POETRY I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION BY CARLETON NOYES, A. M. HE human heart has ever dreamed of a fairer world than the one it knows. No man, however dark his spirit, however cramped his senses, is quite without the yearning after wider horizons and a purer air. In a happy moment earth seems to hold for all the promise of larger things. The moment passes; and the world closes in again, actual, bare, unyielding, as before. Yet among men there are some endowed with vision, an insight more penetrating and more sustained. To their liberated spirit the world unfolds a farther prospect. Earth clothes itself for them in radiant vesture, mute forms are speaking presences, the riddle of life resolves itself into a meaning. To them it is granted to arrest the moment of illumination, otherwise so fleeting; and, gifted further with a shaping power, they are able to re-create the moment in enduring forms. The men of vision are the seers and prophets; the shapers of the revelation, re-creating it, are the artists and the poets. What each of us is seeking the poet has already found. Poetry is the step beyond, which we were about to take, but were not certain of the way. In our experience from year to year, we are not without glimpses of beauty in the world, a sense of meaning somewhere within the shows of things. Of this beauty and this meaning poetry is a fuller revelation. The poet gives us back the world we already know, though it is a world transfigured; he draws his material from stores to which we all have access, but with a difference. His vision, clearer and more penetrating, transfigures the facts and discloses the beauty only waiting to be thus revealed. His fresh sight of this beauty quickens in him an emotion of wonder and of joy which impels him to expression. Seeing the world in new combinations, he selects from the common store of experience certain images colored by his mood. Of these images he weaves a pattern of words, which re-create the beauty he has seen and are charged with that deeper significance he has divined within the outward manifestation. It is just because he sees farther and feels more intensely that he is a poet; and then because he is able to phrase his experience in words which have the power to create the vision and the meaning in us. So the poet fashions that fairer world of which the heart has dreamed; and by the mediation of his art it becomes ours for an enduring possession. If this be indeed the office and destiny of poetry, we may well ask whence it draws its inspiration and by what means it accomplishes its high ends. THE ORIGIN AND COURSE OF NARRATIVE POETRY The older poetry of a people takes shape around a story. Childhood dearly loves a tale; for its simple heart finds the way out of a reality it does not understand by contriving a world of make-believe. The young imagination, not yet beset by too urgent actualities, admits no bounds to its wide exercise. In the childhood of the race, objects are spirits, moved by their own inner life. Natural forces are gods, acting capriciously upon the fortunes of men. A man more cunning or more powerful than his fellows becomes a hero or a demigod in memory and tradition. So a child too animates the common things of his little world with a life of their own that suits the purposes of his active fancy. He endows them with a part in his play, and they act out the story that he weaves around them. The imagination of childhood demands action, deeds done and stories told,-high adventures of gods and heroes, or the tangled fortunes of princes and damsels, of knights and captive ladies, of fairies and sprites. So a fable builds itself out of free imaginings. The love of a story never passes. All through its long history, in every land and among every people, poetry has not ceased to interest itself in all conceivable happenings of life. But the stream of poetry is fed by many sources, and it takes color and volume according to the channels through which it flows. From the "Iliad" to "Enoch Arden," to cite typical instances which by no means set the farther or the nearer bounds of narrative poetry, both the subject and the form have undergone varied and profound changes. This movement, as each nation develops its own art and culture, has been in the direction from the general to the particular, from the interests of the entire nation to the affairs of private persons. Out of the stirrings and strivings of a whole people toward expression is gradually evolved the separate individual artist or poet. CHARACTERISTICS OF PRIMITIVE POETRY In elder days men worked and played together. The single member of the clan or the individual citizen was completely merged in the unity of the tribe or the state. His welfare depended upon the welfare of the group, his interests were bound up inextricably with the life of the community as a whole. This fact explains the range and character of the earlier poetry of any people. All nations have their own distinctive beginnings, and these are widely distributed in time: the term "earlier," therefore, is relative to each nation. Examples of such earlier poetry are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," on the one hand-though these represent the culmination rather than the beginning of an age, which, however, is relatively early—and on the other hand, the English traditional ballads.' In point of time these two instances are separated from each other by about two thousand years, but as earlier poetry they have this trait in common, that they are not the work of any one man. Such poetry as this is not made; it grows. It springs as a kind of spontaneous expression of the life of the group. An incident of common concern to the whole people, a situation involving the fortunes of all, furnishes the occasion and the motive of the tale. Necessarily some one, any one,-unknown by name,―starts it on its course. The story is told and retold: passing from lip to lip, it receives changes and additions. Again, finally, some one, unknown by name, gives it the form in which it is written down and so preserved. But it is the poetry of a people rather than of a man. This poetry has certain traits which serve to mark it as popular or national. In the case of poems of greater scope, like the "Iliad” or "Beowulf," it deals with action in the large. The heroes whose deeds it celebrates are the possession of the kindred or the race; they are kings and men of might or valor, known to all in the national 1 See Harvard Classics, xl, 51-128. traditions. Even the gods are not absent; they play a dominant part in the action. Similarly in the popular ballads, the persons of the story, though drawn from humbler life, acquire a legendary interest which makes them typical figures and invests them with general importance. Such poetry, then, mirrors the ideals of the group or the nation. It is shaped and colored by the religious beliefs of the people or by vague questionings and vaguer answers as to the nature and meaning of things. By the kind of persons it sets in action, by the deeds they do and the passions they feel, this poetry becomes the projection and expression of life at its best as the whole people conceives it to be. It is the nation's interpretation of itself. One characteristic these tales have which, apart from their form as verse, makes them poetry. The world which they give back is idealized. They come into being in response to men's love of a story. But the action which they embody is not the petty and commonplace round of daily affairs; the action is heightened and intensified. What we call the "glamour of romance" is over it. The free imagination is at work to fashion a more engaging and significant world. The stories told are of a time long past, in a happier and golden prime. This, they say, is the world as it was; would that it were so now, or might be again! Across the obscure yearnings of the present need, seen at a distance in the fresh light of mornings gone, the men of an elder age are figured of heroic mould. Their virtues, their passions, and their faults are nobler than the common breed. The world in which they move and do is an ampler scene, bathed in a freer air. This transfiguring of things, making them bright, intense, and full of a farther meaning, is the spirit of poetry. THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM As civilization progresses, the individual begins to define himself more sharply against the background of his group. The common effort of the group has wrought out for itself the arts of life; the store of culture is gradually enriched by collective striving. Then a time comes when the various functions of life tend to be distributed more and more among the separate members of the community; and to them it becomes possible to develop their own special gifts and aptitudes as potter, weaver, smith. One day a man arises who has the gift of song. Conscious of himself now as an individual, he takes the stories which the fathers have told, threads of legend and tradition, and weaves them into a new pattern. As the earlier poetry was the expression of the collective ideals of the group, so now the poem conceived and shaped by a single maker is animated by his own special purpose; colored by his personal emotion, it reflects the world as he himself sees it: and it becomes in this wise the expression of his individual interpretation of life.2 Thus a new spirit comes into narrative poetry. Less and less it is spontaneous, impersonal, objective; more and more it is the product. of a deliberate, self-conscious art; the choice of subject and the manner of presenting it are determined by the poet's own feeling. The world from which he draws his material is nearer home. His characters are more immediate to everyday experience; what they lose in glamour they gain in directness of appeal. Interest in the action for its own sake does not flag, but the persons who move in it are more closely and definitely expressive of what the poet thinks and feels. He chooses his characters because they embody concretely and so exemplify the conception he has formed of a significant situation. The story of the mythical hero Beowulf and his fight with the weird sea-monster Grendel is succeeded by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Here the poet assembles a motley company, of high and low degree, of clerical and lay, sketched from the life with exquisitely humorous fidelity. The stories they tell to pass the stages of their pilgrimage are as varied as themselves—none, however, more characteristic of the new temper of poetry than the Nun's Priest's tale. Now A povre widwe somdel stope in age, Was whylom dwelling in a narwe cotage, And the hero of the tale is "Chauntecleer"! The cock discourses learnedly of dreams, and for authorities he invokes the great names of antiquity. But he succumbs to inexorable fate, figured by “Russel the fox," while the denizens of the barnyard act the chorus to his 2 As illustrating the contrast in point of view of the work of the individual poet and of national poetry, it is interesting to compare the acute self-consciousness of Tennyson's "Ulysses" (H. C., xlii, 977) with the downrightness of Homer's hero. 3 H. C., xl, II. 4 H. C., xl, 34. |