FORMS OF ENGLISH POETRY CHAPTER I THE FOOT, THE LINE, AND THE STANZA THE worth of poetry depends on the fact that it gives pleasure to those who hear or read it. To give pleasure is the justification for the existence. of any art, if we give to the term "pleasure" an extended signification. In the case of poetry the pleasure is very complex, as may be readily inferred from the truth that different kinds of versified language, different in subject-matter and form, please men of very distinct mental and emotional constitution, and in different stages of development. That the capacity of receiving some pleasure from poetry is almost universal may be gathered from the fact that in every age and in every condition of human society, poetic expression - sometimes, as it appears to us, quite rudimentary — has been cultivated, and frequently with great interest and fervor. Often we find the function of the poet regarded as of great importance. Ulysses says in the palace of Alcinous, "By all mortal men bards are allotted honor and respect, because, indeed, the Muse has taught them songs and loves the tribe of singers." The complex pleasure or congeries of pleasurable emotions of which poetry is the cause may be analyzed with great minuteness, because human susceptibilities cover a wide range. A rough basic classification would be: first, the physical pleasure we receive from a rudimentary form of music; time-beats, echoes, and successive notes related to each other so as to form a melody; in a word the pleasure received from sound without much regard to definite intellectual impressions. A child listens attentively to the recitation of a ballad, the words of which it comprehends very imperfectly, to which indeed it may attach erroneous conceptions. Some poetry is enjoyed by mature persons in the same way very much as music is. Notions of beauty and symmetry are dimly suggested, with little regard to the meaning of the words. Conscious thought is not appealed to, but the subconsciousness is vaguely but pleasurably stirred. The capacity for this element of pleasure is substantially universal. The child in the cradle is soothed by the crooning of a simple melody, the sailors are cheered by shouting in time some meaningless "chanty," the schoolboy declaims his Homer, and the student his Swinburne, without much thought of the sense or the syntax. The words are little more than sounds, though that little may be of considerable importance. It is this element of the pleasure-giving power of poetry, akin as it is to music, which lifts the art out of the rank of cultivated diversions and puts it among the great motive forces of the world, from the operation of which no one is exempt. It may be radically based on the fact that the constitution of the material universe is harmonious atomic vibration. The second reason for the pleasure taken in poetry is that the words have significance. Taken separately they have meaning, they symbolize things and abstractions; taken together they convey ideas, relations of things, reactions of the human mind on experiences; taken in combination with measure and melody their significance and power are wonderfully reënforced; they have the power of making us conceive things emotionally and vividly. No man ever reads poetry in a language he cannot understand, however melodious it may be. But those who read poetry in a language they do understand, even imperfectly, see the world and life in a new light, because they catch glimpses of them through the eyes of a poet. Unsuspected beauty in the flower or the landscape is revealed. They come in contact for the moment with an illuminated intellect. Honor and chastity and courage and love, all the virtues which they have been taught to respect as abstractions, are seen to be divine and to be active and permanent forces in life. This emotional and spiritual widening of the intellectual outlook is a source of pleasure to the reader of true poetry, a pleasure bound up with the other and inferior pleasure he receives from the regulated succession of melodious or sonorous sounds. A third pleasure we receive from poetry comes from the perception of artistic work. We admire any beautiful thing produced by a man not only because it is beautiful, but because it is a work of human skill. Sympathy with our kind causes us to take delight in the earliest and crudest attempts at artistic embodiment in which, indeed, patience and simple-minded devotion to the idea of beauty are sometimes strikingly evident. A very slight knowledge of technical art increases our admiration. of its manifestations. Poetry has taken many forms, the heroic epic, the popular ballad, the romance, the short lyric, the lament, and many others, each of which expresses a distinct phase of poetic development. In many cases they correspond more or less exactly to periods of social history. They are combined and again dissociated. A knowledge of some of these forms adds greatly to our appreciation of poetry. It would not constitute an understanding of the real nature of poetry, but only of the construction of verse and of the characteristic forms in which poetry has found expression. In this book a classification of the principal forms will be given and the discussion will be restricted to |