It is true that the master of rules of prosody can tell whether a verse poem follows the rules, he can perceive whether the rhymes are false, whether the rhythm is regular, even whether the figures are not far fetched and whether the diction is good; and a commonplace mind may recognize the ordinary literature of ecstasy. But the chief obstacle to recognizing poetry is that most people derive their views as to what poetry is from rules formulated from the writings of older poets. If the great poets of the world had never used a patterned form, there would have been no text books welding poetry and versification together. A great poet not only creates his own forms but displays individuality in the choice of views and ideas. When he becomes recognized, new rules are formulated from his work, and are even used as a fetter to bind later poets and critics.
Anthologists have often been of great value in choosing for us the literature of ecstasy as written by so-called minor and popular poets who have taken no position in the history of the world's literature. A poet, however, is not great because he has succeeded in producing a few pieces that belong truly to the literature of ecstasy. Nor does a poet who once held a high place in the list of poets and has subsequently lost it by the vicissitudes of taste or circumstances or by the change in ideas, cease being a poet to us if he has written poems that belong to the literature of ecstasy. No one, for example, to-day regards Jean Ingelow as a great poet, but the anthologists who select her When Sparrows Build or High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, justly accept these poems as poetry. It will astonish many people who will take the trouble to go through the work of some so-called minor poets, say Philip Bourke Marston, to find gems here and there that properly are part of the literature of ecstasy.
My theory, I hope, also helps us to determine when certain branches of literature are poetry and when they are not. For example, there has always been a dispute as to whether oratory, comedy and satire are really poetry. There have been critics who would not admit that these species of writing are properly poetry, even in verse; on the other hand, other critics have asserted that they are poetry.
When, if ever, is oratory poetry? Whenever ecstasy and not rhetoric characterizes it, when universal themes of permanent interest and not arguments on a temporal political or economic question are its substance, then oratory is poetry. A plea for adherence to the principles of a political party, a speech about an economic problem, is not as a rule poetry. But why are some of Moses's speeches and the orations of the prophets poetry? Why is Mark Antony's verse funeral oration on Cæsar, poetry? Surely not because of the verse? Why are some of Bossuet's funeral orations, or Thucydides's speech in prose, poetry? All of these orations belong to the domain of the literature of ecstasy, and hence are poetry.
Nevertheless, oratory is usually hollow and bombastic. The orator makes his appeal to men chiefly by rhetorical expression of commonplaces. Eloquence and artifice count here more than thought or art. The less intellect the audience has the better does the orator succeed. Hazlitt saw the limitations of oratory. It is the unthinking man who is appealed to by theatrical effects. The orator must be commonplace, he cannot deliver profound views. Some of the great orations of the world's literature that are poetry are those that were never really delivered but composed by the historians, like the emotional speeches in Thucydides and Tacitus. You can find poems in orations
by Demosthenes and Cicero also, but Fourth of July orations are seldom poetry. Nor is the Congressional Record an anthology of poetic masterpieces. In a footnote in his book in aesthetics, The Critique of Judgment, Kant has ably elucidated the situation.
I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given me a pure gratification; whilst the reading of the best discourse, whether of a Roman orator or of a modern parliamentary speaker or of a preacher, has always been mingled with an unpleasant feeling of disapprobation, of a treacherous art, which means to move me in important matters like machines to a judgment that must lose all weight for them on quiet reflection. Readiness and accuracy in speaking (which taken together constitute rhetoric) belong to beautiful art; but the art of the orator, the art of availing one's self of the weaknesses of men for one's own design (whether these be well meant or even actually good, does not matter) is worthy of no respect.
We must not confuse eloquence with poetry, though there are numerous prose pieces which though eloquent are yet poetry. Mere wordiness and grandiloquence may sound like ecstasy yet lack that quality.
What can be said for famous passages like Burke's sympathetic outburst for Marie Antoinette? I see no reason why we should not call this poetry, though it is not poetry of a high order. The objection to it is that the orator's emotion is misdirected; he wastes sympathy on a dead queen who was at the head of a pernicious system, and ignores the miseries of the thousands of poor Frenchmen. To that extent our appreciation of it is limited. For even though Burke was right when he lamented that the age of chivalry was gone, he did not state that the time of exploitation of man was over, and
the question of exploitation is probably more important than that of chivalry.