Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the first chapter - Poetry and Prose:
Poetry is one of the Fine Arts; it is indeed the queen of the Nine Sisters of the fabled family of the Muses; her children are the myriad forms of the beautiful in sentiment and emotion which are scattered through the world's literatures. It is the result "of a divinely bestowed faculty operating upon the infinite resources of nature, creating new forms of the beautiful by combinations of existing materials, through the aid of the imagination."
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
In this broad signification poetry is to be found embodied in the higher forms of prose quite as much as in verse. Creations of ideal grace and loveliness abound in amorphous prose, but as in that shape their dress lacks the wavy flow of rhythm, the designation of poetry is denied them. Frequently in impassioned prose there is, indeed, a perceptible rhythm which approaches very nearly the measured movement of verse. Many passages from George Eliot, Dickens, and Ruskin, for instance, not to mention others of the skilled masters in word-painting, might well be arranged as poetic lines. Yet, as metrical rules have not been observed in them throughout, as the cadences cease abruptly, they cannot be dignified by the name of poetry. The poet must always conform to metrical laws, while his brother artist only occasionally falls under their seductive influence.
Again, the two forms of literary composition differ with respect to their object; prose seeks for the most part to instruct, whereas the aim of the poet is to give pleasure. And here again we find the two frequently running upon parallel lines, the fictions of romance and the creations of the poet showing a marked family likeness which the presence or absence of rhythmical arrangement alone can differentiate.
In addition to these distinctions of form, matter, and aim, the style and "diction" of poetry differs in many respects from that of prose. Poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate," said Milton; hence it chooses picturesque images and quaint words and epithets that would be out of place in prosaic description. Metaphors, similes, and indeed all the rhetorical figures of speech are freely used to variegate the conventionalities of everyday expressions, as the many-coloured blossoms of spring do the all-pervading sombre tints of winter. There are many words protected by poetic association from vulgar use, such as: "woe, ire, blissful, a-weary, haply, list, ken, methinks, morn and eve," thou and "ye" for you. Striking epithets and picturesque compounds such as those that follow would disfigure good prose, while in verse they are pleasing and natural: "sea-girt" isle, "vasty" deep, the "breezy blue, air-built" castles, "rosy-fingered" dawn, the "iron tongue" of midnight. The poetic sentence is nervous, terse, and euphonious, and every kind of inversion, elision, and departure from ordinary rule is tolerated in order to make it so. Though bound to be musical, and to excite pleasure, the poet is a chartered libertine in most other respects....
