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X.—The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and Prose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It is my purpose in this paper to consider the relations of the two great types of literary expression, poetry and prose, and, if possible, to determine the most vital, fundamental, and essential trait which discriminates one type from the other, more particularly in the primitive stages of their development.
In this investigation certain postulates regarding the nature of literature and of art will be of service in clearing the ground. I shall make four such assumptions, as follows:
First, the difference between these two literary types is a fundamental, not a superficial difference. In the words of Professor Earle, “the distinction between poetry and prose is one which is seated in the nature of things…. it is a profound and essential organic distinction.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1904
References
page 250 note 1 Earle, English Prose, p. 151.
page 255 note 1 According to Hirn, Origins of Art, p, 184, communication is itself essentially non-æsthetic, although it has called into existence some important aesthetic qualities, such as exactness, explicitness, reserve, etc. This position is, I think, untenable. It has arisen from Hirn's taking too restricted a view of the nature and content of communication—“the purely intellectual motive of conveying with the greatest possible clearness a thought-content,” he calls it, as if in its earliest stages communication took the form of business letters. Primitive communication, for aught I can see, may be as little intellectual as primitive expression. The content to be conveyed may be hate, love, despair, reverence, or any other state of feeling, as well as facts or inferences; and the motive, as in the cry for help, may be as emotional as the motive of a lyric.
page 256 note 1 Beginnings of Poetry, p. 95.
page 258 note 1 Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties.
page 258 note 2 Chapter IX.
page 260 note 1 I have observed a pet canary interrupt its song when it was spoken to, give a little chirp of acknowledgment in a quite different key and modulation, then resume its singing.
page 261 note 1 The same differences may be noted in signs of applause, which are, of course, at once expressions of the pleasure of the audience and communications to the performers. When an audience is genuinely delighted and breaks out into a spontaneous clapping of hands, the successive strokes are at fairly regular intervals. This is especially true of persons who, absorbed in pleasing recollections of the performance, applaud abstractedly and as if in a dream. On the other hand, when the hand-clapping is mainly communicative for example when the performance is late in beginning and the audience is impatient, or when the applause is merely notice to a singer that he is to come back and repeat his song, the successive strokes tend to increase in energy and the tempo to accelerate.
page 264 note 1 If verse is the natural language of communication for expression's sake, what shall be said about diaries ? Why are not all diaries written in poetry ? With reference to some diaries the answer is obvious. The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, for example, was written for publication. It is as communicative as a leader in the London Times. But Pepys' Diary ? That was surely written for himself alone. No doubt; but that is just the reason why it is in prose. It was a communication to himself. A reviewer writing in the New York Nation some months ago, called attention to the pang with which Pepys makes note of his growing blindness and suggests that his regret was due less to the blindness itself than to the reflection that he would no longer be able to read to himself the record of his amours. In other words, Pepys' interest in writing his diary was not that of one who is giving vent to irrepressible feelings, but of one who is holding communication with his most intimate acquaintance.
page 265 note 1 The poets themselves have in general taken kindly to this theory of their poetic mood. Thus Walt Whitman says “Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only.”
Tennyson's lines have often been quoted:
“I do but sing because I must
And pipe but as the linnets sing.“
Says Mrs. Browning in Aurora Leigh :
“And whosoever writes good poetry,
Looks just to art. He does not write for you
Or me,—for London or for Edinburgh ;
He will not suffer the best critic known
To step into his sunshine of free thought
And self-absorbed conception and exact
An inch-long swerving of the holy lines
What the poet writes,
“He writes; mankind accepts it if it suits.”
More valuable as testimony is the following from Shelley's Defense of Poetry : “A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds ; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
It is important to note, however, that expression, although it is the dominating influence in the poetic process, is not the only one. Poetry is not expression for expression's sake; communication always plays some part in it. How delicately these two forces must in the act of creation be adjusted one to the other in the poet's mind is thus indicated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
“Above all ideal personalities with which the poet must learn to identify himself, there is one supremely real which is the most imperative of all; namely, that of his reader. And the practical watchfulness needed for such assimilation is as much a gift and instinct as is the creative grasp of alien character. It is a spiritual contact hardly conscious yet ever renewed, and which must be a part of the very act of production.” (Quoted in William Sharp's Rossetti, p. 406.)
page 266 note 1 In prose-poetry the words do, as it were, melt and tend to flow into poetic forms. Prose-poetry results when a writer adhering to the traditional medium of communication—the forms invested by long use with communicative associations — becomes interested mainly in expression. Under the influence of the expressive impulse the words tend to fall into regular rhythms, but are prevented from doing so by the writer's sense of integrity — his sense of the artistic necessity of maintaining the structural form with which he set out. If his sense of stylistic integrity is weak, he is apt, like Dickens and Ingersoll, to lapse into bad blank verse.
page 267 note 1 Anyone who has written verse — such verse as it was given to him to write — knows how fatal to the versifying mood it is to let the mind wander to anticipated readers, and busy itself with their hypothetical needs and desires. The words congeal and the line grows ponderous. In writing prose, however, the case is just the opposite. Many skilful prosaists owe their success to the fact that they address themselves habitually, as they write, to an imaginary hearer or reader. For some interesting data on this point see Bainton's Art of Authorship, and compare the passage on Thackeray in Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature, p. 746.