The reader may say that a new social idea in poetry is just as bad as an old moral saw, in that they are both didactic. It all depends on the ecstatic presentation, but I think that an idea that is advanced and unrecognized is by virtue of its novelty and truth more capable of swaying the emotion that we call poetic than the repetition of a hackneyed ethical maxim which every child knows and hears usually without emotion. Ibsen's plays are poetry not only because of the treatment, but because of the ideas there, while many of the English eighteenth century moralists in verse are poets neither in treatment nor ideas.
The only country where critics have had almost no use for the theory of art for art's sake has been Russia. Here they have also had no such compromising views that seek to know only whether the poet has done his work well, and whether he has delivered his message irrespective of its value, importance or truth. The Russian critics were men who were interested in the connection between life and poetry, and never failed to have their eye on the former while considering the latter. They did more, they had their eye on the future, and hence were usually liberal. We know very little about these Russian critics, and only recently has the nature of their work been outlined by Thomas G. Masaryk, who before the war published The Spirit of Russia just translated into English. Previously Kropotkin and a few historians of Russian literature had touched on their work. Some day perhaps we may be so fortunate as to have translations into English of the works of Bielinski, Tchernishevski, Dobrolubov, Pisarev and Mihailovsky.
To these men art was a serious thing, and they would not have its value lost in metaphysical theories of aesthetics about beauty, in endless discussions about the niceties and importance of metrical forms. Poetry dealt with social problems and suggested changes in society. Its mission was to deal with the unbared human soul and above all not to lie and affect.
Every one has conceived the function of poetry as being something different, usually as something to spread his own views. Thus the theologian looks upon it as a handmaid of religion, to show the beauty of a dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with his religion. The voluptuary thinks it merely a means of arousing sexual morality. Some philosophers think it a vehicle to promulgate their own systems. Thus Nietzsche believed poetry should spread the gospel of the will to power, while Schopenhauer thought it reached its highest point when it glorified the denial of the will to live.
The world can never be fully agreed as to what poetry is any more than it can agree as to what beauty, truth, or duty is. A passage may appeal to one person and not to another. It all depends on the beliefs, tastes, experiences and education of the reader. Patriotic and religious poetry, whether in verse or prose, falls flat on the internationalist and free thinker respectively, because they do not adore the sentiments therein, though they might admit the beauty of the writing and recognize the appeal it makes to those who are in accord with the writer. They cannot be responsive to the soul of the singer because they are differently constituted in their beliefs and because the ideas that aroused in the poet one train of emotions, move them to a contrary passion.
Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few
centuries ago was sentenced to be burned at the stake for his religious beliefs. A poet who approved of this course wrote a poem where his emotions are crystallized. He was sorry for the victim and hoped God would pardon him and make him see the error of his ways. He praised the executioner who himself was grieved that he had to take this course to save the infidel's soul. He was certain that God was pleased with the sentence. He deplored the evil effects that might follow if this man were allowed to live to spread his infamous doctrines, he rebuked the man for the trouble he brought on his family. On the whole he gave us a metrical and emotional composition actually describing his sensations, not even omitting sympathetic reference to the sufferings of the victim. This was poetry to those thousands that day who approved of this act. But most of us cannot to-day enter into the ecstasy of the writer; it is not poetry to us. But while people to-day are not burned at the stake, they are persecuted for advancing ideas that are beyond the public. The poets, who are on a low level of thought with the public, in writing poems against such individuals or the ideas or cause represented by them, are not poets to those who support the persecuted individual or his ideas. Most poets still write in defense of burning at the stake of great humanitarians, but they advocate other measures than burning by real fire.
When Ibsen said in reply to the critic who would not allow Peer Gynt to be called poetry, that the definition of poetry would have to be changed to take in his poem, he was stating a condition that always takes place when a new poetic masterpiece appears. The conception as to what is poetry always changes, for what moves man in one age does not move him in another. The poets often have to do what Whitman and Wordsworth did, create
the tastes by which they are to be enjoyed. We are all aware that in the eighteenth century poetry meant something entirely different from what we believe it to be to-day. Many men were considered poets then whom we do not regard as such. The same is true of poetry in prose. There was hostility to the poetry in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, because the public did not want to accept their artistic innovations, their frankness and their views.
Yeats in his essay "What is Popular Poetry" in the Ideas of Good and Evil, said that poetry of a very high order, like the Epipsychidion, is not popular for it presupposes more than it says. All good poetry, whether springing from a written or an unwritten tradition, is always "strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding," and suggests remembrance of impossible things, and glimmers with thoughts and images dating back to unknown history.