The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 10 | Page 6

Beauty! Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect, or with
the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it
has no concern whatever with Duty or with Truth....
"In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that
pleasurable elevation, or excitement of the soul, which we recognize as
the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth,
which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is
excitement of the Heart. I make Beauty, therefore--using the word as
inclusive of the sublime--I make Beauty the province of the poem....
"It by no means follows, however, that the incitements of Passion, or
the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may not be

introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they may subserve
incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of the work:--but the
true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection
to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the
poem."
Lest one should conclude that this is the verdict of an exclusively
artistic spirit, bent upon the development of "art for art's sake" alone,
disregardful of the spiritual essence involved, let him read the
following passage by Dr. William Hayes Ward, scholar, archæologist,
critic, editor of a great religious journal. Treating of "The Elements of
True Poetry," he lays down this:
"What, then, is poetry? It is the verbal expression of thought under the
paramount control of the principle of beauty. The thought must be as
beautiful as possible; the expression must be as beautiful as possible.
Essential beauty and formal beauty must be wedded, and the union is
poetry. Other principles than beauty may govern a literary production.
The purpose may be, first, absolute clearness. That will not make
poetry. It will make good mathematical demonstration; it may make a
good news item; but not poetry. The predominant sentiment may be
ethical. That may give us a sermon, but it will not give a poem. A poem
is first of all beautiful, beautiful in its content of thought, and beautiful
in its expression through words....
"The first and chief element in a poem is beauty of thought, and that
beauty may relate to any department, material, mental, or spiritual, in
which beauty can reside. Such poetry may describe a misty desert, a
flowery mead, a feminine form, a ruddy sky, a rhythmic waterfall, a
blue-bird's flutterings, receding thunder, a violet's scent, the spicy tang
of apples, the thrill of clasped arms and a lover's kiss. Or it may rise
higher, and rest in the relations of things, in similes and metaphors; it
may infuse longing and love and passion; it may descant fair reason
and meditative musing. Or, in highest flight, beauty may range over the
summits of lofty purpose, inspiring patriotism, devotion, sacrifice, till it
becomes one with the love of man and the love of God, even as the
fading outline of a mountain melts into the blue sky which envelops
it....
"Dominant over all beauty is moral beauty. All highest flights of poetry
must range in the empyrean."

Thus, in poetry, all other graces and powers, be they lower or higher,
must come under control of the principle of beauty--the pleasing
harmony that brings delight. And the almost "infinite variety" of
beautiful modes and styles offered in such a gathering of poems as the
present finds argument for its worth in the brief extract with which our
_mélange_ of opinions may well conclude. It is taken from a series of
articles in the New York Independent on "A Theory of Poetry," by the
Southern poet, Henry Timrod. Making a protest against the limitation
of taste and the poetic vision in certain directions, instead of cultivating
a broader range of taste, he says:
"I have known more than one young lover of poetry who read nothing
but Browning, and there are hundreds who have drowned all the poets
of the past and present in the deep music of Tennyson. But is it not
possible, with the whole wealth of literature at our command, to attain
views broad enough to enable us to do justice to genius of every class
and character? That certainly can be no true poetical creed that leads
directly to the neglect of those masterpieces which, though wrought
hundreds or thousands of years ago, still preserve the freshness of
perennial youth.... The injury [of such neglect] falls only on such as
slight them; and the penalty they pay is a contracted and a contracting
insight, the shutting on them forever of many glorious vistas of mind,
and the loss of thousands of images of grace and grandeur.
"Oh! rest assured that there are no stereotyped forms of poetry. It is a
vital power, and