The literature of ecstasy is all writing, in verse or prose, wherever an emotional atmosphere hovers, where a feeling is concentrated, and hence it is really poetry. Poetry is the language of ecstasy and ecstasy is that possessive faculty of the imagination capable "of projecting itself into the very consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the tone, the color and the temperature thereof." (James Russell Lowell: The Function of the Poet. "The Imagination." P. 70.)
FOOTNOTES:
[18-A] I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth missed ecstasy.
[21-A] This is the idea in Donne's poem, The Ecstasy. Professor William Lyon Phelps in the preface to his The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century claims that the influence of Donne has never been greater than at present.
"Hebrew poetry is
Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.
'Ecstasy affords
The occasion and expediency determines the form.'"
Marianne Moore in Others (1916).