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A Study of Poetry

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Title: A Study of Poetry

Author: Bliss Perry


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8221]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A STUDY OF POETRY ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Bidwell
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




A STUDY OF POETRY

by
BLISS PERRY

_Professor of English Literature in Harvard University_

Author of "A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION," "WALT WHITMAN,"
"THE AMERICAN MIND," etc.



TO

M. S. P.



PREFACE

The method of studying poetry which I have followed in this book was
sketched some years ago in my chapter on "Poetry" in _Counsel Upon the
Reading of Books_. My confidence that the genetic method is the natural
way of approaching the subject has been shared by many lovers of poetry.
I hope, however, that I have not allowed my insistence upon the threefold
process of "impression, transforming imagination, and expression" to
harden into a set formula. Formulas have a certain dangerous usefulness
for critics and teachers, but they are a very small part of one's training
in the appreciation of poetry.

I have allotted little or no space to the specific discussion of epic and
drama, as these types are adequately treated in many books. Our own
generation is peculiarly attracted by various forms of the lyric, and in
Part Two I have devoted especial attention to that field.

While I hope that the book may attract the traditional "general reader,"
I have also tried to arrange it in such a fashion that it may be utilized
in the classroom. I have therefore ventured, in the Notes and
Illustrations and Appendix, to suggest some methods and material for the
use of students.

I wish to express my obligations to Professor R. M. Alden, whose
_Introduction to Poetry_ and _English Verse_ I have used in my own Harvard
courses in poetry. His views of metre have probably influenced mine even
more than I am aware. The last decade, which has witnessed such an
extraordinary revival of interest in poetry, has produced many valuable
contributions to poetic theory. I have found Professor Fairchild's _Making
of Poetry_ particularly suggestive. Attention is called, in the Notes and
Bibliography, to many other recent books on the subject.

Professors A. S. Cook of Yale and F. B. Snyder of Northwestern University
have been kind enough to read in manuscript certain chapters of this book,
and Dr. P. F. Baum of Harvard has assisted me most courteously. I am
indebted to several fellow-writers for their consent to the use of
extracts from their books, particularly to Brander Matthews for a passage
from _These Many Years_ and to Henry Osborn Taylor for a passage from his
_Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_.

I wish also to thank the publishers who have generously allowed me to use
brief quotations from copyrighted books, especially Henry Holt & Co. for
permission to use a quotation and drawing from William James's
_Psychology_, and The Macmillan Company for permission to borrow from John
La Farge's delightful _Considerations on Painting_.

B. P.



CONTENTS

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

I.     A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

II.    THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

III.   THE POET'S IMAGINATION

IV.    THE POET'S WORDS

V.     RHYTHM AND METRE

VI.    RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE


PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

VII.   THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

VIII.  RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

IX.    RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

X.     THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX



A STUDY OF POETRY

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

  "Sidney and Shelley pleaded this cause.
  Because they spoke, must we be dumb?"
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY, _A New Defense of Poetry_



A STUDY OF POETRY

CHAPTER I


A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

It is a gray day in autumn. I am sitting at my desk, wondering how to
begin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the window
a woman is contentedly kneeling on the upturned brown earth of her
tulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbs
for next spring's blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's verses
about "Planting Bulbs"? Probably not. But I find myself dropping the
procrastinating pen, and murmuring some of the lines:

  "Setting my bulbs a-row
    In cold earth under the grasses,
  Till the frost and the snow
    Are gone and the Winter passes--

       *       *       *       *       *

  "Turning the sods and the clay
    I think on the poor sad people
  Hiding their dead away
    In the churchyard, under the steeple.

  "All poor women and men,
    Broken-hearted and weeping,
  Their dead they call on in vain,
    Quietly smiling and sleeping.

  "Friends, now listen and hear,
    Give over crying and grieving,
  There shall come a day and a year
    When the dead shall be as the living.

  "There shall come a call, a foot-fall,
    And the golden trumpeters blowing
  Shall stir the dead with their call,
    Bid them be rising and going.

  "Then in the daffodil weather,
    Lover shall run to lover;
  Friends all trooping together;
    Death and Winter be over.

  "Laying my bulbs in the dark,
    Visions have I of hereafter.
  Lip to lip, breast to breast, hark!
    No more weeping, but laughter!"

Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do you
not write an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of looking
out of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes over
me, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginning
the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this book is to
set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: its
power, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that of a woman
planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of the
dead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and brown earth into
beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheer
music; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and haunting
fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is changed into laughter and
autumnal premonitions of death into assurance of life, and the narrow
paths of individual experience are widened into those illimitable spaces
where the imagination rules. Poetry does all this, assuredly. But how? And
why? That is our problem.

"The future of poetry is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there are
few lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the past
of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its
immemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history, poetry
seems to have occupied the attention of men, and some of the finest
spirits in every race that has attained to civilization have devoted
themselves to its production, or at least given themselves freely to the
enjoyment of reciting and reading verse, and of meditating upon its
significance. A consciousness of this rich human background should
accompany each new endeavor to examine the facts about poetry and to
determine its essential nature. The facts are indeed somewhat complicated,
and the nature of poetry, in certain aspects of it, at least, will remain
as always a mystery. Yet in that very complication and touch of mystery
there is a fascination which has laid its spell upon countless generations
of men, and which has been deepened rather than destroyed by the advance
of science and the results of scholarship. The study of folklore and
comparative literature has helped to explain some of the secrets of
poetry; the psychological laboratory, the history of criticism, the
investigation of linguistics, the modern developments in music and the
other arts, have all contributed something to our intelligent enjoyment of
the art of poetry and to our sense of its importance in the life of
humanity. There is no field of inquiry where the interrelations of
knowledge are more acutely to be perceived. The beginner in the study of
poetry may at once comfort himself and increase his zest by remembering
that any real training which he has already had in scientific observation,
in the habit of analysis, in the study of races and historic periods, in
the use of languages, in the practice or interpretation of any of the fine
arts, or even in any bodily exercise that has developed his sense of
rhythm, will be of ascertainable value to him in this new study.

But before attempting to apply his specific knowledge or aptitude to the
new field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the wider
questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these questions
has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general field
of Aesthetics.


_1. The Study of Poetry and the Study of Aesthetics_

The Greeks invented a convenient word to describe the study of poetry:
"Poetics." Aristotle's famous fragmentary treatise bore that title, and it
was concerned with the nature and laws of certain types of poetry and with
the relations of poetry to the other arts. For the Greeks assumed, as we
do, that poetry is an art: that it expresses emotion through words
rhythmically arranged. But as soon as they began to inquire into the
particular kind of emotion which is utilized in poetry and the various
rhythmical arrangements employed by poets, they found themselves compelled
to ask further questions. How do the other arts convey feeling? What
arrangement or rhythmic ordering of facts do they use in this process?
What takes place in us as we confront the work of art, or, in other words,
what is our reaction to an artistic stimulus?

For an answer to such wider questions as these, we moderns turn to the
so-called science of Aesthetics. This word, derived from the Greek
_aisthanomai_ (to perceive), has been defined as "anything having to do
with perception by the senses." But it was first used in its present sense
by the German thinker Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century.
He meant by it "the theory of the fine arts." It has proved a convenient
term to describe both "The Science of the Beautiful" and "The Philosophy
of Beauty"; that is, both the analysis and classification of beautiful
things as well as speculation as to the origin and nature of Beauty
itself. But it should be borne in mind that aesthetic inquiry and answer
may precede by thousands of years the use of the formal language of
aesthetic theory. Mr. Kipling's "Story of Ung" cleverly represents the
cave-men as discussing the very topics which the contemporary studio and
classroom strive in vain to settle,--in vain, because they are the eternal
problems of art. Here are two faces, two trees, two colors, one of which
seems preferable to the other. Wherein lies the difference, as far as the
objects themselves are concerned? And what is it which the preferable face
or tree or color stirs or awakens within us as we look at it? These are
what we call aesthetic questions, but a man or a race may have a delicate
and sure sense of beauty without consciously asking such questions at all.
The awareness of beautiful objects in nature, and even the ability to
create a beautiful work of art, may not be accompanied by any gift for
aesthetic speculation. Conversely, many a Professor of aesthetics has
contentedly lived in an ugly house and you would not think that he had
ever looked at river or sky or had his pulses quickened by a tune.
Nevertheless, no one can turn the pages of a formal History of Aesthetics
without being reminded that the oldest and apparently the most simple
inquiries in this field may also be the subtlest and in a sense the most
modern. For illustration, take the three philosophical contributions of
the Greeks to aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet:
[Footnote: Bosanquet, _History of Aesthetic_, chap. 3.]
(1) the conception that art deals with images, not realities, i.e. with
aesthetic "semblance" or things as they appear to the artist;
(2) the conception that art consists in "imitation," which they carried to
an absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation must be less "valuable"
than the thing imitated;
(3) the conception that beauty consists in certain formal relations, such
as symmetry, harmony of parts--in a word, "unity in variety."

Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice the
first of these conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "free
verse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value to
the student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory is
sometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion contained in
Aristotle's _Poetics_, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in the
indirect stimulus to his sympathy and taste. For he must survey the
widespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods of
artistic creation in the Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling for
landscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the emergence
of the sense of the "significant" or individually "characteristic" in
the work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself with Kant or Hegel or
Coleridge in philosophical theories about the nature of beauty, or to
follow the curious analyses of experimental aesthetics in modern
laboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions to aesthetic stimuli are
cunningly registered and the effects of lines and colors and tones upon
the human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need not
trouble himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. The
chief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate preoccupation of
men with beautiful objects and to remember that any inquiry into the
nature and laws of poetry will surely lead him into a deeper curiosity as
to the nature and manifestations of aesthetic feeling in general.


_2. The Impulse to Artistic Production_

Furthermore, no one can ask himself how it is that a poem comes into being
unless he also raises the wider question as to the origin and working of
the creative impulse in the other arts. It is clear that there is a gulf
between the mere sense of beauty--such as is possessed by primitive man,
or, in later stages of civilization, by the connoisseur in the fine
arts--and the concrete work of art. Thousands enjoy the statue, the
symphony, the ode; not one in a thousand can produce these objects.
Mere connoisseurship is sterile. "The ability to produce one fine line,"
said Edward FitzGerald, "transcends all the Able-Editor ability in this
ably-edited universe." What is the impulse which urges certain persons to
create beautiful objects? How is it that they cross the gulf which
separates the enjoyer from the producer?

It is easier to ask this question than to find a wholly satisfactory
answer to it. Plato's explanation, in the case of the poet, is simple
enough: it is the direct inspiration of the divinity,--the "god" takes
possession of the poet. Perhaps this may be true, in a sense, and we shall
revert to it later, but first let us look at some of the conditions for
the exercise of the creative impulse, as contemporary theorists have
endeavored to explain them.

Social relations, surely, afford one of the obvious conditions for the
impulse to art. The hand-clapping and thigh-smiting of primitive savages
in a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before admiring
spectators, the chorus of primitive ballads,--the crowd repeating and
altering the refrains,--the rhythmic song of laboring men and of women at
their weaving, sailors' "chanties," the celebration of funeral rites,
religious processional and pageant, are all expressions of communal
feeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in widest
commonalty spread"--which has inspired, in Greece and Italy, some of the
greatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has proceeded,
this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in the
presence of the individual artist only. We see Keats sitting at his garden
table writing the "Ode to Autumn," the lonely Shelley in the Cascine at
Florence composing the "West Wind," Wordsworth pacing the narrow walk
behind Dove Cottage and mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writing
music. But the creative act thus performed in solitude has a singular
potency, after all, for arousing that communal feeling which in the moment
of creation the artist seems to escape. What he produces in his loneliness
the world does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomes
known, really unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its function
is social consolidation."

Tolstoy made so much of this "transmission of emotion," this "infectious"
quality of art as a means of union among men, that he reduced a good case
to an absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking that if a given work
of art does not infect the spectator--and preferably the uneducated
"peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art at all. He
overlooked the obvious truth that there are certain types of difficult
or intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly in
poetry--which so tax the attention and the analytical and reflective
powers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured spectator
or hearer simply unaware of the presence of beauty. Debussy's music,
Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were not
written for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to him
nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his case
with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting upon
emotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative instinct is
undeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the actual work
of production and in the resultant object, and something of this pleasure
in the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the competent
observer. The permanent vitality of a work of art does consist in its
capacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One has only to think
of Gray's "Elegy" and the delight which it has afforded to generations of
men.

Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally it with the
"play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom
of play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in this
sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself.
He is wholly man only when he "plays," that is, when he is free to create.
Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogy
between the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplus
energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles, and that
"playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which seems to characterize
the artist. This analogy is curiously suggestive, though it is
insufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in human artistic
production.

The play theory, again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception of
the Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather
than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of
things; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically or
logically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of the
impressionist painter or the imagist poet illustrates this conception. The
conventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings,
conversations, actions, are all affected by the "_optique du théâtre_"
they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a harmonious
impression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. The
craving for "real" effects upon the stage is anti-aesthetic, like those
gladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw an
unskilful fencer, acting the part of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: the
effect was lifelike, beyond question, but it was shocking.

From this doctrine of aesthetic semblance or "appearance" many thinkers
have drawn the conclusion that the pleasures afforded by art must in their
very nature be disinterested and sharable. Disinterested, because they
consist so largely in delighted contemplation merely. Women on the stage,
said Coquelin, should afford to the spectator "a theatrical pleasure only,
and not the pleasure of a lover." Compare with this the sprightly egotism
of the lyric poet's

  "If she be not so to me,
  What care I how fair she be?"

A certain aloofness is often felt to characterize great art: it is
perceived in the austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples and the
Venus of Melos:

  "And music pours on mortals
  Its beautiful disdain."

The lower pleasures of the senses of taste and touch, it is often pointed
out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory.
Your dinner is _your_ dinner--your exclusive proprietorship of lower
pleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and
radiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they are
sharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, it
is nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute observers
like Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction, but the general
instinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and form and
sound "sharable," because they exist for all who can appreciate them.
The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not lessened, but rather
increased, by the coexistent happiness of others in the same object.

There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiar
importance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse toward
artistic creation always works along lines of order. The creative impulse
may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as many
philosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy which is
somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage,
have now and again possessed this vital creative power. They have been
able to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:

  "I have a bit of fiat in my soul,
  And can myself create my little world."

The little world which their imagination has created may be represented
only by a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece of
bone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be anything more than
the mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is ordered
play or labor. It follows a method. It betrays  remeditation. It is the
expression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler usually
whittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something.
His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a
pattern--invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from other
patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from
his tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood.
But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from his sense of
making something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern or
purpose or "design" is recognized by others the maker's pleasure is
heightened, sharable. For he has accomplished the miracle: he has thrown
the raw material of feeling into form--and that form itself yields
pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it:
made it expressive of something. All the "arts of design" among primitive
races show this pattern-instinct.

But the impulse toward an ordered expression of feeling is equally
apparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking of
hands or feet in unison, the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regular
beat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contest
as they break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves of
cheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some one
starts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in a
circle, all serve to illustrate the law that as feeling gains in intensity
it tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of his
marvelous moments of insight, is the result of "a more than usual state of
emotion" combined "with more than usual order."

What has been said about play and sharable pleasure and the beginning of
design has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin:
[Footnote: Article on "The Fine Arts" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.]

"There are some things which we do because we must; these are our
necessities. There are other things which we do because we ought; these
are our duties. There are other things which we do because we like; these
are our play. Among the various kinds of things done by men only because
they like, the fine arts are those of which the results afford to many
permanent and disinterested delight, and of which the performance, calling
for premeditated skill, is capable of regulation up to a certain point,
but that point passed, has secrets beyond the reach and a freedom beyond
the restraint of rules."


_3. "Form" and "Significance" in the Arts_

If the fine arts, then, deal with the ordered or harmonious expression of
feeling, it is clear that any specific work of art may be regarded, at
least theoretically, from two points of view. We may look at its "outside"
or its "inside"; that is to say at its ordering of parts, its pattern, its
"form," or else at the feeling or idea which it conveys. This distinction
between form and content, between expression and that which is expressed,
is temptingly convenient. It is a useful tool of analysis, but it is
dangerous to try to make it anything more than that. If we were looking at
a water-pipe and the water which flows through it, it would be easy to
keep a clear distinction between the form of the iron pipe, and its
content of water. But in certain of the fine arts very noticeably, such as
music, and in a diminished degree, poetry, and more or less in all of
them, the form is the expression or content. A clear-cut dissection of the
component elements of outside and inside, of water-pipe and water within
it, becomes impossible. Listening to music is like looking at a brook;
there is no inside and outside, it is all one intricately blended complex
of sensation. Music is a perfect example of "embodied feeling," as
students of aesthetics term it, and the body is here inseparable from the
feeling. But in poetry, which is likewise embodied feeling, it is somewhat
easier to attempt, for purposes of logical analysis, a separation of the
component elements of thought (i.e. "content") and form. We speak
constantly of the "idea" of a poem as being more or less adequately
"expressed," that is, rendered in terms of form. The actual form of a
given lyric may or may not be suited to its mood,
[Footnote: Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's "Reverie of Poor
Susan."]
or the poet may not have been a sufficiently skilful workman to achieve
success in the form or "pattern" which he has rightly chosen.

Even in poetry, then, the distinction between inside and outside,
content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, like
painting and sculpture, it often becomes highly interesting and
instructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The French
painter Millet, for instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil who
showed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you to
say?" The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance." The English
painter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same fashion: "I paint
first of all because I have something to say.... My intention has not been
so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest great
thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and kindle all
that is best and noblest in humanity.... My work is a protest against the
modern opinion that Art should have nothing to say intellectually."

On the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have given
assent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of painting.
According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges a
Persian rug--by the perfection of its formal beauty, its harmonies of
line, color and texture, its "unity in variety." It is evident that the
men who hold this opinion are emphasizing form in the work of art, and
that Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinking
primarily of expression, and the other of that which is expressed. The
important point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this divergence
of opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure form,
or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been called,--such as a
rectangle, a square, a cube,--carries a certain element of association
which gives it a degree of significance. There is no absolutely bare or
blank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it is
intimately connected with our experience.
[Footnote: See Bosanquet, _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_, pp. 19, 29, 39,
and Santayana, _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 83.]
It cannot be a mere question of balance, parallelism and abstract "unity
in variety." The acanthus design in architectural ornament, the Saracenic
decoration on a sword-blade, aim indeed primarily at formal beauty and
little more. The Chinese laundryman hands you a red slip of paper covered
with strokes of black ink in strange characters. It is undecipherable to
you, yet it possesses in its sheer charm of color and line, something of
beauty, and the freedom and vigor of the strokes are expressive of
vitality. It is impossible that Maud's face should really have been

  "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
   Dead perfection, no more."

Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist, the
artist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, that
his product lacks interest and proves tedious or nonsensical. There is
"nonsense-verse," as we shall see later, which fulfills every condition
for pure formal beauty in poetry. Yet it is not poetry, but only
nonsense-verse.

Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the work
of art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that
reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They are
associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less
obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest.
They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with
representative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes.
Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The Return of
the Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down,
as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which the
composer has striven to make it carry.

There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed too
far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be
emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between the
elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This
question has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing.
The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning,
Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon it.

Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough
stroke of common sense:

                            "Is it so pretty
  You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
  Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"
[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]

He tried again in the well-known passage from _The Ring and the Book_:

  "So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
   Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
   So note by note bring music from your mind
   Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--
   So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
   Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."

How Whistler, the author of _Ten O'Clock_ and the creator of exquisitely
lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's
carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History of
Aesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of
form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or
individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to
the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium."
That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as you
observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which you
are working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But the
artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium of expression;
if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws of
music or poetry in order to attempt that valiant enterprise of saving a
soul.


_4. The Man in the Work of Art_

Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is baffling
to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspect
of the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It is
this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has put
there. _What he has put in_ is our content question; _what shape he has
put it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical language:
"A man is the middle term between content and expression." There is
doubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative power, but this
is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's material
as such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whatever
other medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of this
particular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, to
think in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time,
as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go."
The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and
"space-arts" in his _Laokoon_ consisted in the emphasis laid upon the
specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying
opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But
though human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible
possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after
all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the
brain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as it
passes through his "shop," in some such way as iron is transformed into
steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a "transformer" alters the
wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low
pressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in a
somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the
senses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking
illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the
imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter.
But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artists
and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of
the artist's mind.

"Painting is the expression of certain sensations," said Carolus Duran.
"You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you,
but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the
mind.... Take careful account of the substances that you must
render--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce
nature _as you feel it_, then you falsify it. _Painting is not done with
the eyes, but with the brain_."

W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is not nature....
The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. _It must pass
through the mind of the artist and be changed_. Art is nature reflected
through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling,
passion of the spirit that reflects it."

In John La Farge's _Considerations on Painting_, a little book which is
full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many
passages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of the
artist's view of the world." La Farge points out that "drawing from life
is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is
merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings,
former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and
through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire
educated part of our nature."

One of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length:
[Footnote: _Considerations on Painting_, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]

  "I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,
  artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all
  the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely
  different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they
  wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they
  were well known to the public are concerned.

  "What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was
  merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay
  before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in
  any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention
  to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to
  express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds
  rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and
  meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us.
  Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in
  shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of
  drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually
  indicates--as you know, or ought to know--whether we are looking far
  or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more
  nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was
  smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and
  down--that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of
  sky above--was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with
  different precision and different attention. In one picture the open
  sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the
  upper sky was of no consequence--it was the clouds and the mountains
  that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say,
  the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked
  upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though
  the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously
  preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his
  neighbour liked.

  "The colour of each painting was different--the vivacity of colour
  and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole;
  and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen
  of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent
  on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.

  "I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if
  we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first
  desire of expressing _ourselves_, and I think would have been very
  much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And
  we were each one true to nature.... If you ever know how to paint
  somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has
  not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of
  his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is
  outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see
  it--which is yourself."

Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief
sayings of the critics, like Taine's well-known "Art is nature seen
through a temperament," G. L. Raymond's "Art is nature made human," and
Croce's "Art is the expression of impressions." These painters and critics
agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts as
a "transformer." It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these
reports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that the
most personal and essential function of the  artist's brain is to be
found.

Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used in
handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a
nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually
drawn after this fashion:

Sensory stimulus           Nerve-centre          Motor Reaction
________________________________O______________________________
  -------------------->                 -------------------->

The process is thus described by William James:
[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, American Science Series, p. 91.
Henry Holt.]

  "The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as
  gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the
  waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The
  commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges
  through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the
  animal and with the irritant applied."

The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind
leg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving the
spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the
acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus,
consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the
law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the
sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be
multiplied indefinitely.
[Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale,
quoted in Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.]
It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened
cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink
upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a question
of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary
reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow
comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces _In Memoriam_."
[Footnote: _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin
Company.]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the
person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a
preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to
"expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he
must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream of
consciousness," sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect
modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through
the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed
"impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the
temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which
has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek
"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete,
a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An
American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece
of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament
has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it
has been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. A
certain stimulus or "impression," an organism which reshapes impressions,
and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the terms
permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which
seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately
fascinating than in poetry.



CHAPTER II

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

    "The more I read and re-read the works of the great poets,
    and the more I study the writings of those who have some
    Theory of Poetry to set forth, the more am I convinced that
    the question _What is Poetry?_ can be properly answered only if
    we make _What it does_ take precedence of _How it does it_."
        J. A. STEWART, _The Myths of Plato_

In the previous chapter we have attempted a brief survey of some of the
general aesthetic questions which arise whenever we consider the form and
meaning of the fine arts. We must now try to look more narrowly at the
special field of poetry, asking ourselves how it comes into being, what
material it employs, and how it uses this material to secure those
specific effects which we all agree in calling "poetical," however widely
we may differ from one another in our analysis of the means by which the
effect is produced.

Let us begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, like
each of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor's
line accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongs
to it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always difficult and
sometimes impossible. But the field itself is admittedly "there," in all
its richness and beauty, however bitterly the surveyors may quarrel about
the boundary lines. (It is well to remember that professional surveyors do
not themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How much
map-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping and
classifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, between
artist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the arts
on the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relative
complexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation to
imitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one cares
particularly to-day about such matters of precedence--as if the arts were
walking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. On the other
hand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of the
distinction made by Lessing in his _Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting and
Poetry_; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression,
according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say,
the "time-arts"--like poetry and music--deal primarily with actions that
succeed one another in time. The space-arts--painting, sculpture,
architecture--deal primarily with bodies that coexist in space. Hence
there are some subjects that belong naturally in the "painting" group, and
others that belong as naturally in the "poetry" group. The artist should
not "confuse the genres," or, to quote Whistler again, he should not push
a medium further than it will go. Recent psychology has more or less upset
Lessing's technical theory of vision,
[Footnote: F. E. Bryant, _The Limits of Descriptive Writing_, etc. Ann
Arbor, 1906.]
but it has confirmed the value of his main contention as to the fields
of the various arts.


_1. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice_

An illustration will make this matter clear. Let us take the Greek myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice, which has been utilized by many artists during more
than two thousand years assuredly, and how much longer no one knows.
Virgil told it in the _Georgics_ and Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_. It
became a favorite theme of medieval romance, and whether told in a French
_lai_ or Scottish ballad like "King Orfeo," it still keeps, among all the
strange transformations which it has undergone, "the freshness of the
early world." Let us condense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon
version of Boethius's _De Consolatione Philosophiae_: "There was once a
famous Thracian harper named Orpheus who had a beautiful wife named
Eurydice. She died and went to hell. Orpheus longed sorrowfully for her,
harping so sweetly that the very woods and wild beasts listened to his
woe. Finally, he resolved to seek her in hell and win her back by his
skill. And he played so marvelously there that the King of Hell to reward
him gave him back his wife again, only upon the condition that he should
not turn back to look at her as he led her forth. But, alas, who can
constrain love? When Orpheus came to the boundary of darkness and light,
he turned round to see if his wife was following--and she vanished."

Such was the myth in one of its manifold European forms. It deals
obviously with a succession of events, with actions easily narratable by
means of a "time-art" like poetry. The myth itself is one of fascinating
human interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne had chosen to tell it
in his _Wonder-Book_, we should doubtless speak of it as a "poetic" story.
We should mean, in using that adjective, that the myth contained
sentiment, imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pathos--the qualities
which we commonly associate with poetry--and that Hawthorne, although a
prose writer, had such an exquisite sympathy for Greek stories that his
handling of the material would be as delicate, and the result possibly as
lovely, as if the tale had been told in verse. But if we would realize the
full value of Lessing's distinction, we must turn to one of the countless
verse renderings of the myth. Here we have a succession of actions,
indeed, quite corresponding to those of the prose story. But these images
of action, succeeding one another in time, are now evoked by successive
musical sounds,--the sounds being, as in prose, arbitrary word-symbols of
image and idea,--only that in poetry the sounds have a certain ordered
arrangement which heightens the emotional effect of the images evoked.
Prose writer and poet might mean to tell precisely the same tale, but in
reality they cannot, for one is composing, no matter how cunningly, in the
tunes of prose and the other in the tunes of verse. The change in the
instrument means an alteration in the mental effect.

Now turn to Lessing's other exemplar of the time-arts, the musician--for
musicians as well as poets, painters and sculptors have utilized the myth
of Orpheus and Eurydice. What can the musician do with the theme? Gluck's
opera may serve for answer. He cannot, by the aid of music alone, call up
very definite ideas or images. He cannot tell the Orpheus story clearly to
one who has never heard it. But to one who already knows the tale, a
composer's overture--without stage accessories or singing actors or any
"operatic" devices as such--furnishes in its successions and combinations
of musical sound, without the use of verbal symbols, a unique pleasurable
emotion which strongly and powerfully reinforces the emotions suggested by
the Orpheus myth itself. Certain portions of the story, such as those
relating to the wondrous harping, can obviously be interpreted better
through music than through the medium of any other art.

What can Lessing's "space-arts," sculpture and painting, do with the
material furnished by the Orpheus myth? It is clear that they cannot tell
the whole story, since they are dealing with "bodies that coexist" rather
than with successive actions. They must select some one instant of action
only, and preferably the most significant moment of the whole, the parting
of husband and wife. In the museum at Naples there is the wonderful Greek
treatment of this theme, in sculptured high relief. The sculptor has
chosen the moment of parting. Hermes, the messenger of the gods to recall
Eurydice, has twined his hand gently around the left hand of the woman.
With her right hand she still touches her husband, but the dread instant
is upon them all. The sculptor, representing the persons in three
dimensions, as far as high relief allows, has sufficiently
characterized their faces and figures, and with exquisite sense of rhythm
and balance in his composition has fulfilled every requirement of formal
beauty that marble affords.

In Sir Frederick Leighton's painting of Orpheus and Eurydice and in many
another less famous painter's rendering of the theme, there is likewise
the portrayal of an arrested moment. But the painter represents the
personages and the background in two dimensions. He can separate his
figures more completely than the sculptor, can make their instant of
action more "dramatic," can portray certain objects, such as the
diaphanous robe of Eurydice as she vanishes into mist, which are beyond
the power of the sculptor to represent, and above all he can suggest the
color of the objects themselves, the degree of light and shade, the
"atmosphere" of the whole, in a fashion unapproachable by the rival arts.

The illustration need not be worked out more elaborately here, though the
student may profitably reflect upon the resources of the modern moving
picture--which is a novel combination of the "time" and "space" arts--and
of the mimetic dance, as affording still further opportunities for
expressing the artistic possibilities of the Orpheus story. But the chief
lesson to be learned by one who is attempting in this way to survey the
provinces of the different arts is this: no two of all the artists who
have availed themselves of the Orpheus material have _really had the same
subject_, although the title of each of their productions, if catalogued,
might conveniently be called "Orpheus and Eurydice." Each has had his own
conception of the theme, each his own professional technique in handling
his chosen medium, each his own habits of brain, each, in a word, has
found his own subject. "Are these children who are playing in the
sunlight," said Fromentin, "or is it a place in the sunlight in
which children are playing?" One is a "figure" subject, that is to say,
while the other is a landscape subject.

The whole topic of the "provinces" of the arts becomes hopelessly academic
and sterile if one fails to keep his eye upon the individual artist, whose
free choice of a subject is conditioned solely by his own artistic
interest in rendering such aspects of any theme as his own medium of
expression will allow him to represent. Take one of the most beautiful
objects in nature, a quiet sea. Is this a "painter-like" subject?
Assuredly, yet the etcher has often rendered the effect of a quiet sea in
terms of line, as a pastellist has rendered it in terms of color, and a
musician in terms of tone-feeling, and a poet in terms of tone-feeling
plus thought. Each one of them finds something for himself, selects
his own "subject," from the material presented by the quiet sea, and
whatever he may find belongs to him. We declaim against the confusion of
the genres, the attempt to render in the terms of one art what belongs, as
we had supposed, to another art, and we are often right in our protest.
Yet artists have always been jumping each other's claims, and the sole
test of the lawfulness of the procedure is the success of the result. If
the border-foray of the impressionist or imagist proves successful, well
and good, but a triumphant raid should not be mistaken for the steady
lines of the main campaign.


_2. The Special Field_

What then do we mean by the province of poetry? Simply that there is a
special field in which, for uncounted centuries, poets have produced a
certain kind of artistic effect. Strictly speaking, it is better to say
"poets" rather than "the poet," just as William James confesses that
strictly speaking there is no such thing as "the Imagination," there are
only imaginations. But "the poet" is a convenient expression to indicate a
man functioning _qua_ poet--i.e. a man poetizing; and we shall continue to
use it. When we say that "the poet" in Sir Walter Scott inspires this or
that utterance, while "the novelist" or "the historian" or "the critic" in
him has prompted this or that other utterance, we are within our rights.

The field of poetry, as commonly understood, is that portion of human
feeling which expresses itself through rhythmical and preferably metrical
language. In this field "the poet" labors. The human feeling which he
embodies in verse comes to him originally, as feeling comes to all men, in
connection with a series of mental images. These visual, auditory, motor
or tactile images crowd the stream of consciousness as it sweeps inward to
the brain. There the images are subjected to a process of selection,
modification, transformation.
[Footnote: "The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought
has suffered a transformation since it was an experience." Emerson,
_Shakespeare: The Poet_.]
At some point in the process the poet's images tend to become verbal,--as
the painter's or the musician's do not,--and these verbal images are then
discharged in rhythmical patterns. It is one type of the threefold process
roughly described at the close of Chapter I. What is peculiar to the poet
as compared with other men or other artists is to be traced not so much in
the peculiar nature of his visual, auditory, motor or tactile images--for
in this respect poets differ enormously among one another--as in the
increasingly verbal form of these images as they are reshaped by his
imagination, and in the strongly rhythmical or metrical character of the
final expression.

Let carbon represent the first of the stages, the excited feeling
resulting from sensory stimulus. That is the raw material of poetic
emotion. Let the diamond represent the second stage, the chemical change,
as it were, produced in the mental images under the heat and pressure of
the imagination. The final stage would be represented by the cutting,
polishing and setting of the diamond, by the arrangement of the
transformed and now purely verbal images into effective rhythmical or
metrical designs.

Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed

  "The vision and the faculty divine,
  Though wanting the accomplishment of verse."

Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process already
described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of
every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner
world and the other world." The "faculty divine," into which vision blends
insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions--
as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passion
recollected in tranquillity,"--into words possessing a peculiar life and
power. The "accomplishment of verse" is easier to understand. It is the
expression, by means of these words now pulsating with rhythm--the natural
language of excitement--of whatever the poet has seen and felt, modified
by his imagination. The result is a poem: "embodied feeling."

Browning says to his imaginary poet:

  "Your brains beat into rhythm--you tell
               What we felt only."

There is much virtue, for us, in this rudely vigorous description of "the
poet." Certainly all of us feel, and thus far we are all potential poets.
But according to Browning there is, so to speak, a physiological
difference between the poet's brain and ours. His brain beats into rhythm;
that is the simple but enormous difference in function, and hence it is
that he can tell what we only feel. That is, he becomes a "singer" as well
as "maker," while we, conscious though we may be of the capacity for
intense feeling, cannot embody our feelings in the forms of verse. We may
indeed go so far as to reshape mental images in our heated brains--for all
men do this under excitement, but to sing what we have thus made is denied
to us.


_3. An Illustration from William James_

No one can be more conscious than the present writer of the impossibility
of describing in plain prose the admittedly complicated and mysterious
series of changes by which poetry comes into being. Those readers who find
that even the lines just quoted from Wordsworth and Browning throw little
new light upon the old difficulties, may nevertheless get a bit of help
here by turning back to William James's diagram of the working of the
brain. It will be remembered that in Chapter I we used the simplest
possible chart to represent the sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the
succeeding motor reaction, and we compared the "in-coming" and "out-going"
nerve processes with the function of Impression and Expression in the
arts. But to understand something of what takes place in the making of
poetry we must now substitute for our first diagram the slightly more
complicated one which William James employs to represent, not those lower
nerve-centres which "act from present sensational stimuli alone," but the
hemispheres of the human brain which "act from considerations."
[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, pp. 97, 98. Henry Holt.]
Considerations are images constructed out of past experience, they are
reproductions of what has been felt or witnessed.

  "They are, in short, _remote_ sensations; and the main difference
  between the hemisphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely
  expressed by saying that _the one obeys absent, the other only present,
  objects. The hemispheres would then seem to be the chief seat of
  memory._"

Then follows the accompanying diagram and illustration.

  "If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare
  the nervous system, _C_, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from
  sense-organ to muscle along the line _S... C... M_. The hemisphere, _H_,
  adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass
  when for any reason the direct line is not used.

[Illustration: M ?----- C ?----- H ?----- C ?---- S ]

  "Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth
  beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of delicious rest and coolness
  pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge
  into the muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the
  dangerous repose. But the loop-line being open, part of the current is
  drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarrhal reminiscences,
  which prevail over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and
  pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest more safely."

William James's entire discussion of the value of the hemisphere
"loop-line" as a reservoir of reminiscences is of peculiar suggestiveness
to the student of poetry. For it is along this loop-line of "memories and
ideas of the distant" that poetry wins its generalizing or universalizing
power. It is here that the life of reason enters into the life of mere
sensation, transforming the reports of the nerves into ideas and thoughts
that have coherence and general human significance. It is possible,
certainly, as the experiments of contemporary "imagists" prove, to write
poetry of a certain type without employing the "loop-line." But this is
pure sensorium verse, the report of retinal, auditory or tactile images,
and nothing more. "Response to impressions and representation of those
impressions in their _original isolation_ are the marks of the new poetry.
Response to impressions, _correlation of those impressions into a
connected body of phenomena_, and final interpretation of them as a whole
are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all
literature, whether poetry or prose."
[Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naiveté," _Atlantic_, April,
1916.]
To quote another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not,
except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to
the bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular envelopes or
auditory canals. Their power lies in their freightage of association,
in their tactical position at the focus of converging experience, in
the number and vigor of the occasions in which they have crossed and
re-crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life. ... Sense-impressions
are poetically valuable only in the measure of their power to procreate or
re-create experience."
[Footnote: O. W. Firkins, "The New Movement in Poetry," _Nation_, October
14, 1915.]

One may give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of
imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense
experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive
courage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature."
[Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.]
Like "free verse," it has widened the field of expression, although its
advocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of "imagist" poems lie
embedded in the verse of Browning and even in the prose of George
Meredith.
[Footnote: J. L. Lowes, "An Unacknowledged Imagist," _Nation_, February
24, 1916.]
We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at this
point that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its
lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely
sensitive decapitated frog. It is "hemisphereless" poetry.


_4. The Poet and Other Men_

The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than the
vision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowments
of habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets like
Tennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-known
case of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye and
near-sighted in the other! No doubt the life-long practice of observing
and recording natural phenomena sharpens the sense of poets, as it does
the senses of Indians, naturalists, sailors and all outdoors men. The
quick eye for costume and character possessed by a Chaucer or a Shakspere
is remarkable, but equally so is the observation of a Dickens or a Balzac.
It is rather in what we call psychical vision that the poet is wont to
excel, that is, in his ability to perceive the meaning of visual
phenomena. Here he ceases to be a mere reporter of retinal images, and
takes upon himself the higher and harder function of an interpreter of the
visible world. He has no immunity from the universal human experiences: he
loves and he is angry and he sees men born and die. He becomes according
to the measure of his intellectual capacity a thinker. He strives to see
into the human heart, to comprehend the working of the human mind. He
reads the divine justice in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetrates
beneath the external forms of Nature and perceives her as a "living
presence." Yet the faculty of vision which the poet possesses in so
eminent a degree is shared by many who are not poets. Darwin's outward eye
was as keen as Wordsworth's; St. Paul's sense of the reality of the
invisible world is more wonderful than Shakspere's. The poet is indeed
first of all a seer, but he must be something more than a seer before he
is wholly poet.

Another mark of the poetic mind is its vivid sense of relations. The part
suggests the whole. In the single instance there is a hint of the general
law. The self-same Power that brings the fresh rhodora to the woods brings
the poet there also. In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he
beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. The
conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walking
shadow," and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he
exclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through the
shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the
universe; his mimic play and "the great globe itself" are alike an
"insubstantial pageant," though it may happen, as Tennyson said of
Wordsworth, that even in the transient he gives the sense of the
abiding, "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns."

But this perception of relations, characteristic as it is of the poetic
temper, is also an attribute of the philosopher. The intellect of a
Newton, too, leaps from the specific instance to the general law; every
man, in proportion to his intelligence and insight, feels that the world
is one; while Plato and Descartes play with the time and space world with
all the grave sportiveness of Prospero.

Again, the poets have always been the "genus irritabile"--the irritable
tribe. They not only see deeply, but feel acutely. Often they are too
highly sensitized for their own happiness. If they receive a pleasure more
exquisite than ours from a flower, a glimpse of the sea, a gracious
action, they are correspondingly quick to feel dissonances, imperfections,
slights. Like Lamb, they are "rather squeamish about their women and
children." Like Keats, they are "snuffed out by an article." Keener
pleasures, keener pains, this is the law of their life; but it is
applicable to all persons of the so-called artistic temperament. It is one
of the penalties of a fine organism. It does not of itself describe a
poet.
[Footnote: I have here utilized a few paragraphs from my chapter on
"Poetry" in _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, Houghton Mifflin
Company.]

The real difference between "the poet" and other men is rather to be
traced, as the present chapter has tried to indicate, in his capacity for
making and employing verbal images of a certain kind, and combining these
images into rhythmical and metrical designs. In each of his functions--as
"seer," as "maker," and as "singer"--he shows himself a true creator.
Criticism no longer attempts to act as his "law-giver," to assert what he
may or may not do. The poet is free, like every creative artist, to make a
beautiful object in any way he can. And nevertheless criticism--watching
countless poets lovingly for many a century, observing their various
endowments, their manifest endeavors, their victories and defeats,
observing likewise the nature of language, that strange medium (so much
stranger than any clay or bronze!) through which poets are compelled to
express their conceptions--criticism believes that poetry, like
each of the sister arts, has its natural province, its own field of the
beautiful. We have tried in this chapter to suggest the general direction
of that field, without looking too narrowly for its precise boundaries. In
W. H. Hudson's _Green Mansions_ the reader will remember how a few sticks
and stones, laid upon a hilltop, were used as markers to indicate the
outlines of a continent. Criticism, likewise, needs its poor sticks and
stones of commonplace, if it is to point out any roadway. Our own road
leads first into the difficult territory of the poet's imaginings, and
then into the more familiar world of the poet's words.



CHAPTER III

THE POET'S IMAGINATION

  "The essence of poetry is _invention_; such invention as, by producing
  something unexpected, surprises and delights."
    SAMUEL JOHNSON

  "The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets."
    WALT WHITMAN

We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radical
distinction between "the poet"--as we have called him for
convenience--and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that this
distinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets after
a certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, at
some moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, the
other day, spoke of a telegraph wire as "that message-vine." Her father
and mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was a
child's instinctive "poetizing" imagination, but the father and mother,
while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, were
conscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, for
the instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart's
desire. That is to say, they could still feel "poetically," though their
wonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon as
the gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood.

All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, and
that if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And all
readers agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker of
poetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But the
moment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin.


_1. Feeling and Imagination_

What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? The
psychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors of
generations of specialists; and it is obvious that the general theories
about the nature of imagination have shifted greatly, even within the
memory of living men. Nevertheless there are some facts, in this
constantly contested territory, which now seem indisputable. One of them,
and of peculiar significance to students of poetry, is this: in the stream
of objects immediately present to consciousness there are no images of
feeling itself.
[Footnote: This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor A.
H. R. Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_. Putnam's, 1912.]

"If I am asked to call up an image of a rose, of a tree, of a cloud, or of
a skylark, I can readily do it; but if I am asked to feel loneliness or
sorrow, to feel hatred or jealousy, or to feel joy on the return of
spring, I cannot readily do it. And the reason why I cannot do it is
because I can call up no image of any one of these feelings. For
everything I come to know through my senses, for everything in connection
with what I do or feel I can call up some kind of mental image; but for no
kind of feeling itself can I ever possibly have a direct image. The only
effective way of arousing any particular feeling that is more than mere
bodily feeling is to call up the images that are naturally connected with
that feeling."
[Footnote: Fairchild, pp. 24, 25.]

If then, "the raw material of poetry," as Professor Fairchild insists,
is "the mental image," we must try to see how these images are presented
to the mind of the poet and in turn communicated to us. Instead of
asserting, as our grandfathers did, that the imagination is a "faculty"
of the mind, like "judgment," or accepting the theory of our fathers that
imagination "is the whole mind thrown into the process of imagining," the
present generation has been taught by psychologists like Charcot, James
and Ribot that we are chiefly concerned with "imaginations," that is, a
series of visual, auditory, motor or tactile images flooding in upon the
mind, and that it is safer to talk about these "imaginations" than about
"the Imagination." Literary critics will continue to use this last
expression--as we are doing in the present chapter--because it is too
convenient to be given up. But they mean by it something fairly definite:
namely, the images swarming in the stream of consciousness, and their
integration into wholes that satisfy the human desire for beauty. It is
in its ultimate aim rather than in its immediate processes that the
"artistic" imagination differs from the inventor's or scientist's or
philosopher's imagination. We no longer assert, as did Stopford Brooke
some forty years ago, that "the highest scientific intellect is a joke
compared with the power displayed by a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante." We
are inclined rather to believe that in its highest exercise of power the
scientific mind is attempting much the same feat as the highest type of
poetic mind, and that in both cases it is a feat of imaginative energy.


_2. Creative and Artistic Imagination_

The reader who has hitherto allowed himself to think of a poet as a sort
of freak of nature, abnormal in the very constitution of his mind, and
achieving his results by methods so obscure that "inspiration" is our
helpless name for indicating them, cannot do better than master such a
book as Ribot's _Essay on the Creative Imagination_.
[Footnote: Th. Ribot, _Essai sur l'Imagination créatrice_. Paris, 1900.
English translation by Open Court Co., Chicago, 1906.]
This famous psychologist, starting with the conception that the raw
material for the creative imagination is images, and that its basis lies
in a motor impulse, examines first the emotional factor involved in every
act of the creative imagination. Then he passes to the unconscious factor,
the involuntary "coming" of the idea, that "moment of genius," as Buffon
called it, which often marks the end of an unconscious elaboration of the
idea or the beginning of conscious elaboration.
[Footnote: See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the
mathematician, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]
Ribot points out that certain organic changes, as in blood circulation--
the familiar rush of blood to the head--accompany imaginative activity.
Then he discusses the inventor's and artist's "fixed idea," their "will
that it shall be so," "the motor tendency of images engendering the
ideal." Ribot's distinction between the animal's revival of images and the
true creative combination of images in the mental life of children and of
primitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to us
is his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come into
being. There are two types of this process, and three stages of each: (A)
the "idea," the "discovery" or invention, and then the verification or
application; or else (B) the unconscious preparation, followed
by the "idea" or "inspiration," and then by the "development" or
construction. Whether a man is inventing a safety-pin or a sonnet, the
series of imaginative processes seems to be much the same. There is of
course a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealing
with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts
of form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imagination
which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and
emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example. But
whatever may be the specific type of imagination involved, we find alike
in inventor, scientist and artist the same general sequence of "germ,
incubation, flowering and completion," and the same fundamental motor
impulse as the driving power.

Holding in mind these general characteristics of the creative imagination,
as traced by Ribot, let us now test our conception of the distinctively
artistic imagination. Countless are the attempts to define or describe it,
and it would be unwise for the student, at this point, to rest satisfied
with any single formulation of its functions. But it may be helpful to
quote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alexander's brilliant and subtle book,
_Poetry and the Individual_:
[Footnote: Putnam's, 1906.]

  "The energy of the mind or of the soul--for it welds all psychical
  activities--which is the agent of our world-winnings and the
  procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is
  distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the
  dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to
  acquire--memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in
  being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being
  an assimilator rather than the mere weigher of what is set before it;
  from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins--the
  will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in
  command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them
  all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the
  total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme
  end--the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the
  world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the
  beautiful. The imagination synthesises, humanises, personalises,
  illumines reality with the soul's most intimate moods, and so exalts
  with spiritual understandings."

The value of such a description, presented without any context, will vary
with the training of the individual reader, but its quickening power will
be recognized even by those who are incapable of grasping all the
intellectual distinctions involved.


_3. Poetic Imagination in Particular_

We are now ready, after this consideration of the creative and artistic
imagination, to look more closely at some of the qualities of the poetic
imagination in particular. The specific formal features of that
imagination lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal imagery, and in the
combination of verbal images into rhythmical patterns. But are there not
functions of the poet's mind preceding the formation of verbal images? The
psychology of language is still unsettled, and whether a man can think
without the use of words is often doubted. But a painter can certainly
"think" in terms of color, as an architect or mathematician can "think" in
terms of form and space, or a musician in terms of sound, without
employing verbal symbols at all. And are there not characteristic
activities of the poetic imagination which antedate the fixation and
expression of images in words? Apparently there are.

The reader will find, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter, a
quotation from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he refers to the
"region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the
irradiations of the world." That is to say, the inward-sweeping stream of
consciousness is instantly met by an outward-moving activity of the brain
which recognizes relationships between the objects proffered to the senses
and the personality itself. The "I" projects itself into these objects,
claims them, appropriates them as a part of its own nature. Professor
Fairchild, who calls this self-projecting process by the somewhat
ambiguous name of "personalizing," rightly insists, I believe, that poets
make a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotes
some of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats's "If a sparrow
come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the
gravel"; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, "I always
feel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull,
gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shall
become a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one." I can
match this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an
eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his
mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in
his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness
and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was
enough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

  "Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,
  Bless thy little _cow_ to-night"--

_Larry being the cow._

  "There was a child went forth every day,"

records Walt Whitman,

  "And the first object he look'd upon that object
  he became."

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the many
passages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all
summed up in Coleridge's heart-broken

  "Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give,
  And in our life alone does Nature live."

This "animism," or identifying imagination, by means of which the child or
the primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic or
organic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poetic
faculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbal
images or symbols.

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the
preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as
yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange
feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility,
transparency--the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects--of the
world as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are not
looking--at least when in this mood--at our "logical" world of hard, clear
fact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called "the eternal
float of solution," the "flowing of all things" of the Greeks, the
"river within the river" of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked,
of course, in artists possessing the "diffluent" type of imagination, and
Romantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination,
said Wordsworth, "recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, the
indefinite."
[Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his _Poems_.]
"Shakespeare, too," says Carlye,
[Footnote: Essay on Goethe's Works.]
"does not look _at_ a thing, but into it, through it; so that he
constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together
again; _the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anew
creates itself before him_. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, as
for Shakespeare, _the world lies all translucent, all fusible_ we might
call it, encircled with _Wonder_; the Natural in reality the Supernatural,
for to the seer's eyes both become one."

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic of
the mind of the typical poet: "He is no mere observer and compiler;
rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which
existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to
whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations
representing and ennobling its effects."

Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imagination "dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_.]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poets
have recorded, in which their feeling of "diffusion" has led them to doubt
the existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping "at a wall or
tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality," and
Tennyson's "weird seizures" which he transferred from his own experience
to his imaginary Prince in _The Princess_, are familiar examples of this
type of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change in
the objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type of
diffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poetic
mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and
the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing,
onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely
"being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a
late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted
Coleridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite _I am_."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 13.]
Here, evidently, unless the "God-intoxicated" Coleridge is talking
nonsense, we are in the presence of powers that do not need as yet any use
of verbal symbols.


_4. Verbal Images_

The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet is
clearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to the
poet's consciousness. In the re-presentation of these pictures to us the
poet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise point at
which he becomes conscious of employing words no doubt varies with the
individual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual or
tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working
primarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of
sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of
visual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of _expression
to us_ is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into
the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his own
peculiar raw material into the current coin of human speech.

Nevertheless, many poets have been sufficiently conscious of what is going
on within their workshop to tell us something about it. Professor
Fairchild has made an interesting collection
[Footnote: _The Making of Poetry_, pp. 78, 79.]
of testimony relating to the tumultuous crowding of images, each
clamoring, as it were, for recognition and crying "take me!" He instances,
as other critics have done, the extraordinary succession of images by
which Shelley strives to portray the spirit of the skylark. The similes
actually chosen by Shelley seem to have been merely the lucky candidates
selected from an infinitely greater number. In Francis Thompson's
captivating description of Shelley as a glorious child the reader is
conscious of the same initial rush of images, although the medium of
expression here is heightened prose instead of verse:
[Footnote: _Dublin Review_, July, 1908.]

  "Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of
  revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.
  Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than
  The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs
  from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous,
  though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the
  child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still
  at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch,
  and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The
  universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.
  He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright
  mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.
  He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the
  shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of
  heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild
  over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets
  between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of
  patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
  wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song."


_5. The Selection and Control of Images_

It is easier, no doubt, to realize something of the swarming of images in
the stream of consciousness than it is to understand how these images are
selected, combined and controlled. Some principle of association, some law
governing the synthesis, there must be; and English criticism has long
treasured some of the clairvoyant words of Coleridge and Wordsworth upon
this matter. The essential problem is suggested by Wordsworth's phrase
"the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." Is the
"excitement," then, the chief factor in the selection and combination of
images, and do the "feelings," as if with delicate tentacles,
instinctively choose and reject and integrate such images as blend with
the poet's mood?

Coleridge, with his subtle builder's instinct, uses his favorite word
"synthesis" not merely as applied to images as such, but to all the
faculties of the soul:

"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and a
spirit of unity, that blends, and as it were fuses, each into each, by
that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate
the name of Imagination." "Synthetic and magical power," indeed, with a
Coleridge as Master of the Mysteries! But the perplexed student of poetry
may well wish a more exact description of what really takes place.

An American critic, after much searching in recent psychological
explanations of artistic creation, attempts to describe the genesis of a
poem in these words:
[Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 215. Macmillan,
1900.]

  "The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on
  some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of
  his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in
  him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many
  images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance
  with laws of association that may at least in part be described,
  these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into
  significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling
  mimicry of the actual world of the senses--all the time delicately
  controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so growing
  intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is
  to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the
  moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional
  expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of
  his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his
  most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words
  finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written
  characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of
  personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer
  to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy
  and strength."

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although some
critics would question the phrase, "all the time delicately controlled by
the poet's conscious purpose."
[Footnote: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according
to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose
poetry.'. . . It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the
mind. ... Its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the
consciousness or will." Shelley, _A Defense of Poetry_.]

For sometimes, assuredly, the synthesis of images seems to take place
without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream
or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant
examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a
gentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds and
the long grasses trailing from the banks; then somehow the tide seems to
change, and all the water and the weeds and grasses, even the fishes in
the stream, turn slowly and flow out to sea. The current synthesizes,
harmonizes, moves onward like music,--and we are aware that it is all a
dream. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," composed in a deep opium slumber, moves
like that, one train of images melting into another like the interwoven
figures of a dance led by the "damsel with a dulcimer." There is no
"conscious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning" in the ordinary
interpretation of that word. Nevertheless it is perfect integration of
imagery, pure beauty to the senses. Something of this rapture in the sheer
release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to
Coleridge about the "pure happiness"  of being insane. "Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till
you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so." (June 10,
1796.)

If "Kubla Khan" represents one extreme, Poe's account of how he wrote "The
Raven"
[Footnote: _The Philosophy of Composition_.]
--incredible as the story appears to most of us--may serve to illustrate
the other, namely, a cool, conscious, workmanlike control of every element
in the selection and combination of imagery. Wordsworth's naive
explanation of the task performed by the imagination in his "Cuckoo" and
"Leech-Gatherer"
[Footnote: Preface to poems of 1815-1845.]
occupies a middle ground. We are at least certain of his entire
honesty--and incidentally of his total lack of humor!

  "'Shall I call thee Bird,
  Or but a wandering Voice?'

"This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of the
voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal
existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power by
a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard
throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight....

  "'As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
  Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
  Wonder to all who do the same espy
  By what means it could thither come, and whence,
  So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
  Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
  Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

  Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead.
  Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
       *       *       *       *       *
  Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
  That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
  And moveth altogether if it move at all.'

"In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying
powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all
brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power
of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of
some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which
intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the
original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure
and condition of the aged man; who is divested of so much of the
indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point
where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison."

Wordsworth's analysis of the processes of his own imagination, like Poe's
story of the composition of "The Raven," is an analysis made after the
imagination had functioned. There can be no absolute proof of its
correctness in every detail. It is evident that we have to deal with an
infinite variety of normal and abnormal minds. Some of these defy
classification; others fall into easily recognized types, such as "the
lunatic, the lover and the poet," as sketched by Theseus, Duke of Athens.
How modern, after all, is the Duke's little lecture on the psychology of
imagination!

  "The lunatic, the lover and the poet
  Are of imagination all compact;
  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
  That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
  Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
  The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
  And as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name.
  Such tricks hath strong imagination,
  That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
  It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
  Or in the night, imagining some fear,
  How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"
[Footnote: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, v, i, 7-22.]

Shakspere, it will be observed, does not hesitate to use that dangerous
term "the poet!" Yet as students of poetry we must constantly bring
ourselves back to the recorded experience of individual men, and from
these make our comparisons and generalizations. It may even happen that
some readers will get a clearer conception of the selection and synthesis
of images if they turn for the moment away from poetry and endeavor to
realize something of the same processes as they take place in imaginative
prose. In Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, for example, the dominant image,
which becomes the symbol of his entire theme, is the piece of scarlet
cloth which originally caught his attention. This physical object
becomes, after long brooding, subtly changed into a moral symbol of sin
and its concealment. It permeates the book, it is borne openly upon the
breast of one sufferer, it is written terribly in the flesh of another, it
flames at last in the very sky. All the lesser images and symbols of the
romance are mastered by it, subordinated to it; it becomes the dominant
note in the composition. The romance of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, as we say
of any great poem or drama, an "ideal synthesis"; i.e. a putting together
of images in accordance with some central idea. The more significant the
idea or theme or master image, the richer and fuller are the possibilities
of beauty in detail. Apply this familiar law of complexity to a poet's
conscious or unconscious choice of images. In the essay which we have
already quoted
[Footnote: _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 216.]
Lewis Gates remarks:

"In every artist there is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritual
organization and play of instincts, which results in large measure from
the common life of his day and generation, and which represents this
life--makes it potent--within the individuality of the artist. This
so-called 'acquired constitution of the life of the soul'--it has been
described by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy acuteness and
thoroughness--determines in some measure the contents of the artist's
mind, for it determines his interests, and therefore the sensations and
perceptions that he captures and automatically stores up. It guides him in
his judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and dislikes as regards
conduct and character, and controls in large measure the play of his
imagination as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and the destinies
of his heroes. Its prejudices interfiltrate throughout the molecules of
his entire moral and mental life, and give to each image and idea some
slight shade of attractiveness or repulsiveness, so that when the artist's
spirit is at work under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric of
a poem the competing images and ideas in his consciousness, certain ideas
and images come more readily and others lag behind, and the resulting work
of art gets a colour and an emotional tone and suggestions of value that
subtly reflect the genius of the age."


_6. "Imagist" Verse_

Such a conception of the association of images as reflecting not only this
"acquired constitution of the soul" of the poet but also the genius of the
age is in marked contrast to some of the theories held by contemporary
"imagists." As we have already noted, in Chapter II, they stress the
individual reaction to phenomena, at some tense moment. They discard, as
far as possible, the long "loop-line" of previous experience. As for
diction, they have, like all true artists, a horror of the _cliché_--the
rubber-stamp word, blurred by use. As for rhythm, they fear any
conventionality of pattern. In subsequent chapters we must look more
closely at these matters of diction and of rhythm, but they are both
involved in any statement of the principles of Imagist verse. Richard
Aldington sums up his article on "The Imagists"
[Footnote: "Greenwich Village," July 15, 1915.]
in these words:

"Let me resume the cardinal points of the Imagist style:
1. Direct treatment of the subject. 2. A hardness and economy of speech.
3. Individuality of rhythm; vers libre. 4. The exact word. The Imagists
would like to possess 'le mot qui fait image, l'adjectif inattendu et
précis qui dessine de pied en cap et donne la senteur de la chose qu'il
est chargé de rendre, la touche juste, la couleur qui chatoie et vibre.'"

In the preface to _Imagist Poets_ (1915), and in Miss Amy Lowell's
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917) the tenets of imagism are
stated briefly and clearly. Imagism, we are told, aims to use always the
language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the
nearly-exact nor the merely decorative word; to create new rhythms--as the
expression of new moods--and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo
old moods; to allow absolute freedom in the choice of a subject; to
present an image, rendering particulars exactly; to produce poetry that is
hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite; to secure condensation.

It will be observed that in the special sort of picture-making which
Imagist poetry achieves, the question of free verse is merely incidental.
"We fight for it as a principle of liberty," says Miss Lowell, but she
does not insist upon it as the only method of writing poetry. Mr.
Aldington admits frankly that about forty per cent of _vers libre_ is
prose. Mr. Lowes, as we have already remarked, has printed dozens of
passages from Meredith's novels in the typographical arrangement of free
verse so as to emphasize their "imagist" character. One of the most
effective is this:

  "He was like a Tartar
  Modelled by a Greek:
  Supple
  As the Scythian's bow,
  Braced
  As the string!"

Suppose, however, that we agree to defer for the moment the vexed question
as to whether images of this kind are to be considered prose or verse.
Examine simply for their vivid picture-making quality the collections
entitled _Imagist Poets_ (1915,1916,1917), or, in the _Anthology of
Magazine Verse_ for 1915, such poems as J. G. Fletcher's "Green Symphony"
or "H. D.'s" "Sea-Iris" or Miss Lowell's "The Fruit Shop." Read Miss
Lowell's extraordinarily brilliant volume _Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916),
particularly the series of poems entitled "Towns in Colour." Then read the
author's preface, in which her artistic purpose in writing "Towns in
Colour" is set forth: "In these poems, I have endeavoured to give the
colour, and light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing _the
purely pictorial effect_, and with little or no reference to any other
aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander
through a city looking for its _unrelated beauty_, the beauty by which it
captivates the sensuous sense of seeing." [Footnote: Italics mine.]

Nothing could be more gallantly frank than the phrase "unrelated beauty."
For it serves as a touchstone to distinguish between those imagist poems
which leave us satisfied and those which do not. Sometimes, assuredly, the
insulated, unrelated beauty is enough. What delicate reticence there is in
Richard Aldington's "Summer":

  "A butterfly,
  Black and scarlet,
  Spotted with white,
  Fans its wings
  Over a privet flower.

  "A thousand crimson foxgloves,
  Tall bloody pikes,
  Stand motionless in the gravel quarry;
  The wind runs over them.

  "A rose film over a pale sky
  Fantastically cut by dark chimneys;
  Across an old city garden."

The imagination asks no more.

Now read my friend Baker Brownell's "Sunday Afternoon":

  "The wind pushes huge bundles
  Of itself in warm motion
  Through the barrack windows;
  It rattles a sheet of flypaper
  Tacked in a smear of sunshine on the sill.
  A voice and other voices squirt
  A slow path among the room's tumbled sounds.
  A ukelele somewhere clanks
  In accidental jets
  Up from the room's background."

Here the stark truthfulness of the images does not prevent an instinctive
"Well, what of it?" "And afterward, what else?" Unless we adopt the
Japanese theory of "stop poems," where the implied continuation of the
mood, the suggested application of the symbol or allegory, is the sole
justification of the actual words given, a great deal of imagist verse, in
my opinion, serves merely to sharpen the senses without utilizing the full
imaginative powers of the mind. The making of images is an essential
portion of the poet's task, but in memorably great poetry it is only a
detail in a  larger whole. Miss Lowell's "Patterns" is one of the most
effective of contemporary poems, but it is far more than a document of
imagism. It is a triumph of structural imagination.


_7. Genius and Inspiration_

Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to analyse the
image-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is a
necessary element in the production of poetry. Let Coleridge have the
final statement of this mystery of his art: "The power of reducing
multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some
one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but
can never be learnt. It is in this that _Poeta nascitur non fit_." We
cannot avoid the difficulties of the question by attributing the poet's
imagination to "genius." Whether genius is a neurosis, as some think, or
whether it is sanity at perfection, makes little difference here.
Both a Poe and a Sophocles are equally capable of producing ideal
syntheses. Nor does the old word "inspiration" help much either.
Whatever we mean by inspiration--a something not ourselves, supernatural
or sub-liminal--a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan of Arc, the
"god" that moved within the Corybantian revelers--it is an excitement of
the image-making faculty, and not that faculty itself. Disordered "genius"
and inspiration undisciplined by reason are alike powerless to produce
images that permanently satisfy the sense of beauty. Tolstoy's common-
sense remark is surely sound: "One's writing is good only where the
intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of
them over-balances the other, it's all up."
[Footnote: Compare W. A. Neilson's chapter on "The Balance of Qualities"
in _Essentials of Poetry_. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912.]


_8. A Summary_

Let us now endeavor to summarize this testimony which we have taken
from poets and critics. Though they do not agree in all details, and
though they often use words that are either too vague or too highly
specialized, the general drift of the testimony is fairly clear. Poets
and critics agree that the imagination is something different from the
mere memory-image; that by a process of selection and combination and
re-presentation of images something really new comes into being, and that
we are therefore justified in using the term _constructive_, or _creative_
imagination. This imagination embodies, as we say, or "bodies forth," as
Duke Theseus said, "the forms of things unknown." It ultimately becomes
the poet's task to "shape" these forms with his "pen," that is to say, to
suggest them through word-symbols, arranged in a certain fashion. The
selection of these word-symbols will be discussed in Chapter IV, and their
rhythmical arrangement in Chapter V. But we have tried in the present
chapter to trace the functioning of the poetic imagination in those stages
of its activity which precede the definite shaping of poems with the pen.
If we say, with Professor Fairchild,
[Footnote: _Making of Poetry_, p. 34.]
that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making of
poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious
that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the
famous terms employed by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, we have been
considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of
imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and
suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner
in the study of poetry.

If the beginner desires to review, at this point, the chief matters
brought to his attention in the present chapter, he may make a real test
of their validity by opening his senses to the imagery of a few lines of
poetry. Remember that poets are endeavoring to convey the "sense" of
things rather than the knowledge of things. Disregard for the moment the
precise words employed in the following lines, and concentrate the
attention upon the images, as if the image were not made of words at all,
but were mere naked sense-stimulus.

In this line the poet is trying to make us _see_ something ("visual"
image):

  "The bride hath paced into the hall,
  _Red as a rose_ is she."

Can you see her?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us _hear_ something ("auditory"
image):

  "A _noise like of a hidden brook_
  In the leafy month of June
  That to the _sleeping woods all night
  Singeth a quiet tune_."

Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear

  "_The tambourines
  Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens_"?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodily
sensations ("tactile" image):

  "I closed my lids and kept them close,
  _And the balls like pulses beat_;
  For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky,
  _Lay like a load on my weary eye_,
  And the dead were at my feet."

Do your eyes feel that pressure?

You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines
("motor" image):

  "I _sprang_ to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
  I _galloped_, Dirck _galloped_, we _galloped_ all three!"

Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there by
conveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery and
rhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become _your_ sense of
riding.

If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through his
own body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is open
to him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to
analyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, he
may select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the various
functions of the imagination are illustrated by them. Suppose the lines
are Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted in
part:

  "The bride hath paced into the hall,
   Red as a rose is she;
   Nodding their heads before her goes
   The merry minstrelsy."

Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some one
characteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the
"nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying or
abstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress.
The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture,
presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thus
satisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mind
takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as
Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset,

  "At one stride comes the dark,"

or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise,

  "O tenderly the haughty day
  Fills his blue urn with fire."

Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts that
a sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dim
region through which the poet feels his way before he comes to the
conscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those words
into beautiful rhythmical designs.



CHAPTER IV


THE POET'S WORDS

  "Words are sensible signs necessary for communication."
    JOHN LOCKE, _Human Understanding_, 3, 2, 1.

  "As conceptions are the images of things to the mind within itself, so
  are words or names the marks of those conceptions to the minds of them
  we converse with."
    SOUTH, quoted in Johnson's _Dictionary_.

  "Word: a sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the
  sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical
  relations.... A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as
  used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds
  its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of
  form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe...."
    _Century Dictionary_.

  "A word is not a crystal--transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a
  living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to
  the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
    Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _Towne vs. Eisner_.

  "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of
  prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry =
  the _best_ words in the best order."
    COLERIDGE, _Table Talk_.


_1. The Eye and the Ear_

"Literary" language is commonly distinguished from the language of
ordinary life by certain heightenings or suppressions. The novelist or
essayist, let us say, fashions his language more or less in accordance
with his own mood, with his immediate aim in writing, with the capacity of
his expected readers. He is discoursing with a certain real or imaginary
audience. He may put himself on paper, as Montaigne said, as if he were
talking to the first man he happens to meet; or he may choose to address
himself to the few chosen spirits of his generation and of succeeding
generations. He trusts the arbitrary written or printed symbols of
word-sounds to carry his thoughts safely into the minds of other men.
The "literary" user of language in modern times comes to depend upon
the written or printed page; he tends to become more or less "eye-minded";
whereas the typical orator remains "ear-minded"--i.e. peculiarly sensitive
to a series of sounds, and composing for the ear of listeners rather than
for the eye of readers.

Now as compared with the typical novelist, the poet is surely, like the
orator, "ear-minded." Tonal symbols of ideas and emotions, rather than
visual symbols of ideas and emotions, are the primary stuff with which he
is working, although as soon as the advancing civilization of his race
brings an end to the primitive reciting of poetry and its transmission
through oral repetition alone, it is obvious that he must depend, like
other literary artists, or like the modern musicians, upon the written or
printed signs for the sounds which he has composed. But so stubborn are
the habits of our eyes that we tend always to confuse the look of the
poet's words upon the printed page with the sound of those words as they
are perceived by the ear. We are seldom guilty of this confusion in the
case of the musician. His "music" is not identified with the arbitrary
black marks which make up his printed score. For most of us there is
no music until those marks are actually translated into terms of tone--
although it is true that the trained reader of music can easily translate
to his inner ear without any audible rendering of the indicated sounds.

This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem is
not primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is a
series of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for these
sounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered--except to
those readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, can
instantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of them
into physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear for
it. They are hopelessly "eye-minded." They try to decide questions of
metre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by the
appearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poets
like Mr. Vachel Lindsay--who recites or chants his own verses after the
manner of the primitive bard--have rendered a true service by leading
us away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheer
delight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates.


_2. How Words convey Feeling_

For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in some
body-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmic
utterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotion
to the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to be
embodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at some
of the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodiment
of poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace these
processes in so far as they are revealed by the poet's use of words.
Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter.

We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself.
The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those of
experiences and objects associated with feeling. The words employed to
revive and transmit these images are usually described as "concrete" or
"sensuous" in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are
"experiential" words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact with
objects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individual
feeling. Such words have a "fringe," as psychologists say. They are rich
in overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheer
intelligence, but covered with veils of association, with tokens of past
experience. They are like ships laden with cargoes, although the cargo
varies with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable that
this very word "ship," just now employed, calls up as many different
mental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews has
recorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word
"forest." Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in a
London club, tried to tell one another what "forest" suggested to each:

  "Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself
  in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of
  different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent
  word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy
  oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier
  it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France.
  To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the
  so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a
  view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the
  Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that
  in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back
  swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by
  man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years
  before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple
  as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with
  his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences
  exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the
  inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every
  language, since there must always be two partners in any communication
  by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other
  has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them."
[Footnote: Brander Matthews, _These Many Years_. Scribner's, New York,
1917.]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Let
half a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shop
where sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fishing-rods, tennis
racquets, riding-whips, golf-balls, running-shoes, baseball bats,
footballs, oars, paddles, snow-shoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubs
and rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of the
observer in more or less exact proportion to his interest in the
particular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a passionate tennis
player, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of the
racquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favorite
strokes with it, winning tournaments with it--though he seems to be
standing quietly in front of the window. The man next him is already
snowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse,
or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet or
riding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they may
stir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has never
experienced. His eye is likely to pass them over as indifferently as if he
were glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varying
responses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or that
physical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to illustrate his
capacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomes
a symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe.
They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while another
object leaves them cold.

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark,
talking--evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No two
can possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures.
Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker of
the company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand the
word, approximately, but each _feels_ it in a way unexperienced by his
friend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous,
picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical and
mental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and most
universal words for things and sensations--such as "hand," "foot," "dark,"
"fear," "fire," "warm," "home"--are suffused with personal emotions,
faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are _my_ hand, foot, fear,
darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singing
in the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them "See this" or
"Feel that" in the literal sense of "see" and "feel"; he can only call up
by means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already,
and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations,
new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyages
with fresh sails upon seas untried.

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himself
in solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expression
rather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill's distinction between
the orator and the poet: "Eloquence is _heard_; poetry is _over_heard.
Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to
lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling
confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself
in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling
in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind."
[Footnote: J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry," in _Dissertations_, vol. 1.
See also F. N. Scott, "The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and
Prose." Published by Modern Language Association, 19, 2.]
But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a man
swears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings to
other persons, it remains true that a poet's language betrays his bodily
and mental history. "The poet," said Thoreau, "writes the history of his
own body."

For example, a study of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H.
Herford
[Footnote: _Robert Browning_, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66.
Blackwood & Sons. 1905.]
emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick
and eager apprehension of space-relations:

  "He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of
  dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate,
  abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented,
  intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call
  for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments
  of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... _Spikes_ and
  _wedges_ and _swords_ run riot in his work.... He loved the grinding,
  clashing and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the
  tender-hefted liquids.... He is the poet of sudden surprises,
  unforseen transformations.... The simple joy in abrupt changes of
  sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support
  to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all
  vital and significant becoming."

The same truth is apparent as we pass from the individual poet to the
poetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history.
Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms of
bodily sensation.

  "_Anger_," says Renan,
  [Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, _The Bible as Literature_, p.
  114.]
  "is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and
  each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken
  from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion,
  now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking,
  now from shivering. _Discouragement_ and _despair_ are expressed by
  the melting of the heart, _fear_ by the loosening of the reins.
  _Pride_ is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure
  straight and stiff. _Patience_ is a long breathing, _impatience_
  short breathing, _desire_ is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed
  by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of
  hiding, of coating over the fault. In _Job_ God sews up sins in a
  sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he
  forgets them....

  "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my
  heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

  "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

  "I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep
  waters, where the floods overflow me.

  "I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I
  wait for my God."

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words,
thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray
[Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," _Atlantic Monthly_,
November, 1912.]
has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:

  "The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words
  into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables
  produces a kind of dancing joy.... Greek lyric is derived directly
  from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the
  feet, _but the yearning movement of the whole body_, the ultimate
  expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech,
  compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling."

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising "a graceful and
ornate rhetoric," declares that poetry, compared with this, is "more
simple, sensuous and passionate."
[Footnote: _Tract on Education._ ]
These words "sensuous" and "passionate," dulled as they have become by
repetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While
language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and
feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of
individual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poet
is still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the new
wonderful Beasts---so terrible, so delightful!--come marching by.


_3. Words as Current Coin_

But the poet's words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individual
experience, must also have a general _transmission value_ which renders
them current coin. If words were merely representations of private
experience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pass the
walls of the Garden inhabited by each man's imagination. "Expression"
would be possible, but "communication" would be impossible, and indeed
there would be no recognizable terms of expression except the "bow-wow" or
"pooh-pooh" or "ding-dong" of the individual Adam----and even these
expressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and that
in highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp to
words, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it,
speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a social
instrument. "It belongs," says Professor Whitney,
[Footnote: W. D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, p. 404.]
"not to the individual, but to the member of society.... What we may
severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed
by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the
acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community."

... A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in
utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature
around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay
without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would
all his life remain a mute."

What is more, the individual's mastery of language is due solely to his
social effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; they
are painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought up
in China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a trace
of his English parentage in form or idiom.
[Footnote: See Baldwin's _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_,
article "Language."]
His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the medium
already established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race.
In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have any
transmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded by
Chaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all that
age-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lost
without a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman and
nothing else.

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school and
college. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book of
such a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was an
exceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and it
revealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson's delicate and sure
felicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effort
of which most of his American classmates were incapable, had mastered many
of the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the rich
treasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself,
instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have
preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the
expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no
matter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to an
American professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that the
power of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others is
conditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange.


4. _Words an Imperfect Medium_

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties
of the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human
intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of
communication. They "were not invented at first," says Professor Walter
Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted at
best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the
weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the
prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They
perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of human
extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But
with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the
quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is.... Beasts fight with
horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of
meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are
quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed
illustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not
what a word means, but what it imputes."
[Footnote: Raleigh's _Wordsworth_. London, 1903.]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal
language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry
is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and
its glories. No poet can keep for very long to the "neutral style," to the
cool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color---passionate
words that will "stick fiery off" against the neutral background of
conventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against "purple
patches"; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to use
purple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotional
effect--orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials--utilize in
certain passages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as if
they ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups of
words in upper-case type.

And yet these "upper-case words" of heightened emotional value are not
really isolated from their context. Their values are relative and not
absolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness depends
upon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violent
word for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a faded
garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give the
richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of
the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like
Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of
logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone.
"Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will
flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of
magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force."
[Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry
Newbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_. Dutton, 1919.]
But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti's poem
on the siege of a Turkish fort:

  "Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3
  seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou
  hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts
  bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer
  whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres
  all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees
  splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys
  cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision
  telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals
  balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour
  shambles wounds refuge oasis."

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, just
as a heap of bits of colored glass might make material for a rose-window.
But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the shining fragments
will never fashion themselves into a whole.


5. _Predominant Tone-Feeling_

If each poem is composed in its own "key," as we say of music, with its
own scale of "values," as we say of pictures, it is obvious that the
separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant
tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like
Nature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or,
to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a
cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black
coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet
the presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to be
absorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreign
substances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring,
although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic
diction assume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire to
employ expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs"
and "porringers," and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implements
used in various trades. _Othello_ was hissed upon its first appearance on
the Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork"
and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian associations and are
consequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but "knife" has a
wider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevenson
confess his romantic longing to "knife a man"?

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations of this law of
connotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history,
in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which it
receives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It is
like an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of many
vibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune from
it. When Wordsworth writes of

  "The silence that is in the starry sky,
  The sleep that is among the lonely hills,"

he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect
that is peculiarly "Wordsworthian." Diction is obviously only a part of a
greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordance
of all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, and
conversely a knowledge of the poet's personality and of his governing
ideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favorite
words--like Marlowe's "black," Shelley's "light," Tennyson's "wind,"
Swinburne's "fire." Each of these words becomes suffused with the whole
personality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out of
its context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot be
adequately _felt_ without some recognition of the particular sensational
and emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-hunters
thus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error of
word-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of their own
independently of the life breathed into them by living men. I recall a
conversation at Bormes with the French poet Angellier. He was complaining
humorously of his friend L., a famous scholar whose big book was "carrying
all the treasures of French literature down to posterity like a
cold-storage transport ship." "But he published a criticism of one of my
poems," Angellier went on, "which proved that he did not understand the
poem at all. He had studied it too hard! The words of a poem are
stepping-stones across a brook. If you linger on one of them too long, you
will get your feet wet! You must cross, _vite_!" If the poets lead us from
one mood to another over a bridge of words, the words themselves are not
the goal of the journey. They are instruments used in the transmission of
emotion.


6. _Specific Tone-Color_

It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot be
ascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and not
absolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have a
certain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possible
place in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess special
qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to
characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of
that word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color." A piano and a
violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality
of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is
usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or
timbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of
ingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of "bright" and "dark" vowels,
smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound has
its special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit a
certain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman:
[Footnote: "The Symbolic Value of Sounds," in _Hamlet and Other Essays_,
by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.]


  "Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:

  [short i] (little)     [long i]   (I)         [short oo] (wood)
  [short e] (met)        [long u]   (due)       [long ow]  (cow)
  [short a] (mat)        [short ah] (what)      [long o]   (gold)
  [long e]  (mete)       [long ah]  (father)    [long oo]  (gloom)
  [ai]      (fair)       [oi]       (boil)      [aw]       (awe)
  [long a]  (mate)       [short u]  (but)

  "The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to
  express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid
  movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds
  at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe,
  deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive
  greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the
  large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror,
  and from the trivial to the solemn and awful."

Robert Louis Stevenson in his _Some Technical Elements of Style in
Literature_, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words,
have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying
"tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in
nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less
remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of
muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid
consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated with
muscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mind
experiences. Lines like Tennyson's famous

  "The moan of doves in immemorial elms
   And murmuring of innumerable bees"

thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the past
history of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerable
individuals, and it is to this fact that the "transmission value" of the
lines is due.

Imitative effects are easily recognized, and need no comment:

  "Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings"

  "The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm"

  "The wind that'll wail like a child
          and the sea that'll moan like a man."

Suggestive effects are more subtle. Sometimes they are due primarily to
those rhythmical arrangements of words which we shall discuss in the next
chapter, but poetry often employs the sound of single words to awaken dim
or bright associations. Robert Bridges's catalogue of the Greek nymphs in
"Eros and Psyche" is an extreme example of risking the total effect of a
stanza upon the mere beautiful sounds of proper names.

  "Swift to her wish came swimming on the waves
  His lovely ocean nymphs, her guides to be,
  The Nereids all, who live among the caves
  And valleys of the deep, Cymodocè,
  Agavè, blue-eyed Hallia and Nesaea,
  Speio, and Thoë, Glaucè and Actaea,
  Iaira, Melitè and Amphinomè,
  Apseudès and Nemertès, Callianassa,
  Cymothoë, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,
  Clymenè, Ianeira and Ianassa,
  Doris and Panopè and Galatea,
  Dynamenè, Dexamenè and Maira,
  Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,
  Amphithoë, Oreithuia and Amathea."

Names of objects like "bobolink" and "raven" may affect us emotionally by
the quality of their tone. Through association with the sounds of the
human voice, heard under stress of various emotions, we attribute joyous
or foreboding qualities to the bird's tone, and then transfer these
associations to the bare name of the bird.

Names of places are notoriously rich in their evocation of emotion.

  "He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice,
  And died in Padua."

Here the fact of illness and death may be prosaic enough, but the very
names of "Venice" and "Padua" are poetry--like "Rome," "Ireland,"
"Arabia," "California."

  "Where the great Vision of the guarded mount
  Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold."

Who knows precisely where that "guarded mount" is upon the map? And who
cares? "The sailor's heart," confesses Lincoln Colcord,
[Footnote: _The New Republic_, September 16, 1916.]
"refutes the prose of knowledge, and still believes in delectable and
sounding names. He dreams of capes and islands whose appellations are
music and a song.... The first big land sighted on the outward passage is
Java Head; beside it stands Cape Sangian Sira, with its name like a
battle-cry. We are in the Straits of Sunda: name charged with the heady
languor of the Orient, bringing to mind pictures of palm-fringed shores
and native villages, of the dark-skinned men of Java clad in bright
sarongs, clamoring from their black-painted dugouts, selling fruit and
brilliant birds. These waters are rich in names that stir the blood, like
Krakatoa, Gunong Delam, or Lambuan; or finer, more sounding than all the
rest, Telok Betong and Rajah Bassa, a town and a mountain--Telok Betong at
the head of Lampong Bay and Rajah Bassa, grand old bulwark on the Sumatra
shore, the cradle of fierce and sudden squalls."

It may be urged, of course, that in lines of true poetry the sense carries
the sound with it, and that nothing is gained by trying to analyse the
sounds apart from the sense. Professor C. M. Lewis
[Footnote: _Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906.]
asserts bluntly: "When you say Titan you mean something big, and when you
say tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of either
word that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you put
together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will
attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the
significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified;
but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphant
terrible Titan,' it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the
significance. When Tennyson speaks of the shrill-edged shriek of
a mother, his words suggest with peculiar vividness the idea of a shriek;
but when you speak of stars that shyly shimmer, the same sounds only
intensify the idea of shy shimmering." This is refreshing, and yet it is
to be noted that "Titan" and "tittle" and "shrill-edged shriek" and "shyly
shimmer" are by no means identical in sound: they have merely certain
consonants in common. A fairer test of tone-color may be found if we turn
to frank nonsense-verse, where the formal elements of poetry surely exist
without any control of meaning or "sense":

  "The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
   Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
   And burbled as it came!

  "'T was brillig, and the slithy toves
     Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
  All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe."

  "It seems rather pretty," commented the wise Alice, "but it's rather
  hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only
  I don't exactly know what they are!"

This is precisely what one feels when one listens to a poem recited in a
language of which one happens to be ignorant. The wonderful colored words
are there, and they seem somehow to fill our heads with ideas, only we do
not know what they are. Many readers who know a little Italian or German
will confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffers
only a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precise
meaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel the
predominant mood--as when we listen to a song sung in a language of which
we are wholly ignorant--we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas.
For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils of
emotional association due to the sound alone. Garrick ridiculed--and
doubtless at the same time envied--George Whitefield's power to make women
weep by the rich overtones with which he pronounced "that blessed word
Mesopotamia."

The capacities and the limitations of tone-quality in itself may be seen
no less clearly in parodies. Swinburne, a master technician in words and
rhythm, occasionally delighted, as in "Nephelidia,"
[Footnote: Quoted in Carolyn Wells, _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904.]
to make fun of himself as well as of his poetic contemporaries:

  "Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft
          to the spirit and soul of our senses
    Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that
          sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
  Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical
          moods and triangular tenses,--
    'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is
          dark till the dawn of the day when we die.'"

Or, take Calverley's parody of Robert Browning:

  "You see this pebble-stone? It's a thing I bought
  Of a bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day.
  I like to dock the smaller parts o' speech,
  As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur--"

The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of these
poets--whether it be

  "A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses"

or

  "A bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day"--

is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been written
in dead earnest. Poe's "Ulalume" is a masterly display of tone-color
technique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all,
is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It is
certain, however, that a poet's words possess a kind of physical
suggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance.
In nonsense-verse and parodies we have a glimpse, as it were, at the body
of poetry stripped of its soul.


7. _"Figures of Speech"_

To understand why poets habitually use figurative language, we must recall
what has been said in Chapter III about verbal images. Under the heat and
pressure of emotion, things alter their shape and size and quality, ideas
are transformed into concrete images, diction becomes impassioned, plain
speech tends to become metaphorical. The language of any excited person,
whether he is uttering himself in prose or verse, is marked by "tropes";
i.e. "turnings"--images which express one thing in the terms of another
thing. The language of feeling is characteristically "tropical," and
indeed every man who uses metaphors is for the moment talking like a
poet--unless, as too often happens both in prose and verse, the metaphor
has become conventionalized and therefore lifeless. The born poet
thinks in "figures," in "pictured" language, or, as it has been called, in
"re-presentative" language,
[Footnote: G. L. Raymond, _Poetry as a Representative Art_, chap. 19.]
since he represents, both to his own mind and to those with whom he is
communicating, the objects of poetic emotion under new forms. If he wishes
to describe an eagle, he need not say: "A rapacious bird of the falcon
family, remarkable for its strength, size, graceful figure, and
extraordinary flight." He represents these facts by making a picture:

  "He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
  Close to the sun in lonely lands,
  Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

  "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
  He watches from his mountain walls,
  And like a thunderbolt he falls."
[Footnote: Tennyson, "The Eagle." ]

Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, and
reflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is
"troped"; i.e. turned into figures which re-present the fundamental idea:

  "Come, Captain Age,
  With your great sea-chest full of treasure!
  Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin
  Disclose the carved ivory
  And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl,
  Riches of wisdom and years.
  Unfold the India shawl,
  With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue,
  Weave of a lifetime.
  I shall be warm and splendid
  With the spoils of the Indies of age."
[Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, "Come, Captain Age."]

It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to use
unornamented language, "not elevated," as Wordsworth said, "above the
level of prose." Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poetic
beauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain words
are spoken. The drama is full of such instances. "I loved you not," says
Hamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: "I was the more deceived." No
figure of speech could be more moving than that.

I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolate
sandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:

  "She died, and left to me
  This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
  This memory of what hath been,
  And nevermore will be."

I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for the
first time the perfection of their beauty.

But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the use
of figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristic
and habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotional
prose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor's account of the
fight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:

  "Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front,
  in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron--the town class,
  Birmingham, etc.--each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we
  looked and reduced speed they opened fire, _and the clear
  'bang-bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink_....

  "The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely
  wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had
  one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance
  _like a wildcat mad with wounds_.

  "Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a
  couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not
  care a d----, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession,
  _like elephants walking through a pack of dogs_, came the Lion, Queen
  Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and
  grim and _uncouth as some antediluvian monsters_. How solid they
  looked! How utterly _earthquaking_!"

The use and the effectiveness of figures depend primarily, then, upon the
mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed
in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing
metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the
rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications,  allegories, and all
the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he
is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate
examples of these various classes of figures, and they need not be
repeated here.


8. _Words as Permanent Embodiment of Poetic Feeling_

We have seen that the characteristic vocabulary of poetry originates in
emotion and that it is capable of transmitting emotion to the hearer or
reader. But how far are words capable of embodying emotion in permanent
form? Poets themselves, in proud consciousness of the enduring character
of their creations, have often boasted that they were building monuments
more enduring than bronze or marble. When Shakspere asserts this in his
sonnets, he is following not only an Elizabethan convention, but a
universal instinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delusion? Here are
words--mere vibrating sounds, light and winged and evanescent things,
assuming a meaning value only through the common consent of those who
interchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year,
often passing wholly from the living speech of men, decaying when races
decay and civilizations change. What transiency, what waste and oblivion
like that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves!

Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact that
certain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass,
and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men as
well as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet.

Some thoughts and feelings, then, eternalize themselves in human speech;
most thoughts and feelings do not. Wherein lies the difference?
If most words are perishable stuff, what is it that keeps other words from
perishing? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragile
material, "fame's great antiseptic, style"? Or is it by virtue of some
secret passionate quality imparted to words by the poet, so that the
apparently familiar syllables take on a life and significance which is
really not their own, but his? And is this intimate personalized quality
of words "style," also, as well as that more external "style" revealed in
clear and orderly and idiomatic arrangement? Or does the mystery of
permanence reside in the poet's generalizing power, by which he is able to
express universal, and hence permanently interesting human experience? And
therefore, was not the late Professor Courthope right when he declared, "I
take all great poetry to be not so much what Plato thought it, the
utterance of individual genius, half inspired, half insane, as the
enduring voice of the soul and conscience of man living in society"?

Answers to such questions as these depend somewhat upon the "romantic" or
"classic" bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress the
significance of the personality of the individual poet. The classic school
of criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualities
revealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and  fashions of
criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding
generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to
particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by
turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their
unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in
giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more
important fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theory
they may have invoked or followed.

For many a time, surely, their triumphs are a contradiction of their
theories. To take a very familiar example, Wordsworth's theory of poetic
diction shifted like a weathercock. In the Advertisement to the _Lyrical
Ballads_ (1798) he asserted: "The following poems are to be considered as
experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far
the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is
adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In the Preface of the second
edition (1800) he announced that his purpose had been "to ascertain how
far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that
quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally
endeavour to impart." But in the famous remarks on poetic diction which
accompanied the third edition (1802) he inserted after the words "A
selection of language really used by men" this additional statement of his
intention: "And at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of
the imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in
an unusual aspect." In place of the original statement about the
conversation of the middle and lower classes of society, we are now
assured that the language of poetry "if selected truly and judiciously,
must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and
figures.... This selection will form a distinction ... and will entirely
separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary
life."

What an amazing change in theory in four years! Yet it is no more
remarkable than Wordsworth's successive emendations in the text of his
poems. In 1807 his blind Highland boy had gone voyaging in

  "A Household Tub, like one of those
   Which women use to wash their clothes;
     This carried the blind Boy."

In 1815 the wash-tub becomes

  "The shell of a green turtle, thin
   And hollow--you might sit therein,
     It was so wide and deep."

And in 1820 the worried and dissatisfied artist changes that unlucky
vessel once more into the final banality of

  "A shell of ample size, and light
   As the pearly car of Amphitrite
     That sportive dolphins drew."

Sometimes, it is true, this adventurer in poetic diction had rather better
fortune in his alterations. The much-ridiculed lines of 1798 about the
child's grave--

  "I've measured it from side to side,
   'T is three feet long and two feet wide"--

became in 1820:

  "Though but of compass small and bare
   To thirsty suns and parching air."

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth forsook gradually his early
experiments with matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly grotesque figures.
Revolt against conventional eighteenth-century diction had given him a
blessed sense of freedom, but he found his real strength later in subduing
that freedom to a sense of law. Archaisms, queernesses, flatly
naturalistic turns of speech gave place to a vocabulary of simple dignity
and austere beauty. Wordsworth attained his highest originality as an
artist by disregarding singularity, by making familiar words reveal new
potencies of expression.

For after all, we must come back to what William James called the long
"loop-line," to that reservoir of ideas and feelings which stores up the
experience of individuals and of the race, and to the words which most
effectively evoke that experience. Two classes at Columbia University, a
few years ago, were asked to select fifty English words of basic
importance in the expression of human life. In choosing these words, they
were to aim at reality and strength rather than at beauty. When the two
lists were combined, they presented these seventy-eight different words,
which are here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom,
country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge,
disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith,
fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief,
happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy,
justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon,
mortal, nature, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace, pleasure, pride,
regret, sea, sigh, sleep, solitude, song, sorrow, soul, spirit, spring,
star, suffer, tears, tender, time, virtue, weep, whisper, wind and youth.
[Footnote: See Nation, February 23, 1911.]

Surely these words, selected as they were for their significance, are not
lacking in beauty of sound. On the contrary, any list of the most
beautiful words in English would include many of them. But it is the
meaning of these "long-loop" words, rather than their formal beauty alone,
which fits them for the service of poetry. And they acquire in that
service a "literary" value, which is subtly blended with their "sound"
value and logical "meaning" value. They connote so much! They suggest more
than they actually say. They unite the individual mood of the moment with
the soul of mankind.

And there is still another mode of union between the individual and the
race, which we must attempt in the next chapter to regard more closely,
but which should be mentioned here in connection with the permanent
embodiment of feeling in words,--namely, the mysterious fact of rhythm.
Single words are born and die, we learn them and forget them, they alter
their meanings, they always say less than we really intend, they are
imperfect instruments for signaling from one brain to another. Yet these
crumbling particles of speech may be miraculously held together and built
into a tune, and with the tune comes another element of law, order,
permanence. The instinct for the drumbeat lies deep down in our bodies; it
affects our mental life, the organization of our emotions, and our
response to the rhythmical arrangement of words. For mere ideas and words
are not poetry, but only part of the material for poetry. A poem does not
come into full being until the words begin to dance.



CHAPTER V

RHYTHM AND METRE

  "Rhythm is the recurrence of stress at intervals; metre is the
  regular, or measured, recurrence of stress."
    M. H. SHACKFORD, _A First Book of Poetics_

  "Metres being manifestly sections of rhythm."
    ARISTOTLE, _Poetics_, 4. (Butcher's translation)

  "Thoughts that voluntary move
  Harmonious numbers."
    MILTON


_1. The Nature of Rhythm_

And why must the words begin to dance? The answer is to be perceived in
the very nature of Rhythm, that old name for the ceaseless pulsing or
"flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for
rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects.
We hear the ticking of the clock as tíck-tock, tíck-tock, or else
tick-tóck, tick-tóck, although psychologists assure us that the clock's
wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is
simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates
the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, and
in the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that it
is we who impose or make-up the rhythm, in our human instinct for
organizing the units of attention. We cannot help it, as long as our own
pulses beat. No two persons catch quite the same rhythm in the sounds of
the animate and inanimate world, because no two persons have absolutely
identical pulse-beats, identical powers of attention, an identical
psycho-physical organism. We all perceive that there is a rhythm in a
racing crew, in a perfectly timed stroke of golf, in a fisherman's fly-
casting, in a violinist's bow, in a close-hauled sailboat fighting with
the wind. But we appropriate and organize these objective impressions in
subtly different ways.

When, for instance, we listen to poetry read aloud, or when we read it
aloud ourselves, some of us are instinctive "timers,"
[Footnote: See W. M. Patterson, _The Rhythm of Prose_. Columbia University
Press, 1916.]
paying primary attention to the spaced or measured intervals of time,
although in so doing we are not wholly regardless of those points of
"stress" which help to make the time-intervals plainer. Others of us are
natural "stressers," in that we pay primary attention to the "weight" of
words,--the relative loudness or pitch, by which their meaning or
importance is indicated,--and it is only secondarily that we think of
these weighted or "stressed" words as separated from one another by
approximately equal intervals of time. Standing on the rocks at Gloucester
after an easterly storm, a typical "timer" might be chiefly conscious of
the steady sequence of the waves, the measured intervals between
their summits; while the typical stresser, although subconsciously aware
of the steady iteration of the giant rollers, might watch primarily their
foaming crests, and listen chiefly to their crashing thunder. The point to
be remembered is this: that neither the "timing" instinct nor the
"stressing" instinct excludes the other, although in most individuals one
or the other predominates. Musicians, for instance, are apt to be
noticeable "timers," while many scholars who deal habitually with words in
their varied shifts of meaning, are professionally inclined to be
"stressers."


_2. The Measurement of Rhythm_

Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questions
of prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse;
the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize about
the nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whose
arrangement we call rhythm. No one disputes, again, that the only arbiter
in matters of prosody is the trained ear, and not the eye. Infinitely
deceptive is the printed page of verse when regarded by the eye. Verse may
be made to look like prose and prose to look like verse. Capital letters,
lines, rhymes, phrases and paragraphs may be so cunningly or
conventionally arranged by the printer as to disguise the real nature of
the rhythmical and metrical pattern. When in doubt, close your eyes!

We agree, then, that in all spoken language--and this is as true of prose
as it is of verse--there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked,
and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals.
But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation to
certainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poem
is written in a definite metre? In one sense "yes." No one doubts that the
_Odyssey_ is written in "dactylic hexameters," i.e., in lines made up of
six "feet," each one of which is normally composed of a long syllable plus
two short syllables, or of an acceptable equivalent for that particular
combination. But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's
_Evangeline_ is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for
the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and
listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a
dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called
"hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of
time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not
in the same "measure" or "metre" at all. For the Greek poet was, as a
metrist, thinking primarily of quantity, of the relative "timing" of his
syllables, and the American of the relative "stress" of his syllables.
[Footnote: "Musically speaking--because the musical terms are exact and
not ambiguous--true dactyls are in 2-4 time and the verse of _Evangeline_
is in 3-8 time." T. D. Goodell, _Nation_, October 12, 1911.]

That illustration is drearily hackneyed, no doubt, but it has a double
value. It is perfectly clear; and furthermore, it serves to remind us of
the instinctive differences between different persons and different races
as regards the ways of arranging time-intervals so as to create the
rhythms of verse. The individual's standard of measurement--his poetic
foot-rule, so to speak--is very elastic,--"made of rubber" indeed, as the
experiments of many psychological laboratories have demonstrated beyond a
question. Furthermore, the composers of poetry build it out of very
elastic units. They are simply putting syllables of words together into a
rhythmical design, and these "airy syllables," in themselves mere symbols
of ideas and feelings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely correct
sound-scales. They cannot be measured in time by any absolutely accurate
watch-dial, or exactly estimated in their meaning, whether that be literal
or figurative, by any dictionary of words and phrases. But this is only
saying that the syllables which make up the units of verse, whether the
units be called "foot" or "line" or "phrase," are not dead, mechanical
things, but live things, moving rhythmically, entering thereby into the
pulsing, chiming life of the real world, and taking on more fullness of
life and beauty in elastic movement, in ordered but infinitely flexible
design, than they ever could possess as independent particles.


_3. Conflict and Compromise_

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm
and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of
sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert to
considerations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon the
old antinomy--or it may be, harmony--between "form" and "significance,"
between the "outside" and the "inside" of the work of art. For words,
surely, have one kind of value as _pure sound_, as "cadences" made up of
stresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllable
is artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which you
perceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a
language of which you know not a single word; and you may experience a
modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the
"sense" of a richly musical passage in Swinburne, and delighting your ear
by its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as
_meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress
and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in
different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence.
"Meaning" values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in a
mechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, not
absolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and one
must be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a word
refuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure,
so that we "wrench" the accent a trifle, or make it "hover" over two
syllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant that
lovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises.
[Footnote: Compare the passage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted from
Alden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter.]
They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expected
measure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat as
closely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course a
compromise between the line as laid by the compass, and the actual facts
of wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus that
the sailor "makes it," triumphantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise, out
of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary words
and rebellious moods, out of

  "Thoughts hardly to be packed
  Into a narrow act,
  Fancies that broke through language and escaped,"

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend into
that larger living whole--the dancing, singing crowd of sounds and
meanings which make up a poem.


_4. The Rhythms of Prose_

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verse
rhythm, and to consider what Dryden called "the other harmony" of prose.
For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast and
learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the Greeks and
Romans, and Saintsbury's _History of English Prose Rhythm_ is a monumental
collection of wonderful prose passages in English, with the scansion of
"long" and "short" syllables and of "feet" marked after a fashion that
seems to please no one but the author. But in truth the task of inventing
an adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing a
working agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almost
insuperable. Those of us who sat in our youth at the feet of German
masters were taught that the distinction between verse and prose was
simple: verse was, as the Greeks had called it, "bound speech" and prose
was "loosened speech." But a large proportion of the poetry published in
the last ten years is "free verse," which is assuredly of a "loosened"
rather than a "bound" pattern.

Apparently the old fence between prose and verse has been broken down. Or,
if one conceives of indubitable prose and indubitable verse as forming two
intersecting circles, there is a neutral zone,

[Illustration:   Prose  /  Neutral Zone  /  Verse]

which some would call "prose poetry" and some "free verse," and which,
according to the experiments of Dr. Patterson
[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, already cited.]
may be appropriated as "prose experience" or "verse experience" according
to the rhythmic instinct of each individual. Indeed Mr. T. S. Omond has
admitted that "the very same words, with the very same natural stresses,
may be prose or verse according as we treat them. The difference is in
ourselves, in the mental rhythm to which we unconsciously adjust the
words."
[Footnote: Quoted in B. M. Alden, "The Mental Side of Metrical Form,"
_Modern Language Review_, July, 1914.]
Many familiar sentences from the English Bible or Prayer-Book, such as the
words from the _Te Deum_, "We, therefore, pray thee, help thy servants,
whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood," have a rhythm which may
be felt as prose or verse, according to the mental habit or mood or
rhythmizing impulse of the hearer.

Nevertheless it remains true in general that the rhythms of prose are more
constantly varied, broken and intricate than the rhythms of verse. They
are characterized, according to the interesting experiments of Dr.
Patterson, by syncopated time,
[Footnote: "For a 'timer' the definition of prose as distinguished from
verse experience depends upon a predominance of syncopation over
coincidence in the coordination of the accented syllables of the text with
the measuring pulses." _Rhythm of Prose_, p. 22.]
whereas in normal verse there is a fairly clean-cut coincidence between
the pulses of the hearer and the strokes of the rhythm. Every one seems to
agree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and
"syncopated" tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse.
There is, unquestionably, a natural "iambic" roll in English prose, due to
the predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in our
native tongue, but when Dickens--to cite what John Wesley would call "an
eminent sinner" in this respect--inserts in his emotional prose line after
line of five-stress "iambic" verse, we feel instinctively that the
presence of the blank verse impairs the true harmony of the prose.
[Footnote:  Observe, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter,
the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. Ingersoll's "Address
over a Little Boy's Grave."]
Delicate writers of English prose usually avoid this coincidence of
pattern with the more familiar patterns of verse, but it is impossible to
avoid it wholly, and some of the most beautiful cadences of English prose
might, if detached from their context, be scanned for a few syllables as
perfect verse. The free verse of Whitman, Henley and Matthew Arnold is
full of these embedded fragments of recognized "tunes of verse," mingled
with the unidentifiable tunes of prose. There has seldom been a more
curious example of accidental coincidence than in this sentence from a
prosaic textbook on "The Parallelogram of Forces": "And hence no force,
however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which
shall be absolutely straight." This is precisely the "four-stressed
iambic" metre of _In Memoriam_, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme
order of the _In Memoriam_ stanza:

  "And hence no force, however great,
    Can draw a cord, however fine,
    Into a horizontal line
  Which shall be absolutely straight."

We shall consider more closely, in the section on Free Verse in the
following chapter, this question of the coincidence and variation of
pattern as certain types of loosened verse pass in and out of the zone
which is commonly recognized as pure prose. But it is highly important
here to remember another fact, which professional psychologists in their
laboratory experiments with the notation of verse and prose have
frequently forgotten, namely, the existence of a type of ornamented prose,
which has had a marked historical influence upon the development of
English style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman
rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened
its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color,
cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly
colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her
polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Medieval Latin took over all of these
devices from Classical Latin, and in its varied oratorical, liturgical and
epistolary forms it strove to imitate the various modes of _cursus_
("running") and _clausula_ ("cadence") which had characterized the rhythms
of Isocrates and Cicero.
[Footnote: A. C. Clark, _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913.
Morris W. Croll, "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," _Studies in
Philology_. January, 1919.
Oliver W. Elton, "English Prose Numbers," in _Essays and Studies_ by
members of the English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913.]
From the Medieval Latin Missal and Breviary these devices of prose rhythm,
particularly those affecting the end of sentences, were taken over into
the Collects and other parts of the liturgy of the English Prayer-Book.
They had a constant influence upon the rhythms employed by the translators
of the English Bible, and through the Bible the cadences of this ancient
ornamented prose have passed over into the familiar but intricate
harmonies of our "heightened" modern prose.

While this whole matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here,
it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of English
prose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries,
requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases and
clauses, and to "the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetorical
emphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody."
[Footnote: New York _Nation_, February 27, 1913.]
For that sonority and cadence and balance which constitute a harmonious
prose sentence cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illiterate
scientist in his laboratory for acoustics; the "literary" value of words,
in all strongly emotional prose, is inextricably mingled with the bare
sound values: it is thought-units that must be delicately "balanced" as
well as stresses and slides and final clauses; it is the elevation of
ideas, the nobility and beauty of feeling, as discerned by the trained
literary sense, which makes the final difference between enduring prose
harmonies and the mere tinkling of the "musical glasses."
[Footnote: This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews,
_The Writing and Reading of Verse_, chap. 5. New York, 1918.]
The student of verse may very profitably continue to exercise himself with
the rhythms of prose. He should learn to share the unwearied enthusiasm of
Professor Saintsbury for the splendid cadences of our sixteenth-century
English, for the florid decorative period of Thomas Browne and Jeremy
Taylor, for the eloquent "prose poetry" of De Quincey and Ruskin and
Charles Kingsley, and for the strangely subtle effects wrought by Pater
and Stevenson. But he must not imagine that any laboratory system of
tapping syncopated time, or any painstaking marking of macrons (-) breves
(u) and caesuras (||) will give him full initiation into the mysteries of
prose cadences which have been built, not merely out of stressed and
unstressed syllables, but out of the passionate intellectual life of many
generations of men. He may learn to feel that life as it pulsates in
words, but no one has thus far devised an adequate scheme for its
notation.


_5. Quantity, Stress and Syllable_

The notation of verse, however, while certainly not a wholly simple
matter, is far easier. It is practicable to indicate by conventional
printer's devices the general rhythmical and metrical scheme of a poem,
and to indicate the more obvious, at least, of its incidental variations
from the expected pattern. It remains as true of verse as it is of prose
that the "literary" values of words--their connotations or emotional
overtones--are too subtle to be indicated by any marks invented by a
printer; but the alternation or succession of long or short syllables, of
stressed or unstressed syllables, the nature of particular feet
and lines and stanzas, the order and interlacing of rhymes, and even the
devices of tone-color, are sufficiently external elements of verse to
allow easy methods of indication.

When you and I first began to study Virgil and Horace, for instance, we
were taught that the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built heir verses
upon the principle of _Quantity_. The metrical unit was the foot, made up
of long and short syllables in various combinations, two short syllables
being equivalent to one long one. The feet most commonly used were the
Iambus [short-long], the Anapest [short-short-long], the Trochee
[long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long].
Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot was
called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four,
a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like
a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in the
first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the
time of St. Augustine:

  _Arma vi¦rumque ca¦no  Tro¦jae qui ¦ primus ab¦oris_.

Or perhaps it was Horace's

  _Maece¦nas, atavis ¦¦ edite reg¦ibus_.

We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: that
there were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing places
with dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, so
that a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with a
dactyl, or _vice versa_; that syllables might be omitted at the beginning
or the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this "cutting-off"
was called _catalexis_; that syllables might even be added at the
beginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called
_hypermetric_; and that we must be very watchful about pauses,
particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occur
about the middle of a line, called a _caesura_. But the magic password to
admit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after all
the word _Quantity_.

If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between this
Roman system of versification and the system which governed modern English
poetry--even such rude playground verse as

  "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
  Catch a nigger by the toe"--

we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plain
one, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in its
verse the principles of _Stress_. Instead of looking for "long" and
"short" syllables, we had merely to look for "stressed" and "unstressed"
syllables. It was a matter, not of quantity, but of accent; and if we
remembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, in
retaining the technical names of classical versification. Only we must be
careful that by "iambus," in English poetry, we _meant_ an unstressed
syllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with
"trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and
not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak
of _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter," and _Evangeline_ in
"dactylic hexameter," etc. The trick was to count stresses and not
syllables, for was not Coleridge's _Christabel_ written in a metre which
varied its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yet
maintained its music by regularity of stress?

Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when we
went to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excited
over prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between
_Quantity_ and _Stress_ would seem to indicate. For we were now told that
the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do
with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when
the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural
dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger
stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had
stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures;
that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and
verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a
certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitative
principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses
aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the
verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of
the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm.
In a word, we were now taught--if I may quote from a personal letter of a
distinguished American Latinist--that "the almost universal belief that
Latin verse is a matter of quantity only is a mistake. Word-accent was not
lost in Latin verse."

And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantity
were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept,
perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented
verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,

  _Mílle Fráncos mílle sémel Sármatás occídimús_.
[Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, _Foreign Sources of Modern English
Versification_. Halle, 1898.]

Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves
about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons;
they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the
"goose-step." Their

  _Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus_

which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse,
[Footnote: _History of English Poetry_, vol. 1, p. 73.]
seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like

  _"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup--Hep--Hep!"_

Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman
public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its
ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the
Greeks.

Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was still
a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on
Quantity or Stress, but merely _Syllabic_, or syllable-counting. This was
immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe
in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript poem of the ninth century:
[Footnote: _Foreign Sources_, etc., p. 3.]

  _"Beatissimus namque Dionysius ¦ Athenis quondam episcopus,
  Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam ¦ propter praedicandi
    gratiam_," etc.

"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. No
further regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived.
Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music."
Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of
versification,--particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither
quantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in
the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medieval
Latin hymns, like _Dies ire_, were written, the Syllabic principle of
versification, like the Quantitative principle, dropped out of sight,
and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system,
heavily ornamented with rhymes.
[Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's _Classical Heritage of the
Middle Ages_ printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]
Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in French
prosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent English
poetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be from
considerations of quantity and stress, in certain English songs written
for music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre"
(8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre"
(7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenient
illustration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone.


_6. The Appeal to the Ear_

At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of _Quantity,
Stress_ and _Syllable_, our instructors were sensible enough to make an
appeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principle
in Germanic poetry,--although not denying that considerations of quantity
and number of syllables might have something to do with the effect,--they
read aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that _Song of the
Battle of Brunanburh_ which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modern
English words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though the
Anglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresses
without difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor,
while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears,
followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could all
perceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaborated
verse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunningly
reckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable long
and strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like a
brook. Whether we called the metre of the _Prologue_ rhymed couplets of
iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed
verse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the
"blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton,
and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and
"syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and
not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, to
be richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be,
to the other!

I have taken too many pages, perhaps, in thus sketching the rudimentary
education of a college student in the elements of rhythm and metre, and in
showing how the theoretical difficulties of the subject--which are
admittedly great--often disappear as soon as one resolves to let the ear
decide. A satisfied ear may soothe a dissatisfied mind. I have quoted from
a letter of an American scholar about quantity being the "controlling"
element of cultivated Roman verse, and I now quote from a personal letter
of an American poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading poetry as it
was meant to be read": "My point is _not_ that English verse has no
quantity, but that the controlling element is not quantity but accent. The
lack of fixed _syllabic _quantity is just what I emphasize. This lack
makes definite _beat _impossible: or at least it makes it absurd to
attempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities'
and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarrassing to the
professor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make it
fit the verse. And when he has done all this, the student, if he has a
good ear, forthwith forgets it all, and reads the verse as it was meant to
be read, as a succession of musical bars (without pitch, of course), in
which the accent marks the rhythm, and pauses and _rests _often take the
place of missing syllables. To this ingenuous student I hold out my hand
and cast in my lot with him. He is the man for whom English poetry is
written."

It may be objected, of course, that the phrase "reading poetry as it was
meant to be read" really begs the question. For English poets have often
amused themselves by composing purely quantitative verse, which they wish
us to read as quantitative. The result may be as artificial as the
painfully composed Latin quantitative verse of English schoolboys, but the
thing can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quantity are well known, and
should be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter:

  "High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me,"

and of his pentameter:

  "All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel."

Here the English long and short syllables--as far as "long" and "short"
can be definitely distinguished in English--correspond precisely to the
rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose
investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has
recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative
hexameters.
[Footnote: _Ibant Obscuri_. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.]
Here are half a dozen lines:

  "Midway of all this tract, with secular arms an immense elm
  Reare

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