The Literature of Ecstasy

inority, as a non-conformist, as a champion of liberty, as a sponsor for advanced views. We want him not to be uttering and singing the commonplaces of to-day but the truths of the m

. And when we are bored by their nuances, their play with words, their records of unprofitable incidents, they tell us we cannot appreciate poetry, that we have not "taste." Man will always listen even though disapprovingly and hostilely, if the poet reveals a soul. But the minor

s own wife is not in sympathy. We like to think of him as an Ishmaelite, as one who is against his age, since the majority is often incapable of welcoming a new and great idea even emotionally treated. If he is merely a patriotic or a religious or conventionally moral poet, he will ap

oet, and not the eternal

thought and sane feeling; of a morality of love and justice that is still too ideal to be grasped by the age. No worthy poet to-day would write a poem merely to teach us simple precepts of morality. In a rude age, an emot

ics, nor of one who portrays a preceding and bygone age. We, or at least a few of us, like to think of him as a man drawing people in the grip of passions and battling for advanced ideas. We like to think of men like Shakespeare and Ibsen, Isaiah and Job, Balzac and Cervantes, Molière and Goethe, Byron and Shelley, Burns and Heine, Whitman and Swinburne, Carducci and Nietzsche, Carlyle and Ruskin, Dostoievsky and Dickens, Hugo and Rolland. We like to think chiefly of men who were largely personal in their appeal, and depicted their own sufferings, and described grief brought about by the social construction of society which they criticized. Such poets are no

Literature cannot be democratic, while poets write for the few who use them as tools for their own interests, to defend a system which is courteously called competition instead of exploitation. Much of our democratic literature is either capitalistic or bourgeois literature that gives a slight condescending nod to the proletariat. Many wealthy

barian and that the alien is an enemy within our gates, a tolerated, unwelcome guest, must be eradicated. Can any one contemplate without disgust plays and photoplays that depict Chinese, Japanese, Negroes and Jews as criminals, simply because of their creed or color? Is it

n economics and literature or poetry is not as remote as it seems. Bernard Shaw has made use of his knowledge of the subject in constructing his plays. The work of Gorki, Hauptmann and Zola has taken into consideration the feelings that the average working people go through in their struggle for existence. Yet the works of these writers are art or poetry, and not tracts. Literature writte

nd, all of which are lauded as among the greatest literary productions of the world. Wars are the subjects, fighters are the heroes. The lust for fighting is encouraged instead of being decried. While

dern and universal interest among them. But for the most part, fighting absorbs the writers and all their interests are in bloodshed, revenge, cruelty. There are many causes fostering the hatreds and errors of our day, without o

hilanthropy, which often means the master throwing crumbs to quiet the growling servant. No, it will be based on feelings that emanate from a sincere desire to promote human justice. There is no doubt that some day our system of s

usiness man, or the submissive contented working man, just as in the past the soldier and the monk were the heroes. To-morrow it will be the man who fights for economic justice for himself or the masses. Our standa

this. Consider the literature of the middle ages and note how seldom the troubles of the serfs and villains were expressed by the poets. There were slight efforts made in

ot a propagandist when he writes something that evokes our emotions. When Untermeyer published his book on poetry he was much criticized for the prominence he gave to James Oppenheim and Arthur Giovanitti, who are excellent poets. It is to be regretted that Unt

omics, manufactures and stock brokerage; as much as sunsets and souls; only these things,

d posthumously collected in Lectures and Essays, gave vent to many remarkable ideas on the subject of poetry. The following passage w

ts associations, the castle and the tournament, has passed away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott. Byron sang its funeral dirge. But tenderness, and heroism, and endurance still want their voice, and it must come fro

f poetry. The intellectual reader will still find in poetry his intellectual heroes. There will never be equality of intellect,

usually. It was this note in which Greek and Roman poetry, however, was deficient. It is

he poetry of the Greeks showed no deep interest in social justice. Pindar, the greatest lyricist of the Greeks, wrote about athletic contests; athletes were his heroes. The Greeks glorified healthy bodies in their poetry, an exalted fea

ce is Plato's Republic, and he concluded that the poet was unnecessary. Yet he

blime, who ends his treatise with a beautiful attack on the love of money which hinders the development of good

than most of the Greek poems because they show a social consciousness steeped in emotion. Passages like these are Hebraic and not Greek. "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." Isaiah (Ch. 5, v. 8). "They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpas

ebrew poetry to Greek poetry. Heine, a pronounced Hellenist, came to t

tion of consciousness of sin. The latter was really a perversion of the former,

with social ideas are not ready to recognize poems that are beautiful, or convey an emotion, even if there is little intellectual content behind the work. There is no social message in Poe's Raven, for example, but I could not imagine Untermeyer not being moved by that poem,

and unrecognized is by virtue of its novelty and truth more capable of swaying the emotion that we call poetic than the repetition of a hackneyed ethical maxim which every child knows and hears usually witho

sidering the latter. They did more, they had their eye on the future, and hence were usually liberal. We know very little about these Russian critics, and only recently has the nature of their work been outlined by Thomas G. Masaryk, who before the war published The Spirit of Russia just translated into English. Previously Kropotkin and a few historians of Russian literature had touched on their work. Some day perhaps we may be so fortunate as to have transl

uty of a dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with his religion. The voluptuary thinks it merely a means of arousing sexual morality. Some philosophers think it a vehicle to promulgate the

Patriotic and religious poetry, whether in verse or prose, falls flat on the internationalist and free thinker respectively, because they do not adore the sentiments therein, though they might admit the beauty of the writing and recognize the appeal it make

the evil effects that might follow if this man were allowed to live to spread his infamous doctrines, he rebuked the man for the trouble he brought on his family. On the whole he gave us a metrical and emotional composition actually describing his sensations, not even omitting sympathetic reference to the sufferings of the victim. This was poetry to those thousands that day who approved of this act. But most of us cannot to-day enter into the ecstasy of the writer; it is not poetry t

s changes, for what moves man in one age does not move him in another. The poets often have to do what Whitman and Wordsworth did, create the tastes by which they are to be enjoyed. We are all aware that in the eighteenth century poetry meant something entirely different from what we believe it t

or it presupposes more than it says. All good poetry, whether springing from a written or an unwritten tradition, is always "strange and obscure, and unre

educated and well read, is often unable to appreciate the beauty of poetry in which new and advanced and unpopular ideas are held in solution. The poetry in the work of Whitman and Nietzsche and Ibsen was no

images that it uses; but the poet is often at his best an aristocrat in thought and language, and then it takes a well trained i

hose doctrines which he himself embraces. Every man believes that the views that he entertains are true, otherwise

egards only conservative views as true. An author who embraces ideas from both the conventio

disciple of art for art's sake, said that the radical poet will paint passionate love, "will show it at war with the forms and customs of society, nay even with its laws and religion, if the laws and tenets which regulate that branch of human relations are among those which have begun to be murmured against." "To him, whatever exists will appear from that alone fit to be repr

views of the age. It is these reasons that still make many people consider Dante and Milton among the first-class poets. Again there is a tendency to regard as poets of the first class those who perfected their art technically. Hence ?schylus and Sophocles are ranked among

t include writers like Macaulay and Holmes. He does not mean that a writer of the first order is always greater than one of the second order, but he does insist as follows: "No man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion and morality are offered to him on a long spoon, can share the same Parnassian bench with those who make an original contribution to religion and morality, were it only a criticism." In spite of the contention of the art for art's sake school that poetry has nothing to do with morality or religion, the greatest poets are those authors of the literature of ecstasy who championed new ideas, fought for liberty in their works, expressed the advanced ideas of the age, and gave us a new and more liberal outlook on life. While it is true that often poets of the second order have expressed strongly and movingly just the common sentiments of everybody, on the whole the original poets rank higher. It is this whic

f the first order, but posterity adjusts the matter. Shelley and Ibsen finally won their places and I

kens' novels, the conceptions about sincerity in history, and the importance of individualism and the heroic Carlyle and Ruskin's views in art criticism and economics,

in prose the ecstasy connected with a great origin

s literature to many of the best known verse productions. Nor must we assume that the literature of emotion or ecstasy, whether in prose or verse, is always the highest form of literature. The literature that shows great insight into character, that brims most with intellectual ideas, that is universal and human in interest even if not emotional, ranks higher than poetry which voices no

s literature than many verses in our magazines. Much literature consists of a succession of ideas or facts, no particular one of which mov

his intellect, his psychological insight, his universality, his personality, all combine to make him the great figure he is. He would have continued to be as great a figure even if he had written no

t, but I can see no reason why, because it is poetry, we must say that it is a greater piece of literature than even an emotional prose passage out of Nietzsche or Carlyle at their best. Goethe's pros

men are not divided into men of thought and men of feeling, the one speaking the language of science, the other that of poetry. If man is a reasoning animal, he also is a creature of instinct as well as of thought. Hence poetry depends on science, the facts of which become part of our imagination. The poet builds a more livable world; he may write great political poetry if he does not become a part

nd moral enthusiasm that he compares to the common liturgical poetry "as a great and sonorous bell to the vague whistle of the wind." They preach no dog

eval Hebrew poets like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah

ieval Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be appreciated by any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's

hteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser rather low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Browning were assumed to have advanced upon Byron and Shelley, and the mid-Victorians in turn were deemed to have been supplanted by the poets of "the nineties." Though a later age may make some technical improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is genius that cou

er different from the ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the fact that these changes which are considered tokens of great courage on the part of the innovators, amount t

is emotion. People are under the impression that all the martyrs for human liberty perished in the medieval ages; that the world has been set free by those who gave up their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, and that there is no more work to be done by poets to-day in championing human liberty. Critics who admire Milton and Shelley as champions of liberty attack to-day

eas, emotions and situations, tricked out even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, tropes, allegories, high personages, supernatural agencies? In fact plays like Peer Gynt and The Sunken Bell are rather technically conventional as verse plays, but could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless and trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern "revolutionary" poets? The great poet who deals with the capabilities of

one away with many conventions. They no longer employ inversions of words and phrases, nor cultivate the stock poetical terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic license. They no longer tolerate clichés such as whenas, o'er, whatime, dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, main, taen, athwart, e'en, f

emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, and as a result they fall below even the old New England poets whom they despise. A poet like Longfellow may be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of such human interest as Evangeline, presents an idea against war as in

opponents of the free verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's productions, are often right; these productions are not

he poets of eminence to-day is o

ry that is distinctly American. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man first. A great idea like a passage in the Song of Myself could have been written by and can be appreciat

will be able to tell what nationality the poem represents. No one has better shown the hollowness of the claimants for nationalism than James Russell Lowell in two essays on nationality

presents the mode of thinking and feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in the soil, be an indigenous product, depict native customs or a provincial life; it may depict certain types of heroes, and glory in the country of its birth, and describe its richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is universal, though it may be colored by national traits, though one nation may feel more keenly, or indulge a certain emotion more frequently than others. The heart and the head, the emotions and the mind, rule

ke imported fruit tastes as well to the m

f recording his own individuality, while Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a Whitman rather than a Lowell

ist-but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of the a

ation which gave us such fine prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's Areopagitica, Locke's Letters on Toleration, Jeremy Taylor's Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, Mill's Liberty and Morley's Compromise. But Whitman was the first American poet who taking his cue from American political documents e

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dieval Hebrew poetry is Prof. Israel Davidson o