English Poetry; Its Principles and Progress, with Representative Masterpieces and Notes (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: as in prose drama, or it may adopt the more highly and delicatelj organized vesture of verse, ? rhythm regulated by metre, and by the . accord of word-sounds in tone, sequence, and rhyme. The latter is Poetry Proper, ? ballad, lyric, epic, drama, idyl, pastoral, reflective poem, elegy, or masque, as the case may be. 5. POETRY PROPER Verse and Prose. ? It is not the use of verse alone, ? that is to say, metrically arranged rhythm, ? that constitutes poetry; prose, such as that of everyday speech, and verse as we know it in metres, rhymes, and stanzas, are merely instruments, and they may be used indifferently by literature of the instructive kind or by the literature of the imagination. But as a rule, poetry, since it treats of ideal thought in a highly imaginative way and for the purpose of appealing to the higher feelings of man, finds its appropriate expression in that highly organized rhythm governed by metrical laws which is called verse. For this organized rhythm is exquisitely fitted to awaken the muscular and nervous rhythms of the human organization and to correspond to their pulsation, their swing, so to speak, when they are under the influence of emotion. In other words, the rhythm of sound and that of exalted feeling speak the same tongue. Prose is naturally the language of communication; verse, of emotion, or of imagination under the control of emotion. Poetry, or, as the word means, creation, differs from the material and product of everyday communication in that it implies supreme and concentrated imaginative and emotive effort; it expresses itself most readily in the pulsation and swing of sensitive, rhythmical, and highly accentuated utterance, such as we call verse. Everybody will concede to poetry a superior simplicity and imaginative concreteness, compactn...