The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 8 | Page 2

from Pope, from
Dryden, from Coleridge and from many another. For one who has not
known and read much poetry the best introduction to its study may well
be the pleasurable reading of some, or of all, of these works, though
remembering that such reading is not study, but only the reviewing of
records of work done by others, useful mainly as a preparation for the
real study which is to follow.
From all these works the student will not be likely to get a definition of
poetry which will satisfy him. One may say indeed with truth that
poetry is such expression as parallels the real and the ideal by means of
some rhythmic form. But this is not a complete definition. Poetry is not
to be bounded with a measuring line or sounded with a plummet. The
student must feel after its limits as these authors have done, and find for
himself its satisfactions. One can feel more of its power than the mind
can define; for definitions are prose-forms of mind action, while poetry

in its higher manifestations is pure emotion, outpassing prose limits.
Yet one can know poetry if he cannot completely define it. The one
essential element which distinguishes it from prose is rhythm. In its
primal expressions this is mainly a rhythm of stresses and sounds--of
accents and measures, of alliterations and rhymes. Poetry began when
man, swaying his body, first sang or moaned to give expression to his
joy or sorrow. Its earliest forms are the songs which accompany the
simplest emotions. When rowers were in a boat the swinging oars
became rhythmic, and the oarsman's chant naturally followed. When
the savage overcame his enemy, he danced his war dance, and sang his
war song around his campfire at night, tone and words and gestures all
fitting into harmony with the movement of his body. So came the
chants and songs of work and of triumph. For the dead warrior the
moan of lamentation fitted itself to the slower moving to and fro of the
mourner, and hence came the elegy. In its first expression this was but
inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion
through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear and it had little
meaning beyond the crude representation of some simple human desire
and grief.
It became poetry when it put a thrill of exultation in work, of delight in
victory, or of grief at loss by death, into some rhythmic form tangible
to the senses. There grew up thereafter a body of rhythmic forms--lines,
stanzas, accents, rhythms, verbal harmonies. These forms are the
outward dress of poetry, and may rightly be the first subject of the
student's study. We properly give the name of poetry to verses such as
Southey's "Lodore," Poe's "Bells," or Lanier's "Song of the
Chattahoochee," which do little more than sing to our ears the
harmonies of sound, the ultimate rhythms of nature. Yet it is not merely
the brook or the bell or the river, that we hear in the poem, but the
echoing of that large harmony of nature of which the sound of the
brook or the bell is only the single strain. Through the particular it
suggests the universal, as does all poetry, leading through nature up to
something greater, far beyond. This rhythm is best studied in poems
that were written to be sung or chanted. If one could read Greek, or
Anglo-Saxon, or Old High German, or the English of Chaucer's day, he
could quickly train his ear to be independent of the hand-books on
versification, by reading aloud, or listening as one read aloud, the

"Odyssey" or the "Beowulf," or the "Nibelungen Lied" or the
"Canterbury Tales." These would be better for this purpose than any
modern verses, for the reason that they were intended to be sung or
chanted, and so all the rhythms are real to the senses. Since the barrier
of language bars out for most of us this older verse, we can read the
early ballads, the lyrics of the Elizabethan time, when as yet verses
spoke mainly to the ear, or some modern poems of the simpler type,
such as "Evangeline" or "Hiawatha."
Such poetry, which is mainly to delight and charm the ear, is really a
primal form of verse and we may properly call it the poetry of the
Senses. In studying it Lanier's "Science of English Verse" is a
delightful companion, and many minor hand-books besides those
named above, such as are found in most schools, and some of the
shorter accounts of versification such as are found in works on rhetoric,
will give assistance.
Yet the pathway to the mastery of the problems of metre is for each
student to tread alone. The best plan is