The Literature of Ecstasy

etween poetry and morals, form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological questions, and

poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views treated in v

oetry and nearly all ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even scientific facts and metaphysical utterances may be so stated by a writer as to show the latent poetry. The two famous passages in Leaves of Grass beginning "I open my scuttle at night"

treatment, especially by force of example, makes part of the book poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truthfully and movingly art

ut nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. An

ely to express beauty and emotions, is the emphatic demand of another class. I doubt if there has ever been a great poet who hasn't done both of these things. If a poet is to teach he must teach something; he must express ideas, and i

lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions may be expressed in prose or free verse probably more poetically than even in metre, it is surely inadvisable to drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and especially at great length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave us an effective harangue against spiritualism in Mr. Sludge, "The Medium," in

m embodying an idea will always be with us, but I doubt if we will have, or at least ought to ha

dacticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship of form implied in Pater's statement; though it should be said that Pater in his essay on "Style" urges that, after all, subject matter is the deciding factor in determining great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us rather a revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment according to his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is more a reporter and a seer than a judge. Poets take their final rank by matter and

ided it does not sink into the commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the Psalm of Life and Excelsior, two of Longfellow's most

w he says it, and he rightly regards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy which encourages men to taste poetry as though it were wine. Poetry inheres in ideas. To insist,

y life, a talk to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an old poet, or a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the substance of which noble l

ressed desires. He is often wrapped in gloom for want of real truthful consoling poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts with relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or amorous affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed out by the prevailing of stupid and deplorable customs; he is often starving or being insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy circumstances. He

dles, and puppies, and arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's souls are starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish and

daisy and made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could write about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal idea. Shelley and Keats could endure em

It is the distinction of the unknown author of the ancient Greek fragment On the Sublime that he deprecates the tendency to wax emotional about the unemotional. The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get excited are often an index to their own moral and inte

nking man takes for granted. When we read the eloquent sermon on the advantage of practicing justice, we wonder at the folly of making a comment about so obvious a truism. It is for this reason that moral axioms lack the

hink that it is the subject matter of emotion to go into ecstatic praises, for example, over a man who supports his child. We find that anim

ntally disabled, he utters a stale truism that is not poetry but ethics. When he adds that it is pitiable to beat a cripple with his own crutches, the little prose passage is lifted up into poetry, for we are brought into a state of ecstasy

shed expression by art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause,

nced by our moral outlook. While we should not seek an ethical aim in literature as an end in itself, while we should shun the preacher of commonplac

just ones. If our intellect is far greater than that of the poet, we shall find that many of the causes that inspire him to sing as he does would not at all arouse in us the emotions e

uel action; or to gloat over the schemes of the fraudulent; or sing favorably of any action which w

reciating it is that of taste. He held that poetry had nothing to do with truth or duty; that the intellect and the mor

ssessed them. The highest form of taste can scarcely be attained unless the poet's intellect and moral sense are fine. For falsehood and sin are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a foolish and inconceivable conception of intellectual valu

fy our sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to Brandes understood that. Fortunately many of the classics have lost only in parts their moral and intel

t in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more

of the new order, and of Pastor Manders, representing society. The leading question there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone back to her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a loathsome disease which might be inherited by any possible progeny? Was she justified in leaving him? That these are the important questions is evident from the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, namely, to answer the critics of the Doll's House. The conclusion reached by Ibsen from the terrible picture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going back to her husband, that there are time

we must go back to the old Greek idea that poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation of the commonplace ethics. Nor does it

the poets and shows us that they are similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas by the dramatists spoken on t

kers who influenced them, Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and Godwin, to learn that the poetry resided in the original

not? Is Browning only a poet and no philosopher, and is Carlyle only a philosopher and not a poet? Is the

ng in Shakespeare that is poetry of a high order, this famous passage is, and yet it is really philosophy. It is poetry not because it is in blank verse or has rhythm, but because the ideas are stated in an emotional and

rhythm or not. If a commonplace thought, rhythmically adorned, may sometimes be poet

r. As a rule, the principles of metaphysics, epistemology and logic as written down in the average philosophical work seldom are poetry. Only occasionally have the philosophers waxed ecstatic. Yet m

easoning and you will often find great ideas emotionally stated that belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have parted with the idea that an author must be tearing a passion to tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes love for a page and a half and tells us how it is composed, we exclaim, this is th

book on the doings of insects, we often are reading poetry or t

Nietzsche. There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we find the imagination and the intellect fused; we cannot distinguish that which belongs to the realm of logic and that which is the resul

edy are among the oldest forms of literature that the theories of poetry have been built up by examining chiefly these forms. Arist

ur relation to it and give us profound conceptions of it. If one finds poetry only in the saccharine sonnets of our magazine writers and none at all in the great philosophers, he does not understand what poetry is. If you, however, call a philosophical principle poetry when you find it in verse, yo

e universal and history with the particular. This definition means very little to us to-day even though commentators try to explain that Aristotle includes under poetry any treatment also of the particular which presents universal situations and depicts universal traits. History, however, also treats of the universal, for it records universal traits in the particular

and all history that is a dry narrative is history and not poetry. Thucydides's Peloponnesian War and Carlyle's French Revolution contain much

e actual, and merely changes the names. And these novels often contain poems. We recall Fielding's distinction between nove

acitus, in Gibbon, Froude,

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s of literature are in the last resort moral. . . . Literature should be a kingdom