Hafiz's poems record his loves, but though he was a liberal and against the asceticism of his day, he was in the main not an exponent of anything new; nevertheless, he is a poet of a high order.
The world usually does not recognize the original poet and accepts a poet of the second order as one of the first order, but posterity adjusts the matter. Shelley and Ibsen finally won their places and I think to-day the growing coldness to Scott and Tennyson is due to their lacking in great original ideas.
We need not agree with Shaw when he says that Dickens, Ruskin and Carlyle made no contributions to the morality of their day. The humanitarian reforms suggested by Dickens' novels, the conceptions about sincerity in history, and the importance of individualism and the heroic Carlyle and Ruskin's views in art criticism and economics, were all original. They all had in addition the great power of expression, and though they were not always very profound in their views, they are poets of a high order.
A poet, then, is of the first order if he expresses in prose the ecstasy connected with a great original idea of social justice far in advance of his age.
There is an opinion ruling among academic circles, also derived from Aristotle, that poetry is the highest form of literature, and that a verse epic, drama or lyric is, when at its best, always better than any work in prose. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Who would say that great novels like Don Quixote, great plays like Ibsen's, great essays like Montaigne's are not superior as literature to many of the best known verse productions. Nor must we assume that the literature of emotion or ecstasy, whether in prose or verse, is always the highest form of literature. The literature that shows great
insight into character, that brims most with intellectual ideas, that is universal and human in interest even if not emotional, ranks higher than poetry which voices no ideas. You will find greater literature in books like Taine's History of English Literature, or Hazlitt's essays, even in those passages which do not belong to the literature of ecstasy, than in many poems of James Whitcomb Riley or Longfellow. The two latter produced many poems that belong to the literature of emotion, but while they are genuine poets, they are intellectually deficient.
Aesthetics and criticism have tended to place little aesthetic value on the literature of ideas. A passage from Hume's Essays is greater as literature than many verses in our magazines. Much literature consists of a succession of ideas or facts, no particular one of which moves us to ecstasy, but the work as a whole does have aesthetic value and yet is not poetry, but has greater literary value than some poetry.
Neither verse poetry, nor the prose literature of ecstasy, then, is the highest literature necessarily. Shakespeare was one of the greatest poets, not only because he depicted emotions, but because his intellect, his psychological insight, his universality, his personality, all combine to make him the great figure he is. He would have continued to be as great a figure even if he had written nothing more than a diary. It is genius that counts and not the form one uses. To say that the drama or epic is the highest literary form is absurd; it may be the essay, if a genius is using that form.
When we have a description of emotions, we have poetry or the literature of ecstasy. But profound thought may give a work more enduring qualities than ecstasy. A love song by Burns is wonderfully sweet, but I can see
no reason why, because it is poetry, we must say that it is a greater piece of literature than even an emotional prose passage out of Nietzsche or Carlyle at their best. Goethe's prose essays are profound and are often greater as literature than his lyrics. There are intellectual passages in Wilhelm Meister that are superior as literature to emotional scenes in Faust as literature.