ESSENTIALS OF POETRY CHAPTER I THE BALANCE OF QUALITIES I MODERN literary criticism has busied itself much with the definition of poetry. Here was a problem essayed by Aristotle, treated from varying points of view by the Roman rhetoricians, by the critics of the Renascence, by the rule-mongers of the neo-classical period; yet, when, over a hundred years ago, criticism and the appreciation of literature entered on a new phase, a sound basis in the form of a clear understanding of the essential qualities of poetry was still found to be lacking. The attempts of Wordsworth and of Coleridge came as near success as those of any of their predecessors; yet these failed of any wide acceptance among their contemporaries; and the critics of the later nineteenth century continued the quest with unabated zeal. No general agreement, however, can be said to have been arrived at; and recently the discussion has tended to sheer off in two different directions, leaving the main issue for the moment unsettled. Just as, in the Elizabethan time, Sir Philip Sidney ignored the question of the essential nature of poetry, and, assuming that to be known, sought to ward off the attacks of the Puritans by a dithyramb in celebration of the poet's high aims and glorious achievements, so the writer of to-day meets contemporary interests either by turning aside to search for the physiological basis of all æsthetic enjoyment, poetry included; or, taking poetry as coextensive with rhythmical or metrical utterance, pursues the trail of origins into the misty regions of primitive culture. Contributions of much scientific and historic interest have already been made by scholars along both of these lines; but for the common reader of poetry, eager for an insight that will clarify and intensify his pleasure, something less remote from his immediate conditions is still to be desired. A final definition of poetry is not to be expected, now or at any future time. For poetry is not simple, but a compound of various elements; and the relative importance of these elements, even the leadership among them, varies from age to age with the changes of taste and prevailing temperament that characterize the lettered as much as the fickle multitude. They vary not only from age to age, but from class to class, from group to group, and from man to man. The men of the age of Queen Anne demanded and responded to stimuli widely different from those that had stirred their forefathers under Elizabeth, or those that were to stir their descendants in the days of Wordsworth and Scott; the men who cared for the Lyrical Ballads were, for the most part, different in taste and temperament from those that acclaimed The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Yet this is not to say that what was poetry for one was not poetry for the other, or to run to the extreme that denies the existence of all permanent criteria. The dilemma here suggested has often been stated, and the history of criticism may be read as an alternation between the men who held, in effect, that poetry is one thing, what the majority like, what the elect like, or, oftenest, what I like, - and those who abandoned as hopeless the search for a standard of judgment, and were fain to admit that what any man found to be poetry was poetry to him. What is here proposed is a way out of this dilemma. If poetry be regarded not as a simple product with one essential element, other qualities being merely accidental, but as a composite of a limited number of elements, whose proportions are variable but whose presence is constant, it is possible to face the facts of the variations of taste and of appeal without losing faith in some identity of substance. This will not, of course, give us such a standard of judgment as will enable us to make an absolute ranking of all the poets of the world; for such a ranking involves a degree of stability of taste and temperament that no public is likely to reach, nor, indeed, that any individual is likely to maintain. But it will make it possible to state with some degree of intelligibility the causes why a given poem or an individual poet has appealed to a certain audience, and why a given age and nation has produced a certain type of poetry. Further, in those cases where the consensus of all ages and all types of critic affirms a great master or a great masterpiece, it will become illuminating to observe the relative proportions in which the constituent elements of poetry are there to be found; and a possibility arises of drawing therefrom criteria for the testing of contemporary judgments and the correction of individual taste. II The labels attached to schools and periods in the history of literature are convenient devices for marking off certain broad general distinctions. But their use often results in a kind of misconception analogous to that produced through defining poetry by isolating one of its elements. The definitions given of such words as Classical and Romantic, or Medieval and Renascence, have often led the student to view literary phenomena as possessing a simplicity quite alien to the real nature of such things. Were such words used only to describe tendencies, the danger might not be so great; but when they are applied to periods it should always be remembered that what they describe is not the whole content of the period, but at best only its dominating characteristic. For the qualities and tendencies indicated by such terms as those just instanced are permanent and persistent through |