If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume _Exotics and Retrospectives_, you delight in poetry.
And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.
Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire?--never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable touch?--never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering of its dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost,--to scream around the peaks with it,--to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion,--no longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that mighty shout?
I should like to go on quoting passages from other books to show the reader that if he likes them he is emphatically a lover of poetry. I might have given one of the great prose poems in Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's novel _Salammbo_. I might have presented for the edification of the "hater" of poetry the renowned description of the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in _The Renaissance_. I could have added Carlyle's reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from _Sartor Resartus_, Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in _The Florentine Nights_, George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his book on _Shakespeare_, Dickens' description of the tower in _Chimes_, or Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the _Wild Ass's Skin_.
That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any profound idea is ecstatically or passionately stated. That is poetry where man gives utterance to any sorrow or desolation, or where he shouts out his gladness because he finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks of the pains or thrills of love; when he shows compassion for the miseries of his fellow-men. You find poetry wherever man is depicted in a spirit of self-sacrifice for an idea or a person he loves; or where he is shown pursuing an ideal or ambition. Heroism is poetry; philanthropy is poetry; self-development is poetry. Pictures of striking scenes; portrayals of interesting events; conflicts between duties; delineations of tragic situations; tolerance for human frailties; anger at injustice, admonition for follies, chidings or outbursts against stupidity; cries of helplessness; all of these in artistic form become poems. Accounts of cruelty, barbarism, madness, horror, wicked deeds or abnormal or supernormal conduct, if well described become poetical, for poetry need not point a conventional moral. Hence villainy, immorality, crime, may be so artistically pictured that our emotions are worked upon and though our moral sense is shocked we are held spellbound in witnessing these malign forces in nature.