A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

those various species of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs and hero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and method to the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds of poetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton’s hint, and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the expression of the Ego in song. Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples,” Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection,” Wordsworth’s “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” Tennyson’s “Break—Break” will serve for illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision is “relative” to the poet’s actual circumstances. Yet in a “dramatic lyric” like Byron’s “Isles of Greece” or Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad” it is clear that the poet’s vision is not occupied primarily with himself, but with another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson’s “Simeon Stylites” or Browning’s “The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed’s Church” it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied with characters in action—the “world of men,” in short, and not the personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. In a traditional ballad like “Sir Patrick Spens,” a modern ballad like Tennyson’s “The Revenge,” or Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” is not the poet’s vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outside of the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, like Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum,” Morris’s “Sigurd the Volsung,” and certainly in the “Aeneid” and the “Song of Roland,” the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in the objective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn from the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” Shelley’s “Autumn,” in Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper,” Browning’s “Where the Mayne Glideth,” we find poets absorbed in the external scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that the born lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both the world of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their own unquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story they are telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reason that we speak of “lyrical” passages even in the great objective dramas, passages colored with the passionate personal feelings of the poet. For he cannot be wholly “absolute” even if he tries: he will invent favorite characters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devise favorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men and women, and his general theory of human life.

 

2. Definitions

While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word “lyrical” has been broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather than a mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the original significance of the word. Derived from “lyre,” it meant first a song written for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whose form suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, a poem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry. [Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine’s Elizabethan Lyric, E. B. Heed’s English Lyrical Poetry, Ernest Rhys’s Lyric Poetry, F. E. Schelling’s The English Lyric, John Drinkwater’s The Lyric, C. E. Whitmore in Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass., December, 1918.] “All songs, all poems following classical lyric forms; all short poems expressing the writer’s moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music, are to be considered lyrics,” says Professor Reed. “The lyric is concerned with the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his passions…. With the lyric subjective poetry begins,” says Professor Schelling. “The characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic energy unassociated with other energies,” says Mr. Drinkwater. These are typical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, while omitting to stress the elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a working rule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term “lyrical” “to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feeling or situation.” The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practical definition when he remarked that the lyric “reflects a situation or a desire.” Keats’s sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Charles Kingsley’s “Airlie Beacon” and Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” (_Oxford Book of Verse_, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive illustrations of Scherer’s dictum.

 

3. General Characteristics

But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain general characteristics which are indubitable. The lyric “vision,” that is to say, the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyric verse, making it “simple, sensuous, passionate” beyond other species of poetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.

To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise “herrlich wie am ersten Tag.” “Thou know’st ‘tis common,” says Hamlet’s mother, speaking of his father’s death, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” But to men of the lyrical temperament everything is “particular.” Age does not alter their exquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson’s lines on “Early Spring,” written at seventy-four, Browning’s “Never the Time and the Place” written at seventy-two, Goethe’s love-lyrics written when he was eighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes this freshness seems due in part to the poet’s early place in the development of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which we have a contemporary musical score:

 

“Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu.”

But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that cuckoo’s song,

 

“Breaking the silence of the seas

Beyond the farthest Hebrides.”

Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled, stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhaps he may have helped in the emancipation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. The new sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon the imaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited by this rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences to match new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes all things new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson’s vision of the “Eternal Unity,” or Browning’s conception of Immortality, afford the very stuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short, like falling in love, like having a child, like getting “converted,” [Footnote: See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.] gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hitherto unrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly “particular” to him. “As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” That was first a “lyric cry” out of the depths of some fresh individual experience. It has become stale through repetition, but many a man, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed, in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.

Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. “Of every poet of this class,” remarks Watts-Dunton, “it may be said that his mind to him ‘a kingdom is,’ and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom.” He celebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physical sensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when they take their morning tub. Far from avoiding that “pathetic fallacy” which Ruskin analysed in a famous chapter, [Footnote: Modern Painters, vol. 3, chap. 12.] and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only to the mind itself, they revel in it. “Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark,” sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered, could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power of distinguishing between things as they actually were and things as they appeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. “This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!… And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individual identifies himself with his family or tribe:

 

“O Keith of Ravelstone,

The sorrows of thy line!”

School and college songs are often, in reality, tribal lyrics. The choruses of Greek tragedies dealing with the guilt and punishment of a family, the Hebrew lyrics chanting, like “The Song of Deborah,” the fortunes of a great fight, often broaden their sympathies so as to include, as in “The Persians” of Aeschylus, the glory or the downfall of a race. And this sense of identification with a nation or race implies no loss, but often an amplification of the lyric impulse. Alfred Noyes’s songs about the English, D’Annunzio’s and Hugo’s splendid chants of the Latin races, Kipling’s glorification of the White Man, lose nothing of their lyric quality because of their nationalistic or racial inspiration. Read Wilfrid Blunt’s sonnet on “Gibraltar” (_Oxford Book of Verse_, No. 821):

 

“Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules

And Goth and Moor bequeath’d us. At this door

England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill

Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,

And at the summons of the rock gun’s roar

To see her red coats marching from the hill!”

Are patriotic lyrics of this militant type destined to disappear, as Tolstoy believed they ought to disappear, with the breaking-down of the barriers of nationality, or rather with the coming of

 

“One common wave of thought and joy,

Lifting mankind again”

over the barriers of nationality? Certainly there is already a type of purely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinks in terms of “us men” rather than of “I myself.” It appeared long ago in that rebellious “Titanic” verse which took the side of oppressed mortals as against the unjust gods. Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” is a modern echo of this defiant or despairing cry of the “illused race of men.” The songs of Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy,—pure personal egoism, then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then passion for Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passes into the glorious

 

“It’s comin’ yet for a’ that,

That man to man the world o’er

Shall brithers be for a’ that.”

One other general characteristic of the lyric mood needs to be emphasized, namely, its genuineness. It is impossible to feign

 

“the lyric gush,

And the wing-power, and the rush

Of the air.”

Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyric poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, “sing as