The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his _Greek Studies_, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.
The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love, for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different nations.
True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth and Whitman, dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.
And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.
Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always will be with us, and probably more so in prose than in verse. We want literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame Lespinasse, or in the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, or in the verse of Hafiz, Burns, Shelley, Browning, Heine or Verlaine.
Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his _Inspiration of Poetry_ for a return of poetry to poetic madness. Emotion is the chief and most important element of poetry. "Emotion" as Woodberry says, "is the condition of their (the poets') existence; passion is the element of their being." When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any emotion in which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine, Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial event important poetry.