[FEBRUARY, 1920.

Poetry and Criticism

Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways peculiar to ourselves.  Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare.  We are in a curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come out of it.  Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds for some fuller justification of the poetic activity.  A presentiment that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard should be once more created and applied.

What shall we require of poetry?  Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a world of the heart’s desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom?  All these things—­all different, yet not all contradictory—­have been required of poetry.  What shall we require of her?  The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as vague as the question.  We require the highest.  All that can be demanded of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry.  It must be adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete universality.

Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say:  ’This is a lyrical age.’  To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all experience.  In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately made the vehicle of man’s profoundest thought and most searching experience.  Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great lyrical poetry.  Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.

Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the condition of poetry, such as Plato’s Republic or Milton’s Areopagitica, but the prose of the great novelists.  Surely the colloquial prose of Tchehov’s Cherry Orchard has as good a claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess of the D’Urbervilles as The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phedre?  Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge into one?  If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.  The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.