A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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Even Macaulay, however, is a less pungent and amusing advocate of
rationalism than Thomas Love Peacock in _The Four Ages of Poetry_.
[Footnote: Reprinted in A. S. Cook's edition of Shelley's _Defense of
Poetry_. Boston, 1891.]

A few sentences must suffice:

"A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He
lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings,
associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and
exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a
crab, backward.... The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable
into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of
exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can
therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a
puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can
never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a
useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one
of the comforts and utilities of life, of which we have witnessed so
many and so rapid advances.... We may easily conceive that the day is
not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be
as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and
this not from any decrease either of intellectual power or intellectual
acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition
have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have
abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry
of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who
continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were
still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual
progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as
mathematicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who
have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit
of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and knowing how
small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect,
smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with
which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the
poetical palm and the critical chair."

No one really knows whether Peacock was wholly serious in this diatribe,
but inasmuch as it produced Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_ "as an
antidote"--as Shelley said--we should be grateful for it. Both Peacock and
Macaulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their statements as to the
uselessness of poetry, as compared with the value of intellectual exertion
in other fields, is wholly in the spirit of twentieth-century rationalism.
Few readers of this book may hold that doctrine, but they will meet it on
every side; and they will need all they can remember of Sidney and Shelley
and George Woodberry "as an antidote."

3. _An Aesthetic Objection_

In Aristotle's well-known definition of Tragedy in the fifth section of
the _Poetics_, there is one clause, and perhaps only one, which has been
accepted without debate. "A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an
action that is serious, complete in itself, _and of an adequate
magnitude_." Does a lyric possess "an adequate magnitude?" As the
embodiment of a single aspect of feeling, and therefore necessarily brief,
the lyric certainly lacks "mass." As an object for aesthetic
contemplation, is the average lyric too small to afford the highest and
most permanent pleasure? "A long poem," remarks A. C. Bradley in his
_Oxford Lectures on Poetry_,
[Footnote: London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on "The
Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth."]
"requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one, and it would be
easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest
value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes." Surely the lyric,
like the short story, cannot see life steadily and whole. It reflects, as
we have seen, a single situation or desire. "Short swallow-flights of
song"; piping "as the linnet sings"; have not the lyric poets themselves
confessed this inherent shortcoming of their art in a thousand similes?
Does not a book of lyrics often seem like a plantation of carefully tended
little trees, rather than a forest? The most ardent collector of
butterflies is aware that he is hunting only butterflies and not big game.
Mr. John Gould Fletcher's _Japanese Prints_ is a collection of the
daintiest lyric fragments, lovely as a butterfly's wing. But do such
lyrics lack "adequate magnitude"?

It seems to the present writer that this old objection is a real one, and
that it is illustrated afresh by contemporary poetry, but that it is not
so much an argument against the lyric as such, as it is an explanation of
the ineffectiveness of certain lyric poems. This defect is not primarily
that they lack "magnitude," but rather that they lack an adequate basis in
our emotional adjustment to the fact or situation upon which they turn.
The reader is not prepared for the effect which they convey. The art of
the drama was defined by the younger Dumas as the art of preparation. Now
the lyrics which are most effective in primarily dramatic compositions,
let us say the songs in "Pippa Passes" or Ariel's songs in _The Tempest_,
are those where the train of emotional association or contrast has been
carefully laid and is waiting to be touched off. So it is with the
markedly lyrical passages in narrative verse--say the close of "Sohrab and
Rustum." When a French actress sings the "Marseillaise" to a theatre
audience in war-time, or Sir Harry Lauder, dressed in kilts, sings
to a Scottish-born audience about "the bonny purple heather," or a
marching regiment strikes up "Dixie," the actual song is only the release
of a mood already stimulated. But when one comes upon an isolated lyric
printed as a "filler" at the bottom of a magazine page, there is no train
of emotional association whatever. There is no lyric mood waiting to
respond to a "lyric cry." To overcome this obstacle, Walter Page and other
magazine editors, a score of years ago, made the experiment of printing
all the verse together, instead of scattering it according to the
exigencies of the "make-up." Miss Monroe's _Poetry_, _Contemporary Verse_,
and the other periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry, easily avoid this
handicap of intruding prose. One turns their pages as he turns leaves of
music until he finds some composition in accordance with his mood of the
moment. The long poem or the drama creates an undertone of feeling
in which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforced
as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on
the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the
lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles,"
requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one
another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation
of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the
last decade, by that very variety of technical experimentation, that
increased range and individualism of lyric effort, which have renewed the
interest in American poetry.

4. _Subjectivity as a Curse_

I have often thought of a conversation with Samuel Asbury, a dozen years
ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise,
who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he
had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by
the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the
younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to
morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions.
He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his _Texas Nativist_,
[Footnote: Published by the author at College Station, Texas.]
that more objective forms of poetry, particularly epic and dramatic
handling of local and historic American material, was far healthier stuff
for a poet to work with.

This objection to the lyric as an encourager of subjective excitement, of
egoistic introspection, like the other objections already stated, is one
of old standing. Goethe remarked that the subjectivity of the smaller
poets was of no significance, but that they were interested in nothing
really objective. But though this indictment of over-individualism has
often been drawn, our own times are a fresh proof of its validity. If the
revelation of personality unites men, the stress upon mere individuality
separates them, and there are countless poets of the day who glory in
their eccentric individualism without remembering that it is only through
a richly developed personality that poetry gains any universal values.
"Nothing in literature is so perishable as eccentricity, with regard to
which each generation has its own requirements and its own standard of
taste; and the critic who urges contemporary poets to make their work as
individual as possible is deliberately inviting them to build their
structures on sand instead of rock."
[Footnote: Edmond Holmes, _What is Poetry_, p. 68.]
Every reader of contemporary poetry is aware that along with its
exhilarating freshness and force there has been a display of singularity
and of silly nudity both of body and mind. Too intimate confidences have
been betrayed in the lyric confessional. It is a fine thing to see a
Varsity eight take their dip in the river at the end of an afternoon's
spin. Those boys strip well. But there are middle-aged poets who strip
very badly. Nature never intended them to play the role of Narcissus.
Dickens wrote great novels in a room so hung with mirrors that he could
watch himself in the act of composition. But that is not the best sort of
writing-room for lyric poets, particularly in a decade when acute
self-consciousness, race-consciousness and even coterie-consciousness are
exploited for commercial purposes, and the "lutanists of October" are duly
photographed at their desks.

5. _Mere Technique_

There is one other count in the old indictment of the lyric which is sure
to be emphasized whenever any generation, like our own, shows a new
technical curiosity about lyric forms. It is this: that mere technique
will "carry" a lyric, even though thought, passion and imagination be
lacking. This charge will inevitably be made from time to time, and not
merely by the persons who naturally tend to stress the content-value of
poetry as compared with its form-value. It was Stedman, who was peculiarly
susceptible to the charm of varied lyric form, who remarked of some of
Poe's lyrics, "The libretto (i.e. the sense) is nothing, the score is all
in all." And it must be admitted that the "libretto" of "Ulalume," for
instance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry who
value the "score" very highly. In a period marked by enthusiasm for new
experiments in versification, new feats of technique, the borderland
between real conquests of novel territory and sheer nonsense verse
becomes very hazy. The _Spectra_ hoax, perpetrated so cleverly in 1916 by
Mr. Ficke and Mr. Witter Bynner, fooled many of the elect.
[Footnote: See Untermeyer's _New Era_, etc., pp. 320-23.]
I have never believed that Emerson meant to decry Poe when he referred to
him as "the jingle-man." Emerson's memory for names was faulty, and he was
trying to indicate the author of the

"tintinnabulation of the bells."

That Poe was a prestidigitator with verse, and may be regarded solely with
a view to his professional expertness, is surely no ground for disparaging
him as a poet. But it is the kind of penalty which extraordinary technical
expertness has to pay in all the arts. Many persons remember Paganini only
as the violinist who could play upon a single string. Every "_amplificolor
imperii_"--every widener of the bounds of the empire of poetry, like
Vachel Lindsay with his experiments in chanted verse, Robert Frost with
his subtle renderings of the cadences of actual speech, Miss Amy Lowell
with her doctrine of "curves" and "returns" and polyphony--runs the risk
of being regarded for a while as a technician and nothing more. Ultimately
a finer balance is struck between the claims of form and content: the
ideas of a poet, his total vision of life, his contribution to the thought
as well as to the craftsmanship of his generation, are thrown into the
scale. Victor Hugo is now seen to be something far other than the mere
amazing lyric virtuoso of the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826. Walt Whitman
ultimately gets judged as Walt Whitman, and not merely as the inventor
of a new type of free verse in 1855. A rough justice is done at last, no
doubt, but for a long time the cleverest and most original manipulators of
words and tunes are likely to be judged by their virtuosity alone.

_6. The Lines of Defence_

The objections to lyric poetry which have just been rehearsed are of
varying degrees of validity. They have been mentioned here because they
still affect, more or less, the judgment of the general public as it
endeavors to estimate the value of the contemporary lyric. I have little
confidence in the taste of professed admirers of poetry who can find no
pleasure in contemporary verse, and still less confidence in the taste of
our contemporaries whose delight in the "new era" has made them deaf to
the great poetic voices of the past. I am sorry for the traditionalist who
cannot enjoy Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edgar Lee
Masters and Carl Sandburg. He is, in my opinion, in a parlous state. But
the state of the young rebel who cannot enjoy "Lycidas" and "The Progress
of Poesy" and the "Ode to Dejection" is worse than parlous. It is
hopeless.

It is not for him, therefore, that these final paragraphs are written, but
rather for those lovers of poetry who recognize that it transcends all
purely moralistic and utilitarian, as it does all historical and technical
considerations,--that it lifts the reader into a serene air where beauty
and truth abide, while the perplexed generations of men appear and
disappear. Sidney and Campion and Daniel pleaded its cause for the
Elizabethans, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it against the
Georgian Philistines, Carlyle, Newman and Arnold championed it through
every era of Victorian materialism. In the twentieth century, critics like
Mackail and A. C. Bradley and Rhys, poets like Newbolt and Drinkwater and
Masefield--to say nothing of living poets and critics among our own
countrymen--have spoken out for poetry with a knowledge, a sympathy and an
eloquence unsurpassed in any previous epoch. The direct "Defence of
Poetry" may safely be left to such men as these.

I have chosen, rather, the line of indirect vindication of poetry, and
particularly of the lyric, which has been attempted in this book. We have
seen that the same laws are perpetually at work in poetry as in all the
other arts; that we have to do with the transmission of a certain kind of
feeling through a certain medium; that the imagination remoulds the
material proffered by the senses, and brings into order the confused and
broken thoughts of the mind, until it presents the eternal aspect of
things through words that dance to music. We have seen that the study of
poetry leads us back to the psychic life of primitive races, to the
origins of language and of society, and to the underlying spirit of
institutions and nationalities, so that even a fragment of surviving lyric
verse may be recognized as a part of those unifying and dividing
forces that make up the life of the world. We have found poetry,
furthermore, to be the great personal mode of literary expression, a
revelation of noble personality as well as base, and that this personal
mode of expression has continued to hold its own in the modern world. The
folk-epic is gone, the art-epic has been outstripped by prose fiction, and
the drama needs a theatre. But the lyric needs only a _poet_, who can
compose in any of its myriad forms. No one who knows contemporary
literature will deny that the lyric is now interpreting the finer spirit
of science, the drift of social progress, and above all, the instincts of
personal emotion. Through it to-day, as never before in the history of
civilization, the heart of a man can reach the heart of mankind. It is
inconceivable that the lyric will not grow still more significant
with time, freighted more and more deeply with thought and passion and
touched with a richer and more magical beauty. Some appreciation of it, no
matter how inadequate, should be a part of the spiritual possessions of
every civilized man.'

"Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;
Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!
Auf! bade, Schueler, unverdrossen
Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenrothl"

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

I add here some suggestions to teachers who may wish to use this book in
the classroom. In connection with each chapter I have indicated the more
important discussions of the special topic. There is also some additional
illustrative material, and I have indicated a few hints for classroom
exercises, following methods which have proved helpful in my own
experience as a teacher.

I have tried to keep in mind the needs of two kinds of college courses in
poetry. One of them is the general introductory course, which usually
begins with the lyric rather than with the epic or the drama, and which
utilizes some such collection as the _Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book
of English Verse_. Any such collection of standard verse, or any of the
anthologies of recent poetry, like those selected by Miss Jessie B.
Rittenhouse or Mr. W. S. Braithwaite, should be constantly in use in the
classroom as furnishing concrete illustration of the principles discussed
in books like mine.

The other kind of course which I have had in mind is the one dealing with
the works of a single poet. Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson,
Browning, are among the poets most frequently chosen for this sort of
study. I have found it an advantage to carry on the discussion of the
general principles of poetic imagination and expression in connection with
the close textual study of the complete work of any one poet. It is hoped
that this book may prove helpful for such a purpose.

CHAPTER I

This chapter aims to present, in as simple a form as possible, some of the
fundamental questions in aesthetic theory as far as they bear upon the
study of poetry. James Sully's article on "Aesthetics" in the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Sidney Colvin's article on "The Fine
Arts," afford a good preliminary survey of the field. K. Gordon's
_Aesthetics_, E. D. Puffer's _Psychology of Beauty_, Santayana's _Sense of
Beauty_, Raymond's _Genesis of Art Form_, and Arthur Symons's _Seven
Arts_, are stimulating books. Bosanquet's _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_ is
commended to those advanced students who have not time to read his
voluminous _History of Aesthetic_, just as Lane Cooper's translation of
_Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_ may be read profitably before taking up
the more elaborate discussions in Butcher's _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry
and Fine Art_. In the same way, Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ is a good
preparation for Croce's monumental _Aesthetics_. The student should
certainly make some acquaintance with Lessing's _Laokoon_, and he will
find Babbitt's _New Laokoon_ a brilliant and trenchant survey of the old
questions.

It may be, however, that the teacher will prefer to pass rapidly over the
ground covered in this chapter, rather than to run the risk of confusing
his students with problems admittedly difficult. In that case the
classroom discussions may begin with chapter II. I have found, however,
that the new horizons which are opened to many students in connection with
the topics touched upon in chapter I more than make up for some temporary
bewilderment.

CHAPTER II

The need here is to look at an old subject with fresh eyes. Teachers who
are fond of music or painting or sculpture can invent many illustrations
following the hint given in the Orpheus and Eurydice passage in the text.
Among recent books, Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_ and Max Eastman's
_Enjoyment of Poetry_ are particularly to be commended for their
unconventional point of view. See also Fairchild's pamphlet on _Teaching
of Poetry in the High School_, and John Erskine's paper on "The Teaching
of Poetry" (_Columbia University Quarterly_, December, 1915). Alfred
Hayes's "Relation of Music to Poetry" (_Atlantic_, January, 1914) is
pertinent to this chapter. But the student should certainly familiarize
himself with Theodore Watts-Dunton's famous article on "Poetry" in
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, now reprinted with additions in his
_Renascence of Wonder_. He should also read A. C. Bradley's chapter on
"Poetry for its Own Sake" in the _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, Neilson's
_Essentials of Poetry_, Stedman's _Nature and Elements of Poetry_, as well
as the classic "Defences" of Poetry by Philip Sidney, Shelley, Leigh Hunt
and George E. Woodberry. For advanced students, R. P. Cowl's _Theory of
Poetry in England_ is a useful summary of critical opinions covering
almost every aspect of the art of poetry, as it has been understood by
successive generations of Englishmen.

CHAPTER III

This chapter, like the first, will be difficult for some students. They
may profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester's chapter
on "Imagination" in his _Literary Criticism_, Neilson's discussion of
"Imagination" in his _Essentials of Poetry_, the first four chapters of
Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's _Biographia
Literaria_, and Wordsworth's Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815. See
also Stedman's chapter on "Imagination" in his _Nature and Elements of
Poetry_.

Under section 2, some readers may be interested in Sir William Rowan
Hamilton's account of his famous discovery of the quaternion analysis, one
of the greatest of all discoveries in pure mathematics:

"Quaternions started into life, or light, full grown,
on Monday, the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking
with Lady Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to
Brougham Bridge, which my boys have since called the
Quaternion Bridge. That is to say, I then and there
felt the galvanic circuit of thought _close_, and the sparks
which fell from it were the _fundamental equations between
i, j, k; exactly such_ as I have used them ever since.
I pulled out on the spot a pocket-book, which still exists,
and made an entry on which, _at the very moment_, I felt
that it might be worth my while to expend the labor of
at least ten (or it might be fifteen) years to come. But
then it is fair to say that this was because I felt a _problem_
to have been at that moment _solved_--an intellectual
want relieved--which had _haunted_ me for at least
ifteen years before_. Less than an hour elapsed before I
had asked and obtained leave of the Council of the
Royal Irish Academy, of which Society I was, at that
time, the President--to _read_ at the _next General Meeting_
a _Paper_ on Quaternions; which I accordingly _did_, on
November 13, 1843."

The following quotation from Lascelles-Abercrombie's study of Thomas Hardy
presents in brief compass the essential problem dealt with in this
chapter. It is closely written, and should be read more than once.

"Man's intercourse with the world is necessarily formative. His
experience of things outside his consciousness is in the manner of a
chemistry, wherein some energy of his nature is mated with the energy
brought in on his nerves from externals, the two combining into
something which exists only in, or perhaps we should say closely around,
man's consciousness. Thus what man knows of the world is what has been
_formed_ by the mixture of his own nature with the streaming in of the
external world. This formative energy of his, reducing the in-coming
world into some constant manner of appearance which may be appreciable
by consciousness, is most conveniently to be described, it seems, as an
unaltering imaginative desire: desire which accepts as its material, and
fashions itself forth upon, the many random powers sent by the world to
invade man's mind. That there is this formative energy in man may easily
be seen by thinking of certain dreams; those dreams, namely, in which
some disturbance outside the sleeping brain (such as a sound of knocking
or a bodily discomfort) is completely formed into vivid trains of
imagery, and in that form only is presented to the dreamer's
consciousness. This, however, merely shows the presence of the active
desire to shape sensation into what consciousness can accept; the dream
is like an experiment done in the isolation of a laboratory; there are
so many conflicting factors when we are awake that the events of sleep
must only serve as a symbol or diagram of the intercourse of mind with
that which is not mind--intercourse which only takes place in a region
where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the
irradiations of the world. Perception itself is a formative act; and all
the construction of sensation into some orderly, coherent idea of the
world is a further activity of the central imaginative desire. Art is
created, and art is enjoyed, because in it man may himself completely
express and exercise those inmost desires which in ordinary experience
are by no means to be completely expressed. Life has at last been
perfectly formed and measured to man's requirements; and in art man
knows himself truly the master of his existence. It is this sense of
mastery which gives man that raised and delighted consciousness of self
which art provokes."

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