Gummere thinks that the early poetry of man was communal and that modern personal lyric poetry is a development from communal poetry. Surely Professor Gummere was aware that among the religious and communal poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine elegy as The Wanderer and such a beautiful dream poem as The Phœnix. It is a great mistake to think that personal poetry is of modern growth, dating from Villon. It has been more developed in modern times. And then there is much of the personal element in this so-called communal poetry. The man who sang for his tribe in ancient times felt with his tribe, and hence was both communal and personal.
The research into the origins of poetry can be made in the soul of any writer to-day. The same psychological
mechanisms that are at work in the composition of his poem were at work in the production of the most crude savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression leading to the utterance of a complaint or the building of a dream-world. Keble was one of the few critics who considered the personal complaint the chief origin of poetry.
Schopenhauer defined poetry as one of the arts whose mission was to reveal an idea in the Platonic sense, that is, the permanent essential forms of the world and all its phenomena; art to him was a way of looking at things independent of the principle of sufficient reason. In accordance with his philosophy he regards ideas as the objectivity of the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon the different grades of the objectivation of the will as fixed. The result is that he considers the peculiar end of all the fine arts "to elucidate the objectivation of will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as the dumb unconscious tendency of the mass in accordance with laws, and yet already reveals a breach of the unity of will with itself in a conflict between gravity and rigidity," while tragedy "presents to us at the highest grades of the objectivation of will this very conflict with itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness." (World as Will and Idea, V. 1, p. 330.)
All this is saying in philosophical terms what we know has been the mission of art, the portrayal of man defeated in his blind and impotent desires. No one denies that poetry must and always will portray man in such circumstances. Freud has restated the problem when he showed that poets deal with their own repressions.
One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to annihilate the will to live. He failed to see
that much of this tragic literature acts as a relief to us and makes us want to live all the more.
Dr. Arthur H. Fairchild deserves credit for assigning high importance to poetry when he says that it is a means of self-realization and is a biological necessity. In his The Making of Poetry he expresses what is really the psychoanalytical theory which sees in poetry a means of freeing oneself of complexes, a way of restoring oneself to a better state of mind, a cure for incipient neurosis. When we are sad, the reading of sad poetry relieves us. As Emerson said, "Poetry is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." The toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's Germinal or Hauptmann's Weavers, or Sinclair's Jungle, and his emotions are discharged. It is true he may be driven to action, but the poet has nothing to do with that. The lover, unhappy in his love, finds help in hearing a poet express his own surcharged feelings resulting from love troubles. The reader may by reading be prevented from going mad. The great public which does not read good literature finds relief in plays, moving pictures, magazine stories or newspapers, all of which, while it is not generally good poetry, may have the effect of a catharsis on the public's rudely developed aesthetic sense.
Mankind hungers for poetry. Those who are unable to appreciate it in higher form, resort to imitations and substitutes, which express their emotions and relieve them. He who can read and enjoy the great masters of prose and verse, or appreciate good music and painting, does not have to resort to the political meeting or religious revivals to have his emotions played on. Athletic contests like baseball, football and prize fights usually help people to express and relieve surcharged emotions. The love for cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin
in a desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has a love for emotional excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the best kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, he is ignorant of the simplest principles of literary art; he cannot read poetry, yet he hungers for it. His dormant instincts will even seek satisfaction in condemnation and persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot express by reading.