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Title: The Lyric: An Essay

Author: John Drinkwater

Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9850]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Thierry Alberto and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LYRIC: AN ESSAY ***




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THE LYRIC

AN ESSAY BY JOHN DRINKWATER


1922



CONTENTS


What is Poetry

The Best Words in the Best Order

The Degrees of Poetry

Paradise Lost

What is Lyric

The Classification of Poetry

Lyric Forms

Song

The Popularity of Lyric

Conclusion




WHAT IS POETRY?


If you were to ask twenty intelligent people, "What is the Thames?" the
answer due to you from each would be--"a river." And yet this would hardly
be matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say,
"What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me." This
would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations on
geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, many
personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds
approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and
contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative
judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one
of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the
final word would inevitably be left unsaid.

The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, often
by the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answered
differently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished
literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of
constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets
themselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left the
answer incomplete, as it must--not in the least unhappily--always remain.
And yet, if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this
wisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does not
strictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us
singly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of
poetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and
describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which
the poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is the
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," he is, exactly, in one intuitive
word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired
gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so
Shelley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.
But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect, a
certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has been
one perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It was
Coleridge's: "Poetry--the best words in the best order."



THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER


This is the fundamental thing to be remembered when considering the art of
poetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this or
that and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitely
narrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of his
utterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything of
a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know
something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly
inessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, no
external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times,
knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into
his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our
judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work
because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite
wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high æsthetic pleasure which the
people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid
of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more
eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we
praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some
particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by
suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is
giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this
alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in
the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.

For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the
best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it
does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental
poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience;
what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way,
that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the
trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin
wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--

"... women of England! ...do not think your daughters can be trained to the
truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God
made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and
defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of
yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great
Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waters
which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only
with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--the
mountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan would
have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for you
without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown God."

Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equally
admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great
nobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best
order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the
highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and
its people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in
silence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to
excellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more
deeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the
answer:

  And did those feet in ancient time
    Walk upon England's mountains green?
  And was the holy Lamb of God
    On England's pleasant pastures seen?

  And did the Countenance Divine
    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
  And was Jerusalem builded here
    Among these dark Satanic mills?

  Bring me my bow of burning gold!
    Bring me my arrows of desire!
  Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
    Bring me my chariot of fire!

  I will not cease from mental fight,
    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
  Till we have built Jerusalem
    In England's green and pleasant land.

It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly
chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better
than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and
do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this
direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with
tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a
deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember
that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual
activity that we call æsthetic delight and that to do this is the highest
achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best
words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest
possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic
government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely
fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will
of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the
people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally
beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the
government that best represents the people will finally best organise
the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an
aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned
civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic
government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic
government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels
in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and
reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best
words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages,
were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the
distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no
difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the
terms of poetry.

One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as
Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can
serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences
that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I
say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in
the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of
being refined into the higher æsthetic experience of which we have spoken,
my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.

That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All
æsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment,
fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has
been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best
words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and
judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction
that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a
kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as
passing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems
dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of
poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few
and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is
the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under
the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and
consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given
the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the
expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as
the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in
poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having
been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do
this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant
verse.



THE DEGREES OF POETRY


The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are there
degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the
requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been
created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at
any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so
slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:

    When I a verse shall make,
      Know I have pray'd thee,
    For old religion's sake,
      Saint Ben, to aid me.

    Make the way smooth for me,
      When I, thy Herrick,
    Honouring thee, on my knee
      Offer my lyric.

    Candles I'll give to thee,
      And a new altar,
    And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
      Writ in my Psalter,

be said to be less definitely poetry than _Paradise Lost_ or in any
essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think it
is the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding of
the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see how
far it may be justifiable.



PARADISE LOST


It is commonly asserted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among the
two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of
supreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities by
virtue of which this claim is made, and allowed by every competent judge?
Firstly there is the witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have
spoken.

  His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
  Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines,
  With every plant, in sign of worship wave.
  Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
  Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
  Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,
  That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,
  Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
  Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
  The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,
  Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
  To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
  Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.

This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem,
and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for
delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance
its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this
imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few
pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall
say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint
Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason,
prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in
whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground,
assign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"
"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good
fortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work than
this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own
elegy. There is an explanation.

Of all the energies of man, that which I will anticipate my argument by
calling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and the
distinguishing qualities of that passage from Milton, is the rarest and the
most highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think of
the handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring this
perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know
that the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in
this matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and
intelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the
energies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy
above the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their
most notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage
which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is the
profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound
emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great masses
of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.
Cæsar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceived
designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of character and
event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political
leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth,
organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy
of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely
lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken
by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one
other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the
objective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy of
the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists.

[1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy
does not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination
of large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely
control of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see
precisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the
emotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of
intellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at
all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its
shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in
his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst
of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living
writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
evaporates unrecorded.]

Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing
in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour
is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson
defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain,
nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is
endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with
some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very
rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.
Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton
had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever
excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion,
and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in
his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief
thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but
also the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions being
related to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great
moral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we
get, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--of
psychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal
for justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome
delight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence
than Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton
besides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes,
by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think
that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without his
poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction,
which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble a
personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be a
great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable from
the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as he
is clearly not evident in Herrick's.

[2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has left
no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect songs,
can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a poet?" Let me
say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect song
is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the
media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one
supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one
moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human
conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect
experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no
matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is,
more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with
whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
most heroic altruism.]



WHAT IS LYRIC?


And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are
left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
judges, that--

    Ye have been fresh and green,
      Ye have been filled with flowers,
    And ye the walks have been
      Where maids have spent their hours.
    You have beheld how they
      With wicker arks did come
    To kiss and bear away
      The richer cowslips home.
    You've heard them sweetly sing,
      And seen them in a round:
    Each virgin like a spring,
      With honeysuckles crown'd.
    But now we see none here
      Whose silvery feet did tread,
    And with dishevell'd hair
      Adorn'd this smoother mead.
    Like unthrifts, having spent
      Your stock and needy grown,
    You've left here to lament
      Your poor estates, alone,

is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to

  Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
  For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
  Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
  So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
  And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
  And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
  Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

We come, then, to the consideration of this specific quality that
distinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression.
Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a work
of art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has three
qualities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architectural
power, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although
it may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of
the poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in _Tom Jones_,
_Unto This Last_, and _The School for Scandal_ respectively;
that there remains a last and dominating quality, which is not related to
intellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of those
other qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other two, but to
extreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object it may be
directed, remembering that this activity is highly exacting as to the
worthiness of objects in which it can concern itself. We find, further,
that this is a quality which it has in common not with _Tom Jones_
or _Unto This Last_, but with a thing so inconsiderable in all other
respects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case we find that the
token of this quality is a conviction that here are words that could not
have been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed; that here is an expression
to rearrange which would be to destroy it--a conviction that we by no means
have about the prose of Fielding and Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find,
in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure
freeing itself in the best words in the best order. And this quality is the
specific poetic quality; the presence or absence of which should decide for
us, without any other consideration whatever, whether what is before us is
or is not poetry. And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our
minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and
the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the
same thing.



THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY


It is not yet the place to discuss the question of lyric forms--to consider
what kind of thing it is that people mean when they speak of "a lyric."
First we must consider the commonly accepted opinion that a lyric is an
expression of personal emotion, with its implication that there is an
essential difference between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrative
poetry. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but
then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of
poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly
artificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramatic
poetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three different
things--epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing
in common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the
same nature as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a further
kind of poetry. Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it in
relation to this suggestion:


CLOWN.      I wish you all joy of the worm.

CLEOPATRA.  Farewell.

CLOWN.      You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.

CLEOPATRA.  Ay, ay; farewell.

CLOWN.      Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of
              wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.

CLEOPATRA.  Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.

CLOWN.      Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth
              the feeding.

CLEOPATRA.  Will it eat me?

CLOWN.      You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself
              will not eat a woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the
              gods, if the devil dress her not. But, truly, these same
              whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for
              in every ten that they make the devils mar five.

CLEOPATRA.  Well, get thee gone; farewell.

CLOWN.      Yes, forsooth; I wish you joy of the worm.

             _Re-enter_ IRAS.

CLEOPATRA.  Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
            Immortal longings in me; now no more
            The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
            Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
            Antony call; I see him rouse himself
            To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
            The luck of Cæsar, which the gods give men
            To excuse their after wrath; husband, I come:
            Now to that name my courage prove my title!
            I am fire and air; my other elements
            I give to baser life. So; have you done?
            Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
            Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.

I have chosen this passage not because of its singular beauty, but because
it is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare,
by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does under
similar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetry
and what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the
Clown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not
demand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that would
force him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this
kind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama
does not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it
poetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and
yet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the
poetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when
Cleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and
a continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the
suggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric
is the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly
emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also
unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of
his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who
is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind
from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry,
then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be
perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a
fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is
concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a
mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as
poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as
vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or
pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not
become one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call the
result lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramatic
poetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying is
that in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I am
producing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic quality
is the same in either case. Cleopatra's speech is notable for two things:
its dramatic significance, which is admittedly contrived by Shakespeare,
and its poetry which springs from an intensity of experience which is
clearly, unless we juggle with words, Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's.
The fact that the material upon which the poet's mood has worked has not
been confined to some event that has happened to himself but has included
the condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significance
of his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. The
poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the
character of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking
of the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process
of any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see
that we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being
constant in its essential properties in whatever association we may
henceforth find it.

If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I think
it rightly may be, that the purely poetic energy is not a variable quality,
that of any given expression of a man's mental activity it can definitely
be said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to be
answered,--Can one poem be better than another, if both are truly poems?
Or can one poet, by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by
reason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every
good judge of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answer
without hesitation--Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason for
it may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit the
principle that has been defined. With a passage from each of these poets at
his best before us, let us see what we find. This from Keats:

    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
      No hungry generations tread thee down;
    The voice I hear this passing night was heard
      In ancient days by emperor and clown:

    Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
      Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
          The same that oft-times hath
        Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

And this from Suckling:

    Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
      Prythee, why so pale?
    Will, when looking well can't move her,
      Looking ill prevail?
      Prythee, why so pale?

    Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
      Prythee, why so mute?
    Will, when speaking well can't win her,
      Saying nothing do't?
      Prythee, why so mute?

    Quit, quit, for shame! This will not move;
      This cannot take her.
    If of herself she will not love,
      Nothing can make her:
      The Devil take her!

The poetic energy in Keats is here entirely undisturbed. I do not mean that
it is not united to any other energy--though here it happens not to be--as
in poetic drama, where it is united to the dramatic energy and is still
undisturbed in its full activity, but that it is here freely allowed to
work itself out to its consummation without any concession, conscious or
unconscious, to any mood that is not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic,
in which case, although unchanged in its nature, it would be constrained in
a hostile atmosphere. Keats's words are struck out of a mood that tolerates
nothing but its own full life and is concerned only to satisfy that life by
uncompromising expression. The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But when
we come to Suckling's lines we find that there is a difference. The poetic
energy is still here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something in
a mood of more than common intensity. It does not matter that the material
which has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound or
passionate. Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling's
to work upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant as
Keats's.

    Shall I, wasting in despair,
    Die because a woman's fair?
    Or make pale my cheeks with care
    Because another's rosy are?
    Be she fairer than the day,
    Or the flowery mead in May--
      If she think not well of me
      What care I how fair she be?

To object that there is an emotional gaiety in this which is foreign to
Keats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preference
which is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have,
from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy
with the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent
note in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this
particular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is
related to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of
poetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn
a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely
a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as it
would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative
pleasure more readily from

    Shall I, wasting in despair

than from

    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not show
him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of its
expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor so
adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no less
surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgment
to rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations) in pure
poetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate Suckling by
the witness of his lyric. For while Wither's mood, in its chosen activity,
is wholly surrendered to the poetic energy, Suckling's is not. It is
contaminated by one of those external activities which I have spoken of as
being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right
urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes
some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives,
and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even
changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser
metal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound with
the element that corresponds to poetic energy transmuted, but an
ill-sorted mixture, while Keats gives us the unblemished gold. We are
right in proclaiming his the finer achievement.

Keats and Wither will serve as examples with which to finish our argument.
In spite of all that has been said Keats takes higher rank as poet than
Wither? Yes, certainly, but not because the poetic energy in him was a
finer thing than the poetic energy that was in Wither. It was more
constant, which is a fact of no little importance; its temper appealed to
a much more general sympathy, a circumstance which cannot be left out of
the reckoning; it touched a far wider range of significant material.
These things give Keats his just superiority of rank, but they do not
deprive Wither, at his best moments, of the essential quality which is
with Keats, as with all poets, the one by which he makes his proudest
claim good. Nor need it be feared that in allowing Wither, with his rare
moments of withdrawn and rather pale perfection, this the highest of all
distinctions, we are making accession to the title of poet too easy. It
remains the most difficult of all human attainments. The difference between
the essential quality in those eight fragile lines and that in such verse
as, say:

    Oft. In the stilly night,
      Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
    Fond memory brings the light
      Of other days around me,

may be so elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist, but it
is the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common enough
sensibility.



LYRIC FORMS


While, therefore, the term "lyric poetry" would in itself seem to be
tautological, and so to speak of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak of
all poetic forms, there are nevertheless certain more or less defined
characteristics of form that we usually connect in our mind with what we
call "a lyric" (or, even less exactly, "lyric poetry") which may be said to
be a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated with other
energies--with a partial exception to which reference will be made. In
examining these characteristics nothing will be attempted in the way of a
history or an inclusive consideration of particular forms which are known
as lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis of their governing
principles.

To say that a lyric (using the word henceforward in its particular sense)
is generally short is but to say that poetic tension can only be sustained
for a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short
ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood,
selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is
a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected
and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the
energy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there
will be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic
perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected
whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or
narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed
into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The
decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall
be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation
of the purely poetic energy, but of another.

The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms
used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic
experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into
poetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarily
implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a
detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:

    I die, I faint, I fail!

it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional
act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that
intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been
speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the
co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most
instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a
partial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic
energy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes
a poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the
structural outline is decided by a definable law--as in the sonnet--he is
in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use of
rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happens
that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive
and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist
independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A very
curious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support. The
adherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they should
thankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, are
sometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of their
manner--which, let me say it again, may be entirely admirable--that it
enables the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence with
change of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when you
wish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have not
the patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that it is
professed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other serious
and gifted people, loyally trying to serve a great art, who hold this view,
and on their account consideration is due to it. But it is none the less a
fallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the change of line-lengths and
rhythms in a short poem written in "free verse" is nearly always arbitrary,
and does not succeed in doing what is claimed for it in this direction,
while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the
sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and
line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them.
A dirge may be in racing anapæsts, laughter in the most sedate iambic
measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while
grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work,
indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to
the ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though--in
English, and I am always speaking of English--it cannot even then be used
with any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the ear
does not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least, it accepts
and even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry may be
externally simple, as in, say, the stanzas of _Heraclitus_:

    They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
    They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
    I wept as I remembered how often you and I
    Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

    And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
    A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
    Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,
    For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take,

or intricate, as in:

    Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,
    Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,
    Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
    Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
    And to our high-raised phantasy present
    That undisturbed song of pure content,
    Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne
        To Him that sits thereon
    With saintly shout and solemn jubilee;
    Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
    Their loud-uplifted angel-trumpets blow;
    And the Cherubic host in thousand quires
    Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
    With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms,
        Hymns devout and holy psalms
        Singing everlastingly:

in either case there is a formal and easily perceptible relation between
one part of the structure and another, and this relation is a positive help
to us in understanding the plain sense of the words, while its presence
does not involve any loss of emotional significance which its absence would
supply. The truth is--and here is the second and chief objection to the
claim that we are discussing--that the poetic mood, which is what is
expressed by the rhythm and form of verse and may very well be called the
emotion of poetry, is not at all the same thing as what are commonly called
the emotions--as happiness, despair, love, hate and the rest. Its colour
will vary between one poet and another, but in one poet it will be
relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material
upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a
relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing
metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions,"
subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding
alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that
other subjects of its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, for
example, that when Shakespeare wrote:

    Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
      Nor the furious winter's rages:
    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
      Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
    Golden lads and girls all must,
      As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,

it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the poetic
emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metrical
and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat: of the second,
rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages: and of the fifth
and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepers
respectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, and
things which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do
this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely
related equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effect
is really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses and
altars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets
to contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's _Lodore_, in
which there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just
as difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this function
as it is to explain why the moon is not a green cheese.

[3: Most poets will occasionally use onomatopoeia with success,
but this is a different matter, and even so it is quite an inessential
poetic device. One might sometimes suppose from what we are told, that
Virgil's chief claim to poetry was the fact that he once made a line of
verse resemble the movement of a horse's hoofs.]

But while it is true that the function of the rhythm of poetry is to
express the governing poetic emotion, and that, since the emotion in
itself is fixed rather than changing, it will best do this not by mere
irregularity, but by flexible movement that is contained in an external
symmetry, it does not follow at all that the subject-matter which the
poetic emotion is controlling, be it the "emotions" or anything else,
cannot hope for expression that catches its peculiar properties. To do this
in poetry is the supreme distinction not of rhythms, but of words. The
preponderance of the five-foot blank-verse line in the work of, say,
Shakespeare and Milton, is so great that we can safely say that their rank
as poets would not be lower than it is if they had written nothing else.
Clearly their constancy to this metre was not the result of any technical
deficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of _Samson
Agonistes_ and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd as
to suggest that they adopted this five-foot line and spent their mighty
artistry in sending supple and flowing variety through its external
uniformity, because they could not manage any other. They used it because
they found that its rhythm perfectly expressed their poetic emotion, and
because the formal relation of one line to another satisfied the instinct
for co-ordination, and for the full expression of the significance of their
subject-matter they relied not upon their rhythms, but upon their choice
of words. The belief that when a poem is written there is one and only one
metrical scheme that could possibly be used for that particular occasion is
an amiable delusion that should be laid aside with such notions as that the
poet makes his breakfast on dew and manna. Once the poem is written we
may feel indeed, if it be a good one, that any change in the form is
impossible, but when the poet was about to write it we may be sure that
he quite deliberately weighed one form against another before making his
choice. It may even be true that he will sometimes find the shape of his
poem running to his tongue as it were unbidden, but this certainty of
selection is really in itself the result of long and, perhaps, subconscious
deliberation. The point is that the chosen form must in any case express
the poetic emotion, but that its particular election is a personal whim,
wholly satisfactory in its result, rather than a divine necessity. _The
Ode to the West Wind_ and the _Stanzas written in Dejection_ are
both superb poems, but who shall say that Shelley might not have written
the former in the short-measured nine-line stanzas and the latter in his
_terza-rima_, and yet have embodied his poetic emotion as completely
as he has done? It need hardly be added that it does not follow that,
because a simple metrical outline may easily and justly be chosen, it can
easily be used. So plain a measure as the six-line octo-syllabic stanza may
be the merest unintelligent jog-trot, or it may be:

    I wander'd lonely as a cloud
    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
    When all at once I saw a crowd,
    A host, of golden daffodils;
    Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

We may now consider this question of the subject-matter and its expression
in words. When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is
endowing the word with life. He has something in his mind, subjected to
his poetic vision, and his problem is to find words that will compel us to
realise the significance of that something. To solve this problem is his
last and most exacting difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and the
closest discipline. When Homer nodded, another man's word came to his lips,
and when that happens the poet may as well be silent. No poet has been
wholly blameless of this relaxation or escaped its penalties, but it is by
his vigilance in this matter that we measure his virility.

I suppose everyone knows the feeling that sometimes calls us to a life
where we fend and cater for ourselves in the fields and rivers, such as
William Morris knew when he shot fieldfares with his bow and arrow and
cooked them for his supper. Shakespeare knew it too, in the mind of
Caliban, and his business was to realise this subject-matter for us in such
a way that it could not possibly escape us in vague generalisation. Its
appeal to our perceptions must be irresistible. He can do it only by the
perfect choice of words, thus:

    I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
    I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.

           *       *       *       *       *

    I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
    And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
    Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
    To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
    To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee
    Young scamels from the rock.

Every word sings with life, and the whole passage shows perfectly the
function of words in poetry. The peculiar delight which we get from such a
passage as this comes, I think, apart from its fundamental poetic quality,
from the fact that the subject-matter is of such general interest as
constantly to tempt incomplete perception to inadequate expression.
Consequently when we get an expression which is complete our pleasure has
an added surprise. "Show thee a _jay's_ nest"; it is strangely simple,
but it is revelation. Or let us take a case where the subject-matter is one
of the emotions of which we have spoken; the emotion that marks the pity of
parting at death:

    I am dying, Egypt, dying:

the use of that one word, Egypt, should answer for ever the people who
think that the subject-matter of poetry is to be expressed by rhythm.

Thus we have rhythm expressing the poetic emotion, or intensity of
perception, and words expressing the thing that is intensely perceived; so,
as the creed of the mystics shows us beauty born of the exact fusion of
thought with feeling, of perfect correspondence of the strictly chosen
words to the rhythmic movement is born the complete form of poetry.
And when this perfect correspondence occurs unaccompanied by any other
energy--save, perhaps, the co-ordinating energy of which I have spoken--we
have pure poetry and what is commonly in our minds when we think of lyric.
If it be objected that some of my illustrations, that speech of Caliban's
for example, are taken from "dramatic poetry" and not from "lyric poetry,"
my answer is that it is impossible to discover any essential difference
between those lines and any authentic poem that is known as "a lyric." The
kind of difference that there is can be found also between any two
lyrics; it is accidental, resulting from difference of personality and
subject-matter, and the essential poetic intensity, which is the thing that
concerns us, is of the same nature in both cases. Any general term that can
fitly be applied to, say, the _Ode to The West Wind_ can be applied
with equal fitness to Caliban's island lore. Both are poetry, springing
from the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfect
selection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the same
ecstasy. Although we are accustomed to look rather for the rhymed and
stanzaic movement of the former in a lyric than for the stricter economy
and uniformity of Caliban's blank verse, yet both have the essential
qualities of lyric--of pure poetry.



SONG


It may be protested that after all the peculiar property of lyric,
differentiating it from other kinds of poetry, is that it is song. If we
dismiss the association of the art of poetry with the art of music, as
we may well do, I think the protest is left without any significance. In
English, at any rate, there is hardly any verse--a few Elizabethan poems
only--written expressly to be sung and not to be spoken, that has any
importance as poetry, and even the exceptions have their poetic value quite
independently of their musical setting. For the rest, whenever a true poem
is given a musical setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed. The
musician--if he be a good one--finds his own perception prompted by the
poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from
the terms of poetry into the terms of music. The result may be, and often
is, of rare beauty and of an artistic significance as great, perhaps, as
that of the poem itself, and the poet is mistaken in refusing, as he often
does,[4] to be the cause of the liberation of this new and admirable
activity in others. But, in the hands of the musician, once a poem has
served this purpose, it has, as poetry, no further existence. It is
well that the musician should use fine poetry and not bad verse as his
inspiration, for obvious reasons, but when the poetry has so quickened him
it is of no further importance in his art save as a means of exercising a
beautiful instrument, the human voice. It is unnecessary to discuss the
relative functions of two great arts, wholly different in their methods,
different in their scope. But it is futile to attempt to blend the two.

[4: His refusal is commonly due to lamentable experience. If a
Shelley is willing to lend his suggestions to the musician, he has some
right to demand that the musician shall be a Wolf. The condition of his
allowing his poem to be used and destroyed in the process is, rightly, that
something of equal nobility shall be wrought of its dust.]

As far as my indifferent understanding of the musician's art will allow me
I delight in and reverence it, and the singing human voice seems to me to
be, perhaps, the most exquisite instrument that the musician can command.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with
the use of words in poetry. If the song be good, I do not care whether the
words are German, which I cannot understand, or English, which I can. On
the whole I think I prefer not to understand them, since I am then not
distracted by thoughts of another art.

If then from the argument about the lyric that it should "sing," we dismiss
this particular meaning of its adaptability to music, what have we left? It
cannot be that it peculiarly should be rhythmic, since we have seen that to
be this is of the essential nature of all poetry--that rhythm is, indeed,
necessary to the expression of the poetic emotion itself. It cannot be that
it peculiarly should be of passionate intensity, since again, this we have
seen to be the condition of all poetry. In short, it can mean nothing that
cannot with equal justice be said of poetry wherever it may be found. To
the ear that is worthy of poetry the majestic verse of the great passages
in _Paradise Lost_, the fierce passion of Antony and Macbeth, the
movement of the poetry in _Sigurd the Volsung_, "sing" as surely as
the lyrics of the Elizabethans or of _Poems and Ballads_. Poetry must
give of its essential qualities at all times, and we cannot justly demand
that at any time it should give us more than these.



THE POPULARITY OF LYRIC


Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire
be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the
universality of its appeal is a matter of course. We often hear people say,
sincerely enough, that they feel no response to poetry. This nearly always
means that their natural feeling for poetry has been vitiated in some
way, generally by contact, often forced upon them, with work that only
masquerades as poetry, or by such misgovernment of their lives as dulls all
their finer instincts. Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, the
delight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with a
little use it will quicken only to what is worthy. And lyric being pure
poetry, and most commonly found in isolation in the short poems which are
called lyrics, these will make the widest appeal of all the forms in which
poetry is found. For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almost
universal, sympathy with most other great energies is relatively rare.
The reason, for example, why twenty people will enjoy Wordsworth's
_Reaper_ for one who will enjoy _Paradise Lost_, is not because
_Paradise Lost_ is longer, but because it demands for its full
appreciation not only, in common with _The Reaper_, a sympathy with
the poetic energy, which it would obtain readily enough, but also a
sympathy with that other energy of intellectual control which has been
discussed. This energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far less
so than the poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and many
readers of _Paradise Lost_ will find in it not only poetry, which they
desire but faintly, while in _The Reaper_ they will find poetry as
nearly isolated from all other energies as it can be.



CONCLUSION


To summarise our argument, we find that poetry is the result of the
intensest emotional activity attainable by man focusing itself upon some
manifestation of life, and experiencing that manifestation completely; that
the emotion of poetry expresses itself in rhythm and that the significance
of the subject-matter is realised by the intellectual choice of the perfect
word. We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these
conditions, the best words in the best order--poetry; and to put this
essential poetry into different classes is impossible. But since it is most
commonly found by itself in short poems which we call lyric, we may say
that the characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure
poetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetry
are synonymous terms.












*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LYRIC: AN ESSAY ***


    

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