the pains or thrills of love; when he shows compassion for the miseries of his fellow-men. You find poetry wherever man is depicted in a spirit of self-sacrifice for an idea or a person he loves; or where he is shown pursuing an ideal or ambition. Heroism is poetry; philanthropy is poetry; self-development is poetry. Pictures of striking scenes; portrayals of interesting events; conflicts between duties; delineations of tragic situations; tolerance for human frailties; anger at injustice, admonition for follies, chidings or outbursts against stupidity; cries of helplessness; all of these in artistic form become poems. Accounts of cruelty, barbarism, madness, horror, wicked deeds or abnormal or supernormal conduct, if well described become poetical, for poetry need not point a conventional moral. Hence villainy, immorality, crime, may be so artistically pictured that our emotions are worked upon and though our moral sense is shocked we are held spellbound in witnessing these malign forces in nature.
I plead then that ecstasy, and not rhythm, should characterize much of our literature; and I seek to show that poetry is not a department of literature but a spirit that permeates the best writing even in prose. Our entire attitude in estimating what is poetry will be changed, for the world's emotional prose literature will be taken into its domain. And the importance of rhythm in making verse will be a thing of the past and genuine emotion will receive its right name.
I also hope that a higher valuation will be given to literature which shows an interest in the working classes and seeks social justice. I do not, however, assert that the literature of pure rational propaganda would become poetry, or that the writings of men who attach themselves to certain political or economical theories would be great
by virtue of the adherence to a particular theory. But there is a tendency to decry a writer when he shows an interest in social problems and tells the world that something is rotten in Denmark.
There are occasionally great literary products that are to be found often in radical and obscure papers that belong to the literature of the ecstasy of social justice. These would have never been accepted by the academic or capitalistic bourgeois press, any more than would some of the older prophecies have been accepted had they been submitted as unrequested contributions to our magazine editors. Many of those compositions depend for literary value on universal feeling, and make no appeal to party feeling or economical theory, and they can be appreciated by people who seek poetry.
The reader will observe then that not all species of ecstasy belong to the high order of literature. But the skill of the artist may elevate the lower order of ecstasy to that of a higher plane, and the amateurishness of the author may deflect what might be poetry of a higher degree to that of a commonplace order. Stories of adventure, abounding in false sentiment, misleading examples and unreal situations, are hardly poetry or good literature of ecstasy. But Stevenson transmutes such a tale into excellent poetry in Treasure Island. Those who have read the pathological outbursts of religio-maniacs, rife in outworn dogma, and seething with morbid emotions, will not maintain that such productions are poetry of a high order, though the ecstatic element is present in marked degree. Yet a St. Augustine occasionally makes good poetry out of such material.
In general, that is not great poetry or literature of ecstasy which appeals to the rude primitive emotions. When the purpose of a literary work is to wean us from
finer feelings, to make us sympathize with cruelty, to paralyze the sympathetic emotions within us, and to kill all feelings rooted in love, pity, service, justice and kindness, it is not of a great order of poetry. Those works in whole or part that fan the martial spirit within us, and take hold of us as with an hypnotic sway of the hand, and make us seek to murder our fellow men, and to arouse the lust for blood in us, cannot be great works. No literature that is heartless or brutal, or confuses an appeal to the murderous instincts with real love of country, or love of liberty, with self-sacrifice for justice or loved ones, can be valuable to us either practically or aesthetically. No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters unreasonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful victories, or crowns with the garland of a hero the mere warrior who is a warrior for the pure delight of killing, is really of the higher type of literature of ecstasy. It is this martial phase that makes most of the early literature of all nations valuable only in parts; in those parts where the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt with, and where the more genial emotions are crystallized. So many theories of poetry are futile, because they are based on studies primarily of the epic poems of the nations, and it is these epic poems that mingle the most impoverished and base poetry with that of a fine quality.
Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which is purely tribal or clannish in feeling; nor when chauvinistic and full of hatred for all other peoples. This does not mean that poetry must not smack of the soil, and that it cannot preserve a sane patriotic and national feeling, and worship a culture inherent in a people. But when the ecstasy descends to the kind which kills individualism under the pretense of encouraging it, when it is hostile to the stranger and the original thinker,
when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts as regards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and pernicious.