The Literature of Ecstasy

by Albert Mordell

Every one quotes the famous lines of Shakespeare in the fifth act of the Midsummer Night's Dream, and many fail to see the exact meaning of the master who had a true conception of the function of his art. First he recognizes that the poet is "imagination all compact," and compares him to the lunatic and the lover. Next he uses the word frenzy in speaking of the poet's eye which rolls about and glances over the universe, showing that he had the conception of the ecstatic element in the poet's make-up and work. The poet gives shape to the forms of unknown things bodied forth by imagination, he gives a local habitation and a name to airy nothing. Shakespeare recognizes the fact that imagination is related to the dream when he says that one of the tricks of imagination is that if it apprehends a joy, it comprehends the bringer of that joy, that is, it builds a dream castle where that joy is realized. His use of the words "unknown things" in addition, as the substance of imagination, shows that he understood

that the realm of the unconscious was the province of the imagination. Hazlitt and Lowell among modern critics correctly understood Shakespeare's meaning of imagination as identical with ecstasy.[193-A]

People to-day give vent to their emotions in prose conversation or in writing prose letters to friends or relatives. Here we have the process that led to the creation of poetry in earliest times. Poetry is the result of ecstasy, the outpouring of the imagination, the expression of the unconscious. If instead of having confused it with song and dancing the critics would have taken it in its real significance as excited speech, we would have had less misunderstanding about its nature. The lover of to-day who tells his emotions to his love, or confides them to a friend, the bereaved person who relates his grief at the death of a loved one and tells of the virtues of the departed, are rude poets expressing themselves in conversation in prose. When they take the pen in hand and write a letter or keep a diary, they become poets no less than the versifier who puts his feelings down in patterned speech.

The greatness of the letter or diary as a poem depends not only on the craftsmanship, but on the substance, on the vividness or beauty or power with which the emotion is depicted, on the degree of its capability of moving others, and on the depth of the ideas therein. Similarly, the person who is moved to prayer spontaneously by some religious experience or private passion and utters his words in a natural manner or reduces them to writing, is creating poetry. The writers to-day of letters and diaries in prose are going through the same mechanism as all the earliest

poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming artificial and are imitating other verse writers and obeying rules that they studied.

We have long been familiar with the saying that every man is a poet, though he does not write what is known as poetry. There is no psychical difference between the average man and the great poet. They both are subject to emotions, have imagination, and both express their emotions in some manner. The only difference between the average man and the poet is that the poet takes the average man's speech, elaborates it, and puts it into shape so that it moves others.

Poetry is born in man's soul when his emotions are aroused, and no emotions are aroused unless they are expressed in some way. Hence Croce's view is correct that poetry is expression, if he means by expression emotional and imaginative expression. People have too long been under the impression that the poet was a different creature from the rest of mankind, subject to a livelier imagination, or intenser emotions. He is no different; on the contrary, there are many people who never wrote a line who are more emotional and imaginative than many poets. The process of the lover writing a letter involves the same imaginative function as of the poet penning a love poem. The prose expression of emotion is also poetry, but we have hitherto given the name "poetry" only to the verse literary composition.

There is great unanimity of opinion as to the connection of literary poetry in its origin with dance, music and song, an opinion that is wrong nevertheless. In fact, most phases of poetry neither have nor ever had anything in common with dancing or music or song.

Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or prose poets of the nineteenth century has little relation to

dancing, music or singing. Take the Shakespearean plays, the tragedies of Hamlet or King Lear, where we have philosophizing and descriptions of painful crises which are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a great idea, nor dance to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and Balzac are poets and yet they are far away from dancing, singing or music. Though most good singers are poets, one does not have to be a singer to be a poet. Then take great impassioned oratory or beautiful emotional word painting in prose or verse, or any idea bathed in feeling. They may all be poetry and need not be—in fact, by their nature, are not—related to dance, music and song.