[184-A] F. C. Prescott's Dreams and Poetry is a magnificent essay on the subject.
[187-A] I do not however agree with Bergson, who does not believe poetry can be composed in dreams at all.
[193-A] "Poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind 'which ecstasy is very cunning in.'" Hazlitt On Poetry. "The imaginative faculty (has) the capabilities of ecstasy and possession." Lowell, "The Imagination." The Function of the Poet.
CHAPTER XI
LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY
Oriental poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the Persians, is notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy couched in intricate conventional forms. The Oriental poems abound numerously in far-fetched figures of speech, and are written in metres following definite laws and are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued in every line in poems of great length. In fact the greatest historian of the Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective discourse based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into verses agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a separate idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A poet was supposed to get many thousands of verses by heart before practicing his art. One of the chapters in Ibn Khaldun's famous Prolegomena[203-A] or introduction to his history, Book of Examples, has a title stating that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.
But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was taken for granted that ecstasy was the main object of poetry. There is probably more ecstasy in the poetry of the Arabs and Persians than in that of most other nations, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds of form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial forms did not utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor Edgar G. Browne in his scholarly Literary History of
Persia has devoted the first chapter of the second volume to Persian metres and he calls attention to the conventional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic poets who were not without influence upon the Persians.