The Literature of Ecstasy

by Albert Mordell

lyric or sonnet. The important thing is that the poet record the sentiments instantly, avoiding preliminaries.

Yet the bulk of the prose we have will not become poetry because of the new outlook I suggest. It is after all only at times that we can single out poems in them. Most prose works of merit fall short of being poetry as a whole or in parts. The ecstasy or emotion is often not concentrated in any particular part of the work. The facts, notions or ideas are not emotionally presented. Yet the volume is literature, and is more akin to poetry than to science. But it is no discredit to a book because it is just literature and not poetry.

Gurney in his The Power of Sound calls attention to the fact that when Lessing defined the limits between the plastic arts and poetry, he made no distinction between verse and prose in his conception of poetry. Whatever Lessing says about poetry in the Laocoon applies equally well to prose. True, he uses Homer as an illustration, but he could just as well have used a modern novel, for the question of metre is never raised in determining the province of poetry, which he differentiates from that of painting. The only place he mentions the prose writer is in the seventeenth section, where he says that the prose writer usually aims only after intelligibility and clarity, while the poet seeks also to be vivid. He does not say that the prose writer may not also be a poet if he is vivid. In fact this is the very inference. He states also that the verse writer who aims at producing no illusion but addresses the understanding is not a poet, instancing Virgil when in the Georgics he describes a cow fit for breeding.

This is then the singular and most remarkable fact about the Laocoon that the author includes all vivid emotional narrative prose under the term poetry, which he

distinguishes from painting. It is easy to see that his famous distinction, that objects side by side in space or bodies with their visible properties are the fit subjects for painting, while actions or objects which succeed each other in time are the peculiar subjects of poetry, is really also a distinction between the plastic arts and the prose novel or short story. Painting, according to Lessing, was descriptive, poetry was narrative. Now narrative properly is the object of the novel. It is true Lessing defined poetry in a limited manner, as if it were only narrative literature; but we are grateful to him for implying that vivid prose narrative is poetry, and that poetry extends beyond metrical compositions.

It is commonly said that an emotional piece of prose writing is not poetry, but the raw material for poetry. Even Arthur Symons calls such warning only poetical substance. One critic has even designated it as a sort of bastard writing that is neither prose nor poetry. In fact rhythmical emotional prose has been a thorn in the academic critic's side. He has become more confused than ever since the vogue of free verse, some of which though really prose is beyond question poetry. He no longer refuses the title of poet to Whitman and he shrinks from denying that the best free verse is poetry. He feels vaguely that since prose is also often rhythmical, the old definition of poetry as an emotional piece of rhythmical writing is faulty, for it must include also emotional rhythmical prose, and he objects to this inclusion. Professor Lowes, who, in his Convention and Revolt in Poetry, recognizes the similarity between the rhythm of free verse and that of prose, unsuccessfully solves the problem by saying that poetry is used in a loose as well as in a more rigid sense and that free verse is an artistic medium of not fully developed possibilities. He,

like most critics, falls into the error of saying that we cannot include prose whenever we speak of poetry. Still we must be grateful to Lowes for his liberal attitude towards new verse forms.

Critics who say that emotional prose should be metrical to be called poetry remind us of the paraphrasers of a few centuries ago who put the Psalms into rhyme. They did not make them poetry, they usually robbed them of it, and spoiled their effect. Even Milton succumbed to the vice. And Gosse, in his article on "Lyrical Poetry" in the Encyclopedia Britannica, tells us of one Azzi who in 1700 put the book of Genesis into sonnets. Emotional prose, rhythmical or not, is poetry. No one to-day thinks of employing Matthew Arnold's touchstone theory of poetry whereby we are to have a few metrical lines of some great poets to apply as a test as to what is poetry.

It is really strange that with the English prose Bible before them, critics should have insisted on the metrical element in poetry. And one must add that parallelisms are not the fundamental features of poetry. The poetry of Isaiah and David would have been poetry without a single parallelism. But we need not go to the prophets or the Psalms, where we have parallelism, for poetry in the Bible: we have it in the narrative portions, in the stories of Ruth and Joseph. Who does not feel the poetical emotions surge through him as he comes to the forty-fifth chapter of Genesis, where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers? Fearing they will be dismayed because they sold him, he assures them that their criminal deed was just what has enabled him to become a ruler and save them from starvation. A poet was he who wrote this chapter beginning with the lines: