to classify this literature, for the extreme beauty and emotion which pervaded it lifted it above ordinary prose and yet because of the absence of measure it was not classified as poetry. The first English critic who perceived that the authors of such work were really poets and should be designated by their appropriate name was Sir Philip Sidney. He showed that verse was but an ornament and did not make poetry, and that there were many poets, among whom he named Xenophon, who never versified. Shelley, however, has given the widest vogue to the feeling that the distinction between poets and prose writers was a vulgar error. He maintained that philosophers like Bacon and Plato, historians like Herodotus, Plutarch and Livy, authors of revolutions in opinion such as Jesus and Rousseau, were poets.
Coleridge held that the object of poetry was to communicate pleasure, and remarked: "But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romance. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. . . . The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet, furnish undeniable proof that poetry of the highest kind may last without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem."
"There are also prose poets," said Emerson in his essay on "Poetry and Imagination" in Letters and Social Aims. "Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had
the magnanimity to say, 'If Burke and Bacon were not poets (measured lines not being necessary to constitute one), he did not know what poetry meant.' And every good reader will easily recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets."
Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of Tristram Shandy a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a poet more because of the Vicar of Wakefield than the Deserted Village.
Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry without absolutely being poetry, instancing Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and the Decameron.
Heine spoke of Don Quixote as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called Wilhelm Meister poetry. Brandes regards Lord Beaconsfield a poet. Matthew Arnold characterized Chateaubriand, Senancour and Guérin poets. Balzac considered himself a poet and Ibsen in mentioning his prose dramas often used the word "poems."
The habit of calling productions in metre or rhythm poetry has been so strongly ingrained in us that we denominate every lengthy performance in verse a poem in toto. Before Poe, Coleridge said that "a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry." Poe gave us the reasons for this proposition and demonstrated to us that a long epic poem is but a series of short poems connected by uninspired passages in metre. The same thing may be said of literary verse performances of moderate length. To those who object to using the word "poem" in connection with any prose composition one may reply that these, like verse productions, are also often made up of poetical parts here and there; they simply lack regular
rhythm and this is not a sufficient line of demarcation as to what constitutes poetry and what does not.
There are many short stories in verse which are known as poems while there are many poetical tales and sketches in prose which no one finds to be poetry, although they often contain more of it than many specimens in measure. I think Poe's Eleonora with its description of the Valley of Many Colored Grass and Hawthorne's Haunted Mind are greater poems, though in prose, than most of Holmes' and Bryant's verse poems are. I see no reason why we should not designate as poetry, prose tales where ecstasy and emotion predominate. Kipling's Brushwood Boy or Bret Harte's Outcasts of Poker Flat is as poetical, I believe, as any tale in Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. The same laws of emotional appeal are working in the one as in the other; a similar artistic stamp is printed on all these stories. In fact, Longfellow's tales are inferior in the quality and quantity of poetry to the stories specified. His compositions could easily be arranged in prose and the stories of Kipling or Harte could be transposed into metrical verse. The transfer would not affect the poetry in either of them.