The Literature of Ecstasy

by Albert Mordell

Any one who has read Tom Jones receives the impression that the long similes Fielding introduced in the Homeric manner were written half in jest of Homer, his master.

Yet the similes of the epic poets are poetry because they belong to the literature of ecstasy. If the trope arouses our emotions it is poetry not because it is an ornament but because it touches our unconscious souls. How many tropes do you find in the prose plays of Ibsen or the novels of Balzac? The ecstasy manages to get conveyed without their use. It was the writers of the Romantic School who made the figure of speech so prominent. These writers who sought that poetry become natural, did much to make it artificial. The reason that such great poets as Keats and Shelley are caviare to the public is that they are rich in tropes. The eighteenth century poets were said to be destitute of imagination chiefly because they did not make frequent use of the metaphor. The sport of critics was to make fun of the peculiar figures of earlier poets. We recall Johnson's dissecting (often with justice) of Cowley's poems. The eighteenth century was right in one respect; in their extreme unimaginativeness, they also avoided distorted imagery. Many nineteenth century poets made it a rule never to call a thing by its proper name, but by some epithet containing a metaphor.

The practice is still persisted in by many of our poets, and epithet-making is one of the functions of many poets. Even prose writers like Carlyle were especially noted for it, but his epithets were often truly poetry.

I do not think that poetry then should be exclusively identified with tropes. Take a much-praised, in my opinion over-praised sonnet of Keats, On Reading Chapman's Homer. The whole idea of this poem is in the comparing his first discovery of Homer to the feelings of the man who discovers a new planet, and to those of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. (He confused Cortes with Balboa, but that is no matter.) Keats conveys to us his idea by two similes. But can this poem compare with such other sonnets of his where he lays bare his inmost emotions, where the figures of speech are not the poems as here, but merely come in incidentally; where he has a profound idea, emerging as the result of a great passion?

A trope then is poetry only when arousing ecstasy; such poetry is not of the highest order.

For many centuries also, that alone was considered imaginative literature which introduced the supernatural or the allegory. Every student is aware how much these two elements figure in medieval poetry. All recipes for writing poems in those days contained provisions about the use of the supernatural and allegory. It did not dawn on critics that these could be dispensed with in a great poetical work. Cervantes laughed away the use of the supernatural, while the eighteenth century realistic novel did away with the use of allegory as a means of telling a story. Nothing better than Poe's remarks has been said against the allegory as a form of literary expression. Yet the artificial supernatural agents of Ariosto and the bloodless types in the Faerie Queene were held to be the truest creations of imagination. The vicious practices of great

geniuses, often due to the examples of their age, are instrumental in creating misunderstanding as to what poetry is, on account of the inability of critics to praise them for their real beauties. Often the passages that have been praised in Homer, Dante, Virgil, Milton, Spenser, Ariosto, are not the ones where the ecstasy was finest, but those where the "imaginative" powers of the poet were thought to be the best seen, in the supernatural and allegorical portions. Yet who can doubt that the greatness of Milton is more apparent when he talks of his blindness than when he gives us the description of Lucifer with the many artificial figures? Who prefers the absurd descriptions of the monsters in Dante's Inferno to the passages where he touches on his own sorrows?

Another misapprehension about the nature of poetry lies in identifying poetry with beauty. Poetry does not necessarily deal with the conception of beauty as understood by the public or by the aestheticians, though the describing of beautiful objects and scenes is often one of its most important themes. Poetry is very little connected with the science of aesthetics, for you may know all about the nature and laws of beauty, the effect of beauty upon the nature of man, the cause of his love for beauty, and yet you may not be able to make a great poem. Croce is as much mistaken as the old aestheticians when he assumes one must study the science of aesthetics to appreciate poetry.

Pater dealt a death blow to the theory that aesthetic, or the science of abstract beauty, helps us to appreciate poetry. The critic who judges a poem need know nothing about abstract beauty, or theories of aesthetic emotion. There is little of value to be given us by the aesthetic treatises to appreciate a play of Shakespeare or Ibsen or a novel of Balzac or Dickens. Even poets like

Goethe, Schiller and Lessing became absorbed in aesthetical problems, but their novels, poems and plays were written by putting out of mind metaphysical disquisitions. How are you enabled to appreciate a poem by knowing Kant's erroneous theory that the appreciation of beauty is impersonal and disinterested?