Oriental poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the Persians, is notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy couched in intricate conventional forms. The Oriental poems abound numerously in far-fetched figures of speech, and are written in metres following definite laws and are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued in every line in poems of great length. In fact the greatest historian of the Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective discourse based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into verses agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a separate idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A poet was supposed to get many thousands of verses by heart before practicing his art. One of the chapters in Ibn Khaldun's famous Prolegomena[203-A] or introduction to his history, Book of Examples, has a title stating that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.

But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was taken for granted that ecstasy was the main object of poetry. There is probably more ecstasy in the poetry of the Arabs and Persians than in that of most other nations, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds of form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial forms did not utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor Edgar G. Browne in his scholarly Literary History of Persia has devoted the first chapter of the second volume to Persian metres and he calls attention to the conventional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic poets who were not without influence upon the Persians.

We today may accept the definition of poetry given in the Four Discourses[204-A] (1162) of Nidhami I Arudi, for though he also believed in the importance of the trappings of verse, he had ecstasy primarily in mind. He defined poetry thus:

What more effective definition could there be of the utilitarian power of art to take man out of himself and exalt him into a state of beneficial ecstasy?

Ibn Khaldun said:

He continues, that they have handled poetry so well, that one could deceive oneself and believe that this gift, which is really an acquired art, was with them an innate one.

These remarkable words of Ibn Khaldun will help us to understand the famous saying that poetry was the register of the Arabs. Never before nor since has poetry been so interwoven with a nation's life. The stories of the competitions for prizes for composing poetry, of the happiness when a poet was born, of the importance assumed by the discussion and recitation of poetry among all classes, read to us like myths. Yet the fact that poetry should be part of the life of a passionate people who lived in the desert, free and untrammeled, is not strange. The Arabs themselves attribute also their great superiority in poetry to the beauty of their language, especially as spoken by the Bedouins in the desert. The great Arabian poet Abu Nuwas completed his education by sojourning a year among the Bedouins.

Another factor enhancing their poetry and one not to be ignored is that after 622 A.D. in post-Islamic times, poetry was rewarded by gifts. Hence the eulogy grew into prominence and the poets were fabulously rewarded for their poems. This, of course, led to fulsome and cringing eulogies. The caliph was the patron. When Mohammed appeared it seemed that poetry would die out, but it flourished more than ever. It was only after the Abbasid caliphate was exterminated by the Mongol invasion (1258 A.D.) that poetry declined in Arabia to such an extent that, as Ibn Khaldun says, no prominent man would deign to devote himself to it.

Although the Arabs excelled in various kinds of poetry, we think of them primarily as love poets.

The Arabs, as we gather from The Arabian Nights, were a people especially devoted to tenderness in love. When the Arab was smitten with love he was a helpless weeping child. There was one tribe, that of Azra, wherein the victims were said to die of love. One poet said he knew of thirty young men whom love sickness carried off. In answer to a reproach for this weakness, one of the tribe replied: "You would not talk like that if you had seen the great black eyes of our women darting fire from beneath the veil of their long lashes, if you had seen them smile and their death gleaming between their brown lips." (Stendhal: On Love, p. 218.)

Arabic poetry in the period before Islam between 500 A.D. and 622 A.D. did not consist of pure eroticism. Satire, eulogy, elegy, revenge, martial feeling, chiefly characterized it. Many poems were also devoted to the praise of animals and the description of nature. The odes or Qasidas, however, began with a love prelude, called nasib, in which the poet dwelt on his love sorrows merely to win the hearts of his hearers to his chief theme. One of the best of these is that in the ode of Imru'ul Qays the first and greatest of the seven poets of the Muallaqat.

Pure erotic poetry appeared after Islam with the luxury that spread with the growth of wealth, but the nasib continued to be used, especially in eulogies. The poets still wrote like the Pre-islamic poets instead of celebrating Islam. The Umayyad Dynasty, which extended from 661 to 749 A.D., saw the birth of pure love poetry celebrated not as introductory or episodic but purely for itself. The love story of one of the Arabian erotic poets of the period, Majnun, was celebrated by the great Persian poet, Nidhami, who flourished in the twelfth century. His Laila and Majnun has been translated into English by Mr. Atkinson. The story was retold by many Persian and Ottoman poets. Then there was Jamil, who was the lover of Buthaina. These love poems by Majnun and Jamil were of popular origin, and represented the spirit of the people. There were many other love poets, while some did not devote themselves exclusively to love.

The most celebrated, however, of the love poets was the handsome wealthy Omar ibn Abi Rabia (643-719 A.D.). He was of the tribe of Koraish, the same tribe to which Mohammed himself belonged. This tribe was famous for many things, but not for poetry until Omar took away the reproach. His poems were called a crime against God, yet a cousin of the prophet memorized some of them. The fullest account of him in English and of his love affairs, with translations from a few of his poems, appears in an essay by William G. Palgrave in Essays on Eastern Questions. Omar was united in marriage to his love Zeynab after a stormy courtship, opposed by her people, but he had several love affairs. The best idea of the sweetness and pathos of his love poetry is conveyed without further comment by giving two translations made by Mr. Palgrave.

I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by different translators, prose renderings by McGuckin de Slane in Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary and by Terrick Hamilton in the Romance of Antar, respectively, and a verse translation by Lyall.

The following poem (Ibn Khallikan, V. 2, p. 330) is attributed to Ibn Alaamidi of the eleventh century:

The next poem represents one of the many outbursts of Antar:

This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unexcelled:

One Unnamed

Arabic poetry may lack the light of intellectual outlook that we find in our greatest English poets; it may be deficient in the intensity of religious fervor characteristic of the medieval Hebrew poets; it may fall short of the high mystic strain attained by the Persians, but in the fervor depicting love of passion they have not been surpassed. The greatest Persian lyric love poet, Hafiz, and the greatest Turkish lyric love poet, Baqui, clearly were under their influence.

Arabic poetry then is probably richer in love ecstasy than that of any nation. This is due to the fact that they are both a sensuous and at the same time deeply religious people. They were strongly emotional, extremely vindictive and extremely hospitable. They recorded their emotions unabashed. They had the naÏvetÉ of the child and cried out their slightest pain; they weep and bemoan constantly. Antar, one of the poets of the Muallaqat and the hero of the romance bearing his name, is more of a child than Achilles. He is always sobbing and weeping copiously; he is the prototype of the medieval knight who wept and declaimed because of absence of his mistress, a feature of romance which Cervantes ably ridiculed in Don Quixote.

Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, was one of the first to point out the Arabic influence on chivalry and romanticism. The battle as to the extent of Arabic influence has been waged ever since, with, I believe, the victory to the Arabs. FitzMaurice Kelly, the historian of Spanish Literature, emphasizing the Hebrew influence, has resented the statement of the great Arabic influence, but Robert Briffault in The Making of Humanity has proved that this influence has been underestimated rather than exaggerated.

The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both sexes—women also were freer than in Post-islamic times—gave rise to romantic love.

Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or chivalrous phase, fashionable. True, this note existed very sparingly among the Greeks and Romans in Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic note was singularly absent from European literature in the early medieval ages. Men loved then as they did before and after, but the personal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme for poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. Critics now admit that intense love poetry of the Troubadours appearing like an oasis in the barren literature of the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs, the rhymes as well as the themes being taken from the east. The troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and these two groups remain among the best composers of love poetry Europe has had.

The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly two centuries.[214-A]

The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence. Cervantes attributed his Don Quixote to a Moorish author because the Moors wrote so many romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic spirit. Wyatt and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry. Similarly the Spanish Cid shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic invasion of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effectively pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry than Sismondi in his history of the literature of the South of Europe. He begins the work with, after the introduction, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he especially recognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the chivalric attitude towards women came from the Arabs. The most sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great influence of Mohammedan influence upon Europe is in Samuel P. Scott's History of the Moorish Empire in Spain.

It is said that even the French poem, the Chanson de Roland, shows Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.

We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds together love poems so remotely separated by time and place as those of the medieval Persians, Arabs and Troubadours, and the modern English poets.

The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe, especially in a few in his West Eastern Divan, influenced by his studies of Oriental literature during the Napoleonic wars. He used his own experiences with eastern names, but he never failed to produce literature of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an influence on Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea of Locksley Hall from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of the Muallaqat; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his Abt Vogler; George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat was written to emulate the Arabian Nights.

The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most famous elegies in Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder of her two brothers. There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in the notes to his translation of Hariri's Assemblies V. 1, pp. 387-391. In fact the elegy is more common among early Pre-islamic poetry than the love poem. The Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, certainly the best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui on the great Sultan Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb in Ottoman Poetry.

The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an outburst of emotion due to repression. The cry of grief for the dead in battle; that is the note in all early literature, Occidental and Oriental.

The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a definite utilitarian purpose. In early times satire was one of the chief forms under which lyric poetry appeared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and his curses against them were supposed to be effective. He was a soothsayer, a prophet, a magician. He voiced not only the communistic feeling of the tribes, but his personal emotions. Even down to our day the public demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in time of war. Goethe was criticized for refusing to write against the French, for example, but he explained later to Eckermann that he had no hatred towards the French. In all wars there have been poets who have written against the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the famous Hymn of Hate by Lissauer in the late world war.

Nothing in literature illustrates more the belief in the magical power of poetry than the chapters in the Book of Numbers dealing with the effort of the Moabite King Balak to get Balaam to curse the children of Israel. Balak believed that these curses would help him defeat the Hebrews. But instead Balaam blessed them, unwillingly, saying that he could but utter the words God put in his mouth, for the inspiration of the poet came to him always from hidden forces. He reached to ecstasy every time he spoke.

Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying ecstasy, with all the stock themes of poetry, but especially with love.

The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and Pre-islamic Arabic poetry have been touched upon by Dr. George A. Smith in his The Early Poetry of Israel and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to his translation of Hariri's Assemblies. Participators in various military events themselves composed the poems in which they told of their exploits, as you may note by comparing the Muallaqat with the songs of Miriam and Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as you may see by comparing descriptions from the Psalms and Job to that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the Muallaqat. The poetry of both nations was often nomadic, the product of the influences of the desert. Both nations recorded personal emotions, springing from tribal events.

There was also the same tendency in both nations to utter ecstatically sententious and moral sayings. Though only one poem in the Muallaqat, that by Zuhayr, really moralizes, the later Arabic poets always loved to give vent to reflections, proverbs, words of wisdom. Two of the best Arabic poems of the kind are the improvisations of the vagabond Abu Zayd in the 11th and 50th Assembly of Hariri's Assemblies. Two finer poems which moralize without losing their poetic quality can scarcely be found in Arabic literature. Most of the reflective poetry of those two pessimistic, skeptic poets Abu l'Atahiya and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are of this kind. The ecstatic potentiality in reflection is seen in Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

The chief phase of Pre-islamic poetry that will not appeal to us is in the great body of martial verse where love of robbery and bloodshed, cruelty, revenge and hatred are fostered. The Bedouins gave us a transcript of their life. They dwelt in their vices with frankness, but they tried to make virtues out of them. We cannot blame them for not having our ideals of peace and it is also doubtful if cruelties in their warfare were greater than those in our own day.

The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting in a way that even nauseates us. The martial spirit in the Romance of Antar has made it less popular with us than The Arabian Nights, for the former work is an account of the fighting Arabs of the desert, and the latter deals largely with the merchant Arabs of the city. Even the great and beautiful Song of Vengeance by the Arab Robin Hood, Ta abbata Sharran, of which we have a second hand translation by Goethe, and fine verse versions by R. A. Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs (pp. 98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of Arabic Poetry, is very cruel.

Pre-islamic poetry reeks too much with the ecstasy of delight to shed blood, in which tendency it of course differs little from the early poetry of other nations. However, the remarkable thing is that the hearts of these warriors possessed so many fine feelings. One of the noblest descriptions of woman is by a companion of the brigand Sharran, from the Mufaddaliyyat, a translation of which appears on pages 81-82 of Lyall's volume.

The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently translated and written about in English is Pre-islamic poetry. In especial, the Muallaqat, or the seven so-called suspended poems, has been translated several times. Sir William Jones made the first translation in prose in the eighteenth century. In modern times we have had several translations, one by Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. There has been considerable support for the critical view that these poems represent the highest achievement of Arabic poetry, both among Arabs themselves and Aryan critics. Imru'ul Qays, who flourished in the sixth century A.D., is the most famous of the poets in the collection, and is regarded by many as the greatest Arabian poet. R. A. Nicholson and Clement Huart have given accounts of the Muallaqat in their histories of Arabic Literature. Professor Mackail has published in his Oxford Lectures an essay on these odes and D. NÖldeke has given us a full study of them in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I shall not therefore dwell on them except to say that they were collected in the eighth century by Hammad, and that most of these poems deal with warriors rather than lovers, though they contain love laments.

Nicholson and others regard the Abbasid period as the great era of Arabic poets. This period extended from the accession of Saffah in 749 to the destruction of Bagdad by the Mongols in 1258. Abu Nuwas, Abu 'l Atahiya, Mutanabbi and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are recognized by Nicholson as the Gods of Arabian poetry, and we in our smug inordinate satisfaction with Aryan poetry, have not even translated or paid attention to them. Abu Nuwas, who flourished in the early part of the ninth century, sang of love and wine and led a riotous and immoral life, and is familiar to the reader of the Arabian Nights as the jester of Harun al Rashid. His Divan is to be found in German but not in English. Many consider him the greatest of the Arabian poets. Abu 'l Atahiya is a pessimist and philosophical poet thinker. He was imprisoned by Harun for having ceased writing love poetry because he was hopelessly in love with a slave girl. He described common emotions and used simple language instead of far-fetched conceits. Mutanabbi in the tenth century was the most famous of all the Arabian poets, but he is criticized by many for his rhetoric and ornament. He is the master of the grand style. Then we have in the next century the great Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, who has been called the predecessor of Omar Khayyam. Bauerlein and Rihani have translated some of his verses into English, and Bauerlein has also devoted a little volume to him in The Wisdom of the East series. Abu 'l Ala is the most modern of the Arabian poets. He was a freethinker and a pessimist and his Luzumiyyat reads like a work of one of our rational poets. It attacks all religion including Islam. His letters have been translated into English by Professor Margoliouth.[218-A]

I have already several times mentioned the most famous Arabic work next to the Koran, the Maqamat or Assemblies, by Hariri (1054-1122). The tales have been called immoral, but Abu Zayd interests us as Gil Blas does. The work written in rhymed prose is most fascinating reading. There is a complete translation of this by T. Chenery and F. Steingass, 1867-1898.

The Arabian Nights is the best known Arabic production to English speaking people and is full of poetry, not only in the interspersed verses, but in the stories themselves.

The Romance of Antar, from which I quoted a poem, is said to have been written by a poet and philologist in the reign of Harun al Rashid. The work is long and a few abridged volumes were translated into English by Terrick Hamilton in 1819 and 1820.

Then there is the great poet of Cordova, Ibn Zaydun of the eleventh century, whose love for the princess Wallada has made him celebrated. Here is a beautiful love poem translated by Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs, pp. 425-426:

Nor have I sounded the depth of Arabian poetry. Their greatest mystic poet was Umar Ibn ul Farid, who flourished between 1181 and 1235, and whose work is full of fervid and inspired poetry.

There is also Baha ad Din Zuhayr (d. 1258 A.D.), the love poet of Egypt, whose complete poems have been translated into English by Edward H. Palmer.

One of the great products of Arabic culture was its work in literary criticism. While it is the fashion to-day to lay much stress on the Italian and English studies of Aristotle's Poetics in the Renaissance and Elizabethan periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly on poetry centuries before they read the Poetics. They made a specialty of the literature called the Adab, or belles lettres made up of criticism, quotation and rhetoric.

The criticism of poetry flourished among the Arabs in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. as a higher art than it did in the sixteenth century among the Italians and English. Unfortunately none of these works have been translated; there is not even a reference to their influence in Saintsbury's History of Criticism in Europe. The Arabs had so many poets even in Pre-islamic times in the sixth century that interest in preserving this poetry gave rise later to anthologists who made collections. These anthologists commented on the poetical work and compared it with that of later periods, and with that of their contemporaries.

Ibn Yunus in the early part of the tenth century translated Aristotle's Poetics into Arabic and the Europeans learned of Aristotle's work from the Arabs several centuries later. But the best Arabic works on the art of poetry had, however, already been produced, presenting original ideas gleaned from the study of the great Arabian poets, and illustrated by examples from them. The Arabic critics did not go to the Greek and Roman poems (which they considered cold besides their own) as did the Italians and English to study the nature of poetry. The Arabs studied Greek science, medicine, and philosophy, but not Greek poetry. Books on prosody and poetry appeared after the founding of the system of Arabic meters by Khalil b. Ahmad in the eighth century. There were also the two celebrated schools of grammarians at Basra and Kufa, soon to merge in the school of Bagdad. Never before had the art of poetry and criticism flourished so thrivingly and displayed a so generally high order as among the Arabs in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. A faint idea of the great number of Arabian grammarians, critics and poets may be gleaned by perusing the biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan, who flourished in the thirteenth century. This work, which contains only a partial list, has been compared to the Life of Johnson, by Boswell (Lucas called him a Bagdad Boswell), and to Plutarch's Lives.

While Europe was plunged in ignorance and barbarism, the great Arab poets and critics were achieving work that belongs to the best; but alas, the very names which rank so high among them are unknown to most people. We let them slumber in the difficult Arabic. We translate the Chinese and Japanese poems probably more out of faddish reasons than of a true love of their poetry, but we ignore the Arabians.

The Arab example contradicts the famous platitude that great epochs of creative literary work are not ages of literary criticism. It is just the reverse. Good criticism is never so conspicuous as in ages of poetry, for there is such interest in poetry as to provoke literary discussion, then more so than ever. The best criticism of poetry appeared in England in the great age of Wordsworth and Byron. The Arabic grammarians and anthologists began their work about the middle of the eighth century. Incredible stories are told of their feats of memory for verse, in the art of improvisation, in skill in manipulating the language. They regarded the letters of their alphabet as human beings, just as the Hebrew Cabbalists treated their alphabetical letters as angels.

To name even the most important of grammarians, anthologists, philologists, critics of Arabia, is to call a long list. Even historians, philosophers, scientists and theologians entered the field of poetic criticism. Every one quoted the poets, consequently poetry was bound up not only with criticism but with Arabic thought. One of the most quoted Arabic critics is Ibn Rashiq, of the eleventh century, whose Umda or Pillar of the Art of Poetry is mentioned often by Ibn Khaldun, the historian. The latter also names four great Arabic writers of Adab, Ibn Qutayba's Accomplishments of the Secretary (Ibn Qutayba's Book of Poetry and Poets is more often cited by other writers than the Accomplishments of the Secretary), Jahiz's Book of Eloquence and Exposition, al Mubarrad's Perfect, all of the ninth century, and in Spain Abu Ali al Qali's Curious Notions, of the tenth century, whose Book of Dictations, however, is better known.

Among the writers on poetry in the manner of the Arabs was the Hebrew poet and critic, Moses Ibn Ezra, author of the Conversations and Recollections, which was the first study of the kind in Hebrew and the first criticism of the poetry of the Bible from an aesthetic point of view. Among Arab critics to whom he is indebted, besides the aforementioned Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Rashiq, are the first book in Arabian Poetics proper, by the Caliph, Ibn ul Mutazz, of the latter part of the ninth century, a work by Qudama, and Ornaments of Conversation, by Al Hatimi, both of the tenth century.

There are many other works that were well known and often cited in Arabic literary circles. I shall name only Tha'alibi (died 1037), whose Solitaire of Time had many continuations by later critics, and the famous Fihrist or Index by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.

Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of Chaucer in the thirteenth century, devoted a number of chapters to poetry in the introduction to his famous history.

As a specimen of poetic criticism among the Arabs and as a corrective to the general impression that ornament and not ecstasy counted in Arabic poetry, I give the following English rendering from De Slane's French translation of Khaldun's Prolegomena:

The Arabs then regarded poetry as ecstatic utterances emanating from the unconscious, embodying an idea, and produced with little ornament. This despite their belief that poetry must use the established forms of metre and figures. It is unfortunate that even to the present day these old forms are used, while Turkish literature has only very recently been emancipated from them. Even Arabian political articles are to-day written in rhymed prose. But as Chenery said, the history of rhymed prose is the history of Arabic literature. Rhyme is natural to the Arabic language, whereas it is really foreign to the English language.

If European civilization could free itself from the prejudices against Semitic and Asiatic culture, and if the universities, instead of studying minutely the barren medieval literature of Europe before the Renaissance, would give fuller courses in the poetry of the Arabs, Hebrews, Persians and Turks, the exchange would be salutary. The only Asiatic literature that Europe made an attempt to study was that of the Hindus, and, as has been suspected by many, this may have been done chiefly out of Aryan vanity, to show that the earliest culture was not Semitic but Aryan, and thus related to European culture. But the fact remains that the poetry of these four nations mentioned is far superior to that of medieval Europe. The two nations who were not Semitic, the Persians and the Ottoman Turks, are almost wholly imbued with the Semitic spirit. Persian poetry grew out of Arabic poetry, just as Ottoman poetry developed from Persian poetry. There is nothing of the Tartar spirit at all in Ottoman poetry, as Gibb has pointed out.

That poetry is subjective, lyric, ecstatic, is best seen in Oriental poetry. It will repay the lover of literature to read such works as Browne's Literary History of Persia, Gibb's History of Ottoman Poetry, and Nicholson's Literary History of the Arabs. As for Post-biblical poetry of the Hebrews, so rich in patriotic and moral fervor, and in hymns and elegies, there are articles in the Jewish Encyclopedia, chapters in Graetz's History of the Jews and works on various phases of it by numerous writers.

To the Oriental, poetry is ecstasy first and last, and this is all the more remarkable since their poetry is so much more ornate, artificial, figurative, and patterned than European poetry. It is sensuous, passionate but not "simple." Its chief inferiority to European poetry, however, springs from its lack in intellectual profundity, and its severance (except in the Prophets of the Bible) from problems of social justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[203-A] There is a French translation of the Prolegomena by Mac Guckin de Slane.