THE suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances. But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear, grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be fighting a hopeless battle.

When Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out:

Scholastic commentators have actually been found to wonder at the “inappropriateness” of “Go slowly, slowly, coursers of the night,” a quotation originally spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do not even note it as marking the distance the scholar Faustus has travelled since his first dry-boned Latin quotation Bene disserere est finis logices which he pedantically translates:

Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater insistence of fate:—

When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” these perfumes are not merely typically sweet smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent also her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the conflict of luxurious ambition against fate and damnation is as one-sided as before. Or take Webster’s most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi:

spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess’ body; and that word “dazzle” does duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, tear-dazzled grief for early death.

The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of “vaine pleasure for 24 yeares” that to rouse this pity has been taken, wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume’s love song “Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me,” or in Andrew Marvell’s Mower’s address to the glow-worms:

There is no pity either for Hume’s lover who suddenly discovers that he has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell’s glow-worms and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst.