Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments 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 conditions of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_, or Milton's _Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good 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 progress 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 have to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. The difference in such must be substantial and essential _aspects of Literature_.[122:A]
[117:A] Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ and Erskine's _The Kinds of Poetry_, two excellent brochures in æsthetic criticism, take a similar view point.
[119:A] For a history of French free verse see _Mercure De France_, March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by Édouard Dujardin.
[122:A] Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor George M. Harper in the preface to his _John Morley and Other Essays_, in Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," _The Dial_, August, 1920, and the preface to F. S. Flint's _Otherworld_.
MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY
Our views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, illuminate many dark crannies in one of the most unfathomable caverns of aesthetic speculation; speculation of the connection between poetry and morals, form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological questions, and philosophical ideas. The question disappears when we regard literature of ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt with in prose and some may be ecstatically treated. If poetry is an atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most various ideas. Emotional treatment of the ideas gives us literature of ecstasy or poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right who did not want poetry (a long composition in verse, as he understood it) to deal with ethics or science.