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A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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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 theatre_"
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.

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