The Literature of Ecstasy

From time immemorial it has been assumed that poetry is something which is caviare to the general public. A "poem" even to-day is supposed to be a literary composition that is in artificial language arranged in a metrical pattern, often conveying a trite idea or enshrining an ineffective image. Thousands of volumes and essays have been written on poetry, and instead of fathoming a true conception of its nature, they have dealt with the trappings and garments which clothe it; these indeed have often been confused with poetry itself.

As a result, there has grown around the pathway leading to poetry an endless maze of shrubbery. The reader who has no knowledge of rules and laws relating to verse, who is ignorant of technical requirements and established uses, labors under the delusion that he does not like poetry. Though he reads many works in prose that stir a deep emotional appeal within him, he does not regard himself as one of those lovers who haunt the foot of Parnassus Hill.

I wish in this volume to present a conception of poetry freed from academic and conventional standards. I wish to restore to the term poetry its primary and fundamental significance as a verbal composition in which the predominating feature is ecstasy. Poetry is an emotional atmosphere that pervades all literature in its finest parts; it characterizes any purely personal expression of the creative imagination. As the reader perceives, my definition of poetry includes prose literature in which ecstasy is present. I do not think of poetry as a branch of literature couched in a metrical form, following regular rules of rhythm, diction, figures of speech or rhyme. My conception of poetry then, is not that of a department of literature which is opposed to prose, but of an emotional spirit hovering over any kind of writing, whether in verse or prose, which conveys ecstasy.

I shall try to show especially that the prose literature of ecstasy fulfils all the intrinsic conditions which have been associated with poetry. I shall consider the question of how much, or rather how little, the element of rhythm or any other pattern is essential in determining the nature of poetry. In fact, I shall even maintain that prose irregularly rhythmical or even unrhythmical,[10-A] just as the exigencies of the emotion require, is the natural language of the emotions, that it was so at the very beginnings of literary history, and has in fact never ceased being used as such a vehicle. I shall further take the position that the set forms of verse which have grown up among all nations as a vesture for emotional writing, have been more or less pervaded with artificiality. The final judgment as to the nature of poetry resides in the appeal to the emotions. The test of poetry is not in the form which the writer uses, or in compliance with rules of prosody, but in the soul of the reader or hearer. If two emotional passages, one in a set pattern and one in prose have the same effect upon the responsive mechanism of the human soul, if they both arouse ecstasy, it matters not if you refuse to call the prose passage poetry; its effect is however that of poetry. It stirs and moves you to rapture, it is a product of the author's unconscious, it speaks from soul to soul, it is beautiful in its expressiveness, it has a rhythm of its own. I shall not be concerned if you refuse to call this emotional prose passage poetry, but it does belong to the literature of ecstasy, and ecstasy was and is the first condition of poetic composition. The poetry in verse is but part of the literature of ecstasy.

I shall hence deal in this volume largely with emotional or impassioned prose; for it belongs to the literature of ecstasy, although it is often termed poetic prose, or sometimes disparagingly, prose poetry. Under this term I shall include not only the so-called "fine writing" but emotional passages in the language of the average man, dialogues from prose dramas, novels and short stories, and I shall also regard criticism, essays and works on science and philosophy highly charged with feeling as part of the province of the literature of ecstasy.

This work becomes thus a treatise on poetics, and will present a new definition of poetry which will include all emotional prose writing.

A very important phase of the subject will take in the connection between poetry or the literature of ecstasy, and various spheres of human thought, such as ethical and social questions. The idea will be shown to be an important factor in the literature of ecstasy, for ecstasy does not preclude the intellectual and moral activities. The notion of art for art's sake thus assumes a rather trivial aspect. Any idea whether scientific or philosophic, moral or social, if ecstatically presented, becomes itself literature of ecstasy, or poetry.

Should the reader conclude to accept the prose literature of ecstasy as poetry, he will find there was much poetry in the world's prose literature that he has never recognized as such. He will also be compelled to admit that much of what has been called poetry, because written in verse, does not properly belong to poetry, as not being of the literature of ecstasy. He will also see that the artificial classifications of the different kinds of poetry, such as epic, dramatic, pastoral, satirical, the ode, the sonnet, the ballad, the didactic poem, the idyl, the elegy, etc., were based on fallacies and were confusing and erroneous. There is only one species of poetry, the utterance of the ecstatic state, and this is always personal, whether in verse or prose, and hence, has a lyrical quality. If the poet gives the utterances of other people in ecstatic states, these also are lyrics. Hence every composition whether in verse or prose, that records ecstasy here and there, is lyrical in those parts where the ecstasy is depicted.

The distinction between prose and verse will be more clearly defined, if we refer to the poetry that is written in both these forms as poetry in verse, and poetry in prose.

Sidney, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Whitman, all of whom, besides being great poets themselves, were probably the greatest critics of poetry in the English language, took cognizance of the fact that the great emotional prose writers of the world were poets. But most of the critics have resented this attitude and have gone on in the unjust classifications that recognize as a poet the petty rhymster, who is often barren of both emotions and ideas. They also deny the glorious epithet of poet to many great prose masters of the delineation of human passions.

The question of free verse, naturally will come in for consideration. I shall show that it is really rhythmical prose arranged so as to call attention to the rhythms. I believe, however, that the free verse writers have a right to make such linear arrangement. The bulk of the poetry of the future may very likely be written in free verse forms, or in prose. If much of the free verse of to-day fails in being poetry, it is not because of the form, but because there is no ecstasy in it, or in the poet's soul. Most of the poetry of the Bible is really in free verse; it is poetry, however, not because of the free verse, but because it presents universal phases of human ecstasy.

I have expressly ignored most of the great authors who wrote epics and dramas in verse, and also most of the great English verse poets, for I wish to arrive at a conception of poetry chiefly from prose examples. Most critics have assumed that they could never learn what poetry was unless they gave examples from men like Homer and Shakespeare, Sophocles and Dante, Spenser and Milton. I rarely quote from them, not because I do not recognize the greatest poetry in these authors, but because I wish to show that one may arrive at a true conception of the nature of poetry by illustrations from prose writers of ecstatic literature alone.

Although I feel that the artificial verse forms hamper instead of beautify the expression of the poet's emotions, I do not think that such forms ever will be, nor need be utterly abandoned. Man will always love a ringing, rhyming ballad or song.

I have devoted a chapter to the poetry of the most poetical nation, the Arabs; their poets produced the anomaly of utilizing the most artificial metres, and yet never lost sight of the fact that ecstasy was the very life of the poem. Probably no poets in the world have produced such exquisite love poetry as the Arabs; they have also had great influence on modern European poetry, for it is being recognized that modern romantic fiction, especially in its employment of the tenderness of the love sentiment as a frequent theme, was transplanted from them.

Poetry is the soul of literature, and we should cease limiting the term to rhythmical or patterned productions, and apply it to emotional writing in general. No term for the word poet in any language that I am acquainted with includes in its etymological significance the idea of rhythm or metrical pattern. The Hebrew word for poet is one who utters prophecies or parables; the Greek word signifies a "maker"; the Latin word "seer," the Arabian word "one who knows." Critics of the Bible have especially recognized that the chief characteristic of both the true and the false prophet (Nabi) was the ecstatic state; the Bible itself is of course authority for this fact. The inferior prophet was one, however, in whom the ecstatic state was hypnotically produced, in whom the rational and moral faculties were suspended; the great prophets were those in whom a powerful sense of social justice was illuminated by the ecstatic state; hence the prophecies of the Bible are not orations wherein rhetoric is a factor, but genuine literature of ecstasy, or poetry in rhythmical prose, using parallelism.

I need not continue to give analyses of the Greek "poetes," the Latin "vates," or the Arabian "shair," for it has been usually conceded that these words all refer in their primary significance to the imaginative work, or ecstatic state of the author, and not to the mere dabbler in verse forms.

With theories of poetry being a product of the unconscious, as developed by Freud and his disciples, or as being expression as advanced by Croce, my task does not become so utterly devoid of reason as may appear at first sight. One must not forget that the critics of poetry have formed their conceptions of poetry by deducing rules from the verse poems of the world's literature. Instead of looking ahead, they have always looked back. Whenever a new great poet appeared, like Wordsworth, Whitman or Ibsen for instance, they had to modify their theories, and to revise their books on poetics and rhetoric. If the productions of Homer and ?schylus had been entirely different, we no doubt would have had other conceptions of poetry prevailing. Yet it is only by mere accident that Homer dealt with gods, wars, mythical events and employed dactylic hexameter. It is again also by pure chance that ?schylus used various metres, made Prometheus and the Furies living beings, was sponsor for a philosophy of divine punishment and often indulged in artificial diction. Had these poets written novels instead, conveying just as much genius and ecstasy as they did in their verse works, the critics of poetry would have deduced an entirely different conception of it.

To Democritus belongs the honor of having first recognized among the Greeks that ecstasy is the condition of the poet. To Plato goes the distinction for having fully developed this theory. Aristotle accepted also the view that poetry is ecstasy. The author of the ancient treatise On the Sublime perceived that the characteristic of poetic genius is in the arousing of the ecstatic state. He says, in a passage which deserves citation: "For it is not to persuasion (i. e., rhetoric) but to ecstasy that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer."

But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the prose form of poetry, but with poetry as a psychological process, as a social force and as a philosophical expression.

Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and synonymous terms for the primary source of poetry. They are the fruitage of the turmoil of the soul, due to the apparently forgotten memories in us of the emotional lives in all our ancestors. They represent also the impassioned activities of our logical and rational faculties, the sum of the views of life of the past. They emanate from the dream life of man, whether this occurs in the waking or sleeping state. They are the workings of the force we call inspiration.

My view of poetry as emotional prose literature enables me, I hope, to eliminate many of the so-called conflicts between poetry and philosophy and between poetry and morals. Philosophical and moral essays become poetry in those parts lit up by ecstasy or emotion. If philosophy deals with rare and profound truths in regard to the universe, if morals treat of the noblest relations between man and man, then I know of no higher form of poetry than a philosophical truth, or a moral or social conception, when ecstatically stated; I can think of no higher literature of ecstasy than the imaginative utterance of great intellectual conceptions or impassioned expression of the love of justice. Shakespeare's line, "We are but such stuff as dreams are made of," is but a metaphysical theory emotionally put; Isaiah's rebuke to the corrupt rich is but a didactic saw, ecstatically delivered. Poetry finds its best material in metaphysical and ethical truths emotionally presented. Lofty ideas, however, and not commonplace deductions or conclusions are the best material for poetry.

I recognize, then, as great poetry, all writings in which metaphysical or scientific truth and the spirit of social service are ecstatically formulated in prose, though I make no terms with dry didactic works that pretend to be poetry. I see the workings of the intellect in a product of the imagination and I try to show that logic and morality have not been so hostile to the poetic faculty as they have been usually deemed. At the same time I find that all poetry is a product or expression of the unconscious.

This is, then, not a book to teach the writing of poetry, but a study of the poetic faculty in literature, not in rhetorical terms, but by an appeal to the emotional life of the reader. It aims to point out the best examples of the literature of ecstasy (or poetry) whether in verse or prose. It shows that poetry is the very life of man's soul, that he has always loved it, that he has in lieu of gratification of a good and true poetic faculty often spent himself in cultivating substitutes for it. What a superficial assumption that because people do not like verse or read verse (especially trivial, lifeless, unhuman verse) they therefore do not care for poetry! Furthermore, I try to relate the poet's own literary revelation back to himself, just as the poet sought to reveal his soul to the reader.

* * *

FOOTNOTES:

[10-A] All prose has rhythm. I use the word "unrhythmical" merely to designate such prose where the rhythm is not marked. There is no sharp dividing line between rhythmical and unrhythmical prose.

* * *