Author Description

From the introductory. POETRY is proverbially difficult to define and explain. The reason for this difficulty seems to lie partly in the subject itself and partly in our attitude toward it. The subject is indeed deep and complex. The production of poetry is still, as it has always been, a mysterious process, even to the poets themselves; while even the most devoted and enlightened readers of poetry still find mystery in its action and effect. Poetry, as Shelley believed, "acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness." Many poets - for example Shelley and Wordsworth - in defining poetry resort to poetical figures; others, like our poet of democracy, avoid definition scrupulously. "Let me not dare," says Walt Whitman, "to attempt a definition of poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like religion, love, nature, while these terms are indispensable, and we all give sufficiently accurate meaning to them, in my opinion no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name poetry." Perhaps, however, mystery in the subject engenders superstition, and leads us to regard poetry with supine reverence and wonder. We should indeed worship our great poets, as the men of old did their bards and prophets; but not abjectly, as savages do their medicine men. We speak of the "divine" Shakespeare, perhaps knowing too little of this poet's life to recognize how much he shared our common humanity. We call poetry divine, which is another way of saying that it is still inexplicable to us. All things are of God; and in the subject of poetry, as in others, our increasing knowledge should lead us to clearer understanding. We need make no apology, then, for attempting to approach this mystery. There is some resemblance and unexplained relation between poetry and dreams. The poet and the dreamer are somehow alike in their faculty of vision. This relation is indicated by the uses of language, which, spontaneously expressing the sense of m