 
 rh^lhm with our fingers when we think. At any 
 rate, to many it is a pleasure not exactly "sweet," 
 but better than that, to have some tune around 
 them when their mind is steadily occupied upon 
 anything. It need not be the tales of mighty 
 poets, nor need the music be better than a hurdy- 
 gurdy at the street comer. The eflPect is the same 
 — a. kind of high buoyancy of thought, with that 
 accentuation of the reality of thought's objects. 
 And I take it to lie, either hke h^^nosis in the 
 lulling of the body and the prudential mind, the 
 partial liberating of imagery from inhibitions of 
 maturity and civihzation, or, Hke the madness of 
 
WINE AND SLEEP AND POETRY 95 
 
 dancers, in a general intensification of all experi- 
 ence. Some day both these things, the imagina- 
 tive suggestibility and the physical ecstasy, the 
 sleep and wine in poetry, may be harmonized to- 
 gether in explanation by a mature science, but at 
 present we are free to speculate a while among 
 them and leave them undetermined. 
 
 However it may go with the explanation, there 
 is no undetermination of the fact that rhythm 
 promotes every realization. A great new art of 
 th ese days is the mov ing::picture show, and I have 
 yet to find one in which the reahty of the pictures 
 is not enhanced with the beating of an old piano. 
 Nobody notices the piano, nobody remembers 
 what the piano played, or how badly, but there it 
 is, always keeping up a metre. And even when 
 the motion films give out, and there are thrown 
 on the screen those old still scenes of true love by 
 moonlight, still it pounds away, and the audience 
 melts to the mood of credulous romance. Their 
 voluntary mind is upon the canvas, but that music 
 slips all the deeper into their being, and it makes 
 them live the pictures. 
 
 The high and wide popularity of this art both 
 makes plausible the rise of epics, and gives assur- 
 ance of the future of poetry. For poetry too is a 
 series of pictures accompanied by appropriate 
 music. The pictures are to the imagination, and 
 
96 ENJOY]\IEXT OF POETRY 
 
 not to its eye only but to its whole being; and the 
 music is of a more subtle volume; but other than 
 this there is no difference. Ages ago we can un- 
 derstand how those with the gift of seeing pictures, 
 and the naming gift, availed themselves of the 
 dance ecstasies of their tribe to get voice and 
 ear for a little \ivid utterance. We can imagine 
 through centuries the gradual union of that poetic 
 emplo}Tnent of speech which we have described 
 as beginning when speech began, with the em- 
 plojTnent of rhythm to intensify experience upon 
 festal occasions, until a custom and an art of po- 
 etry arises, and there are ballad-singers singing 
 to the dance. Like speech itself into the earlier 
 darkness of the tribes, a poet steps into the circle 
 of these dumb carnivals and illumines them. 
 Nor will it be long after that before he begins to 
 gather his own circles, and sing to his own music 
 or his own dancing, telling in metrical and poetic 
 syllables the tales of the tribe. And the experi- 
 ence of his hearers will be purely imaginary. It 
 will be pure poetry — a realization in the rhythmic 
 trance of things that are absent and events that 
 are not happening. 
 
 That is the origin, so far as we know, of the 
 first poem, the metrical stor}% the ballad, the epic. 
 And no one who sees it there, primitive and inevi- 
 table, and then sees it again here in our own thea- 
 
WINE AND SLEEP AND POETRY 97 
 
 tres, the same thing only a little less tranced and 
 more palpable — as adapted to a people who have 
 their sophistication to overcome — no one who 
 sees it so, or once so feels it in his own nature, will 
 doubt that the union of rhythm and the language 
 of realization was great and will be eternal.^ 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 REALIZATION OF ACTION 
 
 The earliest poems were stories, and story poems 
 are ever the most popular. Perhaps they are pop- 
 ular in spite of their poetry rather than because of 
 it. For that onward voracity of the will to which 
 a narrative appeals is different, and is almost 
 always more compelling, than the inclination to 
 realize. So compelling is it that often it makes us 
 impatient of the delay and we resent poetry in a 
 tale as much as we should in a book of technical 
 science. "It is a good story,'* we say, "if you 
 skip the descriptions." And while this may some- 
 times indicate that the descriptions are mere in- 
 ventory, at other times it indicates a deep antipa- 
 thy between the mood of anticipation and that 
 of realization. A narrative poem is an unstable 
 compound, and will generally fall out to be, in the 
 reader's mind, either a good narrative or a good 
 poem, but rarely both. 
 
 On the other hand, granted that the reader's 
 mood is poetic, and that he is more eager to receive 
 an experience than to find out a result, it will be 
 easier to convey to him through language the ex- 
 perience of an action than the experience of an 
 98 
 
REALIZATIOxN OF ACTION 99 
 
 inactive thing. It is easier to make a series of 
 words vividly suggest a series of events, than to 
 make them suggest a collocation of objects. " He 
 starts, he jumps, he runs!" gives a sharper touch 
 to the imagination than "It is red, white, and 
 blue!" And yet each is a mere list of practical 
 names. I think the reason for this difference is 
 that, in the first case, the words stand in the same 
 relation to each other as the acts they name, they 
 succeed each other in time; whereas in the sec- 
 ond, the words succeed each other in time, but the 
 qualities they name co-exist in space — it therefore 
 requires a special kind of word to make us pause 
 and receive them vividly. 
 
 This similarity of the utterance of words to the 
 forth-striking of events has given rise to the cele- 
 brated opinion that the only proper subject for 
 poetry is action.^ But it would be truer to say 
 that the first and easiest subject for poetry is 
 action. Granted that the poetic intention is un- 
 derstood, it requires little technique of choice or 
 comparison to make a succession of words conjure 
 
 * "If it is true that painting employs in its imitations 
 entirely different means or symbols from those adopted by 
 poetry — i. c, the former using forms and colors in space, 
 the latter, on the other hand, articulate sounds in time — 
 if it is admitted that these symbols must be in suitable 
 relation to the thing symbolized, then symbols placed in 
 juxtaposition can only express subjects of which the wholes 
 or parts exist in juxtaposition; and consecutive symbola 
 
100 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 up a succession of events. A trimmed narrative 
 is almost inevitably poetic. 
 
 "Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took 
 him." 
 
 And when to this natural ease of creating and re- 
 ceiving the poetry of narrative we add the fact 
 that unpoetic readers can ignore its poetry and 
 eat up the narrative only, if they wish to, we have 
 abundant explanation of the greater popularity 
 of the story poem. 
 
 Ballad-singing is an art almost universally 
 pleasure-giving. But the pleasure in ballads di- 
 vides itself very sharply into these two kinds: on 
 the one hand, that of persons not especially poetic, 
 which may be described as a pleasure in finding 
 their way to the end, and, on the other, that of 
 poetic persons, a pleasure in viewing the whole as 
 a single and simple jewel — a painting of action 
 more poetic by the grace of nature than its author 
 had the genius to make it. And melody adds to 
 
 can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts are 
 consecutive. 
 
 "Subjects, the wholes or parts of which exist in juxta- 
 position, are termed bodies. Consequently bodies, with 
 their visible properties, are the special subjects of painting. 
 
 "Subjects, the wholes or parts of which are consecutive, 
 are generally termed actions. Consequently actions are 
 the special subjects of poetry." — ^Lessing's "Laocoon," 
 chapter XVI. 
 
REALIZATION OF ACTION 101 
 
 the first kind of pleasure the excitement of sus- 
 pense, while rhythm exalts the pure poetry of 
 ballads. 
 
 " Hie upon Hielands, 
 
 And laigh* upon Tay, 
 
 Bonny George Campbell 
 
 Rode out on a day, 
 
 Saddled and bridled 
 
 Sae gallant to see. 
 
 Hame cam' his gude horse. 
 
 But never cam' he. 
 
 ** Down ran his auld mither, 
 Greetin' fu' sair; 
 Out ran his bonny bride. 
 Reaving her hair; 
 *My meadow lies green, 
 And my corn is unshorn. 
 My barn is too bigg, 
 And my babe is unborn.* 
 
 "Saddled and bridled, 
 And booted rode he; 
 A plume in his helmet, 
 A sword at his knee; 
 But toom^ cam' his saddle 
 A' bluidy to see, 
 O hame cam' his gude horse. 
 But never cam' he." 
 
 These ballads of the people, though they derive 
 from the fingers of time a touch of perfection not 
 their own, were none the less surely the work of 
 poets. They have a discrimination of emotional 
 
 1 laigh = low * toom = empty 
 
102 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 atmosphere, an occasional poetic word used with 
 exquisite regard to that, which proves the receiv- 
 ing mind. It proves that the purpose of this 
 begmning was not merely to reach the end. 
 We are permitted to pause at the sight of that 
 bonny bride "reaving her hau-." Yet, upon the 
 whole, there is a scarcity of these choices in bal- 
 lad literature, and a repetition of conventional 
 comparisons, which reveals in their authors a 
 dilution of the poetic love with a too forward 
 look. They have not that idle enjoyment of 
 qualities which delays the action in great epics. 
 The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung to an 
 achieving people and they rely for popularity, 
 like ballads, fundamentally upon their core of 
 narrative suspense; yet they assume with a more 
 royal assurance that their hearers will be hospit- 
 able to the individual nature of the events 
 detailed, and that the world in which these events 
 happen is itself worth looking round in. 
 
 Only a truly poetic fervor will endure the delays 
 in Homer, or consider that the Iliad is not a clut- 
 tered narrative. The poet is never more alive 
 than when he has stopped the action, and lined 
 up his combatants, upon one excuse or another, 
 to contemplate their aspect. I quote one of these 
 instances for the simple poetic delight that it 
 gives. ^ ■ - 
 
REALIZATION OF ACTION 103 
 
 "So, high in hope, they sat the whole night through 
 In warUke lines, and many watch-fires blazed. 
 As when in heaven the stars look brightly forth 
 Round the clear-shining moon, while not a breeze 
 Stirs in the depths of air, and all the stars 
 Are seen, and gladness fills the shepherd's heart. 
 So many fires in sight of Iliimi blazed. 
 Lit by the sons of Troy, between the ships 
 And eddying Xanthus: on the plain there shone 
 A thousand; fifty warriors by each fire 
 Sat in its light. Their steeds beside the cars — 
 Champing their oats and their white barley — stood 
 And waited for the golden mom to rise." 
 
 Not only after night comes on, however, and 
 while the actors sleep, does Homer make his lin- 
 gerings and excm-sions, but even in the heat of 
 battle and while spears quiver in the fists of he- 
 roes. Perhaps the most soul-surprising calamity 
 that could befall the Greeks was that their bul- 
 wark Ajax, large of muscle and soul, should fall 
 away before the horses of the car of Hector, which 
 came crashing through the ranks like a storm of 
 wind. 
 
 "Father Jove Almighty touched with fear 
 The heart of AjaxI" 
 
 Here surely is a situation of which we cry for 
 the outcome I And yet for the length of fifty lines 
 and more we are expected to drink in the spec- 
 tacle, and not only that, but even to depart from 
 it upon a tour of reminiscence. A hungry lion 
 
104 enjoy:mext of poetry 
 
 was driven off from the cattle-yards by a crowd of 
 farmers; a gang of small boys with sticks went 
 after a donkey that had broken loose into the 
 harvest. 
 
 Nor only in these extreme demands upon our 
 geniality does the epic poet reveal his scorn of 
 mere getting there; but even in the swiftest pas- 
 sages he paints with a loving hand. He flashes a 
 detail or a likeness before us as quick as a word. 
 
 *'I followed on their flight like a black tempest; fifty cars 
 I took," 
 
 says boasting Nestor. 
 
 "Illustrious Hector sprang 
 Into the camp. His look was stem as night." 
 
 "Down plunged 
 The Lycian, like a diver, from his place 
 On the high tower, and life forsook his limbs." 
 
 Deaths are the supreme things in the Iliad. 
 Never a warrior falls but some acutely specific 
 noise, or pose, or shuddering exposure of him, is 
 made, that puts the event into your very marrow. 
 
 "The spear passed through and reappeared behind. 
 DotDTi sat the toounded man vxiih arnms outstretched.'* 
 
 "The helm 
 Of massive brass was vain to stay the blow: 
 The weapon pierced it and the bone, and stained 
 The brain with blood " 
 
REALIZATION OF ACTION 105 
 
 "It pierced the spine 
 Where the head joins the neck, and severed there 
 The tendons on each side. His head and rrunUk 
 And nostrils struck the ground before his knees." 
 
 Such intensity of specification reminds us, in a 
 way, of the Psalms. And yet there is no felt de- 
 lay of the action. It is surely the height of poetic 
 narrative, when realization and suspense thus 
 unite, not to exasperate, but to exalt each other. 
 Homer was at times a master of such vividness in 
 rapidity, but neither he nor any other poet has in 
 this equalled Shakespeare. Look to Shakespeare 
 for the poetry of verbs. 
 
 "He waxed like a sea." 
 "Struck Corioli like a planet." 
 
 "As weeds before 
 A vessel under sail, so men obey'd 
 And fell below his stem " 
 
 " — from face to foot 
 He was a thing of blood, whose every motion 
 Was tim'd with dying cries." 
 
 "And to the battle came he; where he did 
 Run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if 
 'T were a perpetual spoil." 
 
 Never was richer freight of sensuous and emo- 
 tional experience hung on a swifter tale. Never, 
 unless you could pack the whole original parturi- 
 
106 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 tion of verbs out of nouns, and adjectives, and 
 each other for prehistoric ages, into a single tu- 
 multuous volume, could you excel the metaphoric 
 portrayal of action with which Shakespeare aston- 
 ishes the world. 
 
 "Not Romans — " says Coriolanus, "as they are not. 
 Though caLv'd i' the porch o' the capitol." 
 
 'And still to nose the offence- 
 
 "With this ungracious paper strike 
 The sight " 
 
 "This kiss, if it durst speak. 
 Would stretch thy spirits up into the air" 
 
 "Blow winds and crack your cheeks I" 
 
 Such a wanton manipulation of words could 
 awaken nothing but wrath in a man like Tolstoy, 
 whose terrific poetic enthusiasm seems to have 
 been narrowed in his later years almost to the ex- 
 clusive enjoyment of the moral emotions. We 
 can imagine his sa>ang, in one of his novels, that 
 the wind was blowing round like a giant. But 
 that would not do for Shakespeare; he must spec- 
 ify at once. He sees the giant as quick and clearly 
 as he feels the wind. And that sudden, exaggera- 
 tive realization, to the contemptuous destruction 
 of grammar, logic, and all reliable sobriety, of 
 
REALIZATION OF ACTION 107 
 
 everything under the sun that is mentioned, ap- 
 peared to his sombre critic to be a ranting degen- 
 eration of the organ which exists for purposes of 
 moral intelligence. Yet in reality that and no 
 other quahty has made centuries of men worship 
 Shakespeare, in spite of all the sins and failings 
 as an artist or a sage which Tolstoy more justly 
 ascribes to him — and in spite even of the unper- ^w*^ 
 ceiving adulation of his other critics. He is, with^ / 
 Shelley, the supremely poetic genius of the Eng- / ^ 
 lish language. And in the power of feeling action/ 
 he is high above them all. 
 
 It is doubtless this fact that made him so great 
 a dramatist. Yet it must not be thought that by 
 "the realization of action" we mean to recall that 
 outworn distinction of dramatic from lyric and 
 epic poetry. Drama was regarded as a division of 
 poetry by Aristotle simply because prose dramas 
 were unknown to him. In all the Greek theatres 
 the actors spoke poetry, and hence a distinction be- 
 tween the art of acting and this manner of speak- 
 ing never occurred to him. The whole perform- 
 ance was covered by the term "dramatic poetry." 
 For us, however, if we were not still tangled in 
 the scholastic tradition that he started, the term 
 would have no value whatever. Poetry is a kind 
 of speech, and writers of drama may put this into 
 the mouths of their actors, or they may not. 
 
108 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 When they do, it is not a different kind of poetry 
 from what it would be in their own mouths or 
 anywhere else. Therefore, when we say that 
 Shakespeare is supreme in the poetry of action, 
 we mean that when he makes one of his characters 
 speak of an action, that action comes before you 
 like a reality. In the language of his own pro- 
 logue, you 
 
 Think when he talks of horses that you see them, 
 Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth. 
 
 Let us illustrate the mental origin of this high- 
 handed management of verbs which we attribute 
 especially to Shakespeare. I suppose that al- 
 most any poetic man or child, if he were to say 
 " I straddle the fence," would have some dim pass- 
 ing of the shadow of a horse through his mind. 
 He might even say, if he were in a playful mood, 
 "as though it were a horse," or "I pretend it is a 
 horse." But if he said this in the midst of a stir- 
 ring narrative, we should resent the delay. "I 
 horse the fence," on the contrary, would both flash 
 the comparison and make us jump forward all 
 the faster. And yet it appears that nobody but 
 Shakespeare ever wrote, who continually could 
 and did solve these difficulties thus at a stroke. 
 Upon the slightest hint from imagination, he in- 
 terchanges verbs, he puts nouns or adjectives in 
 
REALIZATION OF ACTION 109 
 
 the place of verbs. For poetry's sake, he dis- 
 rupts all barriers between the parts of speech, 
 reverting to practical barbarity — and it is this, 
 the highest power of the poetic impulse in litera- 
 ture, that makes his language a distinct creation 
 amazing in the way that language itself would be 
 amazing to one discovering it. 
 
 It is not uncommon to hear a Shakesperian ex- 
 pression upon a child's lips, where language is truly 
 being born. "The hurt blooded,*' for example, is 
 vivid through a spontaneous transfer of the parts 
 of speech. 
 
 Verbs are fewer than nouns; they are more 
 highly generalized and more rigidly distinguished 
 from each other. The truth is, they are of greater 
 practical importance than nouns, a more finished 
 instrument, and their conventional hold upon the 
 mind is stronger. So it has hardly ever occurred 
 to rhetoricians that verbs are subject to such liber- 
 ties as Shakespeare took with them. They have 
 regarded metaphor, or condensed comparison, as a 
 function of nouns only. But if they had under- 
 stood that metaphor is only an exaggeration of 
 that comparison between two experiences which 
 is intimated by almost any poetic name, they 
 could hardly have made this error. When Burns 
 says of the mountain daisy, 
 **Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth amid the storm ** 
 
no ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 he avails himself, only more instantly, of the same 
 comparison that he uses when he calls the flower 
 itself a "bonny gem." Both the nomi and the 
 verb are names that compare. And when Tenny- 
 son says, 
 
 "Let the wild 
 Lean-headed eagles yelp alone!" 
 
 he puts into that verb more power of the com- 
 parison with ranging dogs, or jackals, than he 
 could with any overt metaphor that a rhetoric 
 would recognize. He paints the action with the 
 very word that names it. He paints for once 
 as Shakespeare would. 
 
 Generally, however, the less drastic poets have 
 been content to color actions by the use of simile 
 or modifying clause or phrase. And they have 
 been perpetually tormented by the fact that such 
 modifiers, while they enhance the poetic effect in 
 the accepted way, nevertheless tend to destroy 
 with art that poetry which pertains by nature to a 
 swift succession of names conveying action. In 
 some form this problem is rarely absent from the 
 deHberations of a narrative poet. How shall he 
 realize a moving thing without stopping it? 
 
 In those rare first stanzas of the poem "To a 
 Waterfowl," by William Cullen Bryant, occur 
 these lines: 
 
REALIZATION OF ACTION 111 
 
 "As, darkly seen against the crimson sky. 
 Thy figure floats along." 
 
 And Bryant is said to have originally written: 
 
 "As, darkly painted on the crimson sky. 
 Thy figure floats along." 
 
 He made the change, I believe, in fideUty to tihe 
 poetry which nature, and not he, created — the 
 trueness of the naked verse to motion. And that 
 diflSculty, that sacrifice, is symbolic for all writers 
 of poetic narrative. When their art cannot exalt 
 and vivify without delay, then they are better 
 without the art, as Byron was. Let their narra- 
 tive be clear, and swift, and rhythmical — ^it is 
 inevitably poetic. 
 
 Yet its poetry is never, for the common reader, 
 the essence of it. For the essence of all high nar- 
 rative is anticipation, and the essence of poetry is 
 realization, and they are opposed. It was, in- 
 deed, the discovery of their difference, the separa- 
 tion of story-telling from the poetic art, that lost 
 for poetry its universal place and influence. It 
 was not industry, nor sanity, nor science, nor the 
 greater generality of language — none of these 
 things has so profoundly affected the prevalence 
 of poetic language. But the common novel, and 
 ; the prose drama, and the newspaper — made very 
 \ meagre in specific qualities of experience, but full 
 
112 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 of general suspense — have supplanted poetry in 
 people's idle hours. Poetic utterance is returning 
 into the novel, as all the followers of Turgenieff 
 witness; poetic utterance is even returning with 
 popularity into the theatre. As for the news- 
 papers — the world \vill yet recover from that 
 mania. And meanwhile poetry will live beside 
 them, if not loved so much perhaps, or by so 
 many, yet loved more purely for itself. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 REALIZATION OF THINGS 
 
 When people began to tell stories in practical 
 words, the distinctive qualities of poetic words be- 
 came more sharply observed. Colors and shapes, 
 and smells, and sounds of concrete things, were 
 seen constantly attracting the attention in the 
 language of poets. It was sensuous language. It 
 appeared to move somewhat slowly and be full 
 of pictures. And so there arose among those who 
 were seeking to catch and confine the essence of 
 poetry, which is quicksilver, within the limits of a 
 definition, the term "word-painting." With that 
 they thought to sum up the whole difference be- 
 tween poetry and practical speech. 
 
 And when we turn from the swift and all too 
 naked tale of some elopement, as it may appear 
 in a popular novel, or in the morning paper, to 
 such a poem as "The Eve of Saint Agnes," we 
 may feel perhaps that "word-painting" is a true 
 definition of the difference. In the poem it is not 
 what happens — that can wait! — but to whom, 
 and where, and in what light, among what dra- 
 peries and music, with what warmth and cold, what 
 113 
 
114 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 weather beating on the panes — these are the inter- 
 ests that we dwell upon. The whole first stanza 
 gives us little more information than would a 
 glance at the thermometer, but it gives a view and 
 a sensation that winter's self could not excel: 
 
 *'St. Agnes* Eve — ^Ah, bitter chill it was I 
 The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; 
 The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass. 
 And silent was the flock in woolly fold: 
 Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told 
 His rosary, and while his frosted breath " 
 
 lingering upon these words, receiving them into 
 our veins, is it not possible for us to be entranced 
 away from our too palpable surroundings, to 
 shiver with the old man muttering there so long 
 ago in futile piety, to feel our own fingers large, 
 and see that swift white disappearance of the 
 breath on frosty air? That is the mood in which 
 the poem will be enjoyed. It is a serenely mov- 
 ing series of high portraitures. It seems a miracle 
 that written words should ever have so richly 
 painted on a page the full experience of the senses. 
 
 " A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, 
 All garlanded with carven imag'ries 
 Of fruits, and flowers, and bimches of knot-grass. 
 And diamonded with panes of quaint device, 
 Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes. 
 As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; 
 And in the midst, 'rnong thousand heraldries. 
 
REALIZATION OF THINGS 115 
 
 And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, 
 A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and 
 kings. 
 
 " Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, 
 And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, 
 As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon; 
 Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, 
 And on her silver cross soft amethyst. 
 And on her hair a glory, like a saint: 
 She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, 
 Save wings, for heaven: — ^Porphyro grew faint: 
 She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. 
 
 "Anon his heart revives: her vespers done. 
 Of all its wreathM pearls her hair she frees; 
 Unclasps her warmM jewels one by one; 
 Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees 
 Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: 
 Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed. 
 Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees, 
 In fancy, fair Saint Agnes in her bed, 
 But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled. 
 
 " Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest. 
 In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay. 
 Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd 
 Her soothM limbs, and soul fatigued away; 
 Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day; 
 Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain; 
 Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray; 
 Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain. 
 
 As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. 
 
 " Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon 
 Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set 
 A table, and, half anguish'd, threw thereon 
 
116 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet : — 
 O for some drowsy Morphean amulet! 
 The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion. 
 The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet. 
 Affray his ears, though but in dying tone : — 
 The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone. 
 
 " And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep. 
 In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd. 
 While he from forth the closet brought a heap 
 Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; 
 With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
 And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; 
 Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd 
 From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, 
 
 From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." 
 
 We cannot refrain from asking upon what prin- 
 ciples a poet makes these choices and comparisons, 
 that with their magic he creates out of that thin 
 line of words a full environment. Upon what gen- 
 eral rules could we be taught to say the " silver- 
 snarling trumpets," or "twilight saints," or "az- 
 ure-lidded sleep," or "jellies soother than the 
 creamy curd," and so convey a presence to the 
 ear, the eye, the tongue? We cannot refrain from 
 asking such questions, but we can, if we are wise, 
 refrain from answering them. We can say: Go 
 to the particulars — there are no rules! Or rather: 
 There is a new principle, and a new rule, for every 
 act of greatness. They are Time's fools who 
 summarize. 
 
REALIZATION OF THINGS 117 
 
 One of the principles at least is Beauty. " Az- 
 ure-lidded sleep" is beautiful. But Beauty — ■ 
 even in this poem — is by no means supreme. 
 "Snarling'* as a name for trumpets is more sur- 
 prising for its truth, a kind of outrage against 
 beauty. Beauty pleads against whole pages of 
 the greatest poetry. I think of Spenser's awful 
 stanza where the dragon spreads her filth; no 
 ingenuous mind would call it beautiful. I think 
 of Shakespeare's execrations. I think of Whit- 
 man. 
 
 ''The malformM limbs are tied to the surgeon's table, 
 What is removed drops horribly in a pail." 
 
 "The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her 
 tipsy and pimpled neck." 
 
 No, not beauty, nor yet unbeauty — not truth > C j^jJf^ 
 nor untruth, nor simplicity, nor complexity, nor 
 the sublime, nor the familiar, nor the thing whose $^^^^^^^ 
 name is rhythmical, nor the thing whose name 
 gives welcome interruption to the rhythm, nor the 
 exciting, nor the soothing, nor the characteristic, 
 nor even the unhabitual, is a master principle for h^^^tjJ'f^ 
 the art of giving names. There is no master prin- ^ «/ •* 
 ciple for that art whose very nature is to shun 
 generality, and cleave to the unique nature of 
 each individual experience. ^ 
 
 
118 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 There is no master principle — but there is a 
 principle that rises in its generality above the 
 others, because it is based deeper in the nature 
 of our consciousness. It is not the principle of 
 the beautiful, however, but of the unhabitual. 
 \ Poetry is the art of keeping us awake in idleness, 
 and to that end it is almost essential that, how- 
 ever a thing be named, it should not be named with 
 exactly the words that we expect. Habit is the 
 arch-enemy of reahzation. No matter how poetic 
 a name may have been in its first application, or 
 when we first received it, let it grow common in 
 that application, and, even though it should ac- 
 quire no practical use, its life withers away. 
 The choice and the comparison both die out of it. 
 It learns to slide unnoticed through the mind. 
 Homer's most awakening epithets became, with 
 endless repetition, no better for the purposes of 
 poetry than Jack or John. And we have killed 
 with iteration in our churches half the living words 
 of Hebrew poets. It was a daring reahzation of 
 the beUeved nature of Christ to call him Lamb of 
 God; it was still more daring a comparison to call 
 him King. But to us these words are only faded 
 labels, and we interchange, or mix them, indis- 
 criminately. 
 
 "Crown him with many crowns. 
 The Lamb upon his throne I" 
 
REALIZATION OF THINGS 119 
 
 we sing, in sleepy oblivion of a ridiculous picture I 
 Most of the hymns are dead. And to those 
 piously reared, a great part of the Bible itself is 
 beyond reviving. Its words have grown habitual, 
 and their poetry has ceased to be. 
 
 The fact that poetic words are thus ever fading 
 with use, and degenerating into mere designations, 
 and the fact that it is not always easy to tell how 
 far they have faded, gives rise to the old school- 
 room tragedy of "mixed figures." A "mixed fig- 
 iu*e" is either the union of two incongruous com- 
 parisons—as in the example of the crowned lamb — 
 or it is the use of a comparison accidentally inap- 
 propriate to its object, as when I say "he landed in 
 the water." These are both errors of the lifeless 
 imagination, and due to the fact that a name once 
 poetic has grown habitual. "To land upon some- 
 thing" was at first a sufficiently living metaphor 
 taken from the sea, but it long ago grew common, 
 and the practical mood seized upon it, and now it 
 can be applied even to its own poetic opposite 
 without our f eehng the incongruity. When poetic 
 words have gone as far as that into the blight of 
 custom, they may well be called dead, and dedi- 
 cated to the use of science. For science is seeking 
 to give permanent names, with fixed habits of 
 reaction attached to them, whereas the names of 
 poetry are by their very definition new and transi- 
 tory. 
 
120 EXJOY^IENT OF POETRY 
 
 Many a sharp divergence in poetry from the 
 common usages of language has no other justifica- 
 tion — and needs none — than lies in the fact that 
 it is a divergence. It begets surprise, which is 
 close kin to consciousness itself. There is an in- 
 trepid defiance of expectation in that poem of 
 Edward Carpenter's, "Little Brook Without a 
 Name" — one of the very precious poems of recent 
 times. "The little mouse," he says, "the water- 
 shrew, walks {even like Jesus Christ) upon the 
 flood, paddHng quickly over the surface with its 
 half -webbed feet." The poet had, no doubt, a 
 practical purpose — to intend by this comparison 
 the kinship in divinity of all nature — but he was 
 not bUnd, I beheve, to the pure poetic value of 
 our astonishment. Homer himself cannot be said 
 to have been above an interest in shocking his 
 readers, when he so unexpectedly announced that 
 
 "Prayers 
 Are the daughters of Almighty Jupiter, 
 Lame, tprinkled, and squint-eyed " 
 
 Such extreme measures are at times indispen- 
 sable to the sustainment of poetry. Something 
 has to explode. Our souls must be invaded and 
 ravaged, so ponderous is their lethargy in which 
 they apprehend only vague presences and general 
 bearings of things. Sing "Lord! Lord!" forever, 
 and you rouse no heart to repentance; but shout 
 
REALIZATION OF THINGS 121 
 
 "Sky-Blasting Jehovah!" and some necks will 
 move. 
 
 This, then, is a principle — ^if beyond the acts 
 themselves of choosing and comparing there 
 can be a general principle — upon which the poet 
 makes his words, which are consecutive, paint ob- 
 jects which are juxtaposed. He makes the words 
 surprise us, and we look around. "The very col- 
 ors of her coat," he says of the virgin, " were better 
 than good news!" And who can pass instantly 
 from such a phrase, or from the contemplation 
 of such colors? The invisible skylark singing is 
 "Uke an unbodied joy" — he brings the abstract 
 into the contemplation of the concrete, reversing 
 the customs even of poetry, and we cannot but 
 pause there in wonder. Or he violates the very 
 discrimination of our separate senses, the deepest 
 habit of perceptual life: "The fire cries with 
 Hght," he says. All possible disorganizations of 
 the categories, not of grammar only, but of per- 
 ception, and of thought, belong to poetry, because 
 these too are habits, and in them our individual 
 spirits sleep. 
 
 Surprise belongs to poetry. But let us say no 
 more than that. Let us not try to make even the 
 unhabitual an absolute or unqualified rule. It 
 seems, indeed, that the greater a poet's experience, 
 the more is his reliance upon this principle miti- 
 
122 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 gated, or at least mingled with other considera- 
 tions. Greater poets do not merely surprise us, 
 but they surprise us with the true, the beautiful, 
 the ugly, the distinctive, in a thing. They sur- 
 prise us oftenest by teUing us most exactly what 
 we knew. 
 
 "The cat on the house-sill" strikes off to my 
 thought a picture clear as day, and " the sun-warm 
 cat" is a touch to my hand. Yet I am not sure 
 but, if I took a glance over the world, I should find 
 that a large majority of cats are both "sun- 
 warm," and "on the house-sill." It is altogether 
 inevitable, and yet signally characteristic of them, 
 that they should be. There is no strained acute- 
 ness of perception in the poets whose poetry is 
 nature. Their words are only the things they 
 sing of. 
 
 "The chanting linnet, or the mellow thrush; 
 Hailing the setting sun, sweet, in the green thorn 
 bush " 
 
 Thus to awaken us with words that are only the 
 surest words, is a high gift, which comports with 
 all that we call classic. It was this that made the 
 early fame of Robert Burns eternal. And I think 
 it was this too — the simple, the inevitable, in her 
 singing — that gave to Sappho the supreme place 
 in antiquity and through time. She was called 
 
REALIZATION OF THINGS 123 
 
 "The Poet," because her very looking upon a 
 thing was poetry, and her poetry was but looking 
 upon it. To Evening she said: 
 
 "Evening, you bring all things that the bright morning 
 scattered wide. 
 You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the 
 child to his mother." 
 
 Perhaps it requires some acquaintance with 
 poetry to develop a high appreciation of what is so 
 greatly simple in choice or comparison. Perhaps 
 the whole joy of it is never felt except as a relief 
 after the self-conscious astonishments that are de- 
 Hvered to us by less mature genius. When Homer 
 tells us that Ajax gave ground before his opponent 
 by "moving knee after knee," if we are old enough 
 in the love of poetry to perceive that anything has 
 been said at all, we perceive that the final word 
 for the imagination has been said. It is not a 
 word ingenious, weighty, significant, or suggestive 
 of anything but its object. It is simply the exact 
 truth of perception, conveyed with singleness and 
 restraint. It surprises us with unsurprise — and 
 that, if it be paradoxical enough to destroy itself, 
 we may safely set up as a master principle. It is a 
 final perfection of the art of painting things with 
 words. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 
 
 "The Eve of Saint Agnes" is wonderful, not 
 only for the vividness of its pictures, but for the 
 fact that they are made to move before us in a 
 stream of romantic feeling. The feeling is pure 
 and sustained; and therein the poet has revealed a 
 great part of his genius. He has roused in us, be- 
 sides an imagination of things, the real experience 
 of an emotion. He has done this, however, by 
 those same acts of choice and comparison. He 
 has chosen for vivid imagining, many things about 
 which the emotion is wont to cling, and compared 
 them with other things having the same quality. 
 In many parts of the poem this has been the sole 
 motive of his w^ords. 
 
 The ode "To a Nightingale" is perhaps even 
 more completely dominated by an emotion. Let 
 us consider, without any context, one stanza of it: 
 
 "Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 
 
 What thou among the leaves hast never known. 
 The weariness, the fever, and the fret 
 
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; 
 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, 
 
 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; 
 124 
 
EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 125 
 
 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
 And leaden-ey'd despairs, 
 Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, 
 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow." 
 
 As a realization of the sorrow of Kfe, we can 
 see — perhaps without the violation of a too mi- 
 nute analysis — the high conscious or intuitive skill 
 of poetry with which this stanza was fashioned. 
 Tired, feverous, and anxious people, old people, 
 young people growing old, beauty and love ceasing 
 to be — ^these are the things chosen to sustain the 
 emotion. And they in turn are made vivid by a 
 second choice of their piercing details — the pallor, 
 the groaning, the gray hairs sad and few, the thin- 
 ness of the sick, and those "lustrous" eyes — won- 
 dering tearfully at the promise of their own decay 
 — and finally that newness of love, that in the 
 morning is gone. And our sense of these things, 
 our consciousness, is still further enhanced by 
 comparisons and intimations of comparison too 
 subtle to be told. They are like spectres, the thin 
 people, and the eyelids are lead, and the thinking 
 of it all is Hke a well filled full of sorrow. 
 
 It is ungrateful to explain a wonder, and fortu- 
 nately it is not altogether possible. The stinging 
 residual essence of every experience is individual, 
 and not to be set forth in general language. The 
 best of poetry is when it starts the old indefinable 
 
126 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 echo of reminiscence and hope. The quality of 
 some vital instant in our past, or our ancestors*, 
 some tremulous balance of the affections, is just 
 re-suggested and appears there only as fleeing 
 from us for an instant, and then it is gone into 
 the past again, and we into the future, forever. 
 
 For the attainment of these moments there are 
 no rules, because they depend upon the things 
 that make us different from each other. Each 
 will have his own chosen poems. We can only 
 generally declare this much — that wherever a poig- 
 nant emotion is sustained, a sensuous memory 
 sustains it. Even those passions that we call in- 
 tellectual, or spiritual, seek always an image and 
 cKng to it. When God becomes a spirit, Christ 
 is begotten. And when Christ is blended with 
 God, we worship the cross that he died on. It is 
 only thus we can hold our love and our pain. As 
 Walt Whitman, in his psalm of the death of 
 Abraham Lincoln, has merged the very body of 
 sorrow in a trinity of sensations, the fragrance 
 of lilacs, the pendulous star, and the quivering 
 voice of a bird — 
 
 "Lflac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, 
 There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and 
 dim " 
 
 SO has the human heart always done with that 
 which it would have eternal. 
 
EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 127 
 
 Poetry is not often written without strong emo- 
 tion, and not often without a dim desire to eter- 
 nalize emotion. And this again has persuaded 
 men who love that quality of poetry to a limiting 
 definition. They have held that to enjoy emotion 
 without anxiety is the essence of poetic pleasure. 
 This opinion was intimated in the writings of 
 Wordsworth and Shelley, but reached its highest 
 scientific expression in an essay of John Stuart 
 Mill, who defines the natural poets as " those who 
 are so constituted, that emotions are the links of 
 association by which their ideas, both sensuous 
 and spiritual, are connected together." 
 
 We can see the reason for this opinion by ex- 
 amining almost any lines of Shelley — ^to whose 
 writings Mill himself refers, in distinction from 
 those of Wordsworth, as the poems of a poet. 
 
 "And like a dying lady, lean and pale. 
 Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil. 
 Out of her chamber, led by the insane 
 And feeble wanderings of her fading brain. 
 The moon arose upon the murky earth, 
 A white and shapeless mass." 
 
 No groimd of union exists between the two 
 imaginations in these lines, except a potential con- 
 gruity of the beholder's emotions. And this dan- 
 gerous disregard, not merely of practical similarity, 
 but of all the external senses, is characteristic of 
 
128 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 great modern poets. Whether their motive be 
 specifically to realize an emotion or not, they con- 
 tinually bring these interior vibrations of the 
 body into a realization, in order to make it full 
 and personal and strong. They continually 
 choose out for a focus the quality or the detail in 
 things that relates them to our vital feeling, and 
 they compare things together upon the basis of 
 similarity in this feeHng. 
 
 Those jewels in "The Eve of Saint Agnes" 
 must have been full of lustre, a romantic lustre in 
 the moonhght; they must have been richer even 
 than the window-panes, more deep in hue; but for 
 the poet of our hearts they were warmed jewels, 
 they could not be more. 
 
 Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, 
 and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the 
 mind. Let things be ever so kin in a sensuous or 
 objective feature, as blood is to roses, but be the 
 burdens that they carry to the heart opposed, 
 they are precarious consorts. Let these burdens 
 be the same, and it matters not how alien in all 
 else, in space and time irreconciled, in act, in rea- 
 son antipathetic as the poles, they flow together 
 as if by nature. 
 
 "Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale 
 Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain 
 Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain, 
 
EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 129 
 
 Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, 
 As Albion wails for thee." 
 
 In the face of such evidence and such authority, 
 it is true, however, that emotion is not the es- 
 sence, nor a definitive feature of poetry. The 
 most practical language — like earnest achieve- 
 ment itself — can awaken the emotions. It is not 
 the existence of these emotions, but our attitude 
 to them, that distinguishes the poetic mood. We 
 wish to experience them for their own sake. 
 And in exactly the same way we wish to experi- 
 ence sensations, or actions, or ideas. It may be 
 that we are not often attracted to experience 
 anything whatever, when it does not contain; 
 for us some emotion, some feeling besides the 
 mere attraction or pleasure. But this does not 
 warrant our regarding the emotion as the exclu- 
 sive object of attraction. It rather counsels us 
 against so sharply separating it from all the other 
 qualities that go to constitute a thing. Probably 
 any theory which regards the laboratory analysis 
 of our experience into emotion, sensation, affec- 
 tion, image, idea, and so forth, as a final truth, 
 will itself prove but temporary. We are safer 
 when we talk of experience as a whole. 
 
 Even in so far, however, as we can distinguish 
 emotion from other elements in a perception, we 
 can prove that it is not always the object of a 
 
130 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 poet's regard. If it were, emotional congruity 
 would invariably characterize poetic compari- 
 sons; or at least we should find no comparisons 
 that distinctly violate and destroy emotion. But 
 these we do find in the greatest and most natural 
 poetry. I have in mind the story of the wounding 
 of Menelaus in the Iliad, — the poetic pleasure that 
 is taken in the sharp mark of "purple" on his 
 thigh, taken in brazen defiance of the hero's 
 agony and peril which we felt. This is the idea 
 that the poet associated with his pHght: 
 
 "As when some Carian or Maconian dame 
 Tinges with pmple the white ivory, 
 To form a trapping for the cheeks of steeds, — 
 And many a horseman covets it, yet still 
 It lies within her chamber, to become 
 The ornament of some great monarch's steed 
 And make its rider proud, — thy shapely thighs. 
 Thy legs, and thy fair ankles thus were stained, 
 O Menelaus! with thy purple blood." 
 
 Here, at least, we can truthfully distinguish 
 sensation from emotion, because sensation leads 
 the comparison in one direction, while emotion 
 would lead it in another. And the poet's fidelity 
 is to the sensation; he loves the pure color. In 
 another passage of the Iliad, equally discordant 
 for the feeUngs, he is faithful to his sense of sound. 
 The shouting onslaught of armed hosts of war is 
 compared to the clamors of a flock of sheep. 
 
EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 131 
 
 The truth is that a poet's associations will de- 
 pend, like those of his readers, upon that un- 
 definitive and incalculable thing, his personal 
 interest. If he happens to love color and love 
 horses, and if we do, and we are in no hurry, then 
 it is poetic that we should pause and recall to 
 observation that Carian maiden — her own arms 
 stained with the crying purple too — and consider 
 the illustrious steed the work of such an artist 
 must be reserved for. Let Menelaus bleed — we 
 must see the horse! 
 
 Emotional choice and comparison are not dis- 
 tinctive of poetry from practical language, but 
 they are in a certain degree distinctive of modern 
 from ancient poetry. Only, indeed, by making 
 this general distinction between the inner and the 
 outer feelings, can we fully explain the lightness, 
 the breadth, and health of early poets. Their 
 choices are less personal, their comparisons more 
 often purely sensuous, than ours. They are com- 
 parisons in shape, size, color, attitude, texture, 
 motion — comparisons which seem very wide to 
 us, because they hold things together which are 
 not, and cannot be, blended deep in the crucible 
 of the heart's passions. 
 
 " Thy hair is as a iBock of goats 
 That lies along the side of Mount Gilead. 
 Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are newly shorn. 
 
132 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 Which are come up from the washing; 
 
 Whereof every one has twins, 
 
 And none is bereaved among them." 
 
 We find also that early poets are more idle in 
 their comparisons, less rich in metaphor, more 
 given to the long simile, more given to the redu- 
 plication of similes, and to that simile that we 
 have called discursive, because our enjoyment 
 wanders in it away from the subject which it was 
 to illumine, and we find ourselves in a different 
 part of the world. Indeed, they do not always 
 care to what object their comparisons are at- 
 tached, and they repeat them like a refrain. I 
 beheve that all these characteristics of the poetry 
 of the ancients can be comprised in the statement 
 that it is more purely poetic, more purely child- 
 like, and willing to love, than the poetry" of later 
 people. Having a less complex en\dronment to 
 which they must adapt themselves, and being 
 irresponsible in their minds to a mature and 
 austere science, they were habitually more free to 
 enjoy all qualities of being. They required no 
 profound organic disturbance, no hushed and 
 tremulous utterance, to sanction their engaging 
 in the enjoyment of poetry. They were ready 
 at any time to suspend business and make 
 an excursion into the worid. Their love was 
 free. 
 
EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 133 
 
 Theocritus begins in this sweetly wandering 
 language a lyric which he calls "passionate": 
 
 "Hast thou come, dear youth, with the third night and 
 the dawning; hast thou come? but men in longing grow 
 old in a day I As spring than the winter is sweeter, as 
 the apple than the sloe, as the ewe is deeper of fleece than 
 the lamb she bore; as a maiden surpasses a thrice-wedded 
 wife, as the fawn is nimbler than the calf; nay, by as much 
 as sweetest of all fowls sings the clear-voiced nightingale, 
 so much has thy coming gladdened me I To thee have I 
 hastened as the traveller hastens under the burning sun 
 to the shadow of the ilex tree." 
 
 We take delight in this free-hearted poetry as 
 we might in the rippling of a stream where it 
 spreads out among little stones. We take de- 
 Kght, thinking of it as something unusual and 
 refreshing. But for ourselves, in our own worid, 
 we have all too Httle of it. We feel that the poetic 
 attitude is not quite allowable in maturity, except 
 when demanded by a deepening of the passions. 
 And this is very unfortunate; because it makes 
 people who have not deep passions and yet are 
 poets, feel compelled to simulate the language of 
 exaltation, and construct studious verses out of 
 strange, intense-sounding words, when they might 
 sit down and write a little natural poetry with no 
 great exhaustion, if we would only expect it of 
 them. 
 
 With this tyranny of the inward feelings which 
 
134 ENJOYIMENT OF POETRY 
 
 culture, or self-consciousness, or just time itself 
 has begotten, the loss has been far greater than 
 the gain. For while we have hardly the tendency 
 to enjoy — except as antique, or after we have 
 named it "pastoral'' — such an address of a lover 
 to his beloved as these we quoted from Theocritus 
 and the Song of Songs, still the writers of such 
 poems did have the power we have of being deep 
 and swift and true only to their passions. There 
 are hymns of the ancient reUgions in which these 
 wanderings are not possible, because the ecstasy 
 has utter dominion. And even Theocritus, the 
 poet of a pasture-land, has made as intense a lyric 
 of impassioned love — save only the lost remem- 
 bered songs of Sappho — as the worid has record 
 of. He has made also the high model for all 
 songs of tears, the model upon which Milton 
 formed his lament for Lycidas, and Shelley the 
 poem "Adonais," which he deemed his greatest, 
 and which is perhaps the most subUme and con- 
 quering expression of sorrow in the worid. 
 
 Both eariy and late it appears that sorrow is 
 the great mother of poetry. It is most fertile of 
 all those streams of feeling out of which high 
 realizations of the worid arise, and which they 
 seek to make eternal. America has not been rich 
 in poems that are supreme, but she has risen in 
 sorrow to the heights of language. Her poet 
 
EMOTIONAL REALIZATION 135 
 
 Bryant is said to have grown up within view of a 
 rural grave-yard; a circumstance that can alone ex- 
 plain his writing at the age of eighteen that final 
 poem of the thought of death, and never again, 
 save for a few re-echoing lines, a syllable of great 
 poetry. "Thanatopsis" is a courageous realiza- 
 tion of death. " When Lilacs Last in the Door- 
 yard Bloomed," another universal poem of Amer- 
 ica, is a passionate realization of death. The 
 fragments of Edgar Allan Poe are all mystical 
 echoes of the beauty of death, or the death of 
 beauty. We cannot write the theory of emotional 
 realization without recalling some songs of love 
 and sorrow. And with them we may well cease 
 writing the theory. We may well ascend to the 
 truth which is no theory in the poems themselves 
 — "Lycidas," "Adonais," "Thanatopsis," "When 
 Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" — poems 
 that not only reaHze, but elevate, and make per- 
 fect for us that universal sorrow of which only 
 the very love of life's experience, pure poetry^, 
 can ever melt or mitigate the sting. 
 
 f 
 
 ,aA 
 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 REALIZATION OF IDEAS 
 
 Persons of intellectual rather than sensuous 
 nature, persons who can say with the philosopher, 
 "I do not mind a blow, sir, — nothing affects me 
 but an abstract idea! " — will not think that all the 
 talk about realization of action and word-paint- 
 ing and the enjoyment of emotion, comes very 
 near to the heart of poetry. For they too have 
 their definition, which is an expression of their 
 taste. They think that the essence of poetry is 
 to be found in its manner of expressing ideas or 
 abstract judgments. And these it expresses in 
 two ways — either by means of a symbol, or by 
 means of a concrete example. " All is vanity," 
 saith the preacher, and the poet adds "a striving 
 after wind." "The shortest distance between 
 two points," says the geometer. "As the crow 
 flies," "a bee Une," says the poet. And these 
 ways of speaking are surely distinctive of him. 
 But we need not be surprised to find that they 
 only illustrate in the intellectual world, those same 
 two acts of choice and comparison which we have 
 observed in the world of things, and that the 
 poet's attitude to an idea is but a part of that 
 136 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 137 
 
 attitude toward all being which we have ascribed 
 to him. He loves the idea, as he loves the thing, 
 not for its meaning, its indication into the fut- 
 ure, but for itself, its content in the present. He 
 wishes to realize the nature of that. And he 
 does so, either by choosing among all the partic- 
 ulars suggested by the idea, one which can bear 
 the whole flavor of its significance, or by com- 
 paring with the idea some being that is wholly 
 outside its significance, but similar to it. 
 
 Suppose that the idea be silence. "The butter- 
 fly sleeps on the village bell," is a poem of this 
 idea, a reahzation by means of the concrete par- 
 ticular. Or suppose the idea be that our sins 
 shall be forgiven. We have for this an enduring 
 symbol, a symbol so strong in native poetry that 
 it begot rhythm in the heart of the translator: 
 
 "Though your sins be as scarlet, 
 They shall be as white as snow; 
 Though they be red like crimson. 
 They shall be as wool." 
 
 Thus to show forth in earthen dyes the thoughts 
 of a spirit, to make what is ideal and impalpable 
 assail the senses of the flesh, has seemed to some 
 the high, and to some the low, essential service of 
 poetry. 
 
 It has seemed high, because it makes ideas 
 warm, and acceptable to those who can hardly 
 
138 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 enjoy them in a purer form. It colors and popu- 
 larizes the hfe of meditation. We are not all ca- 
 pable of that intellectual love which is the invisi- 
 ble support of the philosopher's austerity. We 
 must have in our ideas an admixture of the cor- 
 poreal, before they appear to us a natural object 
 for affection. I suppose that Immanuel Kant, 
 who is the master of an intolerable prose, had 
 within himself a more consuming passion for the 
 process of thought than Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 But he could not make thoughts lovable to the 
 people, because he gave them no body. Emerson 
 was perhaps not the greatest creative thinker, but 
 he was a great lover of the experience of thought, 
 and a creator of that experience and that love for 
 others. 
 
 Let us compare, as examples of the extremes of 
 poetry and its opposite in the worid of ideas, his 
 statement that 
 
 "Man is the facade of a temple," 
 
 with this sentence from Kant which deals, for all 
 we know, with somewhat the same subject-matter: 
 
 "Now, as in order to cognize ourselves, in addition to 
 the act of thinking, which subjects the manifold of every 
 possible intuition to the unity of apperception, there is 
 necessary a determinate mode of intuition, whereby this 
 manifold is given; although my own existence is certainly 
 not mere phaenomenon (much less mere illusion), the deta>» 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 139 
 
 mination of my existence can only take place confonnably 
 to the form of the internal sense, according to the particu- 
 lar mode in which the manifold which I conjoin is given 
 in internal intuition, and I have therefore no knowledge 
 of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself." 
 
 These heights of metaphysical abstraction are 
 obviously inaccessible to those who have some- 
 thing else to attend to, and yet there is a joy in 
 being up there, as the existence of the book and all 
 its arduous commentators attest. And I believe it 
 is a joy not altogether different from that which 
 Emerson extends us. For philosophy, even self- 
 mutilated as it is by the wish to be also a science, 
 is more truly, or more generally, a realization of 
 the full nature of those ideas that are the tech- 
 nique of science. Emerson, with his serene genius 
 of expression, perfected this realization. And he 
 has thus had a more direct and wider influence 
 upon lives of the nineteenth century, than the ac- 
 ceptance of any theory or doctrine can register. 
 He has filled them with a high experience. He is 
 — as he always quietly felt himself to be, in spite 
 of the failings of his verse — essentially a poet. He 
 is the poet of philosophic ideas. 
 
 By some minds this descent from what is called 
 the "abstract rationality" of a concept into that 
 world of accident and multiplicity whence it rose, 
 has not been considered a high experience. To 
 
140 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 the unhealthy morality of mediaeval sainthood it 
 was a positive evil. Together with all things that 
 wear the colors of material existence, poetry was 
 dismissed in those days as a temptation to the 
 soul. It was named — with a stroke of poetic 
 genius which must itself have appeared supremely 
 sinful— "The Wine of the Devil." But even be- 
 fore and since then, by scientists and philosophers 
 as well as by priests, it has been held that the 
 highest attainment of the human spirit is the 
 process of thought unadulterated with any recol- 
 lection of sensuous life. Tradition reports that 
 Democritus bUnded himself for the sake of in- 
 tellectual culture, and even so sensuous a Platon- 
 ist as Shelley declared that "the deep truth is 
 imageless." And so it has always seemed that, 
 even though there be nothing sinful in the mate- 
 rial symbol, there is at least something immature 
 in depending up)on it. With the cultivation of 
 intellect, language has risen slowly away from the 
 particulars, until now the names commonly used 
 only designate, as with a wave of the hand in their 
 direction, vast classes and common quaHties of 
 things. And this power of general designation is 
 so vital to what we call civilization, that it cannot 
 but appear retrogressive and primitive to be per- 
 petually descending to the particulars, perpetu- 
 ally remembering individuals, perpetually specify- 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 141 
 
 ing and symbolizing what is already understood 
 by the mind. 
 
 It is primitive. Poetry is of necessity the lan- 
 guage both of children who do not understand the 
 general names of things, and savages who have \ 
 not decided upon those names. The speech of un- 
 civilized people is full of irrelevant specifications. 
 They continually say such things as red dog, white 
 dog, curly dog, fat dog, not because they wish to 
 convey an impression, but because they cannot 
 help it, they have no word for dog in general. The 
 Cherokee Indians are without any verb meaning 
 to wash, but they have verbs meaning wash my 
 head, wash another person's head, wash my face, 
 wash my clothes, wash dishes, wash a child. And 
 this feature of early language is not due to the 
 predominance in its originators of a poetic in- 
 stinct; it is due to the fact that language arose, not 
 in general reflection, but in particular experiences. 
 The first words would naturally be names of 
 special things. Probably most of them were 
 proper names, the most special of all — names of 
 but one object in the worid. And whenever such 
 names are extended to include a whole class of 
 objects, the act, however practical in its author, 
 appears poetic to us because we have a name for 
 the class itself. When we call certain kinds of 
 people Jvdases, we do so for the sake of vividness; 
 
142 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 but if we had no term traitor, we should be com- 
 pelled to do so whether we wished to be vivid or 
 not. And that is a frequent position of the 
 savage. 
 
 Besides the significant use of examples, his 
 speech is full of elaborate symboHsm. And this, 
 too, can frequently be traced to his lack of an 
 abstract term. Let us imagine that a Navajo 
 Indian has no such concept in his knowledge as 
 patience, yet one day it comes to him in a vague 
 meditation that the Moqui tribe, peaceable 
 though they be, are not altogether contemptible. 
 "Moqui is — " how shall he say it? How shall he 
 express that notion that comes so easily to our 
 tongues? "Moqui sits dovm happy,'* perhaps, — 
 and to the civiHzed translator this will be a most 
 poetic idea. But imagine further that after a 
 week or two of reflecting upon it he decides that 
 to sit down happy is a good thing! He wishes to 
 express that too, but he has no such general term 
 as good. He has good hunting, good fire-building, 
 good fighting, but the idea of virtue in the abstract 
 has never yet entered his speech. What shall 
 he say? " Sit-down-happy is good-fighting," let us 
 imagine! And that is still more poetic. What 
 quaUty or real flavor, indeed, has our own proverb 
 ^Patience is a virtue — until you discover the mili- 
 tary origins of the last word, which give it the 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 143 
 
 power of a symbolic realization? — Patience is a 
 good fight! 
 
 Such poetry, not consciously created, but a by- 
 product of the growth of generality and abstrac- 
 tion, is rife among all uncivilized peoples.* And, 
 moreover, their singing and their speaking are not 
 so separate in their lives as ours, and their passions 
 not so subjected to the time and place, and there 
 is therefore a continual poetry in living among 
 them. It is not unlike the poetry of advancing 
 science, the poetry of any mind that gropes be- 
 yond the confines of its present vocabulary. 
 
 The Persians have many anecdotes of the first 
 appearance of poetry in their literary heroes, and 
 one of them astutely attributes it to the young 
 man's ignorance of technical terminology. 
 
 * I do not mean to imply that savages are not also in- 
 tentionally poetic — more frequently and more purely so, 
 perhaps, than we are. I do not know. But I know it is a 
 profound error to suppose, because of these characteristics 
 of primitive language, and their survival in Homeric and 
 other early poetic dialects, that as language develops in 
 the power of expressing abstract ideas true poetry becomes 
 less natural or less possible. True poetry, arising from the 
 pure poetic wish, only becomes more clearly distinguished 
 from accidental poetry, arising from the quest of informa- 
 tion. It is just as possible to specify, it is just as possible 
 to symbohze, as it ever was. Indeed, the resources for 
 symbolism are richer than ever, for one abstract idea can 
 now stand for another, or for a concrete thing. Only it is 
 not so often necessary, and so the power is less cultivated 
 among practical people. Poetry is left for the truly poetic. 
 
144 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 "The celebrated Abderrahman, son of Hissdn, having, 
 when a child, been stung by a wasp, the insect being one 
 he did not recognize, he ran to his father, crying out that 
 'he had been wounded by a creature spotted with yellow 
 and white, like the border of his vest.' On hearing these 
 words uttered in a measure of Arabian verse, as elegant as 
 natural, Hiss&n became aware of his son's genius for 
 poetry." 
 
 To attribute to it the origin of great poetry, is 
 paying too high a compliment even to so valuable 
 a thing as ignorance. But that there is a certain 
 antithesis between poetry and general knowledge, 
 and that poetry exists either before that is acquired 
 or after it is surmounted, let us gladly acknowl- 
 edge. Leaving out the accident of metre, we could 
 discover these origins of poetry every day in the 
 kindergarten. A little boy is trying to guess the 
 name of his teacher's friend, and not having in his 
 mind the name of the general concept first, he asks, 
 "What is the letter that hves on the edge of it?" 
 Another conveys his abstract notion of height in 
 the words, "Nearest the sky." 
 
 We shall not impugn the genuineness of the 
 poetry of children, nor that purity of their poetic 
 love which we have insisted upon, we shall but 
 strengthen the force of that insistence, if we also 
 acknowledge that their poetry of ideas is fre- 
 quently but a happy incident of ignorance. We 
 might call it necessary poetry. The most prac- 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 145 
 
 tical adults are driven to it when by a reversal of 
 circumstances, the general name being given, they 
 are called upon to explain its meaning to one who 
 is still in the primitive condition. They have 
 either to recall particulars or to employ symbols. 
 There is no escaping the picturesque. I find this 
 memorandum of a bit of such instruction in the 
 early diary of Helen Keller: 
 
 "Nancy was cross. Cross is cry and kick." 
 
 Now, if we could arrange so that all the children 
 of the world should become teachers of the adults, 
 teUing them how to turn their talking into poetry, 
 we should find exactly such memoranda in the 
 note-books of the pupils. They would be taught 
 that, "Cross is cry and kick" But in language, 
 as in life, the prejudice prevails that instruction 
 should pass in the other direction. The jewels of 
 childhood's utterance are adventitious; the chief 
 end of man is to acquire sagacity in the use of 
 general concepts; his chief end is to be sensible 
 or scientific. 
 
 In scientific thinking, we trim away from every 
 experience all that makes it individual and aston- 
 ishing, in order that we may give it a common 
 name and establish it in a familiar class. Science 
 deals with each reality as city people deal with a 
 merchant, neglecting for a supreme expedience 
 
146 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 all that is of unique and immediate value in the 
 relation established. It regards only the same- 
 ness of things. In books of science we get no 
 taste of a particular existence, but things hav- 
 ing some important similarity are referred to as 
 though they were all exactly alike, and by a word 
 stripped of every appropriateness to their nature, 
 stripped of all individual quality whatever, save 
 what is essential to distinguish it from other 
 words. The culmination of this process is to 
 abandon words altogether, as savoring too much 
 of a reahty, and let a stand for one concept, and h 
 for another. Algebra is the extreme antithesis of 
 poetry — so complete in its practical ideaHsm that 
 the real existence of various things is not even 
 intimated as possible, but we deal only with terms 
 and their relations in the mind, the last vestige of 
 poetry sucked out of them. This is the true end 
 and climax, not only of what we call pure science, 
 but of that abstract intellectuality which the phi- 
 losopher praises. It is an idealization of the prac- 
 tical uniformities of experience — a process which 
 advances with such marvellous rapidity, especially 
 in the absence of experience, that if we remain in 
 our studies, we can be led to believe that all the 
 world may one day be summed up in a single 
 formula, and the perfection of science achieved. 
 By that time we shall need to remember that 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 147 
 
 the world does not exist in the abstract, nor in gen- 
 eral, nor in any classification, but in concrete and 
 heterogeneous detail. The poet reminds us of 
 this. Poetry is a countryman, and greets every 
 experience by its own name. Books of poetry, no 
 matter how abstract or general the ideas they con- 
 vey, are filled with presences. Things are made 
 to appear before us in rich multiplicity, and by 
 words cunningly apposite to their unique char- 
 acters, amid which the general meaning must find 
 expression as it can. And no matter what that 
 meaning may be, no matter how intellectual or 
 how scientific his thesis, the poet is by his very 
 speech engaged in exploiting against the spirit of 
 science the varieties of the worid. And as the 
 extreme of science is the vanishing up of all gen- 
 eralization in a single truth, so the extreme of 
 poetry is to descend from the generality proper to 
 the very existence of language, and engage in the 
 diversities of Hfe. Poetry ushers us out of the 
 library. It is a gesture toward the world. 
 
 And thus it is that, although primitive, poetry 
 is also divine. It is a redeemer of the mind from 
 the serious madness of abstraction. It is "the 
 breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," as 
 Wordsworth said; it is "the tuft and final applause 
 of science," as Whitman said; not because it goes 
 still higher up into the air than science and knowl- 
 
148 ENJOYjVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 edge, but because it carries science and knowledge 
 continually back into the specific realities out of 
 which they arose, and whose illumination is their 
 culminating function. 
 
 And yet this, too, we should remember — lest we 
 be as fooUsh as the fools of science — that abstract 
 ideas themselves exist, and are among the realities 
 of experience. The reaUzation of ideas is a part 
 of the adventure of being. And a poet dwells 
 upon the symbohc image, not merely because it is 
 warmer than the idea, but also because it is the 
 essence of the idea in so far as that has any sub- 
 stantive existence. The meaning is transitive, 
 it is an act of the mind; there is no pausing upon 
 it alone. But the image in which it dwells, and 
 which it hallows with new feehngs that are oflF- 
 spring of the power of generalization — ^that is a 
 thing that can be raised up, and seen, and dwelt 
 upon for its own sake. Through that, and 
 through that alone, the poet can arrest and 
 entertain a thought. 
 
 "Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, 
 And while the young Iambs bound 
 As to the tabor's sound, 
 To me alone there came a thought of grief: 
 
 ''Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
 The Soul that rises 'wath us, our life's Star, 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 149 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And Cometh from afar: 
 Not in entire f orgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God, who is our home." 
 
 This was not a new thought, nor was the proof 
 offered of it convincing even in its own day; but it 
 was the new realization of a thought as old as 
 man, and dear to him. It was the bringing down 
 of abstract immortality into the world of things 
 and passions where it might be touched and felt. 
 The day was long gone by when a philosopher 
 could astonish men with the idea that our mind 
 in childhood brings proof of some migration from a 
 higher sphere. Plato thought in a far more sci- 
 entific way of this. But the day was not gone by 
 and never will be, when a poet could astonish us 
 with the vision of this thought in robes of color 
 and emotion. 
 
 "Trailing clouds of glory do we cornel" 
 
 We consider such symbolic or visionary thinking 
 to be very rare, and that a special star attends the 
 birth of a poet. But no doubt these fires of 
 imagery play in the firmament of every mind. It 
 is not without initial effort that we learn to disre- 
 gard them. Present to your mind, if you can, 
 some naked meaning. Let it be that contained 
 
150 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 in the word junction. Unless you are content 
 with the mere sound or appearance of the word 
 itself as a bearer of the meaning, you will find in 
 your imagination a vague picture of two things 
 coming together, two undefined objects whose very 
 lack of definition shall represent the generality of 
 the idea. And if your mind is feverish, or elec- 
 tric with passion, the picture will be more defined. 
 There will even appear a particular instance (per- 
 haps that one in which you first learned the word), 
 and this will stand for junction in the abstract, 
 until a new concrete is given by the completion 
 of a sentence. "Let there be a junction between 
 your ideals and your daily life." Yet even here 
 we are at a loss to attain a clear image, for the 
 words ideal, and daily life, are also highly general. 
 Something above reaches down upon something 
 below, something light touches upon something 
 drab-colored, or a vagueness from heaven swims 
 over the picture of ourselves in practical costume 
 — the difference depending upon how we have 
 learned and used the word ideal, and the word 
 junction, and the words daily life. Whatever form 
 it takes, it is inevitably vague and unemerging — 
 unsatisfying, because it leaves us all of the pic- 
 torial work to do. It is " prosaic." " Hitch your 
 wagon to a star" — that is poetic. It gleams into 
 the mind, scorning all three of those old words 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 151 
 
 that were obscure and not compatible with each 
 other, putting in their place one visual experience 
 which abides. Poetry but dwells upon and per- 
 fects that significant imagery which is the natural 
 instrument of all thinking. It perfects the in- 
 dividual nature of the idea. 
 
 And the poignancy of an idea so perfected is 
 usually greatest when the image stands alone, 
 when the meaning in its more abstract form is 
 not expressed. We are given only the specific 
 and concrete, yet with some shadowed intima- 
 tion that it contains more than itself. 
 
 "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ. 
 Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit 
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
 Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it." 
 
 We cross the bridge of comparison by our- 
 selves, and hardly with words. We only inwardly 
 feel that we have arrived in the presence of an 
 idea. And so unique and magical is this, the ex- 
 perience through speech of what is unspoken, so 
 wonderfully does it float and Hnger through the 
 Hues of all ideal poetry, that it has seemed to those 
 who love above all things a miracle to be a kind 
 of essence of the poetic quahty. They, too, have 
 wished to confine all poetry within the limits of 
 their love. "Suggestion" — "intimation" — "nu- 
 ance" — "meaning," in the occult sense — are what 
 
152 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 they wait for, and sail over the great seas of open 
 poetry thinking they are but a passage-way for 
 these vessels of mystery. 
 
 Let us acknowledge that though poetry is far 
 wider and far more than they believe, yet this is 
 among the sublimest of her powers. For we are 
 sometimes led by her most fine suggestions, not 
 only into the presence of ideas, but into the pres- 
 ence of what is beyond any idea. We are made 
 to apprehend the being of things the mind cannot 
 contain. In trigonometry, because we know the 
 relation between two hues, we can measure the one 
 which is beyond the span of our instruments, and 
 we nail our diagrams to the stars; and in poetry, 
 likewise, when we have experienced the reference 
 of a present image to absent ones, we are awake to 
 those references which pass beyond our minds, and 
 we catch them on their way to the images that 
 are eternally absent. There is poetry that runs 
 along the verge of infinity. Repeatedly we span 
 the universe by the juxtaposition of words, and 
 as the architecture of these successive visions is 
 piled before us, we are led almost to expect a reve- 
 lation of the unseen. This power has hung the veil 
 of sacredness upon the name of poetry — that with 
 these written syllables it can so bring over us the 
 nearness of infinite and universal being. 
 
 Some shadow of this enduring wonder must 
 
REALIZATION OF IDEAS 153 
 
 have dwelt above all those bright gods of Greece, 
 who were the children of the love of pure ideas. 
 ReaUzations in that warmest symbol, personaHty, 
 of the ideas of health, and courage, and wisdom, 
 and some unnamable great beauty that was sup- 
 posed to lie beyond them all — they dwelt like 
 light among the citizens of Athens. And in the 
 darkness of dechning faith in their true being, 
 there arose one who declared that though they 
 fade, the symbols fade, the ideas abide forever and 
 are real. Health and beauty and lightness, these 
 abstract things, exist in perfection and can be 
 seen, if not with the sensual eye, yet with the eye 
 of the mind. So Plato*s evening prayer was a 
 prayer not to the deities, not to the beautiful and 
 good, but to beauty and goodness. He sought to 
 substitute the image of a word with its meaning, 
 for the image of a god with his meaning, and so 
 preserve for a little longer the high-hearted joys 
 of a young religion. But he too failed, and died. 
 The gods must all perish and be lost to us, until 
 we have grown old enough in science to return to 
 them and know that they are poetry, the sym- 
 bols of ideas and of a universal mystery. 
 
CHAPTER Xn 
 
 POETRY ITSELF 
 
 Poetry is not only a realization of things, but 
 it is also a thing itself. It contains present ele- 
 xments to realize and make perfect, or make poig- 
 nant, for their own sake. Perhaps the finest of 
 all these elements, the most magnetic to those 
 who love life, is a great conflict. The sponta- 
 neous pulse of the speech is fighting the restraint 
 of rhythm perpetually, and in the clash both 
 are exalted. In some poems the estabhshed 
 rhythm triumphs often; in others it is often 
 wrecked. And they who value generality and 
 law for their own sake, will favor the first kind of 
 poems, and they who value the general law only 
 as an opportunity for individual rebellion, will 
 favor the second kind. This difference will al- 
 ways be. But for either of them to get the real 
 food for his taste, it is necessary that both the 
 rhythm and the spontaneous pulse should exist, 
 that they should exist distinctly, that they should 
 continue in that state of warring equilibrium which 
 seems to define the very nature of existence. 
 Those who love liberty will enjoy this conflict 
 154 
 
POETRY ITSELF 166 
 
 as it fares in the blank verse of Shakespeare's ma- 
 ture years; those who love the established order 
 will be better pleased with Tennyson. But even 
 Tennyson cannot allow the order to prevail for 
 many lines unbroken, as a quotation will reveal. 
 
 **So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept 
 And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, 
 Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, 
 Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang 
 Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping dowD 
 By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock. 
 Came on the shining levels of the lake. 
 
 There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, 
 And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, 
 Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth 
 And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt " 
 
 There are three variances in these lines against 
 the formal rhythm: 
 
 and 
 and 
 
 "Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam," 
 'Brightening the skirts of a long cloud," 
 'Came on the shining levels of the lake." 
 
 And one might insert for brightening the skirts of a 
 long cloud, the words, illumining the skirts of trail' 
 ing cloud, and for shrill, chill, the words all shrill, 
 and for came on, the word beheld, which would 
 restore the rhythm to complete regularity; and 
 by so mutilating a perfect thing he might see, if 
 
156 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 he cared to, how greatly its perfection depends 
 upon a conflict. 
 Another element of poetry, as a thing itself, 
 yis that melody of letters on the lips and tongue 
 — a melody less high and startling perhaps, but 
 just as clear and eminent to those whose senses 
 can discriminate with fineness as the clang of horns 
 and cymbals. I call it melody because it gives 
 no sounds in unison, but otherwise it has upon 
 an elfin scale the whole diversity of symphonic 
 music. It has a cadence that is almost formal 
 melody; it has the change of tempo and intensity; 
 it has a lineal euphony and dissonance of tonal 
 quahties. Each vowel is an instrument, and each 
 consonant a kind of stop. And all these stops 
 and instruments can be conjoined in myriads of 
 the ways of pleasing that we call beauty — more 
 ways, indeed, than those of instrumental music. 
 For it is not to the ear only, but to the sen- 
 tient organs of articulation, and even to the eye, 
 that the lettered syllables of poetry give music. 
 Phrases, lines, and stanzas have each a distinct 
 being, and all these beings can be built up together 
 congruously into an architectural wonder. 
 
 In modern days, indeed, this building up of 
 vocal wonders has become a great part of the art 
 of writing poetry. Tennyson gave much of his 
 creative attention to it. And it was truly a 
 
POETRY ITSELF 157 
 
 wonder that he built— a supremely soft, mellifluous 
 wonder — 
 
 "Music that gentlier on the spuit lies, 
 Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes." 
 
 Sidney Lanier also loved this art, and wrote a 
 science of it, and even exceeded Tennyson, if not 
 in the melting away, at least in the intense sweet- 
 ness of the linking of his syllables. They hardly 
 allow themselves to be forgotten, they fall so vel- 
 vetly out of the mouth with rhyme, aUiteration, 
 assonance, and every shade of conscious euphony. 
 But of all the builders of the lingual melody, 
 Edgar Allan Poe seems to have given it the least 
 divided regard, and in the few perfected poems 
 that he made, brought it to an extreme of Hmpid 
 fluidity. 
 
 "At midnight, in the month of June, 
 I stand beneath the mystic moon. 
 An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, 
 Exhales from out her golden rim. 
 And, softly dripping, drop by drop, 
 Upon the quiet mountain top. 
 Steals drowsily and musically 
 Into the universal valley. 
 The rosemary nods upon the grave; 
 The lily lolls upon the wave; 
 Wrapping the fog about its breast. 
 The ruin moulders into rest; 
 Looking like Lethe, seel the lake 
 A conscious slumber seems to take. 
 
158 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY ' 
 
 And would not, for the world, awake. 
 All Beauty sleeps I — and lol where lies 
 Irene, with her Destinies I" 
 
 Rudyard Kipling injected into this art a more 
 heroic ring. His syllables raise a magnificent 
 clangor that puts health into the pulse, and their 
 sounding marks quite a crisis in the history of the 
 music of English letters. "The ringing, stinging 
 spindrift, and fulmar flying free!" seem hardly of 
 the same genus as "The velvet violet cushions," 
 and "The silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each 
 purple curtain." Yet after all they are only a 
 variation of taste in the same field of interest. 
 They direct the attention, more or less explicitly, 
 as Tennyson so often did, to the vocal materials 
 of verse. 
 
 Poetry contains more essence of its own, how- 
 ever, than syllables and letters, or the wonders 
 yffiade of them. It contains words. And of all 
 the jewels of Africa there is no one that can sur- 
 pass, in concentration of intense being, a unique 
 word. Suspend before the mind, but only for a 
 moment lest its spirit flee, a word — the word 
 wraith, or vigil, or night-pandering. Ingot, water- 
 nixy, preen, simoom — are they not wonderful creat- 
 ures? They bear all the charmed diversities of 
 nature in a faery world. No poet ever lived, no 
 vivid-minded child, but loved to know them. 
 
POETRY ITSELF 159 
 
 And knowing them — or shall we call it tasting, 
 feeHng of them, loving to build them also into 
 wonders — has been a second great part of the art 
 of poetry in modern days. Consider, for example, 
 those lines "To a Snow-flake," by Francis Thomp- 
 son. Consider them, not because they lack all 
 other poetry, but because they lack all other great- 
 ness in poetry, than the greatness of a creation in 
 the flavors of words. A sensuous if delicate cloud 
 is hung before us, hiding the snow-flake, or even 
 the God, we may have thought of, but hiding 
 it in order to ravish us away with a mystery 
 of names. As a builder of these magic clouds, 
 dwelling upon them forever, and even to the ruin 
 of his melody and rhythm, Francis Thompson has 
 hardly been excelled. 
 
 TO A SNOW-FLAKE 
 
 "What heart could have thought you?— 
 Past our devisal 
 (A filigree petal!) 
 Fashioned so purely, 
 Fragilely, surely, 
 From what Paradisal 
 Imagineless metal, 
 Too costly for cost? 
 Who hammered you, wrought you. 
 From argentine vapor? — 
 *God was my shaper. 
 Passing surmisal. 
 He hanunered, He wrought me. 
 
160 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 From curled silver vapor, 
 
 To lust of his mind : — 
 
 Thou could* St not have thought me I 
 
 So purely, so palely, 
 
 Tinily, surely, 
 
 Mightily, frailly, 
 
 Insculped and embossed. 
 
 With his hammer of mind, 
 
 And his graver of frost.' " 
 
 The poem is so moving, and yet withal so inevi- 
 table — so superior in that quality to others in its 
 volume — that we might almost retract what we 
 said of it. We might say, for one thing, that 
 there is a kinship between the sensible nature of 
 its words and of the thing they speak of. Both 
 do curl and flutter, even if not in the same un- 
 conscious purity. And in so far as that is true, 
 there is a higher poetry than lies in the mere reali- 
 zation of words. It is a poetry upon the border- 
 land between word-conjuring and the imaginative 
 realization of things — a special poetry to which 
 the text-books have given the longest and most 
 impoetic name of onomatopceia. 
 
 This p)oetry contains similarity, but it is a sim- 
 ilarity not between two things that are named, 
 but between a thing and the very naming of it. 
 Buzz, bang, slap, grumble, are words used to illus- 
 trate this, and they are always supplemented by 
 these long-suffering lines of Tennyson: 
 
POETRY ITSELF 161 
 
 "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmm'ing of innumerable bees." 
 
 No book about poetry is acceptable without a 
 quotation of these lines; and few books about 
 poetry fail to convey an indistinct impression 
 that they contain the real, or at least the only 
 seizable, quintessence of poetic language. This 
 is unfortunate, because the lines are obviously 
 unusual and had to be sought after, and we should 
 not care to hear a great many Hke them even if 
 we could. But, unfortunate though it is, it is the 
 nearest that the text-books ever come to telling 
 the truth about poetic language. It is a real 
 intuition of the truth, and far less misleading than 
 what they have to say about "figures of speech" 
 in general. 
 
 The reason why the text-books talk about 
 onomatopoeia as though it were the quintessence 
 of poetry, is that their authors understand its 
 poetic value, but they do not understand the 
 poetic value of the other figures. They perceive, 
 in an obscure way, that making an absent experi- 
 ence vivid to the mind is the very magic of poetry. 
 And they can explain to themselves how an imita- 
 tive sound makes an absent thing vivid. It is 
 like saying "bow-wow" for baby at the word dog. 
 But how the choice of a salient detail, or the com- 
 parison of one absent thing with another, makes 
 
162 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 it vivid to the mind, they cannot explain. And 
 so they pass over these greater acts of poetry 
 somewhat abstractedly, as we have seen, and they 
 dwell upon this small incident of mimicry and 
 these misfortunate two Hnes of Tennyson, as 
 though they were a kind of special SiTchetype for 
 all poetry, and were achieved by a supernatural 
 union of the poet himself with the objects he 
 loves. But we need only glance back a Httle 
 way in the same poem to prove to ourselves how 
 much more utterly lost in his objects a poet may 
 become, and yet make no sensible imitation what- 
 ever. 
 
 "But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease 
 To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine, 
 To sit a star upon the sparkling spire; 
 And come, for Love is of the valley, come. 
 For Love is of the valley, come thou down 
 And find him; by the happy threshold, he. 
 Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize. 
 Or red with spirted purple of the vats, 
 Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk 
 With Death and Morning on the silver horns,— 
 
 **But follow; let the torrent dance thee down 
 To find him in the valley; let the wild 
 Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave 
 The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill 
 Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke. 
 That like a broken purpose waste in air: 
 So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales 
 Await thee " 
 
POETRY ITSELF 163 
 
 The language of Dante held people in so great 
 awe that a tradition arose, and has survived among 
 the credulous, that a foreigner can understand him 
 to some extent by the very wailing of his words 
 — a tradition which gives more credit to Dante 
 in its folly, than it would if it were true. For 
 how should a man descending into very hell, ex- 
 periencing the universal horror till his mind was 
 rabid and his bones were gaunt — ^how should he 
 be attending to the trick of juggling some eight 
 thousand words until they mimicked every noise 
 or object he encountered? It is pardonable that 
 we should speak of Dante with superstition, for 
 he is probably the only man that ever fully went 
 through hell. But I think we do light honor to 
 the superhuman genius in him when we unite it 
 with this magic of the languid study. We unite 
 it with such achievements as Edgar Allan Poe's 
 "Bells" — a poem which shows the love of onomat- 
 opoeia, and word-tasting, and letter-music, in ex- 
 treme and almost ludicrous dominance over the 
 motives of universal poetry. 
 
 "Hear the sledges with the bells — 
 Silver bells 1 
 What a world of merriment their melody foretells! 
 How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, 
 
 In the icy air of night! 
 While the stars that oversprinkle 
 All the heavens, seem to twinkle 
 
164 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 With a crystalline delight; 
 Keeping time, time, time, 
 In a sort of Runic rhyme. 
 To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells 
 From the bells, bells, bells, bells, 
 
 Bells, beUs, beUs— 
 From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells." 
 
 One might almost regard these verses, with 
 "The Raven," as a parody upon the tendencies of 
 chamber-poets in the modern day — their conse- 
 cration of the sensuous materials of language. It 
 is but a step beyond them in affection for the pal- 
 pable, to devote the energies of creation — as at 
 one time the poets of Persia did — to beautiful pen- 
 manship, and the coloring of the pages, and dust- 
 ing them with Hve perfumes. 
 
 The poets of the world have not been domi- 
 nated by any of these passions of the writing-room. 
 For them poetry itself is an experience subor- 
 dinate to those which it portrays. They have 
 mastered the art of verbal melody much as they 
 mastered the art of handwriting, in order to sub- 
 ject it utterly to the service of the imaginative 
 reaHzation of life. The pleasure in their syllables 
 does not protest itself; the perfection of their 
 utterance is supreme, but it is in the truest sense 
 a negative perfection. It is but the clear medium 
 through which a greater thing continually appears. 
 / Two elements belong to poetry as a thing itself, 
 
POETRY ITSELF 165 
 
 however, upon which even the great poets have 
 sometimes concentrated their best energy. They 
 are the form, an intellectual element, and the 
 unique emotion that words aloof from things can 
 sometimes generate. I quote for illustration of 
 the first a sonnet whose excellence, whatever ele- 
 ments of passion it may hold, is not separable 
 from its totality. The passion and its images are 
 wrought together on a rhythmic pattern into a high 
 unity that becomes a being for the intellect — a 
 poem. 
 
 "REMEMBER 
 
 "Remember me when I am gone away. 
 Gone far away into the silent land; 
 When you can no more hold me by the hand. 
 Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. 
 Remember me when no more, day by day. 
 You tell me of our future that you planned: 
 Only remember me; you understand. 
 It will be late to counsel then or pray. 
 Yet if you should forget me for a while 
 And afterwards remember, do not grieve; 
 For if the darkness and corruption leave 
 A vestige of the thoughts that once I had. 
 Better by far you should forget and smile 
 Than that you should remember and be sad." 
 
 Thus to engender without loss of passion or 
 simplicity a perfect form, is an art which somehow 
 stirs in us a greater admiration than does the mere 
 music made of syllables. It is at least a more 
 
166 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 complete creation. A poem as a form is a new 
 thing that language adds outright to what the 
 world contained. 
 
 Perhaps to create out of the materials of life, by 
 recombining them with names, a feeling that life 
 itself never offered, a quaUty of passion that is the 
 poem's own, is a still higher art. It seems both 
 high and rare, and to partake of the divineness of 
 nature's own spontaneous generation. And we 
 need not wonder if those who dwell too much in 
 reading and too little in the world, should make 
 a kind of idol of this power and almost wish to 
 call no other utterance poetry. 
 
 "I saw pale kings, and princes too, 
 Pale warriors, death-pale were they aU; 
 
 "I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam. 
 With horrid warning gapfed wide, 
 And I awoke and found me here 
 On the cold hillside. 
 
 "And this is why I sojourn here 
 Alone and palely loitering, 
 Though the sedge is withered from the lake. 
 And no birds sing." 
 
 An echo will recall the spell of this sad ballad, and 
 remind us that such magical emotions are indeed 
 a precious gift that words can make to the orig- 
 
POETRY ITSELF 167 
 
 inal wealth of life. They are at least a crowning 
 attribute of poetry as a thing itself. And blended 
 with all poignancy and beauty in the other attri- 
 butes we have too crudely analyzed and separated 
 from each other, they can easily become the ob- 
 ject of supreme poetic love in days when art 
 usurps the place of life. They are a culmination 
 of what we may call the poetry of the poet's 
 chamber. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 TO ENJOY POETRY 
 
 Of all things poetry is most unlike deadness. 
 It is unlike ennui, or sophistication. It is a prop- 
 erty of the alert and beating hearts. Those who 
 are so proud that they cannot enter precipitately 
 into the enterprise of being, are too great for 
 poetry. Poetry is unconditionally upon the side 
 of life. But it is also upon the side of variety in 
 life. It is the offspring of a love that has many 
 eyes, as many as the flowers of the field. There 
 is no poetry for him whose look is straitened, and 
 his heart lives but to the satisfaction of a single 
 taste. He had the power of poetry and lost it. 
 
 Nor variety alone, but idleness in variety per- 
 tains to the poetic life. Greed, anticipation, or 
 the aspiration to achieve may branch a thousand 
 ways. Even old necessity is not monotonous. 
 But poetry cannot flourish where these things 
 absorb the heart. Realization is a flower of lei- 
 sure and does not blossom quickly. It is a flower 
 of the mood of leisure, and that in these days is 
 the possession of a few. Among the well-to-do it 
 is a traditional possession of women only, and so 
 168 
 
TO ENJOY POETRY 169 
 
 poetry has there grown to appear feminine. 
 Among the poor it is unattainable to any but de- 
 generates, or the best rebels, and so poetry appears 
 not to belong there at all, but to be almost an 
 exclusive pleasure of those whom we call culti- 
 vated. Poetry has grown aristocratic. It looks 
 into the future for its golden age, the age when it 
 will again be loved by many kinds of people, and 
 rise to its heights upon a wide foundation. They 
 who cherish hopes of poetry will, therefore, do 
 well to favor in their day every assault of labor 
 upon the monopoly of leisure by a few. They will 
 be ready for a drastic re-distribution of the idle 
 hours. 
 
 Even a more heroic change they will have to 
 see, if poetry is to prosper in those hours. For 
 with the achievement of leisure as it is to-day, 
 there spreads over the whole nature of man that 
 baleful constraint, the ideal of respectability. 
 And that is a more sure destroyer of poetry, than 
 even necessity or the absorbing ambition that is 
 genuine. The privilege of maintaining a refined 
 insulation from real contacts with the matter of 
 Kfe being possible only to the wealthy, it becomes 
 the accepted token of wealth, and a stern require- 
 ment to those whose judgments of merit are 
 determined by a pecuniary standard. They wrap 
 themselves in fabrics and fine manners. They 
 
170 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 incase themselves in forms. They touch nothing 
 to the quick. They are even more effectually sun- 
 dered from the poetry of experience than those 
 considered less fortunate who are occupied with a 
 genuine problem of self-preservation. For they, 
 when they do discover some hour of contempla- 
 tion, look straight into the face of the world. 
 They taste the sorrows at least. But these others 
 dwell in their mansions of great aspect as in the 
 tomb, forbidden by their ideal the realization even 
 of the tragedy of their own deadness. I walk from 
 Central Park eastward, and as I draw near to 
 those quarters where poverty has kept off this 
 malady, I draw big breaths again, as if I had issued 
 out of a polished museum wherein were kept pack- 
 ages of human remains. 
 
 What wonder if the poets, the lovers of the 
 sting of life, have revolted against this voluntary 
 bUght. A noble flavor of disreputability clings 
 about the greatest of them. Nor does comedy 
 err in presenting their type as clad in a rolling 
 collar, a flowing tie, or some other symbol of rebel- 
 lion against the demands of respectable opinion. 
 They do not love these peculiarities for themselves 
 alone, but they love them for the declaration that 
 they make of public liberty for individual exist- 
 ence. 
 
 It is true that this revolt in manners cannot 
 
TO ENJOY POETRY 171 
 
 always be brought without a loss of that uncon- 
 sciousness of self which is so justly valued. But 
 this does not prove that the revolt arose from such 
 consciousness; it proves the all-poisoning power 
 of the ideal revolted against. It but extends to 
 the man who defies it a further challenge. His 
 defiance will not weaken, because it is grounded 
 in the nature of his will. But the strange power 
 of that ideal is grounded in a condition of extreme 
 economic rivalry, and will diminish with a change 
 in this condition. With a wiser distribution, not 
 of leisure only, but of wealth, its tyranny, which 
 is pecuniary at heart, will there rot. And a cer- 
 tain naturalness without respectability, the rarest 
 jewel of our present leisure, will then be more 
 abundant. 
 
 It would not be true, perhaps, to attribute all 
 the unexpectedness of the poetic to their revolt 
 against the anxiety or insulation of being respect- 
 able. For there is a certain contrariety between 
 custom itself, whatever be the heart of it, and 
 poetry. There is truth in the high opinion that in 
 so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist. He 
 fails to launch that separate orbit into the sphere 
 of being which the luck of birth allowed him. 
 And, therefore, a divergence for its own sake from 
 the common course receives the poet's sanction. 
 To aspire forever toward the general type is — as 
 
172 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 even Plato in his world of thought acknowledged 
 — a kind of death for the individual. The meas- 
 ure of experience is all too short for those who 
 love it. 
 
 And if custom, or the typical, appears to them a 
 kind of death, how much the more does indi\adual 
 habit, or the washing out of all acute impressions 
 through mere repetition. This they cannot bear. 
 They cannot settle down to any daily round what- 
 ever — to stay at home, or leaving home to cut 
 always across the same meadow. They make 
 new paths at every turn. They shun the clutch 
 of habit as a wild hawk shuns the cage, knowing 
 that it has more power than its bars. It has the 
 power of conquering their wish to leave it. And 
 here that other popular or comic apprehending of 
 the poet's nature — that he is a little unrehable — 
 finds also a measure of justification. He is not 
 the best of neighbors, because you can never tell 
 quite where to find him, or what you may expect 
 of him when found. He is unrehable only in so 
 far as you commit your fortunes rashly to the 
 hope of his repeating yesterday to-day. That 
 mode of hving, in so far as mortal tissue and its 
 preservation will allow, he has kept clear of. 
 And in this way, as well as in the way of unsophis- 
 tication, and variety, and idleness, and the dis- 
 reputable, and the uncustomary, he has made the 
 
TO ENJOY POETRY 173 
 
 return to childhood. He has preserved the poetry 
 of life. 
 
 The poetry of language is secondary to that. 
 It will be found, mixed often with humor, on the 
 tongues of those we have described; its best en- 
 joyment will be known to them. And yet it is a 
 different art, and there are further requisites of 
 its enjoyment. The first and greatest of them is 
 that we should know its character, and estimate 
 it as itself. All lively things of nature, from the 
 planets to ourselves so busy on them, are forever 
 forward-looking, and unconsciously we draw all 
 ?iew things to this company, and judge them as 
 they further or retard its progress. Far more 
 than half our judgments, half our conscious being, 
 half our speaking, is directed toward the future, 
 finds its sanction there. And poetry is exactly 
 otherwise. It aims to step aside from, and to 
 stem, that everlasting process with a strong abid- 
 ing in the present. And this is fooHsh mutiny to 
 those who cannot understand; but to those who 
 can, it is a fine rebellion. And that, is all the 
 difference. 
 
 What silly tassels "figures" can appear, when 
 discourse is conceived as wholly occupied with 
 interchange of meaning, we have seen. A studied 
 row of metrical or rhyming syllables is equally 
 absurd, if it be judged accessory to the convey 
 
174 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 ance of information or conceptual understand- 
 ing. The entire technique of poetry is rejected 
 with a contemptuous epithet by persons who have 
 never caught the idea, even unconsciously, that 
 there is a difference between the realization of 
 being and the occupation of becoming. From 
 their standpoint, the standpoint of practical sa- 
 gacity, the statement ascribed to Tolstoy that 
 nothing was ever said in poetry which could not be 
 better said in plain language, is entirely true. 
 But from the standpoint of one who wishes to 
 experience the intrinsic nature of a thing spoken 
 of, it is entirely true that nothing was ever said 
 in plain language which could not be better said in 
 poetry. When language is essentially practical, 
 too much of the poetic is an intrusion; but when 
 language is essentially poetic, too much of the 
 practical is an intrusion. Whatsoever part of 
 language is poetic, moreover, and aims to be so, 
 will be judged and apprehended under the stand- 
 ard of its own aim, or it will not be really judged 
 or apprehended at all. 
 
 When the essential difference is once fixed, 
 however, and it is seen how all language parts 
 away on one side or the other, what further re- 
 lates to the art of enjoying poetry will be quickly 
 understood. It will appear that poetry is not a 
 mere digression, but a parallel of achievement. 
 
TO ENJOY POETRY 175 
 
 It requires the same energy of morning. You 
 cannot sit down in the odd moments and snatch a 
 bite of poetry. There will be words, but the real- 
 ization will not come. It is the vigorous idleness 
 that is so rare. And once it is attained, a child- 
 like vividness of speech is almost inevitable, and 
 the poetry of books rings wholly true. All those 
 inconsequent details and qualities, those self-sig- 
 nificant comparisons, those throbbing syllables, 
 come like an inspiration to the mind. Their stir- 
 ring and sustaining of pure consciousness exalts 
 us. And the power of lingering, forgotten since 
 the nursery picture-books were closed, returns, 
 and these the picture-books of our maturity grow 
 vivid with the colors of the worid. 
 
 The power of lingering with energy — this is the 
 second lesson in the art of loving poetry. The 
 third, if we may steal a word from those who 
 teach the love of God, is faith. For poetry is like 
 religion in that it exists with glorious definition 
 for those who have attained it, but for those who 
 merely look upon it, there is little that appears. 
 I believe that if we were to examine the whole 
 field of poetry, from the first corybantic festival 
 to the last polished rondel of a French artist, for 
 some common characteristic in the words them' 
 selves, whereby the essence of poetry should be 
 indicated, we should find one such characteristic 
 
176 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 and one only. It would not be rhythm. It 
 would be the employment of certain particles 
 of emotion or address which are wholly foreign 
 to the speech of ordinary communication. The 
 Ahs, and Thou's, and the Forevermores, seem to be 
 more universal in the language of realization than 
 any other audible or visible thing. And are they 
 not a result of the wish to establish a separation 
 of the poetic moment, to beget in the hearer a 
 change, a reverence, a kind of submission to the 
 magic that invests the poet — a magic that will 
 not exist for him until he yields? The trance of 
 realization is a definite experience. It would be 
 praised by many that are scornful, if they but 
 knew it, this sacred charm that can swing down 
 into the most wretched lives or circumstances and 
 illumine them. And if we dwell upon its kinship 
 with a vision or a waking sleep, let this not sug- 
 gest unhealth, or unreality, or anything occult, 
 for it is natural as laughter. Only let it give a 
 doubt to those who now dismiss the poetry of 
 rhji:hmic language from the things of their en- 
 joyment before they ever have experienced it. 
 
 The surest path to its experience, if they should 
 humbly wish to know, lies not through reading, 
 but through making it. Better than faith or cher- 
 ished idleness, better even than understanding 
 poetry as a way to learn the enjoyment of it — 
 
TO ENJOY POETRY 177 
 
 and that without alienation from the better poem 
 of one's own existence — is to create it for one's self. 
 Let but a rhythmic utterance with the chosen 
 name rise in some deep or vivid moment of our 
 own experience, and the rhythms and designa- 
 tions of great poetry are then forever natural. 
 We are of their kindred, and their speech is native 
 to our minds. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 TO COMPOSE POETRY 
 
 The knowledge needed to create an English 
 rhythm, the only general knowledge there is upon 
 that subject, may be acquired while one converses 
 about it. There may be different ways of sys- 
 temizing this knowledge, but one which flows 
 from our hypothesis about the waves, appears 
 the most simple. Rhythm, according to that 
 hypothesis, must be a repetition of similar effects 
 at approximately equal intervals; and the similar 
 effects repeated in poetry are, in the first place, 
 lines, and in the second place, surges of emphasis 
 within the lines. 
 
 Both lines, or short utterances separated by a 
 pause, and the surges of emphasis within them, 
 are found in primitive chants; therefore neither 
 can be regarded as the more original unit. Poetic 
 rhythm is almost universally a combination of the 
 two, and its chief varieties arise from this fact. 
 Nevertheless, the line has been simply taken for 
 granted by most prosodists, as though it were tied 
 across the page before the poet came there, and 
 his verses were various ways of stringing syllables 
 upon it. This is due, I suppose, to the fact that 
 178 
 
TO COMPOSE POETRY 179 
 
 the line rhythm is visible to a reader, whereas the 
 rhythm of emphasis is only audible, or to be felt 
 in the motions of articulation. But whatever may 
 be the cause, it is a basic error, and the great rea- 
 son, I believe, why no clear account of the nature 
 of poetic rhythm has ever been given. 
 
 The recurrence of lines is often accentuated by 
 placing rhymed syllables in a regular order at the 
 ends. Without some such device, indeed, when 
 poetry is read aloud as we read it in these days, 
 the existence of lines is hardly to be detected at 
 all. We may regard the audible rhythm of blank 
 verse as almost purely accentual, and represent 
 it by a single series of waves. 
 
 The incurrence of rhyme in this series might then 
 be represented as scientists represent any merging 
 of commensurable undulations, thus: 
 
 This strong intensifying of the line series arises 
 naturally, I believe, only in poetry that is espe- 
 cially exciting. Milton was doubtless right in de- 
 claring it to be a troublesome bondage in the labor 
 of composing or reading a work, part poem and 
 part treatise, Hke " Paradise Lost." But as a gen- 
 eral dogma he has reduced his own statement to 
 
180 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 absurdity by writing greater poetry with rhyme 
 inevitable. Rhyme reduplicates the metric pulse 
 when feeling runs strong, as insuppressibly as a 
 dancing darky begins to clap his hands with 
 every so many clicks of his flying feet. A sim- 
 ilar reduplication may be, and has been, accom- 
 plished in poetry by other means, and means less 
 difficult to the composer, but rhyme is probably 
 the final best of them. Its exciting and hypnotic 
 power was discovered by the Chinese, by the 
 Persians, and Arabic poets, and doubtless inde- 
 pendently by the late Latins in Europe. It is 
 neither a conventional ornament, nor a mnemonic 
 device, nor esoteric, nor ephemeral, in poetry. It 
 is as native to a rhythm that flows high as white- 
 caps to the ocean. 
 
 As for the accentual rhythm, the surge of em- 
 phasis within the lines — that needs no intensifica- 
 tion, for once it is established, it can hardly be 
 concealed. It is established by so arranging the 
 words that their natural accents produce it. Ex- 
 amine, for instance, the following sentence: 
 
 When y6u have eaten all of ydur peanuts, y6u 
 wUl n6t he allowed to share mine. 
 
 Various emphases or accented syllables are here, 
 but no metrical rhythm. The words must be re- 
 arranged until the emphases recur at approxi" 
 mately equal intervals. 
 
TO COMPOSE POETRY 181 
 
 When y6u have eaten all yours, my pednuts ydu 
 cannot shdre, 
 
 begins to suggest such an arrangement. Yet it is 
 unsatisfactory. It sounds like the translation of a 
 libretto. It can be improved as follows: 
 
 "You cdnH haw any of my peanuts when yoUr 
 peanuts are gone!'* 
 
 This possesses a rhythm so strong as to compel us 
 to mispronounce a word without knowing that 
 we have done so. We cannot say pea-nuts any 
 longer, even when we try. 
 
 These three sentences will exemplify the process 
 of producing an accentual rhythm. Each surge 
 of this rhythm, each group of syllables containing 
 an accent, is called a " foot." And the natural ac- 
 cent plays exactly the same part in the foot, that 
 the rhyme, or the pause, or the turning back of 
 the eyes, does in the line. It establishes and 
 marks the crest of a rhythmic pulse. And these 
 pulses, as well as the line pulses, might be marked 
 off upon the page, if they were not already in 
 danger of over-emphasis. 
 
 "Odt of the/hills of /Hdber/shdm, 
 Down the /valleys of /Hall— 
 I h(ir/ry amain /to redch/the plain, 
 Rtin the/rdpid and/ledp the /fall " 
 
 From this combining of the pulse of accent with 
 the pulse of line into a single flow, there arise four 
 
182 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 general types of rhythm. That in which the ac- 
 cent occurs upon the first syllable of the line, and 
 not upon the last, we might call a downward, or 
 falling, rhythm. 
 
 "Lazy latjghing languid J^nny, 
 F6nd of a kiss and f6nd of a guinea." 
 
 That in which the accent occurs upon the first 
 syllable, and also upon the last, would be a down- 
 and-upward, or a falling-rising rhythm. 
 
 "Swiftly wdlk o'er the western wave, 
 Spirit of Night 1" 
 
 That in which the accent occurs upon the second 
 (or third) syllable, and not upon the last, would be 
 an up-and-downward, or a rising-falling rhythm. 
 
 "Wee, sleekit, cowrin*, tlm'rous beistie, 
 O, wh^t a panic's In thy breastie! 
 Thou need na start awa sae hasty, 
 
 Wi' blck'ring brattle! 
 I wld be lalth to rin an' chase thee, 
 
 Wi' mtird'ring pittlel" 
 
 And that in which the accent occurs upon the 
 second (or third) syllable, and also upon the last, 
 would be a wholly upward, or rising, rhythm. 
 
 "Ye banks and bries o* b6nny Doon, 
 How c£n ye bl6om sae fresh and f^I 
 How can ye sing, ye little birds. 
 And I sae weary fu' o' carel 
 
TO COMPOSE POETRY 183 
 
 Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, 
 That wantons thro' the flowering thorn! 
 Thou minds me o' departed joys. 
 Departed — ^never to return." 
 
 These four ways of combining the line with the 
 foot-rhythm are so different in effect that it is 
 well either to make them alternate at regular in- 
 tervals, or else to make one kind predominate 
 enough throughout a poem to throw the mantle 
 of its quality over the whole. 
 
 Two rhythms are so made to alternate in this 
 supremely, and to me sadly, beautiful song of 
 Tom Moore's. 
 
 "Come, ye disconsolate, where'er you languish. 
 Come, at God's altar, fervently kneel; 
 Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish 
 'Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.* 
 
 "Joy of the desolate, Light of the straying, 
 Hope, when aU others die, fadeless and pure. 
 Here speaks the Comforter, in God's name saying 
 * Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot cure.' 
 
 **Go, ask the infidel, what boon he brings us — 
 What charm for aching hearts he can reveal, 
 Sweet as that heavenly promise Hope sings us— 
 'Earth has no sorrow that God cannot heal.* ** 
 
 In Charles Eangsley's "Song of a River," on the 
 other hand, the spirit of a fall and rise rhythm is 
 sustained, in spite of many variant lines, through- 
 out. 
 
184 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 "Clear and cool, clear and cool, 
 By laughing shallow and dreaming pool; 
 
 Cool and clear, cool and clear. 
 By shining shingle and foaming wear; 
 Under the crag where the ouzel sings, 
 And the ivied wall where the Church bell rings, 
 
 Undefiled for the undefiled; 
 Play by me, bathe in me, Mother and Child. 
 
 "Dank and foul, dank and foul. 
 By the smoky town in its murky cowl; 
 
 Foul and dank, foul and dank. 
 By wharf and sewer and slimy bank; 
 Darker and darker the further I go. 
 Baser and baser the richer I grow; 
 
 Who dare sport with the sin defiled? 
 Shrink from me, turn from me, Mother and Child. 
 
 "Strong and free, strong and free; 
 The flood gates are open, away to the sea. 
 
 Free and strong, free and strong. 
 Cleansing my streams as I hurry along 
 To the golden sands, and the leaping bar, 
 And the taintless tide that awaits me afar, 
 As I lose myself in the infinite main 
 
 Like a soul that has sinned and is pardoned again. 
 Undefiled for the undefiled; 
 Play by me, bathe in me, Mother and Child." 
 
 The variations possible from any of these 
 rhythms are evidently milimited. But a maker 
 of poetry will usually have the swing of one or 
 another of them definitely in his veins. And this, 
 if he be an amateur, he can most easily acquire by 
 
TO COMPOSE POETRY 185 
 
 "beating the time" with a pencil, or by simply 
 repeating a monotonous syllable in the various 
 ways. 
 
 Ta ta, Ta ta, Ta ta 
 Ta ta, Ta ta, Ta 
 
 for example, and 
 
 ta Ta, ta Td, ta Td, 
 ta Td, ta Ta, ta Td, ta. 
 
 Two such rhythms, even in this abstract form, 
 will have a different effect upon his spirits. And 
 by tasting this difference he will learn more than 
 a whole book of Greek terms could teach him. 
 , The only other general difference between 
 rhythms is a difference in the length of their 
 surges. Poetry may be made, that is, with lines 
 of greater or less length; and it may be made with 
 feet of greater or less length. The lines will hardly 
 exceed six (or at the most seven) feet, because if 
 they exceed that, they cannot easily be perceived 
 in the reading as a single thing. Within that lim- 
 itation, however, the variety in length of line, or 
 arrangements of different lengths, among which a 
 poet may choose is determined, not by any laws 
 of prosody, but by the laws of combination and 
 permutation, or his own wish. Only he must re- 
 member that if he mixes lines of different length, 
 with entire absence of regularity in the recurrence 
 
186 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 of similar ones, he sacrifices the line almost en- 
 tirely as an element of fmidamental rhythm. 
 
 As for the length of foot — that, too, is deter- 
 mined by the poet's wish. He will find it impos- 
 sible to pronomice more than three (or at the 
 most four) syllables naturally, without placing an 
 accent upon one of them, but within that limita- 
 tion his choice is free. He may introduce what- 
 ever number of syllables between each recurrent 
 emphasis he chooses. And he may use feet of 
 different length in whatever succession he chooses. 
 Only, as in the case of lines, if the length of his 
 surge (the interval between his emphases) is not 
 kept regular enough to maintain the general char- 
 acter of repeating similars in equal intervals, he 
 will sacrifice the foot entirely as an element of 
 fundamental rhythm. 
 
 There is little more than this to be said with 
 truth of metrical utterance as a mode of sustaining 
 realization. There is one thing more to be said, 
 however, for those who wish to compose poetry. 
 Rhythmic perception among the civilized races, 
 and especially the musically civilized, is finer than 
 it used to be when they shouted their poems to the 
 accompaniment of a tom-tom. We no longer need 
 the tom-tom's assistance in detecting a rhythm, 
 and it only gives us a sing-song and monotonous 
 experience, against which in itself we often react 
 
TO COMPOSE POETRY 187 
 
 80 strongly that it fails utterly to produce a 
 rhythmic exaltation. We simply go somewhere 
 else. And therefore amateur poets must beware 
 of shouting to the tom-tom. They must beware 
 of having the actual surge of their poetry, when it 
 is naturally read, fall in too exactly with the 
 rhythmic pattern. For the pattern will then 
 dominate them entirely, and their bodies will ap- 
 pear to be swaying and swinging and their feet 
 drununing time to their words, and while they 
 may themselves enter in a truly hearty and primi- 
 tive fashion into this performance, it will surely 
 appear a little ludicrous to most of their audi- 
 ence. 
 
 We might express it in this way, that man has 
 grown so perspicacious, and so vain of his perspi- 
 cacity in these matters, that he will not tolerate 
 having himself played upon by a too obvious de- 
 vice. He will not even walk up the street with a 
 drum, unless it conceal its monotonous function 
 under some flippancy, skipping a beat now and 
 then, or throwing in a little superfluous thunder. 
 He wishes to unravel his rhythm out of something 
 else. He wishes here, as everywhere, to find a 
 similarity in apparent difference by at least a 
 semiconscious act. And this little vanity of his 
 you will have to consider, even though you may 
 not care to cultivate the conflicts between your 
 
188 ENJOYIMENT OF POETRY 
 
 pattern and your phrasal rhythm for themselves. 
 You will have to remember continually to swing 
 the natural utterance of your verse out of the chan- 
 nel of its rhythm, and yet swing it in again, and 
 ever and ever again, so that the pulses of that 
 rhythm, while they are not exaggerated, are yet 
 abundantly sustained. 
 
 Remember that you are engendering and sus- 
 taining in the mind a flow of waves, and you will 
 need no laws of prosody. Remember also that the 
 words, and groups of words, you work with, are 
 not common names grown old in the conveyance of 
 a meaning; they are surprising names, new-made 
 by you, to choose fresh quaHties and details in the 
 things you speak of, and to join them in the mind 
 wath other things they never knew before, thus 
 sending them alive and vivid into that stream of 
 heightened consciousness the waves induce. You 
 will need no laws of rhetoric. You will have the 
 knowledge of the art of writing poetry, and the 
 surest path to its enjoyment. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF POETRY 
 
 Every little while the members of a young 
 men's society debate the question whether poets 
 or statesmen have had the greatest effect upon 
 history. They decide in favor of the poets, and 
 then go and devote themselves to poUtics and 
 practical affairs. If meanwhile a poet arises 
 among them, he has attributed to him an unusu- 
 ally liquid and ineffectual character. It appears 
 that a poet in history is divine, but a poet in the 
 next room is a joke. Nobody demurs at our at- 
 tributing power to Shakespeare, the supreme 
 greatness of Anglo-Saxon life. Few feel that 
 Bacon could uphold such greatness. And the 
 farther into history we look, the more the states- 
 men dwindle and the poets shine. Lincoln's word 
 of praise gives final honor to Walt Whitman, but 
 poets are the very fame of Pericles. 
 
 This mixture of veneration with distrust toward 
 poetry is not colloquial. It is the world's attitude. 
 There are savages of Africa who give beads of 
 wealth and honor to the singers that entertain 
 them, but they bury them upside down in a hollow 
 tree, to show that the honor is not unmixed with 
 189 
 
190 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 contempt. I sometimes think the singers of our 
 own day have a sunilarly compounded attitude 
 toward themselves. For while they consider a 
 life of realization so self-justifying as to warrant 
 their renouncing for it every aspiration of an 
 acting man, they still descend from this to com- 
 plain that they are not appreciated by others, as 
 though they had not their own reward. Even the 
 greatest have been affected by some double cur- 
 rent of feehng, for they have been moved to de- 
 fend poetry and write apologies for her, as though 
 she were in contempt of men, but these apologies 
 when they were written gave her such character 
 as would make apology an impertinence. They 
 defended her by declaring that she is above the 
 need or possibility of defence, she is life and mind 
 itself. 
 
 One supreme man in literature is reputed to 
 have renounced poetry altogether. But he did 
 in fact only dwell with especial emphasis upon 
 each side of this paradox. Plato is magnificent 
 both in scorn and adoration of the poetic gift. 
 Poets, he declares, are foolish, they are an out- 
 rage upon the moral understanding, so insidious 
 in their arts that he is all but ready to banish the 
 whole tribe from his ideal Republic. For what 
 are they engaged in? They are engaged in pre- 
 senting to the affections, not ideas, but mere 
 
PRACTICAL VALUE OF POETRY 191 
 
 things, and these generally the most blood-heating 
 kinds of things, over which they work us up into a 
 wholly inconsequent madness. Nay, it is worse 
 than that, for these things of theirs are not even 
 real, they are not there at all, they are only 
 imagined things! So why should we sacrifice our 
 equiUbrium to them? Have we not enough to 
 exercise us in the conduct of genuine life according 
 to intelligent principles? Such is the great ques- 
 tion as to poetry. And I think that every poetic 
 person who is well equipped for life, has in him this 
 platonic and vulgar contempt of conscious realiza- 
 tion, and can taste the anathema in the term poet. 
 "He who cannot rise above his writings that he 
 has been long patching and piecing together, add- 
 ing some and taking away some, may be justly 
 called Poet!'* says Plato, in high scorn of his own 
 pursuits. 
 
 It seems as though a man ought to have some- 
 thing to do. Sitting in a hammock with a book 
 of rhyme, realizing the intrinsic being of some- 
 thing, perhaps the west wind, when he ought to 
 trim a windmill, and be starting up the pump — 
 this is a poor picture of a hero. So poor is it, 
 that it will probably bring those who adore poetry, 
 if they have not been brought already, into open 
 conflict with our opinion that it is essentially a 
 realization. They will declare that poetry does 
 
192 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 promote achievement, does concern itself with 
 practical truth and meaning. A man unac- 
 quainted with the "Book of Poems," according to 
 Confucius, is not only unable to see, but also 
 unable to advance — ^he is face to face with a stone 
 wall. According to Philip Sidney, effective instruc- 
 tion is almost the definitive function of poetry. 
 For Shelley all life's idealism, all progress of the 
 spirit, all hope of high action, is contained in the 
 word. And no one of these enthusiasts exceeds 
 Plato himself, who declares, with royal inconsist- 
 ency, that the character of a people depends so 
 much more upon their songs than upon anything 
 else, that we ought to make these the chief forces 
 in education. Give them great poetry and the 
 state will flourish. Did he say that poetry is mad- 
 ness? Yes — but the madness of poets is the most 
 eflBcacious state of being that this world offers. 
 Madmen are strong. They mould history and the 
 earth. Is it not a kind of madness that the world 
 exists at all, a kind of infatuation with the idea of 
 being? And is not the madness of Homer more 
 akin to divinity than the sanity of all your poli- 
 ticians? Would you not even rather join your- 
 self with Homer, who so loved reality, and begot 
 with her such children as the Iliad and the Odys- 
 sey, than be a husband and the father in respecta- 
 bility of a whole family of industrious citizens? 
 
PRACTICAL VALUE OF POETRY 193 
 
 Such is the other judgment of Plato, and his en- 
 thusiasm when he speaks upon the brighter side 
 of this universal paradox. 
 
 We cannot but conclude that poetry is of high 
 practical value; it is of value to purposive con- 
 duct and adjustment for the future. And yet we 
 know that in some way it is also not practical, 
 and of no value beyond itself. I think there would 
 be no inconsistency here, if we were not too eager 
 to generalize — if we were content to say that some 
 poetry is of high practical value, and that other 
 poetry is of no such value at all. Then we should 
 be separating the general definition of poetry from 
 the estimation of particular poems, as heretofore 
 none of its lovers have been willing to do, and we 
 could resolve that ancient paradox and subject it 
 to the demands of rationality. 
 
 The poetic as such is not concerned with con- 
 duct or the conveyance of meaning. But when 
 one who is concerned with conduct and desires to 
 convey a meaning, conveys it poetically, he adds 
 to his speech a great and separate power. He not 
 only gives to our mind the indication, or the gen- 
 eral information that he wishes, but he gives to 
 our bodies an acute impression less easy to forget. 
 To read in practical language is to be told, but 
 to read in poetry is to learn by experience. And 
 it is because of this, because imaginative realiza- 
 
194 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 tion can enhance the statement of a meaning and 
 augment its practical effect, that poetry has be- 
 come identified with meaning, and with truth, 
 and wisdom, and morahty, and all those things 
 that look greatly into the future. Poetry but 
 lends itself to them. It is of its own nature for- 
 eign to them all. 
 
 Suppose we say that life and danger and death 
 are a great adventure, and it is best to know them 
 and enter into them heartily — ^we should put into 
 that statement almost all the meaning of this 
 poem, but we should leave out the living realiza- 
 tion of its meaning: 
 
 "Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea 
 Loves to have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind 
 Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, 
 And his rapt ship run on her side so low 
 That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air; 
 There is no danger to a man that knows 
 What life and death is — there's not any law 
 Exceeds his knowledge." 
 
 Does not such poetry add itself and its own 
 efficacy, entirely new, to the meaning which we 
 had expressed? And furthermore, if poetry can 
 add efficacy to such a meaning, will it not also 
 add efficacy to false or impractical meanings? I 
 think that we should as rigorously condenm a 
 poet for touching the torch of realization to an 
 unheroic idea, such as this. 
 
PRACTICAL VALUE OF POETRY 195 
 
 ** *T is not what man Does which exalts him, but what 
 man Would dol" 
 
 as we should extol him for giving illumination to a 
 great concept. But in either case the illumination 
 is not the concept, and if opinions are ever to be 
 consistent upon this subject, it must be distin- 
 guished from it by the understanding. No mean- 
 ing properly so called has ever been expressed 
 with poetry, which could not conceivably be sev- 
 ered from its poetry and set forth in practical 
 language. 
 
 Perhaps this judgment does not give to poetry 
 as such the most conmianding place in men's 
 esteem. For while they all respect the expression 
 of a meaning destitute of poetry, calling this a 
 culmination of their scientific spirit, but few give 
 honor to any poetry that is unrelated to a mean- 
 ing. Reading pure poetry is like gazing on the 
 moonlight long. We wish we could receive it, 
 but we cannot — a final proof that we are sadly 
 practical at heart. We are but driven pilgrims 
 through the world, the children of its evolution, 
 and we must be going on. Pure being is too much 
 for us. The best that we can ask of moonlight is 
 that it shall shine upon our occupation. Perhaps 
 the best that we can ask of poetry is that it shall 
 attend the statement of a truth with glory. And 
 yet there are great poems, poems universally 
 
196 ENJOYIVIENT OF POETRY 
 
 called great, which are pure realizations. There 
 is Keats's "Ode to Autumn." Let it be held a 
 supreme achievement of his genius. For with all 
 the world intent upon a future, eager for the word 
 that indicates, it is not easy to withhold it and be 
 noble. It is not possible for those mere lovers of 
 their moods who oftenest elect to try it. But for 
 those whose character and thought are deep, de- 
 termined onward with the world, and who arrest 
 us as the world itself sometimes arrests us for a 
 moment only with the wonder of its being, it is 
 possible. Pure poetry upon their lips seems even 
 more divine than truth, mor«. ultimate, more uni- 
 versal. 
 
 There is indeed, for those who recognize its aim, 
 a value in such poetry that goes beyond the pres- 
 ent. There is a value toward a goal not yet at- 
 tained. Even the mere realization of autumn in 
 its absence — unattended though it be by any 
 moral or true meaning — looks somewhat to a fut- 
 ure ^nd. It looks to autumn. It is not only an 
 imagination, but a preperception, and its value 
 culminates in the more full experience of the very 
 hours it dreamed of. Thus the poetry of words 
 may be regarded as a means toward the poetry 
 of life. It is to that end practical. It nourishes 
 the waking spirit, nourishes the gift of vision, and 
 the tendency to issue from the bondages of habit 
 
PRACTICAL VALUE OF POETRY 197 
 
 and receive the world. We recognize this value 
 in our kindergartens, where we seek to train the 
 mind in childhood for keeping awake during a 
 lifetime. But poetry continues and renews this 
 training always. We do not read Shelley and 
 then return to the world, but we see the world 
 through Shelley's eyes. Creative vision of the 
 specific actaal throughout all time — creative vi- 
 sion kindled by that flaming language, is an on- 
 ward and immortal value of his songs. 
 
 The poetry of books prepares, and also it re- 
 stores. To us the world grows stale, because in 
 proportion as we become accustomed to a thing 
 we are estranged from it. In proportion as we 
 win the daily presence of our friends, we lose 
 them. We come to regard life as a dry package of 
 facts. We want the spirituous refreshment of an- 
 other's vision. We want to have our eyes re- 
 opened, and our souls made naked to the touch of 
 being. 
 
 This is the priesthood of art — not to bestow 
 upon the universe a new aspect, but upon the 
 beholder a new enthusiasm. At our doors every 
 morning the creation is sung. The day is a 
 drama, the night is an unfolding mystery, within 
 whose shadowy arena impetuous life shall still 
 contend with death. A world laughs and bleeds 
 for us all the time, but our response in this 
 
198 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 
 meteoric theatre we suffer to be drugged \\^th 
 business and decorum. We are born sleeping, 
 and few of us ever awake, unless it be upon some 
 hideous midnight when death startles us, and we 
 learn in grief alone what bit of 01>Tnpian fire our 
 humid forms enwrapped. But we could open our 
 eyes to joy also. The poet cries "Awake!" and 
 sings the song of the morning. He that hath eyes 
 let him see! Even now all around us the trees 
 have arisen, and their leaves are tongues of the 
 air in song — the earth swings on in drastic revolu- 
 tion — and we laugh and love perpetually — and 
 the winds enlarge our goings and our comings 
 with a tune. 
 
 The poet, the restorer, is the prophet of a 
 greater thing than faith. All creeds and theories 
 serve him, for he goes behind them all, and imparts 
 by a straighter line from his mind to yours the 
 spirit of bounteous living. His wisdom is above 
 knowledge. He cries to our sleeping selves to 
 come aloft, and when we are come he answers with 
 a gesture only. In him we find no principle; we 
 find ourselves re-born alive into the worid. 
 
 So far from being past, or on the wane, this wis- 
 dom of the soul of poetry looks for the first time 
 joyfully into the future. Man is now returning 
 to his rights as an animal. He has now learned 
 that morals is not meant for a scourge and a dry 
 
PRACTICAL VALUE OF POETRY 199 
 
 medicine, and that joy is its own reason. Exist- 
 ence was not perpetrated in malice or benevo- 
 lence, but simply is, and the end of our thinking 
 is that here we are, and what can we make of it. 
 We have a planet to act upon, a sense of the 
 drama. We will not squat and argue, nor balk, 
 and try to justify God, but we will make with high 
 hearts of abandon our entrance and our exit before 
 the congregation of the stars. 
 
IDEAI^ OF POETRY 
 
roEALS OF POETRY 
 
 Poetry that has life for its subject, and demo- 
 cratic reality, is rather expected to manifest 
 that irregular flow and exuberance of material 
 over structure with which Walt Whitman chal- 
 lenged the world. In America at least the free- 
 dom and poignant candor of strong art is associ- 
 ated with the tradition that he founded, and little 
 is granted to that other tradition which finds its 
 original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in 
 Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes 
 turned back in admiration to Poe, and they were 
 poets of reality, and those who touched the mood 
 of social revolt. And for my part I think there is 
 a modern validity in the attitudes of both these 
 poets, a certain adjudication between them which 
 a perfectly impersonal science might propose; 
 and that is what I should like to discuss with 
 those who may enter sympathetically into these 
 pages. 
 
 They will all be familiar, I suppose, with Walt 
 Whitman*s ideal of an American poetry so free and 
 strong and untrammelled of ornamentation, that it 
 203 
 
204 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 should go out of the books it was published in, and 
 stand up with the hills and forests on the earth. 
 
 "The poetry of the future," he said, "aims at 
 the free expression of emotion, (which means far, 
 far more than appears at first,) and to arouse 
 and initiate, more than to define or finish. . . . 
 
 " In my opinion the time has arrived to essen- 
 tially break down the barriers of form between 
 prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth 
 to win and maintain its character regardless of 
 rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, 
 spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if ^h^^lle and 
 those measurements continue to furnish the me- 
 dium for inferior writers and themes, (especially 
 for persiflage and the comic, as there seems hence- 
 forward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably 
 comic in rh\Tne, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the 
 truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and nec- 
 essarily always rh}i:hmic, and distinguishable 
 easily enough,) can never again, in the English 
 language, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming 
 metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or 
 the truest power and passion. \Miile admitting 
 that the venerable and heavenly forms of chim- 
 ing versification have in their time play'd great 
 and fitting parts — that the pensive complaint, the 
 ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, &c., 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 205 
 
 have, many of them, been inimitably rendered in 
 rhyming verse — ^that there have been very illus- 
 trious poets whose shapes the mantle of such 
 verse has beautifully and appropriately envelopt 
 — and though the mantle has fallen, with per- 
 haps added beauty, on some of our own age — it 
 is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the day of 
 such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, 
 at any rate, and as a medium of highest aesthetic 
 practical or spiritual expression, present or fu- 
 ture, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. 
 The Muse of the Prairies, of California, Canada, 
 Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado, dismissing 
 the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea 
 feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting 
 itself to comprehend the size of the whole people, 
 with the free play, emotions, pride, passions, ex- 
 periences, that belong to them, body and soul — 
 to the general globe, and all its relations in as- 
 tronomy, as the savants portray them to us — to 
 the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as 
 grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steam- 
 ships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, 
 cylinder presses — to the thought of the solidarity 
 of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the 
 entire earth — ^to the dignity and heroism of the 
 practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, 
 workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or on lakes 
 
206 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 and rivers — resumes that other medium of ex- 
 pression, more flexible, more eligible — soars to the 
 freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose." 
 
 It may surprise some people to see this monu- 
 mental challenge to the poets of the future con- 
 fronted with the pathetic memory of Edgar Allan 
 Poe. And yet it is natural to place these two 
 poets in contrast, and the weight neither of genius 
 nor of influence is altogether upon one side. They 
 are the two American poets of unique distinction, 
 and they are the fountains of the two strongest 
 influences in all modern poetry of the Occident. 
 And it is worth observing that if Walt "Whitman 
 had written as few pages of poetry as Poe did, his 
 name would hardly be remembered, whereas Poe 
 would have established a literary tradition if he 
 had written but five sorrowful lyrics. His in- 
 dividuality was so poignant. His art was so ex- 
 quisite. And not only was his art exquisite, but 
 his philosophy of his art was as unique, assertive, 
 and prodigious in contempt for his predecessors, 
 as that of Walt Whitman. I have never read any- 
 thing about any art more sheer and startlmg in 
 its kind than Poe's essay on *'The Philosophy of 
 Composition"; and nothing more energetically 
 opposite to Walt Whitman could possibly be de- 
 vised. To convey the flavor of the contrast, I 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 207 
 
 quote these sentences — inadequate for any other 
 purpose — from Poe's essay: 
 
 "Most writers — poets in especial — ^prefer hav- 
 ing it understood that they compose by a species 
 of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition; and would 
 positively shudder at letting the pubUc take a 
 peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacil- 
 lating crudities of thought, at the true purposes 
 seized only at the last moment, at the innumer- 
 able glimpses of idea that arrived not at the ma- 
 turity of full view, at the fully matured fancies 
 discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the 
 cautious selections and rejections, at the painful 
 erasures and interpolations — ^in a word, at the 
 wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, 
 the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's 
 feathers, the red paint and the black patches. . . . 
 
 "For my own part, I have neither sympathy 
 with the repugnance alluded to, nor at any time 
 the least difficulty in recaUing to mind the pro- 
 gressive steps of any of my compositions; and, 
 since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruc- 
 tion, such as I have considered a desideratum, is 
 quite independent of any real or fancied interest 
 in the thing analyzed, it will not be regarded as a 
 breach of decorum on my part to show the modus 
 operandi by which some one of my own works 
 
208 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 was put together. I select 'The Raven' as most 
 generally known. 
 
 "Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per 
 se, the circumstance — or say the necessity — 
 which in the first place gave rise to the intention 
 of composing a poem that should suit at once the 
 popular and critical taste. 
 
 "We commence, then, with this intention. 
 
 "The initial consideration was that of extent. 
 If any literary work is too long to be read at one 
 sitting, we must be content to dispense with the 
 immensely important effect derivable from unity 
 of impression; for, if two sittings be required, the 
 affairs of the world interfere, and everything like 
 totahty is at once destroyed. . . . 
 
 "My next thought concerned the choice of an 
 impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I 
 may as well observe that, throughout the con- 
 struction, I kept steadily in view the design of 
 rendering the work universally appreciable. I 
 should be carried too far out of my immediate 
 topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I 
 have repeatedly insisted, and which withTthe 
 poetical stands not in the sUghtest need of dem- 
 onstration — the point, I mean, that Beauty is 
 the sole legitimate province of the poem. . . . 
 
 " But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, 
 or with however vivid an array of incident, there 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 209 
 
 is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which 
 repels the artistical eye. Two things are invaria- 
 bly required: first, some amount of complexity, 
 or more properly, adaptation; and, second, some 
 amount of suggestiveness, some under-current, 
 however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, 
 in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much 
 of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forci- 
 ble term) which we are too fond of confounding 
 with the ideaV^ 
 
 The opposition of these two characters and at- 
 titudes is complete. Upon the one side a vast 
 preoccupation with human meaning and morals, 
 with health and the common reality and love and 
 democracy, a grand contempt for beauty, and for 
 the effort to attract or gratify a reader with "ver- 
 bal melody," a contempt for everything that 
 savors of deliberate technique in art. Upon the 
 other side also contempt — contempt like a piece 
 of cold analytical steel for every pretense that 
 the technique of art is not deliberate, that poets 
 are not seeking to attract and gratify, that truth 
 or moral or meaning instead of beauty is the por- 
 tent of a poem — a disposition to seek beauty in 
 unique and even unhealthy places, a lonely aris- 
 tocratic heart of pain, and a preoccupation with 
 "verbal melody" never before or since equalled 
 
210 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 in poetry. The details of this dijBFerence are fas- 
 cinating, but the generalization of it is what will 
 illumine the modern problems about poetry. To 
 Edgar Allan Poe a poem was an objective thing, 
 to Walt Whitman poetry was an act of subjective 
 expression. Poe would take sounds and mel- 
 odies of words almost actually into his hands, and 
 carve and model them until he had fonned a 
 beautiful vessel, and he would take emotions and 
 imaginations out of his heart and weave and in- 
 lay them in that vessel, and even the crimson 
 out of his blood, and finally for "enrichment" he 
 would seek out in his mind the hue of some mean- 
 ing or moral to pour over it until it was perfect. 
 And these beautiful vessels he would set forth for 
 view and purchase, standing aside from them 
 like a creative trader, proud, but no more iden- 
 tified with them than as though he had made them 
 out of the colors of shells. To Walt Whitman a 
 poem was not a thing. His poetry was himself. 
 His meanings, emotions, experiences, love and 
 wonder of life, filled him and he overflowed in 
 language — ^without "art," without purpose but to 
 communicate his being. So he maintained. His 
 poem was never an object to him, even after it 
 had flowed full and he sought to perfect its con- 
 tours. His emendations were not often objective 
 improvements; they were private remodellings to 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 211 
 
 make the language a more direct and fluent iden- 
 tity with what he considered himself. This was 
 the task upon which he labored as the poet of 
 democracy and social love. 
 
 Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection 
 upon America or upon human nature, that Walt 
 Whitman, with all his yearnings over the aver- 
 age American and his offering of priesthood and 
 poetry to the people, should remain the poet of a 
 rather esoteric few, whereas Poe — even with the 
 handful of poems he wrote — ^may be said to 
 be acceptable to the generality of men. "The 
 Raven," or "Helen," or "Annabelle Lee," or some 
 sad musical echo of the death of beauty, might be 
 found in illuminated covers on the most " average " 
 of American parlor tables, but never anything 
 there of Walt Whitman — unless it be "Captain, 
 My Captain !" the one rather weak metrical poem 
 he deigned to write. And there is something 
 deeply and really pathetic in this fact, and some- 
 thing which only an adequate science of verse can 
 explain. For the emotions and the meanings of 
 Walt Whitman's poetry are actually the ones 
 that interest simple and thoughtful people who 
 have leisure to feel. His realizations of life would 
 be acceptable and be honored, as much at least 
 as great art is ever honored, by the "divine aver- 
 age," if they had been conveyed, as Poe's were. 
 
212 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 in vessels of light, which would make them ob- 
 jective, and from which they might brim over 
 with excess of subjective meaning and emotion. 
 
 I do not mean to express a wish that Walt Whit- 
 man had conveyed them so, or the opinion that he 
 could have been a more stupendous poetic and 
 moral hero of nature by writing otherwise than he 
 did. His propulsive determination to put forth 
 in this facile nineteenth-century culture, sweet 
 with the decay and light with the remnant fineries 
 of feudal grandeur, the original, vast, unfinished 
 substance of man, was a phenomenon like the 
 rising of a volcanic continent amid ships on the 
 sea. No word but the words in his book can 
 portray the magnitude of his achievement; no 
 critic but Envy could judge it except as itself and 
 by its own standard. But as a prophetic exam- 
 ple of the poems of the future, and especially the 
 poems of democracy and social love, it suffers a 
 weakness — ^the weakness that Walt Whitman's 
 character suffered. It is egocentric and a little 
 inconsiderate of the importance of other people. 
 Walt Whitman composed wonderful passages 
 about universal social love, but he could not be 
 the universal poet exactly because he was not 
 social enough. He was not humble enough to be 
 social. The rebel egoism of democracy was in 
 him the lordly and compelling thing, and though 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 213 
 
 his love for the world was prodigious, it was not ', 
 
 the kind of love that gives attention instinctively ; 
 
 to the egoism of others. i 
 
 There may be no grand passion for the idea, but 
 there is a natural companionship with the fact of 
 "democracy," in Poe's statement that he "kept 
 steadily in view the design of rendering the work 
 universally appreciable," and that statement more 
 characteristically distinguishes his attitude from 
 Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had 
 of talking about beauty. All poets who mould 
 their poems objectively, even though they may 
 conceive themselves to be utterly alone with 
 beauty, are really in social communion with hu- 
 manity. For that is what the word objective 
 means. An object, or as we say, a "thing," dif- 
 fers from other elements of our experience only 
 in that it can be experienced in the same form at 
 different times and by different persons. And for 
 an object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in 
 itself, so that various perceivers may come from 
 all sides and find it there. Therefore one who 
 moulds an object toward external perfection, 
 however sad his solitude, enters directly into the 
 "universal friendship" toward which Walt Whit- 
 man directed so much of the longing of his words. 
 One who pours out phrases direct from his emo- 
 tion may experience a relief and glory that im- 
 
214 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 pKes listeners, and he may win listeners, but they 
 will each rebuild out of his phrases their own dif- 
 ferent poem, and they will comprise in their 
 number only those endowed with the special 
 power to build poems out of phrases poured out. 
 And whatever we may wish were true of the 
 world, it is not true that the majority are so en- 
 dowed. Therefore the poetry that is highly sub- 
 jective is almost inevitably the poetry of a few; 
 and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves 
 a less clear and general social communion than 
 the embodiment of emotion in an object of art. 
 
 It could be established, I beheve, with mechan- 
 ical precision, that the rh3i:hmic values most cher- 
 ished by the social rebels who now write so much 
 "free verse," are values practically inconununi- 
 cable to others, and absolutely incommunicable 
 by the method usually adopted, that of printing 
 words on a page. A httle of that icy matter-of- 
 fact realism with which Poe used to scatter the 
 sweet foggy thoughts of the literarious, while it 
 might not affect the art of these poets, would 
 surely reduce the volume of what they have to 
 say about it. For instance, here is the answer of 
 one of them to an assertion that the line division 
 in free verse is " arbitrary," and that if we copied 
 one of these long poems in soUd prose, the poet him- 
 self could hardly ever divide it again as it was: 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 215 
 
 "Free verse that is free verse is not arbitrary. 
 Much of it is, of course — so are many canvases 
 mere splashy imitations of Matisse. But there is 
 free verse that resolves itself into just those lines 
 — a little more subtly than sonnets or triolets — 
 by virtue of pauses, of heart-beats, of the quick- 
 ness or slowness of your, breath, and maybe of 
 your pulse itself. ... It tries to give the rhythm 
 value of those hesitations, those quickenings and 
 slowings of the flow of ideas, the flutterings — it 
 is closer to the breath, as modern music and mod- 
 ern dance are, or as primitive music and primitive 
 dance were." 
 
 It is impossible not to respond to such asser- 
 tions, for we know in ourselves what these ex- 
 quisite differential experiences are. Any one who 
 has ever written love-letters — ^which are a kind 
 of aboriginal free verse — ^knows what they are. 
 And yet I believe it is obvious, if not demonstra- 
 ble, that most of them are too individual to be 
 communicated even to a lover. Human nature is 
 too various for it to be true that the same hesi- 
 tations, the same quickenings and slowings of the 
 flow of ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, 
 will reproduce themselves in another upon the 
 perception of the same visible symbols. And 
 while this fact may make the art of composi- 
 tion seem a little monotonous, it is better that 
 
216 roEALS OF POETRY 
 
 art should be monotonous than that the world 
 should. And it would be a monotonous world in 
 which different people were so much alike, or we 
 ourselves so much alike at different moments, that 
 these minute filigrees of feeling should be alto- 
 gether durable and capable of being served round 
 in paper and ink. 
 
 There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of 
 thought and feeling which exist for one individual 
 alone, and for him once only. There are other 
 values less delicate which he can reproduce in 
 himself at will, but cannot altogether communi- 
 cate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings 
 are too much their own. There are other values, 
 still less delicate, which he might communicate 
 by vocal utterance and rhythmic gesture, taking 
 possession as it were of the very pulse and respira- 
 tion of others. But poetry which is composed 
 for publication ought to occupy itself with those 
 rhythmic values which may be communicated to 
 other rhythmic minds through the printing of 
 words on a page. It ought to do this, at least, if 
 it pretends to an attitude that is even in the most 
 minute degree social. 
 
 A mature science of rhythm might be imagined 
 to stride into the room where these poets are dis- 
 cussing the musical values of their verse, seize 
 two or three of the most "free" and subtle among 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 217 
 
 them, lock them into separate sound-proof cham- 
 bers, and allow them to read one of their favorite 
 passages into the ear of an instrmnent designed 
 to record in spatial outline the pulsations of 
 vocal accent. It is safe to assert that there 
 would be less identity in the actual pulsations 
 recorded than if the same two were reading a 
 passage of highly wrought English prose. ^ And 
 the reason for this is that free verse imports into 
 English prose a form of punctuation that is ex- 
 ceedingly gross and yet absolutely inconsequen- 
 tial. Its line division has neither a metrical nor a 
 logical significance that exists objectively. It can 
 mean at any time anything that is desirable to 
 the whims, or needful to the difficulties, of the 
 reader or the writer. It is a very sign and instru- 
 ment of subjectivity. To incorporate in a pas- 
 sage of printed symbols an indeterminate element 
 so marked and so frequent as that, is to say to 
 the reader — "Take the passage and organize it 
 
 * This statement is borne out by Mr. William Morrison 
 Patterson's account of the records of Amy Lowell's reading 
 of her poems in his laboratory. It constitutes the preface 
 of the second edition of his book, "The Rhythm of Prose'* 
 — a book which, upon the true basis of experimentation, 
 analyzes and defines convincingly for the first time the na- 
 ture of rhythmical experience, and the manner in which it 
 is derived by the reader both from prose and metrical po- 
 etry. Until it is amplified or improved by further investi- 
 gation, this book will surely be the basis of every scientific 
 discussion of the questions involved here. 
 
218 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 into whatever rhythmical pattern may please 
 yourself." And that is what the reader of free 
 verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into 
 any great diflBculty, he can make a full stop at 
 the end of some line, and shift the gears of his 
 rh\i:hm altogether. And since it is possible for 
 one who is rh}i:hmically gifted to organize any 
 indeterminate series of impressions whatever into an 
 acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces a very 
 enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to 
 the author and, having made it himself, is not 
 unable to admire. Thus a good many poets who 
 could hardly beat a going march on a base drum, 
 are enabled by the gulUbiUty and talent of their 
 readers to come forward in this kiad of writing as 
 musicians of special and elaborate skill. The 
 "freedom" that it gives them is not a freedom to 
 build rh;yi:hms that are impossible in prose, but a 
 freedom from the necessity to build actual and 
 continuous rhythms. Free verse avails itself of 
 the rhythmic appearance of poetry, and it avoids 
 the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so 
 it will certainly live as a supremely convenient 
 way to write, among those not too strongly ap- 
 pealed to by the greater convenience of not writ- 
 ing. But as an object of the effort of ambitious 
 artists I cannot believe it will widely survive the 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 219 
 
 knowledge that it is merely a convenience, a 
 form of mmnble and indetermination in their 
 art. 
 
 Walt Whitman, however he may have been de- 
 ceived about the social and democratic character 
 of his form, was not deceived, as the modern 
 eulogists of free verse are, about its subtlety. He 
 thought that he had gained in volume and direct- 
 ness of communion, but he knew that he was dis- 
 carding subtlety, discarding in advance all those 
 beautiful and decadent wonders of microscopic 
 and morbid audacity that developed in France 
 among the admirers of Poe. The modern disciples 
 of his form, however, are materially of Poe's per- 
 suasion, and like to believe that they have in free 
 verse an instrument expressly fitted for the com- 
 munication of those wonders, and of the most 
 delicate modulations of that "verbal melody" 
 that Whitman scorned. In this, from the true 
 standpoint of criticism, Whitman has a command- 
 ing advantage over them, and what can be said 
 of free verse in general cannot be said of his 
 poems. He did achieve the predominant thing 
 that he aimed to achieve — ^he made his poetry 
 rough and artless in spite of his fineness and art. 
 He made it like the universe and like the presence 
 of a man. In that triumph it will stand. In that 
 
220 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 character it will mould and influence the litera- 
 ture of democracy, because it will mould and in- 
 fluence all literature in all lands. 
 
 "Who touches this book touches a man." 
 
 There is, however, another ideal of poetry that 
 Walt Whitman confused with this one, and that he 
 no more exemplified in his form than he exem- 
 plified democratic and social communion. And 
 this ideal is predominant too in the minds of his 
 modern followers. It is the ideal of being natural, 
 of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and 
 the tricks of Hterary sophistication. He wanted 
 his poetry to sound with nature and the untutored 
 heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of this 
 desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a " vast 
 diviner heaven," toward which poetry would 
 move in its future development in America. Prose 
 seemed diviner to him because it seemed more 
 simple, more large with candor and directness. 
 But here again a cool and clear science will show 
 that his nature led him in a contrary direction 
 from its ideal. The music of prose is only dis- 
 similar to that of poetry in its complexity, its 
 subtle and refined dissimulation of the funda- 
 mental monotonous metre that exists, either ex- 
 pressed or implied, in the heart of all rhythmical 
 experience. Persons who can read the rhythm of 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 221 
 
 prose can do so because they have m their own 
 breast, or intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual 
 standard pulse-beat, around which by various in- 
 stinctive mathematical tricks of substitution and 
 syncopation they so arrange the accents of the ut- 
 tered syllables that they fall in with its measure, 
 and become one with it, increasing its momentum 
 and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and 
 body. There is no rhythm without this metrical 
 basis, no value in rhythm comparable to the 
 trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its 
 undulations are akin to the intrinsic character of 
 neural motion, and that is why, almost as though 
 it were a chemical thing — a stimulant and nar- 
 cotic — it takes possession of our state of being and 
 controls it. 
 
 Poetry only naively acknowledges this ecstatic 
 monotony that lives in the heart of all rhythm, 
 brings it out into the light, and there openly 
 weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. 
 Poetry is thus the more natural, and both his- 
 torically and psychologically, the more primitive 
 of the two arts. It is the more simple. Metre, and 
 even rhyme — which is but a colored, light drum- 
 beat, accentuating the metre — are not "orna- 
 ments" or "refinements" of something else which 
 may be called "rhythmical speech." They are 
 the heart of rhythmical speech expressed and ex- 
 
222 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 posed with a perfectly childlike and candid gran- 
 deur. Prose is the refinement. Prose is the 
 sophisticated and studio accomplishment — a thing 
 that vast numbers of people have not the fineness 
 of endowment or cultivation either to write or 
 read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of poetry, 
 in which the original healthy intoxicant note of 
 the tom-tom is so laid over with fine traceries of 
 related sound, that it can no longer be identified 
 at all except by the analytical eye of science. 
 
 Walt Whitman was not really playful and child- 
 like enough to go back to nature. His poetry was 
 less primitive and savage than it was superhu- 
 man and sublime. His emotions were as though 
 they came to him through a celestial telescope. 
 There is something more properly savage — some- 
 thing at least truly barbarous — ^in a poem like 
 Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's insistence upon 
 "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the 
 poem — ^beauty, which he defines as a special and 
 dispassionate "excitement of the soul" — ^he is 
 nearer to the mood of the snake dance. Poetry 
 was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. 
 And one can see in reading his verses how he was 
 attuned to sway and quiver to the mere syllabic 
 singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions 
 grew more intense and lovely than the passions 
 and real meanings of his life. It is actually primi- 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 223 
 
 tive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in 
 this intense and yet unsanctimonious way that 
 Poe did, and Baudelaire too, and Swinburne. 
 Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspira- 
 tion. It is healthier perhaps too, and more to the 
 taste of the future, than priesthood. I think the 
 essence of what we call classical in an artist's at- 
 titude is his quite frank acknowledgment that — 
 whatever great things may come of it — ^he is at 
 play. The art of the Athenians was objective 
 and overt about being what is it, because the 
 Athenians were educated, as all free men should 
 be, for play. They were making things; and the 
 eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a 
 child's through their eyes upon the things that 
 they made. That pearl of adult degeneration, the 
 self, was very Kttle cultivated in Athens; the "ar- 
 tistic temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the 
 perpetual yearning beyond of Christians, had not 
 been thought of. A little group of isolated and 
 exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true 
 and current glories of life to a status of ignobiHty, 
 so that every great thing must contain in itself 
 intimations of otherness. The Athenians were 
 radiantly willing, without any cosmical prepara- 
 tion or blare of moral resolve, to let the constella- 
 tions stay where they are. It was their custom to 
 "loaf and invite their souls," to be "satisfied — 
 
224 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 see, dance, laugh, sing.** They were so maturely 
 naive that they would hardly understand what 
 Walt Whitman, with his declarations of animal 
 independence, was trying to recover from. And 
 so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city 
 that we can most surely go back to nature. 
 
 And when we have arrived at a mood that is 
 really and childly natural — a mood that will play, 
 even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make 
 out of interesting materials "things** to play with, 
 and when in that mood we give our interest to 
 the materials of reality in our own time, then per- 
 haps we shall find that we have arrived also at a 
 poetry that belongs to the people. For people 
 are, in the depths of them and on the average, as 
 they are bom, still natural, still savage. And 
 there is no doubt that nature never fashioned 
 them to work harder, or be more serious, or filled 
 with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. 
 She meant them to live and flow out upon the 
 world with the bright colors of their interest. 
 And it will seem rather a fever in the light of uni- 
 versal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness 
 of everything we modern occidentals value. The 
 poets and the poet-painters of ancient China 
 knew that all life and nature is so sacred with 
 the miracle of being that only the lucid line and 
 color is needed to command an immortal rever- 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 225 
 
 ence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will 
 rarely be loved, but they too, with their gift of 
 delicate freedom in kinship with nature, were at 
 play. And in Japan even to-day — surviving from 
 that time — there is a form of poetry that is ob- 
 jective and childlike, a making of toys, or of ex- 
 quisite metrical gems of imaginative realization, 
 and this is the only poetry in the world that is 
 truly popular, and is loved and cultivated by a 
 whole nation. 
 
 If with this pagan and oriental love for the 
 created thing — ^the same love that kept a light in 
 Poe's sombre heart — ^we enter somewhat irrever- 
 ently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our 
 own treasure and not hesitating to remove it 
 from its bed of immortal slag, we do find poems 
 in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. 
 Sometimes for the length of one or two or three 
 lines, and occasionally for a stanza, and once for 
 the whole poem — "When I heard at the close of 
 the day" — Walt Whitman seems to love and 
 achieve the carved concentration of image and 
 emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syl- 
 lables along a chain that begins and ends and has 
 a native way of uttering itself to all minds that 
 are in time. He seems, without losing that large 
 grace of freedom from the pose and elegance of 
 words in a book, which was his most original gift 
 
226 IDEALS OF POETRY 
 
 to the world, to possess himself of the mood that 
 is truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to 
 the hearts of simple people — ^the mood that loves 
 with a curious wonder the poised and perfect ex- 
 istence of a thing. 
 
 HUSHED BE THE CAMPS 
 
 Hush'd be the camps today; 
 And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons; 
 And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate. 
 Our dear conmiander's death. 
 
 No more for him life's stormy conflicts; 
 
 Nor victory, nor defeat — no more time's dark events. 
 
 Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky. 
 
 RECONCILIATION 
 
 Word over all, beautiful as the sky I 
 
 Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in 
 
 time be utterly lost; 
 That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly 
 
 softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world. . . . 
 
 These sculptural sentences, with their rhythmic 
 and still clarity of form, if they had been the end 
 and essence of his art, and not only a by-accident 
 of inevitable genius, might have led the way, not 
 perhaps to a great national poetry for America, 
 but beyond that into something international and 
 
IDEALS OF POETRY 227 
 
 belonging to the universe of man. The step for- 
 ward from them would not have been toward a 
 greater sprawling and subjectifying of rhythmic 
 and poetic character, but toward an increasing 
 objective perfection which should still cling to 
 the new and breathless thing, the presence of one 
 who lives and speaks his heart naturally. I chose 
 them, not only because they are among the most 
 musical and imaginative lines that Walt Whit- 
 man wrote, but also because in bringing a mood 
 that is calm and a lulling of wind in the world's 
 agonies of hate, they show themselves to be deep. 
 And so it will not be thought that when I say the 
 poet of democracy will be a child who is at 
 play with the making of things, I desire to nar- 
 row the range and poignancy of the things he will 
 make. He will be free, and he will move with a 
 knowing and profound mind among all the ex- 
 periences and the dreams of men. But to what- 
 ever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration, or 
 now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will 
 come as a child, whose clear eyes and deliberate 
 creative purposes are always appropriate and 
 never to be apologized for, because they are the 
 purposes of nature. 
 
NOTES 
 
NOTES 
 
 Page 6 
 In an essay called "The Will to Live," and published 
 in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific 
 Methods (Vol. XIV, No. 4), I discussed the scientific basis 
 and implication of the statement that there is in all animal 
 life such an impulse, or "general innate tendency," as I have 
 here described. I wish that people who feel sceptical of 
 my psychology at this point would read that essay. 
 
 Page 11 
 The quotation is from|Robert Browning's "Saul." 
 
 Page 12 
 Irving King in " The Psychology of Child Development," 
 p. 147, records an instance similar to the one I describe. 
 He also, on p. 174, shows very conclusively that what we 
 call in children "the instinct of imitation" is not that, in 
 any intelligible sense, but a desire to enlarge, and intensify 
 (or as he says, because he writes from a purely practical 
 view-point, define) their own experience. To put it in their 
 own words, they are always wanting to " see what it feels 
 like." And this is not merely the instinct of curiosity 
 either, for after they know what it feels like, they still want 
 to feel it again. Indeed, the instinct of curiosity itself may, 
 like other feelings, become the object of this desire. "The 
 child is curious," says M. ClaparMe in his "Psychologie 
 de TEnfant," "for the pleasure of being cm-ious; the scholar 
 is curious in order to know." But any work upon the 
 psychology of children will more or less unconsciously bear 
 out the statement that children are more interested in 
 experience for its own sake than adults. 
 
 Page 13 
 The quotation is from Keats's "Ode to Melancholy." 
 
 Page 15 
 The quotation is from Wordsworth's sonnet, "The World 
 Is Too Much With Us." 
 
 231 
 
232 NOTES 
 
 Page 19 
 
 The quotation is from Walt Whitman's "Crossing 
 Brooklyn Ferry." 
 
 Page 23 
 
 I have mentioned the three classic theories of the origin 
 of speech. That they should have appeared as opposing 
 theories, and begot volumes, is an example of that puerility 
 of the academic intellect, and the foolishness which infects 
 both science and conversation, of supposing that a single 
 generalization is always possible and is the form of truth. 
 Probably the majority of words never originated in any of 
 these pretty ways. Otto Jespersen in his "Progress in 
 Language" (chap. IX) has pointed out that simulta- 
 neous occurrence, however accidental, is enough to es- 
 tablish a connection between syllables and experiences. 
 Granted, therefore, a savage with excess energy to ex- 
 haust in vocal exercises as he goes along, and you have 
 adequate conditions for the birth either of practical or 
 poetic names. 
 
 Suppose that he happens to be singing ta-ra-ra-ra boom- 
 de-aye when he is splitting the kindlings this morning; it 
 may well happen that he sings the same syllables at the 
 same time to-morrow morning, and so on, until ta-ra-ra 
 comes to "mean" split-the-kindlings. 
 
 Page 24 
 
 In English a struggle for survival has long raged, and is 
 raging, among these verb-forms. And of late years the 
 battle is not to the strong, but to the handy — the loss of 
 those old forms being one of the poetic sorrows of our 
 tongue, though it would be expeditious and an act of prac- 
 tical good sense, I suppose, to wipe out the whole tribe. 
 
 We might examine the character of those strong forms 
 which survived, against those which perished, and see if 
 it were not special poetic strength which determined the 
 
NOTES 233 
 
 issue in many cases, and thus perhaps we could oppose 
 the tendency of scholars nowadays to impute everything 
 that has happened in language to a desire to make it 
 practical. 
 
 As examples of that tendency I select these quota- 
 tions: 
 
 "To no other law than that of economy of utterance 
 have any of the phenomena of phonetic change been found 
 traceable (though it is also to be noted that some phe- 
 nomena have not hitherto been successfully brought under 
 it, and that the way of efifecting this is still unclear)." 
 — William Dwight Whitney (Article on "Philology" in 
 the "Encyclopsedia Britannica"). 
 
 The only test of the merits of languages that is of 
 any value is "the practical interests of the speaking (or 
 talking) community." — Otto Jespbrsbn ("Progress in 
 Language"). 
 
 Page 25 
 
 The word rakehell is a poetic "corruption" of the ad- 
 jective rakel, meaning rash. "Train oil," a degeneration 
 from Thrdne or "tear-like" oil, may serve as an example 
 of a practical corruption. 
 
 Corruption in language is often almost as valuable as 
 creation. Out in Colorado there is a winding river which 
 some starving first-settler, a Frenchman, caUed the Pur- 
 gataire. But that name has no appropriateness for the 
 prosperous citizens who now dwell along its coils; for them 
 it is the Pickettoire. The name is still poetic. 
 
 Skeat says of ghastly ^ "the h has been inserted for no 
 very good reason." But to those who taste the flavors of 
 words it has been inserted, as also in ghost, for the best 
 of all reasons, namely, that it makes the word suggest 
 its object. It is a kind of strange, breathless letter 
 there — essentially unpronounced, unmuscularized, super- 
 natural. 
 
234 NOTES 
 
 Our ancestors are being scolded by the simplified spell- 
 ing board for such liberties as this. They took an h out 
 of gossip and inserted one into ghost 1 This is highly 
 "irregular," "impractical," and "unscientific," but it 
 shows that they knew in their inmiediate experience the 
 essential difference between a gossip and a ghost, and they 
 could convey this in the most delicate poetry, and they 
 cared to. Is the lack in them, or in the simplified spelling 
 board? 
 
 Page 26 
 
 Bluff, crib, grad, flunk, are slang words of purely prac- 
 tical value. 
 
 Swelled head, brass, fax:e, paint the town red, have a bee in 
 your bonnet, down and out, a mossback, a jonah, are poetic, 
 with the usual tincture of humor. To have a bee in your 
 bonnet is a metaphor which occurs, if I remember rightly, 
 as the basis of a stanza of one of Bums's poems. 
 
 Page 50 
 
 The quotations are from Keats's early poem, "I Stood 
 Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill," except "The Grey Fly," 
 which is from Milton's "Lycidas," and "Million-footed 
 Manhattan," which is from Walt Whitman. 
 
 Page 63 
 
 It has been customary to divide comparison, or the 
 association of ideas as it is called, into two kinds — asso- 
 ciation by resemblance and association by contiguity. 
 That this is not a fundamental difference, but that both 
 kinds of association are instances of the redintegration of 
 a past experience in memory according to the laws of 
 habit, is one of the opinions of Aristotle, rediscovered by 
 modern psychology. In a contribution to the Journal of 
 Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. VII, 
 no. 6, entitled "To Reconsider the Association of Ideas," I 
 
NOTES 235 
 
 tried to show that this doctrine even as it now stands 
 is not satisfactory and that its tenninology needs revis- 
 ing. I do not believe that I reached the bottom of the 
 question in that article, but if any one cares to read it, he 
 will find there some indication of how I came to treat 
 comparison as essentially an interruption, and explain its 
 value to realization in the way I have. 
 
 Page 54 
 
 In this section I may appear to give more standing to 
 the purely practical theory of the origin of consciousness, 
 than I wish to. I believe, as I stated in chapter I and at 
 the beginning of chapter II, that the impulse toward con- 
 sciousness for its own sake, is fundamental. And I may 
 reconcile what I said then with what I say here, by calling 
 attention to the fact that even though I describe our life 
 in general as blindly practical, I point out that the poets 
 are there, seeking to arouse us. They too must have their 
 explanation. The poetic in each of us must have its ex- 
 planation. And I believe the only explanation it can have 
 is the placing of it equal with the onward impulse, as an 
 original and arbitrary quality of life. 
 
 Page 56 
 
 If "similarity" were the object of attraction in a po- 
 etic comparison, we should find pleasure in those pedan- 
 tic similes in which various points of resemblance are 
 brought forward, and the likeness of two things dwelt 
 upon at length. But this exploitation of similarity itself 
 is a thing which no one with a spark of true poetry in him 
 can tolerate. 
 
 Page 59 
 
 I need not explain that this opinion has dominated Eng- 
 lish minds ever since the days of Elizabeth, and before. 
 The poet makes things, says Philip Sidney, "either bet- 
 
236 NOTES 
 
 ter than nature bringeth forth, or, quite a newe, fonnes 
 such as neuer were in nature." According to Francis Bacon 
 likewise, the great virtue of poetry is that it does not 
 "buckle and bow" the mind to the real facts of experience. 
 Endless quotations are possible to this same effect: that 
 poetry is a means by which too delicate spirits can run 
 away from the terms of existence. It is a parlor idea, and 
 every great poet that ever lived belies it. Milton and 
 Dante, indeed, are supposed to have made supernatural 
 ventures into a realm of unreality, or at least a world of 
 spirit, simply because they said that this was where they 
 were going. It is clear enough to the eye of analysis, 
 however, that in proportion as their imaginative passages 
 are great, they are filled with the material colors of the real 
 world. There may be such a thing as pure spirit, but a 
 book of poems is the last place in which it will be found. It 
 will be found in Euclid rather than Dante. 
 
 Page 65 
 
 The quotation is from Walt Whitman's "Passage to 
 India." 
 
 Page 67 
 
 The Japanese translations are taken, for the most part, 
 from a book by Basil Hall Chamberlain, called "Japanese 
 Poetry." 
 
 Page 72 
 
 Tlie quotations are from Walt WTiitman's "The An- 
 swerer" and "Salut au Monde." 
 
 Page 76 
 
 This definition and the whole modem treatment of 
 " figures of speech, * ' is perhaps due to a misunderstand- 
 ing of Aristotle's classifications. "Rhetoric" meant to 
 Aristotle the forensic art, the art of convincing and per- 
 
NOTES 237 
 
 suading. This art was a sub-chapter of logic, in which 
 metaphors (for he calls all these things metaphors) have 
 no vital place. They are "ornaments" merely. Aristotle 
 himself recognized, however vaguely, that their position 
 in poetic writing is different, and he never intended his 
 rhetoric for a general Bible. 
 
 Page 77 
 
 This kind of choice is called "metonymy" when some 
 adjunct or pervasive quality of a thing is named, "synec- 
 doche" when a definite part. But if you substitute the 
 word experience for thing in these definitions, the distinc- 
 tion between metonymy and synecdoche properly disap- 
 pears. 
 
 In defining synecdoche as "naming a part for the whole," 
 it is customary to add "or sometimes the whole for a part." 
 But I think in every example which can be given of the 
 latter, it will be found that the name of the whole either 
 offers a more single and somehow apprehensible focus of 
 attention, or stimulates the imagination by the very 
 strangeness of its use, or else is not poetic at all, but 
 merely a less specific way of talking than the reader ex- 
 pected. 
 
 Aristotle made the peculiar mistake of including this 
 use of a general term instead of a specific, among his 
 "metaphors." (Poetics, chap. XXI, 4). Transferring a 
 name from genus to species, he calls it, and gives as an 
 example from the Odyssey: 
 
 "Secure in yonder port my vessel stands." 
 
 "For to be moored," he says, "is a species of standing." 
 I do not know what the associative flavors of the words are 
 in Greek, but if the one is really by grammatical definition 
 a species of the other, then there is no transfer of a word 
 "out of its proper signification." There is simply general 
 
238 NOTES 
 
 instead of specific language, as when we say "an animal" 
 instead of "a dog." 
 
 Perhaps it is mainly out of a persistent, and generally 
 well-founded, reverence for Aristotle, that this secondary 
 definition of synecdoche survives. There surely are cases 
 when, for accidental reasons either in the word or the 
 thing, it is more vivid to name the whole than the part. 
 "The west warns us," appears to me more poetic than 
 **The sunset warns us." But I think this, and other cases 
 of the kind, are actually (when we substitute experience 
 for thing) selections of a vivid part. 
 
 Page 78 
 
 " Pleonasm ** and " Tautology " are two other so-called 
 "figures" which find their explanation here. "Saying the 
 same thing over again" is supposed to be a peculiar lit- 
 erary delight upon many occasions. But when this is not 
 exact repetition, it is usually one of the manifestations of 
 poetic choice — an experience being indicated in general 
 first, and then the chosen attribute called forth. 
 
 Page 82 
 
 The quotations are from the Book of Psalms. 
 
 Page 87 
 
 Perhaps the intrinsic natm-e and motive of all poetic 
 utterance is clearest proven in the spontaneous answer of 
 one of these Indians when he was asked, "How do you 
 make your songs?" "When I am herding my sheep," he 
 said, "or away in the fields, and I see something that I like 
 — then I sing about it." Another compiled a commentary 
 upon his song, so that its "inner meaning" might be known 
 to the hearer, and this is what he said: "My song is about 
 butterflies flying over the cornfields and over the beans. 
 One butterfly is running after the other like the hunt, and 
 there are many." 
 
NOTES 239 
 
 Let us hear the song, for it is one of the few whose 
 poetry is all within the perception of a person who has 
 been civilized. 
 
 "Yellow butterflies, 
 Over the blossoming virgin com, 
 
 With pollen-painted faces, 
 Chase one another in brilliant throng. 
 
 "Blue butterflies, 
 Over the blossoming virgin beans, 
 
 With pollen-painted faces, 
 Chase one another in brilliant streams. 
 
 "Over the blossoming com, 
 Over the virgin com, 
 
 Wild bees hum, 
 Over the blossoming beans, 
 Over the virgin beans, 
 
 Wild bees hum. 
 
 "Over your fields of growing com. 
 
 All day shall hang the thimder-cloud; 
 Over your fields of growing com. 
 All day shall come the rushing rain." 
 
 All these examples are taken from "The Indians* Book," 
 by Natalie Curtis. 
 
 Page 88 
 
 The pleasure of attributing supremely poetic language to 
 an occult inspiration, will set many romantic poeple who 
 never wrote poetry, against this description of the poet's 
 mind. But for my part I see no gain, even for intelligent 
 romance, in imputing these qualities to the intuitive or sub- 
 liminal mind. They are just the same things there, that 
 they are in the deliberate mind. We cannot make a natural 
 thing supernatural by showing that it is not expressly 
 directed at every step by a self-conscious faculty. So 
 
240 NOTES 
 
 while we recognize that these gifts of the poet are often sub- 
 conscious, we need not therefore hesitate to say that they 
 are what they are. And to this we may add that if biog- 
 raphy tells us anything, it tells us that the greatest 
 poets and artists were in a high degree self-conscious and 
 deliberate, as well as exalted, in their creative moments. 
 
 Page 90 
 The quotation is from Keats's "Endymion." 
 
 Page 92 
 
 This twofold function of rhythm can be more techni- 
 cally expressed if we remember that emotions are never 
 imaged; they are "real" even when images arouse them. 
 They are of the body. And a poetic rhythm, though its 
 cruder effect is usually to lull us into that state where 
 images grow clear, does also (I would almost say after- 
 ward) directly intensify the emotions that accompany those 
 images. If this statement is unsatisfactory from a scien- 
 tific stand-point, that is not, I think, because it idealizes 
 or blurs the facts, but because science has in this direction 
 no dominant hypothesis under which the facts can be 
 arranged. 
 
 Page 96 
 
 It is perhaps necessary, in this place, to allude to the 
 fact that the word "poetry" often means "metrical lan- 
 guage," regardless of whether any genuine realization is 
 conveyed by such language or not. The opposite of 
 "poetry" in this sense is "straight copy." And since this 
 distinction is valuable in its place, we need not dispute the 
 definition. We are using the word poetry in one of its 
 other senses which is for our purpose, and for the general 
 purposes of Hfe, more important, and we wish to show the 
 historical and scientific relation of metrical language to 
 poetry in this sense. 
 
NOTES 241 
 
 The dispute over what "poetry" means, as though one 
 word always means and always must mean but one class of 
 things, is so wearisome and (now that we understand the 
 history of words) so full of academic folly, that I insert 
 this note simply to ward off the suggestion of it. 
 
 Page 100 
 The quotation is from the Book of Genesis. 
 
 Page 103 
 
 The quotations of Homer are from Bryant's transla- 
 tion of the "Iliad." 
 
 Page 105 
 
 The quotations of Shakespeare are, for the most part, 
 from "Coriolanus" or "King Lear." 
 
 Page 107 
 
 As a poet of the world, there is, I think, this failing in 
 Shakespeare — and it is seen by Tolstoy — that he had a too 
 special love of words. Often the experience which his 
 lines convey is an experience of the high wonder of the 
 birth and being of language rather than of things, and it is 
 open only to persons of specialized perception in that direc- 
 tion. I can best show what I mean by calling attention 
 to the entire transparency of the words in this passage from 
 Shelley, how un-Shakespearian it is: 
 
 "The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night 
 I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds 
 Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands 
 A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. 
 Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, 
 And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars: 
 Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink 
 With eager lips the wind of their own speed. 
 
242 NOTES 
 
 As if the thing they loved fled on before, 
 And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks 
 Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all 
 Sweep onward." 
 
 Here is motion, and motion rich with the technique of 
 verbal realization, yet clear in a way that Shakespeare is 
 not often clear, because he loved excessively the feeling of 
 words in his mouth and mind. 
 
 "They drink with eager lips the wind of their own speed." 
 
 Page 107 (2) 
 
 The term "lyric poetry," as now used, has less than no 
 scientific value. And the word "epic," when it does not 
 express a judgment of value, means simply a long story 
 told in poetry. 
 
 Page 109 
 
 The quotation is from Bums*s poem "To a Mountain 
 Daisy." 
 
 Page 110 
 
 The quotation is from a song in Tennyson's "Princess/* 
 quoted again in Chapter XII. 
 
 Page 113 
 
 The expression "word-painting" derives, I believe, from 
 John Ruskin, but the idea that physical vision of imagi- 
 nary things is the poetic faculty par excellence, is older 
 than books. "A speaking picture" is Philip Sidney's ex- 
 pression. 
 
 The tribute of the eye surpasses that of all the other 
 senses except touch, in giving us the sense of a presence. 
 It is a matter of small moment if we hear a lady splash- 
 ing in the bath at sunrise, but given the least retreating 
 shade of her to our eyesight, and there is a great awakening I 
 
NOTES 243 
 
 It IS a topic for myth and song. For such reasons we speak 
 of all mental substance as though it were composed 
 purely of visual memory. " Imagination" and even 
 "idea" are visual words. And the definition of poetry as 
 painting, is but a continuation of this way of speaking. 
 
 It is in truth a poetic name for poetry. It chooses one, 
 and that an eminent one, of its quaUties and compares it 
 upon the basis of that to a material art. But poetry may 
 as truly be compared to sculpture or to any other art that 
 appeals to an external sense. The realizations of other 
 artists are limited to certain of the senses, but the artist 
 of imagination appeals to them all. Therefore, to call the 
 poet "painter," is to speak poetically. Whereas to call 
 the painter a "poet" — a realizer of things through form and 
 color — ^is almost a scientific generalization. 
 
 In Caxton's "Book of Curtesye," I find this apprecia- 
 tion of "Galfreyde Chawcer," which expresses more truly 
 than "word-painting" the characteristic of poetry which 
 we distinguish in this chapter: 
 
 "His langage was so fayr and pertynente 
 It eeemeth unto mannys herrynge 
 Not only the worde but verely the Thynge." 
 
 Page 117 
 The quotation is from the poem called "Walt Whitman." 
 
 Page 120 
 
 Even where it appears, as so often in Wordsworth's 
 poems, that exactly the opposite principle has been fol- 
 lowed, the commonest of all names being chosen, I think 
 that the poetic effect lies largely in the fact that, for per- 
 sons who are accustomed to the ways of poetry, that very 
 thing is a surprise. In somewhat the same way, an ex- 
 treme prose word is often poetic in a passage of continuous 
 poetry. 
 
244 NOTES 
 
 Page 121 
 
 The quotations are from a mediBeval writer, from Shel- 
 ley's "Skylark/' and from the Rig-Veda. 
 
 Page 122 
 The quotation is from Robert Bums. 
 
 Page 123 
 
 All that we have of Sappho has been collected, with 
 various English translations, by Henry Thornton Wharton, 
 in a book called "Sappho." 
 
 Page 127 
 The quotation is a fragment of Shelley's. 
 
 Page 128 
 The quotation is from Shelley's "Adonais." 
 
 Page 131 
 The quotation is from the "Song of Solomon." 
 
 Page 133 
 
 The quotation is from Andrew Lang's translations of 
 Theocritus. 
 
 Page 135 
 
 "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" is Walt 
 Whitman's poem upon the death of Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 Page 136 
 
 For any who may read my book studiously, I wish to 
 explain that in this chapter I mean by "abstract ideas," not 
 merely those indicated by terms which are abstract in the 
 logicd sense. I mean also those indicated by general 
 terms when they are used, not to denote some individual 
 
NOTES 245 
 
 (a dog barked), but to denote any individual (a dog is a 
 good friend). The abstraction to which I refer is psyciio- 
 logical, not logical. It is the abstraction inherent in any 
 "concept," regarded as a concept, or used for the purpose 
 of exposition — used in any way except to name for the 
 imagination an individual thing. This is what the word 
 abstract signifies in its popular, as well as its psychological 
 use, and, therefore, except for technical purposes, this note 
 is superfluous. 
 
 Page 136 (2) 
 
 This way of apprehending poetry appears to be as an- 
 cient as any. "Apparent pictures of unapparent nat- 
 ures" is a Zoroastrian definition which sums up all the 
 others. 
 
 Aristotle, in contrasting poetry with history, assumes 
 that the particulars in poetry are but instances of a gen- 
 eralization. 
 
 Sidney revives this opinion, and pleases his heart with 
 the idea that the aim of all poetry is to instruct by means 
 of pictures. 
 
 Emerson shows the same tendency. "I am a poet," he 
 says, "in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the har- 
 monies that are in the soul and in matter, and especially of 
 the correspondences between these and those." 
 
 It was by this road that I arrived at the present analysis 
 of poetry. I published in the North American Review for 
 March, 1908, an article on "The Poet's Mind," which 
 proposed to distinguish poetry from practical language, 
 but did so only in so far as each is employed in the ex- 
 pression of abstract ideas. 
 
 Hudson Maxim has written a book in which he defines 
 poetry in much the same way. His book has a grand 
 title, "The Science of Poetry, and the Philosophy of 
 Language," and this, as well as its contents, bears me out 
 a little in my belief that these definitions are, like the 
 
246 NOTES 
 
 others, partial definitions, expressions of taste upon the 
 part of excessively intellectual people. The true general- 
 ization does not contradict, but includes them. 
 
 Page 137 
 
 "The butterfly sleeps on the village bell" is a Japa- 
 nese poem, like those quoted in Chapter VI. 
 
 Page 137 (2) 
 The quotation is from Isaiah. 
 
 Page 138 
 The quotation is from Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." 
 
 Page 140 
 
 " The deep truth is imageless. " — Something of this kind 
 must have been meant by Hegel in his assertion that while 
 poetry is the highest of the arts, "the prose of thought" is 
 one thing higher. 
 
 That such a thing as "imageless thought" exists is 
 maintained by very few psychologists today. We may 
 say, I think, that, no matter how "pure" one's reason may 
 be, its procedure is dependent in some measure upon frag- 
 ments of imagery or sensation. 
 
 Page 148 
 
 The quotation is from Wordsworth's ode on "Intima- 
 tions of Immortality." 
 
 Page 150 
 The quotation is from Emerson. 
 
 Page 151 
 
 The quotation is from Fitzgerald's translation of "Th« 
 Rubiiydt" of Omar Khayyim. 
 
NOTES 247 
 
 Many of the Japanese Hokku are poems of this kind, 
 there being some idea suggested to the initiated, even 
 though the words appear to us purely pictorial. This is 
 true, I beUeve, of two or three of those quoted in chap- 
 ter VI. But it is not true of all, and is not essential to 
 their being poems. 
 
 Page 155 
 The quotation is from Tennyson's "Morte d' Arthur." 
 
 Page 166 
 
 This decline into a passion for the technique of poetry 
 as an end in itself, is of course always imminent, when 
 people make a life business of composing it. Browning 
 was almost more infatuated with rhyme, it would appear, 
 than with his very highest imaginations, for he so frequently 
 sacrificed the latter to the former. 
 
 A similar, although more intellectual, decadence, is the 
 passion for singularity and similarity as ends in them- 
 selves. The aim of a poetic choice or comparison here 
 ceases to be the enhancement of an experience, and it be- 
 comes merely an exploitation of intellectual ingenuity. 
 
 Page 157 
 The quotation is from Tennyson's **The Lotos Eaters." 
 
 Page 157 (2) 
 
 Poe has himself given an account of his mood and man- 
 ner of creating, which supports this judgment. And he 
 too wrote upon the science, or ^'rationale," of verse, and 
 even made a definition of all poetry as "a pleasurable idea 
 accompanied by music." 
 
 Page 157 (3) 
 The quotation is from Poe's "The Sleeper." 
 
248 NOTES 
 
 Page 162 
 
 Another reason why it is unfortunate to quote those im- 
 memorial Hnes as examples of poetry, is that they are not 
 even illuminating examples of onomatopoeia. Their imi- 
 tation is too obvious and extraordinary. But onomat- 
 opoeia, in milUons of subtle forms, is pervasive in poetry. 
 It is a principle that relates to far other matters than the 
 naming of bees, or a buzz-saw. It is the principle of that 
 poetic quality which we found native to all rapid narra- 
 tive — a similarity in consecutiveness between the words 
 and the events. It is the principle of infinite indescribable 
 appropriatenesses in language — things that science can but 
 indicate in their variety and leave to unconscious discovery 
 by those whose sensibihties are fine. 
 
 That line of Keats, "Lucent s;yTops tinct with cinna- 
 mon," can show that the principle applies to other organs 
 than the ear. Tinct is a most dehcate imitation of the act 
 of tasting. It is more than that. Wolfish again is a poetic 
 word through muscular imitation of a snari. And "un- 
 flesh your teeth" is still more so, because it does exactly 
 what it says. But these also are ob\^ous, compared, for 
 instance, to the appropriateness of the dark sound of the 
 word war to the thing it conceives, or the thick shock of 
 the word blood. It is difficult to distinguish what quality 
 pertains to a word through its previous uses, and what 
 through its purely sensible nature. — Violet is so different 
 from violent ! But certainly some of this quality is purely 
 vocal. Words do have their sensible nature; it is definite; 
 and to those gifted or trained in such perceptions, it may 
 become a strong enhancement of the imagination of things. 
 
 If one wished to write a science of these values, he would 
 nave to recognize not only similarities in the different 
 senses (sound and sight and motion) involved in word per- 
 ception, but also similarities between one sense and another 
 (as sound and color in the word gray), and between sensa- 
 tions and ideas, or emotions. He would have also to 
 
NOTES 249 
 
 recognize a second principle, besides onomatopoeia. For 
 words acquire value through association, not with other 
 things only, but with the names of other things. Bind' 
 geon, for instance, is a poetic word because it has blood 
 on it, as well as a good heavy smash of its own. On the 
 other hand, spectre and phantom and ghost are poetic 
 words exactly because they have no associates. They are 
 unique words, naming the unique apparition. Milton 
 speaks of the army of the pigmies as small infantry, and the 
 critics accuse him of a pun. But doubtless he chose the 
 word, as he would any other, entirely unconscious of the 
 source of its appropriate flavor. No one has ever studied 
 to classify these sources, but I believe the associative rela- 
 tions among words and syllables themselves would be found 
 almost as important in such a classification as onomato- 
 poeia. 
 
 Page 162 (2) 
 
 The quotation is from that song in Tennyson's "Princess" 
 called "Come Down, O Maid." 
 
 Page 165 
 The sonnet is by Christina Rossetti. 
 
 Page 166 
 
 The quotation is from Keats*s "La Belle Dame Sans 
 Merci." 
 
 Page 175 
 
 This will be true about the poetry of books only if one 
 is entirely free from cultural dogmas about what books 
 he "ought to*' enjoy, free to make his own arbitrary 
 choices, free to reject all books when the poetry of his own 
 soul is at its highest. 
 
250 NOTES 
 
 Page 178 
 
 That these intervals are not mathematically equal in the 
 modem reading of poetry, has been established by me- 
 chanical experiment. An approximation to equality is 
 nevertheless what gives them their rhythmic character, 
 and the act of perception may somehow equalize them in 
 their nervous, as it does in their psychic, effect. 
 
 Page 178 (2) 
 
 As a result of this attitude to the line rhythm, at least 
 one so-called "law of prosody" has entirely dominated 
 EngHsh poets, and often, I think, to their misfortune. It 
 is the law about left-over syllables at the end, or beginning, 
 of a line in blank verse. Suppose the division between 
 two lines properly falls in the middle of a word, or of an 
 indivisible phrase, as in this example: 
 
 "To him the wdU 
 That Blinders gh6sta and ehddow-c^ting m6n 
 Becdme a crystal, ^d he siw them thr6ugh it." 
 
 Prosodists diagnose that contrarious syllable it, which 
 properly belongs to the next line, as a sort of abnormal 
 excrescence upon the old line, call this by the terrifying 
 name of acatalectic (or catalectic, or hypercatalectic — one 
 never remembers which) and require that the next line shall 
 begin all fresh with another unaccented syllable. Thus: 
 
 "Became a crystal dnd he s^w them thr6tSgh it 
 And hedrd their v6Ice8 tdlk behind the wdll." 
 
 That is, they require that we sacrifice the flow of the ac- 
 cent rhythm, in order to preserve the integrity of the lines 
 upon the page. It is, perhaps, foohsh for them to "re- 
 quire" anything, but I think it would be less foohsh to 
 require that we cut off the real excrescence, which is the 
 syllable and, allowing the syllable it, which is the first 
 
NOTES 251 
 
 syllable of the new line, to remain, if it must, upon the end 
 of the old. Thus: 
 
 "To him the wiD 
 That stinders gh6st8 and sh^ow-cdsting m6n 
 Became a crystal, dnd he s^w them thr6tlgh it, 
 He^d their voices t&Tk behind the w&ll." 
 
 I think so, because the visible rhythm, although more 
 obvious, is not so important as the audible rhythm. I 
 believe that one who composed blank verse in natural free- 
 dom from the idea of a printed page — ^while he might any- 
 where introduce extra syllables for his pleasure or con- 
 venience — ^would usually overcome this technical diflSculty 
 by sacrificing the regularity of both lines rather than by 
 sacrificing the regular recurrence of his accent. 
 
 I have taken the example from Tennyson (Vivien in 
 "The Idylls of the Eong"), because he is famous for the 
 studied perfection of his rhythm, but in this matter he fol- 
 lows a pattern which has been accepted, so far as I know, 
 by every English composer of blank verse. 
 
 Page 180 
 
 In ancient Greek and Latin poetry the rhythm within 
 the line was apparently not a product of natural accent, 
 but depended upon the reader's "bringing it out," just 
 as the line rhythm did. I believe that it was brought 
 out, however (when instrumental music or dance-gesture 
 was absent), by means of some rhythmic accent, and that 
 the poet's effort was to combine syllables easy and diflBcult 
 of enunciation in such an order as to lend themselves well 
 to that accent. It is certain, at least, that poets of any 
 worth were not much occupied with those artificial "rules 
 of quantity," which their learned commentators have 
 passed down to us; and it is certain that there was no finer 
 "discrimination of time intervals" then, than there is now. 
 
252 NOTES 
 
 Poetry was a good deal the same, but scholars were 
 making up a different fairy-tale about it. 
 
 Page 181 
 
 The quotation is from Sidney Lanier's "Song of the 
 Chattahoochee. " 
 
 Page 181 (2) 
 
 Rhyme is employed in the line, "I hurry amain to 
 reach the plain," to reduplicate the rhythm still again — 
 to bring out, that is, a half-line rhythm within the others. 
 
 Page 182 
 
 The quotations are from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 
 "Jenny"; SheUey's "To Night"; Bums's "To a Mouse," 
 and "The Banks o* Doon." 
 
 Page 183 
 
 Notice that this regular alternation produces a third re- 
 duplication of the wave series. A fourth is produced by 
 separating equal groups of lines into stanzas. Stanzas are 
 usually so long, however, that they can only be perceived 
 in retrospection, and are then not truly rhythmical, but a 
 part of the formal attractiveness of poems. 
 
 Page 185 
 
 The alternation of lines of different length is a fifth way 
 of reduplicating the wave series. And the alternation of 
 feet of different length is a sixth. The latter is not com- 
 mon in English poetry, occurring so far as I know only in 
 imitations of ancient unrhjined song, but its effect is both 
 strong and unique. I quote an example from Swinburne's 
 "Sapphics." 
 
NOTES 253 
 
 "Then the Muses, stricken at heart, were silent; 
 Yea the gods waxed pale; such a song was that song. 
 AT reluctant all with a fresh repulsion, 
 Fled from before her. 
 
 "All withdrew long since, and the land was barren, 
 Full of fruitless women and music only. 
 Now perchance, when winds are assuaged at sunBet, 
 Lulled at the dewfall, 
 
 **By the gray sea-side, unassuaged, unheard of, 
 Unbeloved, unseen in the ebb of twilight. 
 Ghosts of outcast women return lamenting, 
 Purged not in Lethe. 
 
 ** Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing 
 Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, 
 Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity. 
 Hearing, to hear them." 
 
 Page 186 
 
 For the person who sees it on the page, or reads it in a 
 certain way, a similarity of nature and position remains, 
 even when the length of lines is varied. A broad sugges- 
 tion of rhythmic recurrence is retained in this way even 
 in Walt Whitman's poetry. 
 
 Page 186 (2) 
 
 So soon as, and so far as, the poem itself becomes an 
 object of realization, and the elements of writing and 
 utterance are developed in variety for their own sake, 
 much more than this may be said of rhythmical speech. 
 Only it will all be a pointing out of various specific 
 characteristics; it will not be a general theory of poetic 
 rhythm. 
 
 An infinite number of good things have already been said 
 upon this subject. But they have not recognized them- 
 selves to be a pointing out of new varieties and ways in 
 which verse has attracted a reader; they have taken them- 
 
254 NOTES 
 
 selves each to be an exclusively true general theory of 
 En^ish rhythm. And so prosody has been vitiated and 
 rendered ridiculous, just as at some time every science has, 
 by the superstitious assumption that a single, eternal, and 
 futile, and absolute truth exists in answer to every ques- 
 tion that may arise. 
 
 Page 194 
 
 The quotation is from George Chapman. 
 
 Page 195 
 The quotation b from Robert Browning's "SauL" 
 
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