It is a confused system of literary classification which does not permit calling these tales of Harte and Kipling poetry, but crowns the same writers' doggerel verses like The Heathen Chinee and Fuzzy Wuzzy with the title "poems."
To bring sharply before the reader's mind the idea that a piece in verse is often not poetry and that a prose passage frequently is a poem, I will quote at random two passages.
One is from a work that is rich with poetry and written by one of England's greatest poets and yet the particular section, though in metre, is but a dry statement of facts.
I quote from Wordsworth's Michael, one of the finest things in English literature, yet unpoetical in the first part:
Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Here are unpoetical lines which might have been written in prose, but Wordsworth had to give us some preliminary information so that we could follow his story. Incidentally, he has the reputation for having much prosy material in the body of his work.
The other passage I quote is purposely a translation from a foreign novel and yet it has not lost any of its poetry. The paragraph, of which I give part, is a poem and part of a larger one in prose. It is from D'Annunzio's Triumph of Death and describes the music in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde":
And in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed. The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more restless poignant anxiety passed over all the instruments and expressed a continual and ever vain effort to attain the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every grasp, although it shone ever so near, etc.
I shall show more fully that our definitions of what is poetry and what is a poem have been faulty. The error
is so perceptible that it is surprising that so few critics have detected it. Meanwhile I will give my definitions: