There is affinity of oratory then to poetry, as it is calculated to arouse the emotions of the audience. But the political oration is usually not poetry, as it has a tendency to the ephemeral. No one will deny, however, that there is genuine prose poetry in orations by Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, Webster and Sumner.
What is true of the oration, is also true of the sermon. Sermons like those of Jeremy Taylor and Sterne contain poetry; they have ecstasy.
There has also been considerable confusion as to how much poetry exists in witty and humorous writings and in comedy. In other words, the connection between poetry and tears is well established, but that between poetry and laughter is vague. We may say that most of the so-called humorous verse is not poetry at all, for the merely funny does not merit the term poetry. Yet there is poetry in the humorous writings of men like Mark Twain and O. Henry, on account of the ecstatic effect upon the reader. In reading them one occasionally feels impelled to tears, while moved to laughter. A mere witticism is not poetry, but it may have certain qualities, such as a bit of wisdom conveying ecstasy, which makes it poetry. The wit of Heine and Voltaire often belongs to this class. When laughter is bound up with a profound idea or emotion, the work expressing the laugh becomes poetry. However, laughter that springs from seeing horse-play or the mere ludicrous, is not poetry. But the portrayals of Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Parson Adams are poems.
Meredith has presented the case of the comic spirit better than any one else. He says: "The comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest song fully poetic," and he
shows how this spirit enters the work of Menander, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Terence, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Restoration Comedians, Pope, Molière, Fielding, Smollett. These men were all poets; that is, they gave us poems here and there in their work. Meredith might have added Dickens's and his own work among comic works that contain poetry. The writers of comedy deal with feelings and emotions; most of them were men of intellect and deep feeling.
In a passage that is itself a poem, Meredith describes the Comic spirit, which he recognized as allied to poetry. And this in part is his delineation of it:
It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of the faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and wherever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
Closely akin to the comic genius is that of satire. Again satire is not poetry, except when presenting ideas and evoking ecstasy. There used to be a distinct form of verse poetry called the satire, but there is often more or less satire in the works of novelists, prose dramatists and essayists. We have as remnants of great ancient satire, poems by Horace and Juvenal, tales by Apuleius and Petronius and the prose dialogues of Lucian.
The great masters of satire in modern times have done their work in prose and much of this is poetry. We think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Anatole France and Samuel Butler. There is plenty of poetry in the Penguin Island and Erewhon, for example. Modern satire is prone to be more poetical than the ancient verse satire, being free from coarseness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Satire is not mere ranting and cursing, but a keen and amusing way of showing forth human follies. You find it in writers as different as Thackeray and Bernard Shaw. Some of the satire in Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street is excellent poetry.
The highest form of satire in all the prose writers is poetry, as much so as if put in the heroic couplets of Pope or the ottava rima of Byron's Vision of Last Judgment.