UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

POETRY: A NOTE

To distinguish Poetry from Prose it is not sufficient to say that the one is rhythmical expression, the other expression without rhythm. One knows quite well that it is not. Turn a leader from a daily newspaper into octosyllabics and it is still prose; we can recognise passages in Homer as poetry even when we have to read them in the beautiful prose of Mr. Lang.

Prose and Poetry are the forms man's expression takes according to his state of mind at the moment of utterance, Prose is the normal language of man; Poetry is his normal language, too, when he is in an abnormal state.) Prose and Poetry, equally normally and naturally, give expression to two different sides of man's being.

A beast cannot speak in prose; that is left to mortal man. It is, however, the immortal in him that speaks in poetry. In poetry he voices the soul and is a part of the spirit that breathes in everything.

Prose is the language of cool reason, Poetry that of ecstasy. It follows that Prose is the language of speech, normal, without rhythm, balanced, like a highway road, a straight line, a stick, the sentences coming to an end and joining into one another imperceptibly; and that Poetry is the language of song, at least of rhythm-for utterance, when excited, takes to itself a

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rhythmic quality.1 Poetry is what man utters when he loses his balance, his normality-the high and low notes of emotion.

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Prose is an expression of the intellect; Poetry the language of feeling. Prose addresses itself to an audience; Poetry utters what she feels without thought of a listener.' If Prose is humanity talking, Poetry is humanity 'overheard.'2

The best prose conveys to us what is already in the

1 As, for example, 'Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's Mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow :-and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wildflaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quicksucceeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane ; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive?'-Sartor Resartus (1838), p. 276.

2 See Mill's Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties (Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i.). The statement that poetry is 'overheard' is Mill's, and what is here said of Prose he had formerly said of Eloquence. But as he is distinguishing not between Poetry and Prose but between Poetry and Eloquence, to avoid confusion I do not quote him here. His actual words will be found on page 137.

The process of Mill's essay is as follows: Denying as of course that the essence of poetry is to be found in metre, he goes on to distinguish shortly between poetry and matter of fact or science (terms he prefers to prose), 'the object of poetry' being 'confessedly to act upon the emotions.' But this also is the object of the novelist and orator. He therefore goes on to distinguish between the poet and the novelist, and enters at length upon the distinction between eloquence and poetry-a distinction most beautifully carried out by

brain of the writer. The best poetry reveals something to the poet himself.1 Looking at his verses he does not know how that expression came there, or why Othello in his trouble, when the fancied conduct of Desdemona had ruined his world for him, said that it had been better had the Heavens

'Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes.'

Every man is a poet in his youth, a politician or an essayist in middle age., Prose lives in an atmosphere of completion; Poetry dallies with the beginnings and ends of things. She is all for the morning and the twilight, hope and sorrow, desire and defeat, what is to be and what has been.

/Prose is Is, the ever-present fact, to-day; Poetry, in love with yesterday and to-morrow, flies to the cool night and away from noon-to the cool night with its silences and the riddle of the unnumbered stars. Prose deals with things as they are-school, marriage, wills, dress, law, civilisation, order and degree. Poetry is occupied with the bases of thesebirth, love and death, human passions, men.

reference to music and painting. This constitutes the first part, thirteen pages, from which no one would wish to dissent. The second part of the essay is chiefly occupied with the discussion of the essence of poetic natures, and of the difference between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind.' The distinction is clearly drawn, but for the purposes of a detailed discussion too generally and definitely, nor do I think his instances happy. For his distinction between description and descriptive poetry see page 20. This also occurs in the first part, a series of now generally accepted truths of which Mill has the credit, as far as I know, of being the first systematic enunciator.

1 Cp. Mr. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry. The specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas.'