Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the conditions of poetry, such as Plato's Republic, or Milton's Areopagitica, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's Cherry Orchard has as good claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess of the D'Urbervilles as The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phedre. Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable progress by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will have to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. The difference in such must be substantial and essential aspects of Literature.[122-A]
FOOTNOTES:
[117-A] Spingarn's Creative Criticism and Erskine's The Kinds of Poetry, two excellent brochures in æsthetic criticism, take a similar view point.
[119-A] For a history of French free verse see Mercure De France, March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by Édouard Dujardin.
[122-A] Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor George M. Harper in the preface to his John Morley and Other Essays, in Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," The Dial, August, 1920, and the preface to F. S. Flint's Otherworld.