Whitman or Ibsen for instance, they had to modify their theories, and to revise their books on poetics and rhetoric. If the productions of Homer and Æschylus had been entirely different, we no doubt would have had other conceptions of poetry prevailing. Yet it is only by mere accident that Homer dealt with gods, wars, mythical events and employed dactylic hexameter. It is again also by pure chance that Æschylus used various metres, made Prometheus and the Furies living beings, was sponsor for a philosophy of divine punishment and often indulged in artificial diction. Had these poets written novels instead, conveying just as much genius and ecstasy as they did in their verse works, the critics of poetry would have deduced an entirely different conception of it.

To Democritus belongs the honor of having first recognized among the Greeks that ecstasy is the condition of the poet. To Plato goes the distinction for having fully developed this theory. Aristotle accepted also the view that poetry is ecstasy. The author of the ancient treatise On the Sublime perceived that the characteristic of poetic genius is in the arousing of the ecstatic state. He says, in a passage which deserves citation: "For it is not to persuasion (i. e., rhetoric) but to ecstasy that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer."

But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the prose form of poetry, but with poetry as

a psychological process, as a social force and as a philosophical expression.

Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and synonymous terms for the primary source of poetry. They are the fruitage of the turmoil of the soul, due to the apparently forgotten memories in us of the emotional lives in all our ancestors. They represent also the impassioned activities of our logical and rational faculties, the sum of the views of life of the past. They emanate from the dream life of man, whether this occurs in the waking or sleeping state. They are the workings of the force we call inspiration.

My view of poetry as emotional prose literature enables me, I hope, to eliminate many of the so-called conflicts between poetry and philosophy and between poetry and morals. Philosophical and moral essays become poetry in those parts lit up by ecstasy or emotion. If philosophy deals with rare and profound truths in regard to the universe, if morals treat of the noblest relations between man and man, then I know of no higher form of poetry than a philosophical truth, or a moral or social conception, when ecstatically stated; I can think of no higher literature of ecstasy than the imaginative utterance of great intellectual conceptions or impassioned expression of the love of justice. Shakespeare's line, "We are but such stuff as dreams are made of," is but a metaphysical theory emotionally put; Isaiah's rebuke to the corrupt rich is but a didactic saw, ecstatically delivered. Poetry finds its best material in metaphysical and ethical truths emotionally presented. Lofty ideas, however, and not commonplace deductions or conclusions are the best material for poetry.

I recognize, then, as great poetry, all writings in which metaphysical or scientific truth and the spirit of social

service are ecstatically formulated in prose, though I make no terms with dry didactic works that pretend to be poetry. I see the workings of the intellect in a product of the imagination and I try to show that logic and morality have not been so hostile to the poetic faculty as they have been usually deemed. At the same time I find that all poetry is a product or expression of the unconscious.

This is, then, not a book to teach the writing of poetry, but a study of the poetic faculty in literature, not in rhetorical terms, but by an appeal to the emotional life of the reader. It aims to point out the best examples of the literature of ecstasy (or poetry) whether in verse or prose. It shows that poetry is the very life of man's soul, that he has always loved it, that he has in lieu of gratification of a good and true poetic faculty often spent himself in cultivating substitutes for it. What a superficial assumption that because people do not like verse or read verse (especially trivial, lifeless, unhuman verse) they therefore do not care for poetry! Furthermore, I try to relate the poet's own literary revelation back to himself, just as the poet sought to reveal his soul to the reader.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY

"The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy," says Huneker in his essay "Anarchs and Ecstasy" in Bedouins, "is bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth[18-A]—who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson and Browning, only in occasional exaltation. Like the cold devils of Felicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy. . . . William Blake and his figures, rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy."

Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means to make stand out; the mind makes sensible things stand out because it is concentrated on particular emotions, and on the ideas associated with and springing from these emotions. We must not make the mistake of thinking that ecstasy has nothing to do with thought. On the contrary, it is too much occupied with thought. It in fact represents a form of monomania connected with a certain idea. It is a rapturous state in which the person is governed by preoccupation with a definite viewpoint. The poetic

condition of ecstasy to which I refer is that mentioned by the poet Gray, in his famous Elegy, when he speaks of one of the dead who might have "waked to ecstasy the living lyre." He again uses the word in his Progress of Poesie, when he speaks of Milton, who rode "upon the seraph wings of ecstasy." Undoubtedly Gray understood by ecstasy the poetic emotion primarily. In fact, any emotion that grips a man strongly may be called ecstasy. Great grief or joy, pleasure or pain, passion or tragedy, enthusiasm for an idea or a cause, are all ecstatic conditions. The passion for social justice, an intense love for humanity, devotion to art, beauty, knowledge, the emotions of a happy or an unhappy lover, all constitute important subjects in the literature of ecstasy.

But the ecstasy must be a universal and secular ecstasy. There are two kinds of ecstasies which though universal may manifest themselves in such primitive forms as to appear only to limited circles. I refer to the ecstasy of chauvinism, or fanatical, local, unjust patriotism, and to the ecstasy of the pathologically religious victim whose views border on hallucination. For example, if a man goes into extreme rhapsodies about