and Whitman, dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.
And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.
Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always will be with us, and probably more so in prose than in verse. We want literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame Lespinasse, or in the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, or in the verse of Hafiz, Burns, Shelley, Browning, Heine or Verlaine.
Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his Inspiration of Poetry for a return of poetry to poetic madness. Emotion is the chief and most important element of poetry. "Emotion" as Woodberry says, "is the condition of their (the poets') existence; passion is the element of their being." When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any emotion in which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine, Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial event important poetry.
But emotions described by the poet affect people
differently. I may find great emotion in reading about a man who sacrifices himself for a great and unpopular idea, but others may not be interested in that man or his idea and hence will not be moved by the work. Such a work is poetry to me and like minded readers. Further, differences of intellectual outlook on the part of the readers count in determining poetry. Socrates, Buddha, Bruno and Galileo are poetic figures to us to-day; they have been enshrined in poetry and history and we accept many of their ideas. But to their contemporaries who rejected them they were not poetic figures. Who knows but that there are figures to-day we scoff at who may have a halo of poetry in history?
A distinct but by no means essential quality of the literature of ecstasy is that of pain. There is more pain depicted in the world's literature than pleasure. In his The Nature of Poetry, Edmund Clarence Stedman speaks of a certain sadness or melancholy in the poetry of the nineteenth century but he might have said this was true of the poetry of any century. Most poetry is sad, for life often is, and the poet is naturally interested in and pays most attention to the painful emotions that trouble him. Tragedy and elegy (and the term elegy was used by the Romans not only to bemoan the dead, but to deplore sad love affairs) are predominant in all literature, prose and verse.
We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read by us because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the substance of poetry and in the public mind there has always been an association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said—"our sweetest songs are those that told the saddest thought."
It is assumed that Christianity made poetry sad but this is not so, for there is sad poetry in the Old Testament and among the Romans and the Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is intertwined with human nerves. The most frequent note in poetry is wailing and lamentation, self-pity and passionate rebuke.
In Professor William A. Neilson's Essentials of Poetry, there is an interesting chapter on sentimentalism in poetry, in which the author dwells on the sentimentalism in the poetry of the English Romantic School. He defines it as the cultivation of an emotion for the sake of the thrill. Most certainly there can be no great poetry where the sentimentalism is forced, where it becomes ridiculous, where it bubbles over and becomes monotonous. Sentimentalism often characterizes popular poetry and if the public is likely to err in judging poetry it is particularly likely to confuse sentimentalism with normal human emotions. Yet it is hard often to draw the line between sham emotions and genuine sentiment.