Again we have followed the ancients in subdividing lyric poetry into elegy, pastoral, ode, satire, idyll. The moderns introduced the sonnet, the ballade, the ballad and other forms. These divisions have perverted our knowledge as to the nature of poetry. Any one can make a similar classification of the poetry in prose, but it is useless to do so. Poetry is recorded emotion and depicts various characteristics. The Song of Deborah is a war song, a hymn and a satire, all in one.
Professor Posnett in his Comparative Literature protested long before Croce against these artificial divisions in poetry.
Poetry is the voice of excited man; it is as Baumgarten said—"perfect sensitive speech," a definition that Croce regards as probably the best ever given of poetry, while Saintsbury scoffs at it. It is immaterial whether the rhythm is there or not. Prose is always poetry when it is sensitized. Nietzsche, himself a great poet, also saw this. "Let it be observed," said Nietzsche, "that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets as well, whether openly, or only in secret and for the closet; and in truth one only writes good prose in view of poetry." He names Leopardi, Landor, Emerson and Merimée among the great prose writers who were poets. We can add many other writers of essays, dialogues, and criticisms to complement his list.
"The distinction between poetry and prose cannot be justified," said Croce. "Poetry is the language of sentiment; prose of intellect; but since the intellect is also sentiment, in its concretion and reality, so all prose has a poetical side." "There exists poetry without prose, but not prose without poetry." Poetical material permeates
the souls of all; any expression of it in verse or prose, in painting or music, is poetry. Since all poetry is expression and all expression lyric, the divisions of different kinds of poetry into epic, dramatic, etc., or different divisions of one poem into scenes, books, chapters, acts, stanzas, paragraphs, are of little importance, and are matters of convenience.
Poetry is essentially lyrical. There is no such thing as dramatic or epic poetry. All poetry is the emotional outcry of the poet or his characters. We may have an emotion recorded in a separate poem called a lyric, or in a speech in a composition divided into acts, following certain rules and known as a drama. Similarly the speeches in epic poems are lyrics. The poetry of Homer or Shakespeare is not epic or dramatic, for poetry is just an emotional outburst. Andromache's speeches and Hamlet's soliloquies could have appeared alone and they would have been considered lyrics; they remain lyrics even in the body of a long composition. The emotional passages in all prose works are also lyrical poetry. There is really only one kind of poetry, lyrical poetry, for all poems are emotional outbursts of an individual. Every imaginative literary composition, whether in verse or prose, is made up of lyrical poems, more or less.
One should no more look for a chapter on the drama in a book like this dealing with poetry than for a treatise on the novel. A drama, considered merely as a series of scenes bound together by a plot in a fit manner to be presented on the stage to move people, and based on rules that relate to economy of words, concentration of facts and strikingness of action, is a performance that has a technique of its own; the dramatist is a poet only by virtue of the ecstasy he puts in the work. Considered in its primary significance as a performance where action is
the chief feature, the drama becomes poetry in those parts where the action and emotion are concentrated.
It is, however, often difficult to extract scenes from the play, as they lose in effectiveness by being thus separated. But the fact remains that there is no such thing as dramatic poetry, for the essence of all poetry is its lyricism. Dramatic scenes contain the lyric cries of the dramatis personæ. Action is but the emotional disturbances of the characters and no longer merely means violent conduct, surprises, battles, duels, suicides, murders. All great novels have dramatic scenes and they are often as exuberant in poetry as are similar scenes in plays. We no longer regard as tragedies only those plays in verse where a virtuous person of high degree is in a frightful predicament because of unjust and unlooked-for defeat with fate. No, in spite of Aristotle, the suffering of even a wicked person of low station, depicted as due to his own fault as of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, and described in prose narrative, is also tragedy. There is incidentally no such thing as a comic dramatic poem, but a comic scene may be poetic if it moves to ecstasy (not merely to farcic laughter), and if it is essentially lyrical. Comedy also appears in works of fiction in prose, and may be poetical. Moreover, most performances in prose dialogue or fiction present an admixture of tragic and comic.
Tragedy often presents lyric poems greater than any other work of literature; hence Aristotle and his imitators concluded that a verse tragedy was the highest form of poetry. This is not so. If Shakespeare and Sophocles lived in our day they might have written novels or essays, and I daresay with their genius those novels or essays would have been as good as their plays and would have contained as great poetry.