Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things.  Poetry has a double origin in joy and utility.  The “Thirty days hath September” rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial wisdom, of legend and narrative.  Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his New Study of English Poetry, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that is not descended from the choric dance.  In my opinion it is better to recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree of poetry.  We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil, but in Homer and Chaucer.  The utility of form and the joy of form have in all these poets become inextricably united.  The objection to most of the “free verse” that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither delightful nor memorable.  The truth is, the memorableness of the writings of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight.  If Pope is a delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by giving them rhymes.  His satires and The Rape of the Lock are, no doubt, better poetry than the Essay on Man, because he poured into them a still more vivid energy.  But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of poetry which would exclude even Pope the “essayist” from the circle of the poets.  He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are to-day, of all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately, “poetry,” like “religion,” is a word that we are almost bound to use in several senses.  Sometimes we speak of “poetry” in contradistinction to prose:  sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry.  Similarly, “religion” would in one sense include the Abode of Love as opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of Love as opposed to the religion of St. James.  In a common-sense classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse.  Sir Thomas Browne may have been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not write poetry.  Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose.  Sir Henry Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind.  For him poetry is an expression of intuitions—­an emotional transfiguration of life—­while prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment.  I doubt if this division is defensible.  Everything that is literature is, in a sense, poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly