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What Is Poetry?
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The better to meet the question, What is poetry? we begin by putting before it another, and ask, Where is poetry? Poetry is in the mind. Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in the best and deepest part of that life.
The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or be started and modified by what is without them, all this—that is, all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can come within the scope of man—is the domain of poetry; only, to enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the very mystery of being.
In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished that it gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner and the outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by the understanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things, conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into the mind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are not dandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Before proceeding a step further—nay, in order that we be able to proceed safely—we must make clear to ourselves what means this great word, imagination.
The simplest intellectual work is to perceive physical objects. Having perceived an object several times, the intellect lifts itself to a higher process, and knows it when it sees it again, remembers it. Perception is the first, the simplest, the initiatory intellectual process, memory is the second. Higher than they, and rising out of them, is a third process, the one whereby are modified and transmuted the mental impressions of what is perceived or remembered. A mother, just parted from her child, recalls his form and face, summons before her mind’s eye an image of him; and this image is modified by her feelings, she seeing him in attitudes and relations in which she had never seen him before, cheerful or sad according to her mood. This she could not do by aid of memory alone; she could not vary the impress of her boy left on the brain; she could not vividly reproduce it in shifting, rapidly successive conditions; she could not modify and diversify that impress; in a word, she could not liberate it. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready instrument. This third process is imagination.
Through this mode of intellectual action the materials gathered in the mind are endlessly combined and modified. In all intellectual activity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in some degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations, phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the most intense action, of the intellect.
When I run over in my mind, and in the order of their service, the first seven presidents of the United States, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, I exert only memory. The moment I begin to compare or contrast one with another, or to give the character of any of them, I put into play the higher, the imaginative action; for, to draw an historical character, the facts collected by memory must be shaped and colored and organized, the details gathered must be combined into a whole by the intellect, which being a mere tool, the success of the result (the tool being of a temper to do the work laid on it) will depend on the quality of the powers that handle it, that is, on the writer’s gifts of sympathy.
The degree and fullness wherewith the imaginative power shall be called upon depending thus on faculties of feeling, thence it is that the word imagination has come to be appropriated to the highest exercise of the power, that, namely, which is accomplished by those few who, having more than usual emotive capacity in combination with sensibility to the beautiful, are hereby stimulated to mold and shape into fresh forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, or the material originated within the mind through its creative fruitfulness. In strictness, this exaltation of intellectual action should be called poetic imagination.
To imagine is, etymologically speaking, with the mind to form in the mind an image; that is, by inward power to produce an interior form, a something substantial made out of what we term the unsubstantial. To imagine is thus always, in a certain sense, to create; and even men of dullest mentality have this power in kind. The degree in which men have it makes one of the chief differences among them. The power is inherent, is implied in the very existence of the human mind. When it is most lively the mind creates out of all it feels and hears and sees, taking a simple sight or hint or impression or incident, and working out images, making much out of little, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creative might, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of his brain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought, throbbing with humanity.
When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through this power and freedom of play elicits by sympathetic fervor, from its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision—insights gained never but through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect being used as an obedient cheerful servant.
The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses, revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing, according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than minds less creatively endowed.
Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a power without which the daily business of life even could not go on, being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling; and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.
Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the production of poetry?
Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were first written? Because they have in them more fullness and fineness and fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in him than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged, refined, made translucent by that gift of sensibility to the fair and perfect3 whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.
When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies—the foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of Coriolanus—having “declared their business in a very modest and humble manner,” he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere, answering them with “much bitterness and high resentment of the injuries done him.” What was the temper as well as the power of Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer of Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressed sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his nature, he adds, “When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.”
Hear how a mother’s heart, about to break, from the loss of her son, utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering with poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted: she answers—
