Godwin, to learn that the poetry resided in the original philosophic prose passage. It was enhanced not by the verse form but by the process of ecstatic re-statement.
Should we say that Cowper and Wordsworth are poets, and that Rousseau, from whom they got many ideas, is not? Is Browning only a poet and no philosopher, and is Carlyle only a philosopher and not a poet? Is the verse of Goethe where pantheism is taught, poetry, and do you find no poetry at all in Spinoza's Ethics?
Among the most famous philosophical passages of Shakespeare is the one in The Tempest describing the transitoriness of this world and ending with the famous line about our life being rounded with sleep. If there is anything in Shakespeare that is poetry of a high order, this famous passage is, and yet it is really philosophy. It is poetry not because it is in blank verse or has rhythm, but because the ideas are stated in an emotional and ecstatic manner. There is poetry in ideas and those critics who shrink from applying the word poetry to intellectual performances are urged to honeycomb their Shakespeare for numerous ideas that are beyond question poetry.
A great idea is poetry; a profound and farseeing idea is poetry, whether written with rhythm or not. If a commonplace thought, rhythmically adorned, may sometimes be poetry, most certainly a profound idea ecstatically but unrhythmically expressed is poetry.
What is the difference between poetry and philosophy? If we examine into the nature of each we will find that there is a line at which they meet and where it is hard to distinguish one from the other. As a rule, the principles of metaphysics, epistemology and logic as written down in the average philosophical work seldom
are poetry. Only occasionally have the philosophers waxed ecstatic. Yet many novelists, essayists and verse writers have made many of these philosophical principles poetry by stating them in an ecstatic manner. Any philosophical principle arousing our emotions is poetry.
The general truths of sociology, ethics and psychology form the subject matter of the literature of ecstasy, but they are poetry only when ecstatically treated. The psychological novel and the problem play deal with these truths. Go to some original treatises on sociological, moral or psychological subjects and omit the statistics, the laboratory work and the cold hard reasoning and you will often find great ideas emotionally stated that belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have parted with the idea that an author must be tearing a passion to tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes love for a page and a half and tells us how it is composed, we exclaim, this is the literature of ecstasy even though we find it in a treatise on psychology. He describes to us how we feel when we love by enumerating to us the different sensations we experience. (Principles of Psychology Vol. 1, Part IV, Ch. 8, Par. 215.) The passage may not be passionate poetry, but it would not have been out of place in a novel by Stendhal, George Eliot or Meredith.
When Freud reveals our souls to ourselves, when Fabre writes a book on the doings of insects, we often are reading poetry or the literature of ecstasy, when we think we are reading science.
We might select many passages from philosophical works that belong to the literature of ecstasy, passages from Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, but more especially from Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we find the imagination and the intellect fused; we cannot distinguish that which belongs to the realm of logic and that which is the result of pure emotion. Of philosophers of our own time, Bergson and Bertrand Russel have occasional passages where a profound idea is emotionalized. Hence these belong to the literature of ecstasy, or poetry.