The Literature of Ecstasy

hat overburden him. We have considerably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose or verse, in dialogue or narrative. We be

(1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him, while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity and fear, holding men in bondage, we

e in the preface to Samson Agonistes. Milton properly understood Aristotle's meaning of the function of tragedy. It was to "temper

hed in 1857, that any literary work telling of unhappy events has a homeopathic effect on the reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually suffer, the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within us. Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his History of Aesthetics, believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to admit that even Vanity Fair and Cousin Bet

onally and sympathizing with them. Since the novel or lyric poem depicts human sorrow, and the reader is purged by reading the

al prose rhetoric and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of tragedy the entire episode in Hardy's Return of the Native, of the death of Eustace's mother? Hardy's tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the Greek playwrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements o

ture and is a forerunner of Freud. He however refers only to the cathars

then ecstasy. We may say as Nietzsche did, that tragic art is the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysius,

merican Journal of Psychology for April, 1912. Wittels shows that the unconscious unethical desires break into consciousness and cause tragedy. He points out that the Greeks were purified of pent up emotions in the theater, and that they identified the demons of their inner self in the actors. He also says that the Greek drama cannot any longer talk as

at in fact poems are even composed in dreams. Thus, the Bible itself is authority for the fact that all the prophets received th

rned with the interpretation of dreams. Ibn Ezra thought that it was just in the sleeping state that the use of thought and imagination was greatest, for then the soul loses consciousness of things, the body and senses are at rest and only the common sense, which the critic uses really as synonymous with the unconscious, is active. He quotes a Hebrew philoso

erpretation is the science of hidden things communicated by God. The poet also composes verses in dreams, often because he does this in waking life, for many people carry on in

braham Ibn Daud, Moses Maimomides, and Levi ben Gerson also dev

e has had in life. He writes a poem like Epipsychidion, to build himself a home where he has ideal love, because he is not satisfied with his married life. He writes a

conscious. The poem is usually a product of the day-dream, which is related to the dream of sleep, for both species of drea

critics. In the middle ages many poems were cast in the form of dreams. The allegory was generally a dream. Who can doubt that the Divine Comedy and Pil

selves. Their dabbling with trifles is indicative of an inability or lack of courage to think and

uld make the reader weep he must weep himself, is true. Yet we have often failed to recognize that poetry is a genuine

tim of social abuses. He voices complaints about the unjust system and its tyrannical sway. He shows himself and others suffering in its coils. He dreams a vision of a more beautiful and just system of society where ne

become a reformer, but he recognizes social wrongs resulting from custom or stupidity or downright wickedness. Person

at were bursting within him and cures himself of incipient neurosis. I have shown that the view was not wholly originated by Freud, but stated by various English critics like Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb and Kingsley. There are several other Englishmen who held

s. Further, Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, Daudet, Holmes, Lowell, Poe and Hearn have left us written evidence of their belief that poetry emanates fr

osen theme. He depended chiefly on inspiration. His book was praised by Dante G. Rossetti, and forms the subject of an essay by the poet James Thomson, called "A Strange Book" in Biographical and Critical Studies. Emerson had also praised this physician, who was an authority on Blake and Swedenb

. Again, no art dispenses altogether with the poet's use of artistic judgment, no matter how much an improvisation that art is. I do not believe that even Coleridge's famous Kubla Khan was actually composed in a dream, but that it was merely suggested by a dream.[187-A] He fashioned the form consciously, that is the rhyme and metre. The substance of the poem is, however, always fr

ingly fabulous, yet apparently true stories of improvisation feats by Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised in different metres, the Arabic poets in competition would compose alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes the poet would improvise a short poem on the basis of any opening verse given to him. We remember the story of Harun al Rashid who

Oxford, and the author of a most widely read Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the eighteen-thirties, in Latin. These were published in 1844 under the title of De Poeticae vi Medica. They were translated into English fo

up emotions in the individual and argues that this is the natural conclusion from his definition. He divided poets into two classes-primary and secondary. In the first class he put those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In the second class he put imitators

ed that poetry was a sublimation of the poet's surcharged emotions and that the poet healed himself, therapeutically treating himself by writing. He was really developing at length Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy as purging the audience of pity and fear. Aristotle was referring however

t this does not necessarily mean overcharged with grief. For it expresses people who are overflowing with joy or any emotion. It covers what Nietzsche called ecstasy, and especially the ecstasy of love or sexual excitement. It covers the desire for beauty which, as Nietzsche again saw, possessed a

d seriousness, and that it was not merely a metrical plaything. He per

nd Theocritus among the secondary poets; nor does every personal poet belong to the primary class, for minor poets are often personal. Poets must, to be in the first class, voice a very compelling e

er believed, but an expression necessary to relieve both poet and reader. Its origin is not in play but in the desire to heal oneself and create a re

ch David Masson reviewed. In chapters in his greater book, on "The Imagination," "The Hidden Soul," "The Play of Thought" and "The Secrecy of Art," he anticipated many of the modern discoveries of art in connection with the unconscious. He saw that man leads a hidden inner life of which he is unaware and that th

, it is passion that works out of sight. Imagination is the unconscious. It suggests not only the power of figuring to ourselves the shows of sense, but also that of imagery or the comparison of shows. It does not differ from reason, but shows the process of reason working automatically. It is play of thought, it is hidden soul. It combines s

he knew both were the products of creative imagination. Of the ancients, it was only Aristotle who, defining poetry as imitation, saw that he must in

ction of the imagination, but as the term, like poetry, has been so much abused and misunderstoo

lly mean nothing more than the introduction of numerous figures of speech; others confuse it with the sportive play of the author with supernatural machinery in his work. To others imagination suggests something that is opposed to the convictions of the intellect and to the moral faculty. Eve

er the universe, showing that he had the conception of the ecstatic element in the poet's make-up and work. The poet gives shape to the forms of unknown things bodied forth by imagination, he gives a local habitation and a name to airy nothing. Shakespeare recognizes the fact that imagination is related to the dream when he says that one of the tricks of imagination is that if it apprehends a joy, it com

instead of having confused it with song and dancing the critics would have taken it in its real significance as excited speech, we would have had less misunderstanding about its nature. The lover of to-day who tells his emotions to his love, or confides them to a friend, the bereaved person who relate

he depth of the ideas therein. Similarly, the person who is moved to prayer spontaneously by some religious experience or private passion and utters his words in a natural manner or reduces them to writing, is creating poetry. The writers

ween the average man and the great poet. They both are subject to emotions, have imagination, and both express their emotions in some manner. The only diff

been under the impression that the poet was a different creature from the rest of mankind, subject to a livelier imagination, or intenser emotions. He is no different; on the contrary, there are many people who never wrote a line who are more emotional and imaginativ

in with dance, music and song, an opinion that is wrong nevertheless. In fact, most pha

painful crises which are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a great idea, nor dance to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and Balzac are poets and yet they are far away from dancing, singing or music. Though most good singers are poets, one does not have

e Lucretius's Nature of Things, or a novel in verse like Aurora Leigh is not related to song,

were supposed to be the first function of the poets. Epics and ballads are cited in proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are thought to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who were also magicians and hurled them as potent forces against the enemy. Thomas Peacock believed eulogies constituted the first poetry of the human race. Then the proverb and parable have their devotees, as the first imaginative representation of the common thinking of the earliest people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to the use of verse patterns. One could go on naming various theories that have been advanced as to what kind of poetry is earliest; there is the poem which designates the awak

subject to multifarious emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, in speech, later writing them down in prose and finally in some verse pattern. Some of these emotions were originall

n poetry. We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has be

in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or reader. It is true, in early times the religious and martial emotions were much expressed, but this does not prove that religious or warlike feelings alone gave ri

ecially since early man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and wild animals. One should add that the pangs of the loss of one's mate, the grief resulting from being worsted in the battle for the female, were other contributing causes of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of poetry was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament of some kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry ever since. Grief is the source of poetry. Note the number of wailing poems in Irish and Scotch literature where the death

The savage wailed in public as the poet does. Our novelists still do unavoidably the same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the death

nglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine elegy as The Wanderer and such a beautiful dream poem as The Ph?nix. It is a great mistake to think that personal poetry is of modern growth, dating from Villon. It has been m

osition of his poem were at work in the production of the most crude savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression leading to the utterance

jectivity of the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon the different grades of the objectivation of the will as fixed. The result is that he considers the peculiar end of all the fine arts "to elucidate the objectivation of will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as the dumb unconscious tendency of t

efeated in his blind and impotent desires. No one denies that poetry must and always will portray man in s

hilate the will to live. He failed to see that much of this tragic li

, the reading of sad poetry relieves us. As Emerson said, "Poetry is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." The toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's Germinal or Hauptmann's Weavers, or Sinclair's Jungle, and his emotions are discharged. It is true he may be driven to action, but the poet has nothing to do with that. The lover, unhappy in his love, fin

ontests like baseball, football and prize fights usually help people to express and relieve surcharged emotions. The love for cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin in a desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has

e derive aesthetic satisfaction from contemplating the web or the hive they build, or the bird gets artistic pleasure from the song it sings or hears, or any animal may win sympathy from another by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and ideas in words in an endurable work of art so as to reliev

ists for sensations and we get our sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment and creation of poetry. The unlettered savage has his craving for poetry satisfied in his dancing, and war cries, in religion and tribal customs. The child h

motions and ideas that seek expression, and i

rning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay," Ch. 20, v. 9. David also said, "My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue," Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made resolut

TNO

gen uber d. Aristotlei

lege, Philadelphia, has promised us a complete translation from the Arabic manuscrip

Husik's Medieval

eams and Poetry is a magnif

Bergson, who does not believe poet

ind 'which ecstasy is very cunning in.'" Hazlitt On Poetry. "The imaginative faculty (has) the