Improvisation is one of the features that characterized Persian and Arabic poetry. It is easier there than in English because of the facility for rhyme in these languages, and because the improvisers usually composed in rhymed prose and were not hampered by metre. The test of the great poet often was his ability to compose a poem on the spur of the moment. Seemingly fabulous, yet apparently true stories of improvisation feats by Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised in different metres, the Arabic poets in competition would compose alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes the poet would improvise a short poem on the basis of any opening verse given to him. We remember the story of Harun al Rashid who recited a line to Abu Nuwas who composed a poem for him. The _Arabian Nights_ is full of improvised poems. Arabic critics always dealt with improvisation as a feature of verse making, and this is an argument to those who maintain that Arabic poetry was conscious art and artificial. It was the ecstasy that unconsciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought.
I would like, however, to make special reference to two Englishmen, John Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very little read, who left critical works expounding poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view. Keble was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the author of a most widely read Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the eighteen-thirties, in Latin. These were published in 1844 under the title of _De Poeticae vi Medica_. They were translated into English for the first time a few years ago. They have been praised by Cardinal Newman, Justice Coleridge, Gladstone and Saintsbury. Dean Church called them the most original and memorable lectures on poetry that had ever been delivered at Oxford.
Keble defined poetry as "a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man, which gives healing relief to secret mental emotions, and yet without detriment to modest reserve, and yet, while giving scope to enthusiasm, rules it with order and due control." He traces the origin of poetry to the desire for personal relief of pent up emotions in the individual and argues that this is the natural conclusion from his definition. He divided poets into two classes--primary and secondary. In the first class he put those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In the second class he put imitators of the first and all others. He had been meditating over these views for some time, and they also appear in some of the essays which were collected after his death under the title of _Occasional Papers and Reviews_. In fact, in one of these essays he used the Freudian word "repression," in referring to the creation of poetry.