WHAT IS POETRY?
Proper conception and appreciation of the poetic, whether in objects of nature or in the mirror of words reflecting the human heart, presupposes a delicate and divinely wrought nature tuned to the touch of the Maker’s hand. Only such a beauty-loving soul finds responsive a chord to the soul of beauty that dwells in the bodying words of poetry. The finer the soul, the finer the music. To possess this light-receiving and radiant Divinity is to possess at once both the highest attainment of human culture and aspiration and the greatest gift of God. It is thus at the same time both a growing seed and the seed’s growth. That is, the poetic soul is both a gift divine and a cultivation of it consecrated to the Divine Giver. Or, in other words, the poet is both born and made. Poeta nascitur non fit—the poet is born, not made—is true in this sense and in no other; for the feelings, the gifts of the poet, are the gifts of every human soul in greater or less degree. Else the proverb is not true, and we must say, Poeta nascitur et fit; which would, no doubt, be equally misunderstood. But Poeta nascitur non fit is true; and if, instead of being translated literally, it is rendered in an explanatory way, it means simply:—“The poet possesses the same faculties that others do; but the poetic faculty in him at birth is more highly developed than it is in others, and is consequently susceptible of a higher degree of cultivation. If the poetic faculty is naturally slight or insignificant at birth, no amount of cultivating and polishing can create, or make, a poet of its possessor.” This is the ancient meaning, and the only sensible meaning, the meaning accepted by all who understand the subject.
To see it from a different angle. The true poet has both genius and talent—or rather, genius has the poet and compels the poet to have talent. Genius is the divine gift; talent is the cultivation. Genius—poetic genius—, the highest harmonious union of the feelings, is the part of the poet that is born; talent, the ability to reveal that genius, is the part that is cultivated, or made. Genius is power; talent is skill. The man of poetic genius cannot help writing; the man of poetic talent can help it, but won’t. That’s the main difference.
If you can’t help writing, nine chances out of nine you are a poet, and are unconscious of your great power from the simple fact that it is natural to you. If you can help writing, don’t write; for you are evidently no poet, though you may have talent, and may believe (very likely will) from the unnaturalness of it that you are great.
The genius which forces the poet to write is the same genius that is ever reaching out of the poem and beckoning us upwards. Thus much for the present as to what constitutes the poet.
Now as to poetry. Though we cannot hope to arrive at the seat of its mysterious fountain of inspiration and bind its hidden springs of immortality, we shall nevertheless, in earnest search, by upward, honest, toilsome flight, at least behold the beauty-embodying mountain heights whence its rivers of eternal glory flow, and whither the soul must ever soar to drink of its purest living waters;—waters that purify mortality and reflect Divinity, and make the soul bathed in them and drunken of them better know its own vastness, grandeur, and divinity.
Until the soul by this upward flight shall have beheld itself thus divinely reflected in the immortal streams of poetry, it can never feel and know its own vastness, its infinitude. Likewise, until it shall have bathed in and drunk of these mighty purifying waters of goodness, truth, and beauty, the soul can never know the divinity and immortality of poetry. Thus, if the soul know not the one, it cannot know the other; the two knowledges are reciprocal.
It may be said æsthetically and as nearly scientifically as it can well be said, that poetry is naturally rhythmical and metrical imaginative language interpreting the Divine in the human heart. This defines at once, as nearly as can well be defined in a single sentence, the Form (or mechanism), the Spirit, and the Mission of poetry.
Form we can define and anatomize, just as we can define and anatomize the human body. The spirit of poetry we cannot define and anatomize, just as we cannot define and anatomize the human soul. Form alone cannot constitute a poem, just as body alone cannot constitute a man. Spirit alone may constitute poetry (in the abstract) though not a concrete poem, just as the soul alone may constitute life though not a living man. Just as both body and soul are necessary to constitute a man, so also both form and spirit are necessary to constitute any of his visible art-creations, as a poem.