Satire is poetry when it is universal. Much of the old Arabic poetry was satire and yet genuine poetry. Pope's satires are poetry. Lafcadio Hearn has said a few words on the subject that deserve quoting:
It is not because the satires (of Pope) were true pictures or caricatures of any living person in particular, but because they were true pictures of general types of human weakness which have always existed, which exist to-day and which will exist to-morrow. (Life and Literature, p. 286.)
My theory of poetry as ecstasy also seeks to do away with the tendency of criticism to identify poetry with the figure of speech or trope. Even when it has lacked the quality which fills the reader with ecstasy, the trope has been called poetry just because it was a trope. Imagery has been confused with imagination, and many critics regard that as poetry which makes the most frequent use of unusual figures of speech. As a result, some of the figures of speech in poetry to-day are more artificial even than those found in Oriental poetry. But no one can take issue with the beautiful figures such as appear in the Bible and in Dante, in Shelley and Keats, of which the essence is a beautiful flight of the imagination that fills us with ecstasy. But when freakish tropes take the place of poetry then we ought to rebel. We like the figure of speech introduced occasionally and naturally, and we don't want the figure substituted for ideas and emotions.
One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on The Science of Poetry, to identify poetry with the figure of speech. In spite of its eccentricities, and its attempt at creation of new terms like tro-tempotentry, the author recognizes that the critics confuse poetry with metre, and that a prose writer like Robert Ingersoll was a poet. Any one who had read Ingersoll's prose poems, and some of his orations like the one on Liberty in Literature, will recognize this. The mistake that Maxim makes is to call poetry defiantly a science, and then to define it as an art in which figures of speech count most. To create figures of speech is an art. Maxim's definition of poetry is "The expression of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by artistic trope." This definition covers much of ancient poetry, when man constantly used tropes or figures of speech. It is also true that a vast body of the
world's poetry is full of tropes like metaphors and similes. In fact even our free verse is full of them. But the figure of speech is only one of the features that are often present in poetry, and we may and do have the best poetry without it. Its frequent use has become a nuisance; it often atones for lack of ideas, it is often a sign of insincerity in the poet, and it occasionally bespeaks a raving imagination. The day of tropes in poetry is, in spite of the Imagists, on the decline. You find none of them in prose plays and very few in prose fiction. The trope was an early adornment of poetry as rhythm was. It is not the essence of poetry, though it often beautifies poetry.
The critics do not accept the book of Maxim's as a true statement of the aims of poetry, but curiously enough they have always followed the views in his book. They have confused tropes, or figures of speech, or imagery with imagination. In the past the older critics fell into this error and when they spoke of imagination they were really expatiating on imagery.
One of the best English critics on poetry, Leigh Hunt, sinned in this direction. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge he made much of the distinction between imagination and fancy. Wordsworth arranged his poems in an edition of his works according to this distinction. Leigh Hunt got up an anthology called Imagination and Fancy, in which he italicized the imaginative and the fanciful passages, and to which he prefixed his famous essay on "What is Poetry?" Here he gave his definitions of and distinctions between imagination and fancy. Half the essay is devoted really to identifying them with figures of speech. The only difference between the two faculties was that fancy was a lighter play of the imagination, a distinction really utterly trivial. His work was needed at a time when the influence of Pope still ruled, and
people could not appreciate the rich figures in Shelley and Keats. Pater called attention to the real distinction between imagination and fancy which is "between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of his work, and in his concentration of himself upon his work." For all purposes, however, fancy may be included under imagination. Imagery is not always imaginative, for many figures of speech have no ecstatic quality.
The English poets who were regarded as most gifted with the faculty of imagination under the old definition were Milton and Spenser, chiefly for their bold use of supernatural imagery. Homer and Dante were always noted for their beautiful and effective similes, and they were also the poets of the imagination par excellence. The confusion of imagery with imagination resulted in giving figures of speech a significance in determining the nature of poetry that it did not merit. Puttenham's book in the Elizabethan Age, The Arte of English Poesie, was half employed with ornament or various figures. Oriental poetry was especially figurative; all Oriental books on rhetoric deal extensively with figures of speech. In short it was taken for granted by all critics that poetry was imagery or figures of speech, because poetry was a product of the imagination, and imagination was confused with imagery. It is true that it is the function of the imagination to compare, but that does not mean that it is nothing more than metaphor or simile. The tropes were more natural to early man who personified inanimate things and always saw resemblances to draw from in nature. To-day the novelist or dramatist introduces his metaphor or simile occasionally or naturally, as an ornamental touch to convey his meaning better. Many modern versifiers identify poetry with ornament and figures, and it is impossible for
them to write a poem without a succession of figures. The trope, like the rhythm, is supposed to be poetry. Hunt's essay defines poetry as imaginative passion in versification. He can conceive of no passion being poetry unless presented in metre with figures of speech. His essay is divided into two parts, the one dealing with imagination, or rather imagery, the other with versification. Great critic that he was, he gave us one of the weakest definitions of poetry we have.