An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's Prelude, or a series of impassioned ideas like Lucretius's Nature of Things, or a novel in verse like Aurora Leigh is not related to song, yet it is poetry in parts. (This does not mean that poetry is not the soul of music or dancing.)
There is nothing more amusing than to read the innumerable and contradictory theories about the origin of poetry. Many believe that the first poetry was pastoral poetry, since the shepherd's life was, after hunting, the first occupation appropriate and conducive to composing poetry. Scaliger, Fontenelle and Pope endorsed this view. Others believe that the original poetry was written to express man's religious emotions; his prayers and hymns to his gods are considered by many the first poetry. Again the communistic needs of the clans are supposed to have invited the poet to write. Celebration of tribal victories, praise of heroes, incitement to martial courage and revenge, the virtues of the clan, were supposed to be the first function of the poets. Epics and ballads are cited in proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are thought to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who
were also magicians and hurled them as potent forces against the enemy. Thomas Peacock believed eulogies constituted the first poetry of the human race. Then the proverb and parable have their devotees, as the first imaginative representation of the common thinking of the earliest people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to the use of verse patterns. One could go on naming various theories that have been advanced as to what kind of poetry is earliest; there is the poem which designates the awakening of a moral conscience; there is the mythical tale reciting the dream desires of the tribe; the song chanted at various labors and toilings of the common people; the chorus which served as an accompaniment to holiday celebrations and nature worship; the chanting of the first cantors or priests and the responses of the congregation; there are the ecstatic utterances of the earliest prophets, soothsayers and magicians; the admonitions of counselors and legislators; the personal grievances and complaints recited by those seeking redress before the assembly or chief; marriage hymns, love poems and elegies; all of these are separately cited as the original springs from which later poetry developed.
The critics assume that man was originally possessed of one emotion only, which he celebrated, or that only one feeling predominated to which he gave vent. Now, as a matter of fact, early man was subject to multifarious emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, in speech, later writing them down in prose and finally in some verse pattern. Some of these emotions were originally written down with rhythm and repetition. There really was no state when poetry first began, for the first spoken poetry is as early as human speech which has always been used to express emotions.
Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission
of spoken poetry. We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has been handed down by tradition and never been reduced to writing.
The mental process of composing poetry to-day is no different from what it ever was. Different people express verbally the ranges of all the emotions and several individuals give us the written expression of these moods in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or reader. It is true, in early times the religious and martial emotions were much expressed, but this does not prove that religious or warlike feelings alone gave rise to the art of poetry. Every emotion man felt gave rise to the art of poetry. Poetry is the expression of all the emotions and is born with speech and hence is universal expression and the most ancient art we possess.
Poetry is, however, so often the expression of a personal complaint, the expression of a repression, that we may say that its real origin to-day, and at all times, is the prose elegy. The person who pours out his griefs is psychologically the poet in action. Attempts have been made by Greek scholars to show that both the epic and the drama had their origin at public funerals where elegies were recited instead of at the Dionysian rites. This is very plausible. The pang of death was one of the causes that led to the creation of poetry, especially since early man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and wild animals. One should add that the pangs of the loss of one's mate, the grief resulting from being worsted in the battle for the female, were other contributing causes of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of poetry was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament of some kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry ever since. Grief is the source of poetry. Note the number of wailing poems in Irish and Scotch literature where
the death of a husband in war, or the loss of love, plays a part. Much Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegiac. The earliest poems from Egypt, China, Japan contain laments. Savage literature is full of them. The hymn is really a lament in the form of a plea. The dirge, the threnody, the elegy, these constitute the bulk of much poetry, ancient and modern. Burns's poems are chiefly dirges of some kind. The dirge is most human and appealing to us. Some of the most effective poetry in the Bible are the cries of David in the Psalms and the dirges in Lamentations.
The modern elegy whether in prose or verse, whether it laments death or lost love, is the direct offspring of the earliest savage cry of grief. The savage wailed in public as the poet does. Our novelists still do unavoidably the same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the death of Levin's brother in Anna Karenina or Ivan Ilyitch, he was actually bemoaning his own brother, whose death made a lasting impression upon him.