and beyond; while the Germans made the name Dichter, a poet, from dichten, "to forge, to compose, to invent, or Here in the word itself we have imbedded the central idea. The poet sees what is beyond the ken of those who are not see-ers by nature and constant habit. "Emphatically it may be said of the poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, 'that he looks before and after,' wrote Wordsworth1, and Emerson declared that "Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing;" while Carrière is quoted by Dr. Gummere as thus phrasing much the same idea: "Poetry speaks out the thought that lies in things.' To interpret is to stand between and make the utterance of one clear to the hearing of another. So does the poet stand, having sensed the sweetness and light and music and strength and seriousness of all hidden meanings in man and nature and God, and by voicing them in articulate manner brings that to our understanding which else were unknown. This is what Matthew Arnold meant when in phrase somewhat severe-sounding he said that poetry is "a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and beauty;" and Shelley had the same thought when he wrote that "to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful." As the seer sees truly, as his eye is sensitive to the beautiful, he is fitted to occupy the choice seat in the Interpreter's House. Today as never before, with men groping among material things, seeking for they know not what, today with its unrest and its cries for relief from oppressions, the poet is needed to see truth and interpret the meanings of life to us all. (d) Imagination is a fourth element of poetry. Leigh Hunt, answering the question "What is Poetry?" in his volume so entitled, gives a category of six aspects of imagination, and whole treatises have been written without exhausting its scope. But chiefly we understand it to be the faculty of forming images, and this is the poet's vocation. Samuel Johnson once said that poetry was the art of "calling imagination to the help of reason," and Blair, upon whose rhetorical foundations all nineteenth-century critics have built, conceived poetry to be "the language of passion or of enlivened imagination," while Shelley saw it to be "in a general sense the expression of the imagi nation." The earliest critic whose work is read today is Aristotle. "Poetry," he wrote in his Poetics, "is imitation, or an imitative art. In this view Francis Bacon shared. "Poesie," said he also, "filleth the imagination." So by imitation these great minds doubtless meant imagery, "the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination." The language of poetry is "vitally metaphorical;" by it poetry institutes noble and striking comparisons, sends 1 Macaulay, "Essay on Milton." Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry." per out the eye of the soul into the world of things seen and unseen, establishes points of contact for our understandings, conceives that is, gives birth to thoughts and emotions which it in turn interprets to men. "I saw the heart of man, it says, "and it is like unto this." In a word, the poet's imitative imagery, untrammeled by laws and statutes, sees visions and dreams dreams which are more just than justice and more true than science. Sidney Lanier has beautifully expressed the poet's use of imagery when he says that a "harmonious union of soul and body, of spirit and nature, of essence and form, is promoted by the nature-metaphor, which reveals with wonderful force how these two, united from of old, still have new points of sweet and thrilling contact, and still adorn and complement each other. Spirit needs form, and finds it in nature, which is formal; nature needs life, and finds it in spirit, which is life-giving. Never be these two sundered! Forever may the nature-metaphor stand a mild priest, and marry them, and marry them, and marry them again, and loose them to the free air as mated doves that nestle and build and bring forth mildnesses and meeknesses and Christ-loves in men's hearts!" 1 (e) Utterance is a further element of poetry. As Stedman put it, poetry is "vocal." Human speech is its natural exponent, words form its music. Some one has said that poetry is "the beautiful representation of the beautiful, given in words." What is thought and felt and discerned and imaged must be translated into language. Many 1 "Music and Poetry." there are who feel but cannot sing, while more live in songs sung by other voices. For both of these the poet has a ministry: to him it is given to utter the unuttered—to express life. Go to your favorite poet, and you will find that he is speaking to you, singing to you-even uttering for you your inmost self. (f) Rhythm is the sign manual of poetry's outward form. Shelley in his "Defense of Poetry" has admirably phrased this need for a patterned, recurrent form: "Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order." Rhythm is sensed from nature. Sound and movement and regularity of succession produce harmony, under the best conditions, and harmony is the suitable dress of poetry. "Musical thought "is how Carlyle denominated it. On this question opinions have varied decidedly. Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Apologie for Poetrie," asserted that verse was not essential to poetry, while so scientific a modern as Hegel insisted that "meter is the first and only condition absolutely demanded by poetry." Between these amazing extremes stood the oft-quoted Shelley, who believed that poetry must be rhythmical, though not neces sarily metrical-a position which seems to us to be correct. More than the harmonious, vibrating sequence of beautiful sounds we may not demand as an essential, however we may admire and approve full metrical form. Archbishop Whately's dictum that poetry must employ "elegant, decorated language in meter" is true in most instances, but scarcely universal enough to be accepted as a law. Here (g) Beauty is an element so well recognized as scarcely to need either demonstration or the confirmatory pronouncement of Poe: "I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty." we have a fine suggestion that the beauty of poetry must consist not alone in the adornment of language, but in the presence of the ideal both in substance and in manner. (h) Loftiness, or, in its highest expression, sublimity, has been recognized as an essential element of poetry ever since Plato spoke of it poetically as "the language of the gods." Ruskin's definition was by no means satisfying, but the one element of loftiness he enforced most effectively: Poetry is "the presentment, in musical form, to the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions." The same high thought was in the mind of Alfred Austin when he expressed it as "a transfiguration of life." And of poetry Goethe says: "Like the air balloon, it lifts us, together with the ballast which is attached to us, into higher regions, and lets the confused labyrinths of the earth lie developed before us, as in a bird's-eye view. "'4 1 "The Poetic Principle. 244 'English Prosody. |