In general, that is not great poetry or literature of ecstasy which appeals to the rude primitive emotions. When the purpose of a literary work is to wean us from finer feelings, to make us sympathize with cruelty, to paralyze the sympathetic emotions within us, and to kill all feelings rooted in love, pity, service, justice and kindness, it is not of a great order of poetry. Those works in whole or part that fan the martial spirit within us, and take hold of us as with an hypnotic sway of the hand, and make us seek to murder our fellow men, and to arouse the lust for blood in us, cannot be great works. No literature that is heartless or brutal, or confuses an appeal to the murderous instincts with real love of country, or love of liberty, with self-sacrifice for justice or loved ones, can be valuable to us either practically or aesthetically. No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters unreasonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful victories, or crowns with the garland of a hero the mere warrior who is a warrior for the pure delight of killing, is really of the higher type of literature of ecstasy. It is this martial phase that makes most of the early literature of all nations valuable only in parts; in those parts where the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt with, and where the more genial emotions are crystallized. So many theories of poetry are futile, because they are based on studies primarily of the epic poems of the nations, and it is these epic poems that mingle the most impoverished and base poetry with that of a fine quality.
Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which is purely tribal or clannish in feeling; nor when chauvinistic and full of hatred for all other peoples. This does not mean that poetry must not smack of the soil, and that it cannot preserve a sane patriotic and national feeling, and worship a culture inherent in a people. But when the ecstasy descends to the kind which kills individualism under the pretense of encouraging it, when it is hostile to the stranger and the original thinker, when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts as regards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and pernicious.