I have not tried to present a theory of poetry, so much as to point out certain features of a particular kind of writing which I have called the literature of ecstasy. It has developed that I really used the word ecstasy in the same sense that the other critics have employed the terms unconscious, imagination, poetry. I think I have shown that the literature of ecstasy even when in prose is synonymous with poetry as understood by Shakespeare when he used "frenzy" and "things unknown" in reference to the poet. I have also, I hope, pointed out that an ecstatic presentation of intellectual and moral ideas results often in a great poetic product.

I do not purpose to teach any one how to write poetry or the literature of ecstasy. If my views have any value, it lies in helping us recognize the literature of ecstasy. It is in aiding us to eliminate much trivial, flimsy, unecstatic free verse and regular verse from the sphere of poetry. It lies in inducing us to include much emotional prose as poetry. Since men, however, entertain so many diverse views on life, morals, and social justice, it can never be possible for critics to agree as to which literature of ecstasy is the best, for its value is affected by the question as to the truth of the ideals therein maintained. Every one thinks that he can determine what are the merits of a book. Those who have mastered the rules of prosody are certain that they can judge the qualities of poetry. But only those critics can recognize great poetry whose moral, intellectual and aesthetic faculties are well balanced. It is true that the master of rules of prosody can tell whether a verse poem follows the rules, he can perceive whether the rhymes are false, whether the rhythm is regular, even whether the figures are not far fetched and whether the diction is good; and a commonplace mind may recognize the ordinary literature of ecstasy. But the chief obstacle to recognizing poetry is that most people derive their views as to what poetry is from rules formulated from the writings of older poets. If the great poets of the world had never used a patterned form, there would have been no text books welding poetry and versification together. A great poet not only creates his own forms but displays individuality in the choice of views and ideas. When he becomes recognized, new rules are formulated from his work, and are even used as a fetter to bind later poets and critics.

Anthologists have often been of great value in choosing for us the literature of ecstasy as written by so-called minor and popular poets who have taken no position in the history of the world's literature. A poet, however, is not great because he has succeeded in producing a few pieces that belong truly to the literature of ecstasy. Nor does a poet who once held a high place in the list of poets and has subsequently lost it by the vicissitudes of taste or circumstances or by the change in ideas, cease being a poet to us if he has written poems that belong to the literature of ecstasy. No one, for example, to-day regards Jean Ingelow as a great poet, but the anthologists who select her When Sparrows Build or High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, justly accept these poems as poetry. It will astonish many people who will take the trouble to go through the work of some so-called minor poets, say Philip Bourke Marston, to find gems here and there that properly are part of the literature of ecstasy.

My theory, I hope, also helps us to determine when certain branches of literature are poetry and when they are not. For example, there has always been a dispute as to whether oratory, comedy and satire are really poetry. There have been critics who would not admit that these species of writing are properly poetry, even in verse; on the other hand, other critics have asserted that they are poetry.

When, if ever, is oratory poetry? Whenever ecstasy and not rhetoric characterizes it, when universal themes of permanent interest and not arguments on a temporal political or economic question are its substance, then oratory is poetry. A plea for adherence to the principles of a political party, a speech about an economic problem, is not as a rule poetry. But why are some of Moses's speeches and the orations of the prophets poetry? Why is Mark Antony's verse funeral oration on CÆsar, poetry? Surely not because of the verse? Why are some of Bossuet's funeral orations, or Thucydides's speech in prose, poetry? All of these orations belong to the domain of the literature of ecstasy, and hence are poetry.

Nevertheless, oratory is usually hollow and bombastic. The orator makes his appeal to men chiefly by rhetorical expression of commonplaces. Eloquence and artifice count here more than thought or art. The less intellect the audience has the better does the orator succeed. Hazlitt saw the limitations of oratory. It is the unthinking man who is appealed to by theatrical effects. The orator must be commonplace, he cannot deliver profound views. Some of the great orations of the world's literature that are poetry are those that were never really delivered but composed by the historians, like the emotional speeches in Thucydides and Tacitus. You can find poems in orations by Demosthenes and Cicero also, but Fourth of July orations are seldom poetry. Nor is the Congressional Record an anthology of poetic masterpieces. In a footnote in his book in aesthetics, The Critique of Judgment, Kant has ably elucidated the situation.

We must not confuse eloquence with poetry, though there are numerous prose pieces which though eloquent are yet poetry. Mere wordiness and grandiloquence may sound like ecstasy yet lack that quality.

What can be said for famous passages like Burke's sympathetic outburst for Marie Antoinette? I see no reason why we should not call this poetry, though it is not poetry of a high order. The objection to it is that the orator's emotion is misdirected; he wastes sympathy on a dead queen who was at the head of a pernicious system, and ignores the miseries of the thousands of poor Frenchmen. To that extent our appreciation of it is limited. For even though Burke was right when he lamented that the age of chivalry was gone, he did not state that the time of exploitation of man was over, and the question of exploitation is probably more important than that of chivalry.

There is affinity of oratory then to poetry, as it is calculated to arouse the emotions of the audience. But the political oration is usually not poetry, as it has a tendency to the ephemeral. No one will deny, however, that there is genuine prose poetry in orations by Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, Webster and Sumner.

What is true of the oration, is also true of the sermon. Sermons like those of Jeremy Taylor and Sterne contain poetry; they have ecstasy.

There has also been considerable confusion as to how much poetry exists in witty and humorous writings and in comedy. In other words, the connection between poetry and tears is well established, but that between poetry and laughter is vague. We may say that most of the so-called humorous verse is not poetry at all, for the merely funny does not merit the term poetry. Yet there is poetry in the humorous writings of men like Mark Twain and O. Henry, on account of the ecstatic effect upon the reader. In reading them one occasionally feels impelled to tears, while moved to laughter. A mere witticism is not poetry, but it may have certain qualities, such as a bit of wisdom conveying ecstasy, which makes it poetry. The wit of Heine and Voltaire often belongs to this class. When laughter is bound up with a profound idea or emotion, the work expressing the laugh becomes poetry. However, laughter that springs from seeing horse-play or the mere ludicrous, is not poetry. But the portrayals of Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Parson Adams are poems.

Meredith has presented the case of the comic spirit better than any one else. He says: "The comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest song fully poetic," and he shows how this spirit enters the work of Menander, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Terence, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Restoration Comedians, Pope, MoliÈre, Fielding, Smollett. These men were all poets; that is, they gave us poems here and there in their work. Meredith might have added Dickens's and his own work among comic works that contain poetry. The writers of comedy deal with feelings and emotions; most of them were men of intellect and deep feeling.

In a passage that is itself a poem, Meredith describes the Comic spirit, which he recognized as allied to poetry. And this in part is his delineation of it:

Closely akin to the comic genius is that of satire. Again satire is not poetry, except when presenting ideas and evoking ecstasy. There used to be a distinct form of verse poetry called the satire, but there is often more or less satire in the works of novelists, prose dramatists and essayists. We have as remnants of great ancient satire, poems by Horace and Juvenal, tales by Apuleius and Petronius and the prose dialogues of Lucian.

The great masters of satire in modern times have done their work in prose and much of this is poetry. We think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Anatole France and Samuel Butler. There is plenty of poetry in the Penguin Island and Erewhon, for example. Modern satire is prone to be more poetical than the ancient verse satire, being free from coarseness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Satire is not mere ranting and cursing, but a keen and amusing way of showing forth human follies. You find it in writers as different as Thackeray and Bernard Shaw. Some of the satire in Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street is excellent poetry.

The highest form of satire in all the prose writers is poetry, as much so as if put in the heroic couplets of Pope or the ottava rima of Byron's Vision of Last Judgment.

Satire is poetry when it is universal. Much of the old Arabic poetry was satire and yet genuine poetry. Pope's satires are poetry. Lafcadio Hearn has said a few words on the subject that deserve quoting:

My theory of poetry as ecstasy also seeks to do away with the tendency of criticism to identify poetry with the figure of speech or trope. Even when it has lacked the quality which fills the reader with ecstasy, the trope has been called poetry just because it was a trope. Imagery has been confused with imagination, and many critics regard that as poetry which makes the most frequent use of unusual figures of speech. As a result, some of the figures of speech in poetry to-day are more artificial even than those found in Oriental poetry. But no one can take issue with the beautiful figures such as appear in the Bible and in Dante, in Shelley and Keats, of which the essence is a beautiful flight of the imagination that fills us with ecstasy. But when freakish tropes take the place of poetry then we ought to rebel. We like the figure of speech introduced occasionally and naturally, and we don't want the figure substituted for ideas and emotions.

One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on The Science of Poetry, to identify poetry with the figure of speech. In spite of its eccentricities, and its attempt at creation of new terms like tro-tempotentry, the author recognizes that the critics confuse poetry with metre, and that a prose writer like Robert Ingersoll was a poet. Any one who had read Ingersoll's prose poems, and some of his orations like the one on Liberty in Literature, will recognize this. The mistake that Maxim makes is to call poetry defiantly a science, and then to define it as an art in which figures of speech count most. To create figures of speech is an art. Maxim's definition of poetry is "The expression of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by artistic trope." This definition covers much of ancient poetry, when man constantly used tropes or figures of speech. It is also true that a vast body of the world's poetry is full of tropes like metaphors and similes. In fact even our free verse is full of them. But the figure of speech is only one of the features that are often present in poetry, and we may and do have the best poetry without it. Its frequent use has become a nuisance; it often atones for lack of ideas, it is often a sign of insincerity in the poet, and it occasionally bespeaks a raving imagination. The day of tropes in poetry is, in spite of the Imagists, on the decline. You find none of them in prose plays and very few in prose fiction. The trope was an early adornment of poetry as rhythm was. It is not the essence of poetry, though it often beautifies poetry.

The critics do not accept the book of Maxim's as a true statement of the aims of poetry, but curiously enough they have always followed the views in his book. They have confused tropes, or figures of speech, or imagery with imagination. In the past the older critics fell into this error and when they spoke of imagination they were really expatiating on imagery.

One of the best English critics on poetry, Leigh Hunt, sinned in this direction. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge he made much of the distinction between imagination and fancy. Wordsworth arranged his poems in an edition of his works according to this distinction. Leigh Hunt got up an anthology called Imagination and Fancy, in which he italicized the imaginative and the fanciful passages, and to which he prefixed his famous essay on "What is Poetry?" Here he gave his definitions of and distinctions between imagination and fancy. Half the essay is devoted really to identifying them with figures of speech. The only difference between the two faculties was that fancy was a lighter play of the imagination, a distinction really utterly trivial. His work was needed at a time when the influence of Pope still ruled, and people could not appreciate the rich figures in Shelley and Keats. Pater called attention to the real distinction between imagination and fancy which is "between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of his work, and in his concentration of himself upon his work." For all purposes, however, fancy may be included under imagination. Imagery is not always imaginative, for many figures of speech have no ecstatic quality.

The English poets who were regarded as most gifted with the faculty of imagination under the old definition were Milton and Spenser, chiefly for their bold use of supernatural imagery. Homer and Dante were always noted for their beautiful and effective similes, and they were also the poets of the imagination par excellence. The confusion of imagery with imagination resulted in giving figures of speech a significance in determining the nature of poetry that it did not merit. Puttenham's book in the Elizabethan Age, The Arte of English Poesie, was half employed with ornament or various figures. Oriental poetry was especially figurative; all Oriental books on rhetoric deal extensively with figures of speech. In short it was taken for granted by all critics that poetry was imagery or figures of speech, because poetry was a product of the imagination, and imagination was confused with imagery. It is true that it is the function of the imagination to compare, but that does not mean that it is nothing more than metaphor or simile. The tropes were more natural to early man who personified inanimate things and always saw resemblances to draw from in nature. To-day the novelist or dramatist introduces his metaphor or simile occasionally or naturally, as an ornamental touch to convey his meaning better. Many modern versifiers identify poetry with ornament and figures, and it is impossible for them to write a poem without a succession of figures. The trope, like the rhythm, is supposed to be poetry. Hunt's essay defines poetry as imaginative passion in versification. He can conceive of no passion being poetry unless presented in metre with figures of speech. His essay is divided into two parts, the one dealing with imagination, or rather imagery, the other with versification. Great critic that he was, he gave us one of the weakest definitions of poetry we have.

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?

Pater in his Renaissance took the position that poetry has a personal message for us, an effect on us individually. We cannot learn this effect by following metaphysical discourses on the relation of beauty to truth or experience. In his Appreciations in the essay on "Style" Pater identifies beauty with expression, just as Croce did after him, and Lessing and Winckelmann before him. "All beauty," wrote Pater, "is in the long run only fullness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within." Here we have Croce's conception of beauty, the word defined as it is being understood to-day. It is in this sense only, the sense of the most adequate expression of emotion, that the word beauty is the same as poetry, or literature of ecstasy.

Formerly treatises were written about curved lines, elegant diction, etc., on the theory that beauty was the subject of art. But a peasant's description in slang of his emotions, an author's description of a corpse that is rotting, or of a woman giving birth to a child, or of a man going mad, or of a hideous degenerate crime, are also beautiful, for since expression is beauty, the narration or description of the ugly is a work of art. The word beauty in its popular sense no longer has aesthetic significance. Even when it was really believed that art dealt with beautiful objects and deeds, the aesthetician had to admit that there was nothing beautiful in tragedies. Nor does beauty mean elegant expression. Many stories and poems in slang and dialect belong to the literature of beauty. The expression of emotions, the delineation of ideas, the drawing of characters is beauty, if effectively done. The reader need not have what the old aestheticians called "taste"; he must only respond sympathetically to the ecstasy of the author.

I have made no attempt to set confines to poetry, for no two people will ever agree as to whether a literary performance has sufficient ecstasy or whether the ecstasy is of a high strain to entitle it to be called poetry, but I believe all will agree that ecstasy is necessary.

I believe, however, that many authoritative works and essays on Poetry, from Aristotle to our own day, are obsolete. I shall mention only Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry in the Encyclopedia Britannica which has furnished modern critics with many of their ideas. The article is beyond question one of the most interesting produced in England in many years. Watts-Dunton has a true conception of poetry when he calls it the product of inspiration or concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional language. He believes, however, versification is necessary to all poetry. He also makes too much of the divisions of poetry into the various orders, like epic, lyric, drama, an artificial division adopted by all critics from Aristotle. Watts-Dunton's divisions of poets into those with an absolute or personal vision and those with a relative vision, is arbitrary and confused. All poets are personal, and even when they depict other people's emotions objectively, the product is personal because touched with the creator's personality. He is also too much under the influence of Hegel's Aesthetics.

Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of impassioned prose or its right to be called poetry. He once said to William Michael Rossetti that the latter's reputation as a critic would soon vanish because of his admiration for Whitman, whom he himself detested. He is blamed with having done much to quench the poetic fire of Swinburne's muse, for whose changed attitude towards Whitman he also was responsible. He had no sympathy with the poetry that had a social message and he did not understand its effect as a catharsis. Watts-Dunton cannot remain our leading authority on poetry. His essay belongs to the extinct class of Ars Poetica, with Boileau and Opitz.

Ecstasy is then the substance of poetry, and there are all kinds of ecstasy, from a very exalted to a primitive order. It includes the scientist's or philosopher's passion for knowledge, the idealist's devotion to a cause. It comprehends the warrior's madness for battle, the patriot's ardor to die for his country, and man's submission to his God. Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved by reading a great work of art. It sweeps every one who is in the throes of ambition. Those who enjoy nature, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy. Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or rejoicing in the emergence of dear ones from illness or danger, those who take pride in watching their children grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of friendship, are all in ecstasy.

Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better things, every one who fulminates against ugliness and wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are you in a state of rapture because your love is returned, or in one of despair, because it is denied?—you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of grief?—you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a bad sense. The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.

The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion with God, the lunatic who thinks demons are prodding him, the spiritualist who imagines he talks to his dead son, the child who is in communication with animals and supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of ecstasy.

It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of ecstasy to choose, what attitude to take towards it and in what words and form to convey it.

The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware of the fact. For the great bulk of the poetry read by the people is the prose fiction that they find exciting and stimulating. This fiction is usually of a very low order. Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situations in novels, in the best passages of short stories. Prose poetry is the most democratic and natural poetry, at least in form, and you can rely on the public to appreciate some of it.

The poetry in Dickens is democratic poetry. The drawing of such characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe Gargery, wherein he shows the noble virtues residing in common people, is poetry that the public can appreciate.

Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for when it deals with ideas beyond the people, such as you find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it does not succeed in evoking the intended response and sympathy from the public, which rejects such ideas.

So when we hear people say that they do not care for poetry we see that they mean they have an aversion to verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm. But they will weep as they read of the death of Little Nell and be moved by the sorrows of Anna Karenina, and be stirred by the tragedy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Like the gentleman in MoliÈre's play who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, these readers are fond of poetry without being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is touched by the ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or beautiful prose literature. Here the poetic is divested of metaphors and rhythm and trappings and verbal tricks; here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by affectation.

You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord, where the great orator, desolate because of the loss of his son and embittered by criticism for accepting a pension, bares the state of his soul.

You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in his Confessions his feelings as he lay on his mattress grave, no less than when you peruse his love woes in verse.

When you read Hardy's Return of the Native and reach the part where Yeobright reproaches his wife Eustacia for causing the death of his mother by closing the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover, you are in the midst of poetry.

If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume Exotics and Retrospectives, you delight in poetry.

I should like to go on quoting passages from other books to show the reader that if he likes them he is emphatically a lover of poetry. I might have given one of the great prose poems in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's novel Salammbo. I might have presented for the edification of the "hater" of poetry the renowned description of the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in The Renaissance. I could have added Carlyle's reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from Sartor Resartus, Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in The Florentine Nights, George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his book on Shakespeare, Dickens' description of the tower in Chimes, or Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the Wild Ass's Skin.

That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any profound idea is ecstatically or passionately stated. That is poetry where man gives utterance to any sorrow or desolation, or where he shouts out his gladness because he finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks of 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.

Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which in its mystic quality eludes all compromises with reason, and borders on absurdity or is pathological. When poetry seeks salvation in apparent madness, and attaches itself to faith in the impossible, and sees distorted visions, and creates a maniac's world of unquestionably inverted order of hell-fire and brimstone, and makes outrageous and unjust demands on human nature it is of a low order. Nor is an unwarranted asceticism in poetry calculated to raise its tone.

It is vain to enumerate the various ecstasies of a low order, that of the literature which upholds different forms of wrong, as well as that which is too much attached to the commonplace, nor is it necessary to show that that poetry is not of a high order whose author goes into ecstasies about nuances, indulges in inappropriate imagery, piles up trite ideas in flowery diction, or gives continual iteration to the least important of commonplace emotions.

What then is literature of a high order? What is this great form of art that takes us out of ourselves because it has in it so much of ourselves? What is this magical arrangement of words enshrining what ideas and emotions that gives us a zest for life, that makes us drunk with aesthetic pleasure? It includes many species, all, as Milton would say, in a "strain of a higher mood." One of its greatest manifestations is that in which the ecstasy for social justice and a high form of idealism control the poet. We become carried away with his frenzy, for it evokes the highest emotions in us; an undeviating and never swerving enthusiasm for spreading right and happiness is an elevated form of ecstasy. The grief of the oppressed and the poor goes to our own hearts, and the calamities of the woe-begone become our own. We submerge our personality in that of the human race, and the griefs of strangers lure us to cry out for them.

But it should be remembered that literature never thus becomes a weapon for reform or a piece of didacticism or propaganda. The emotion is the thing. The practical work of relief of suffering is the function of the reformer and not the poet. It is the poet's duty only to make a certain form of ecstasy contagious. Practical results will follow as a matter of course.

And then there is the ecstasy that revolves around a profound philosophic insight, when the poet rids himself of prejudiced and barren thinking and looks at the universe with awe and goes into rhapsodies about its workings. And it takes a high order of intellect to sympathize with the literature of ecstasy of this kind, that pierces into the soul of the universe. The advanced ideas of the greatest poets are, however, often such as only a few people have intellect enough to perceive, or are such as can be grasped only when man throws aside all his prejudices. And here the great philosopher, mathematician and scientist come to the aid of the poet, who emotionalizes their greatest discoveries. For reason must go hand in hand with ecstasy.

There is the ecstasy where men are shown in the helpless grasp of great passions, and are in despair because of events beyond their control. Such passions include grief of all kinds, whether brought about by death or wrong or one's own folly. The depicting of great passion belongs to the grand order of the literature of ecstasy even when the poet makes no attempt to moralize from or sympathize with it. Crime and wickedness may be masterfully described with no ethical intent, for we are interested in the grand spectacle of a man whom the Gods have made mad, for madness is potential in all of us.

There is the ecstasy of the lover in his rapture for his mistress, and in his transformed nature. We are moved by the delicacy of his sentiment, his chivalry, his sacrifice, we are overcome by his sorrows and his misfortunes. There is the ecstasy of the love of nature where the majesty of this universe is set out in its glory. There is the ecstasy of the lover of beauty for its own sake, and of the artist in the pursuit of his work, and of the reader and of him who listens to music, of him who sees artistic pictures. There is the ecstasy of the scientist in his pursuit of truth, and of the inventor in transforming the face of the globe.

We cry out for ecstasy; it is the substance of our lives; even though, often in our pursuit of pleasant ecstasy, we are launched into tragedy. We are hungry for a happy life of the emotions. It is this which makes lovers and friends and parents of us. It is this which makes us poets, and it is the poet in ourselves that we always hunt out.

I hope our study has helped us to distinguish the higher from the lower forms of ecstasy, to find poetry in prose, and to differentiate poetry from verse, wherein there is no ecstasy but various conventions, like inversion, poetic diction, rhyme, metre, figures of speech, parallelisms, technique, and all forms of rhythm and repeats. That much of the best of the world's poetry has made abundant use of these mechanisms has led the critics to confuse poetry with its conventions. But the ecstasy was forgotten, and the emotional and intellectual value of the poem was overlooked. It was thought because the masters subscribed slavishly to the conventions that they became poets because of them, whereas they were poets first and last because of the ecstasy, sometimes with the aid of the conventions and sometimes despite them. That these mechanisms will always be used in some degree is certain, but the most natural poetry will be that which uses them moderately, irregularly and only when the emotions and the ideas naturally clothe themselves in them.

Poetry and prose then are not contradictory, but prose becomes poetry when the element of ecstasy is present. We use the word prosaic in a sense, it is true, which means destitute of imagination or emotion; we even call verse of this kind prosaic. But a work in prose may be poetical, and one in verse be prosaic, and science, philosophy and morality become poetry, though in the form of prose, when bathed in the spirit of ecstasy. And the highest form of poetry is that wherein the ecstasy springs from our nature's most human and most admirable side.

After having learned that poetry is more natural without metre or a pattern, that it may be in prose with or without rhythm, that it may have a social message, that it is the product of the unconscious, that it is related to dreams in being an imaginary fulfilled wish of the poet, that it acts as a relief to the writer and the reader, that it is always personal and lyric, that it is synonymous with expression in the poet's mind, that its chief characteristic is passion, imagination or ecstasy, that its qualities are often enhanced rather than destroyed by the presence of intellect or morality, that it is an emotional spirit holding literature in suffusion instead of being a branch of literature, we shall find that most of the old definitions of poetry exclude a great deal of the world's best poetry, and include much that is not poetry.