Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better things, every one who fulminates against ugliness and wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are you in a state of rapture because your love is returned, or in one of despair, because it is denied?--you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of grief?--you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a bad sense. The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.
The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion with God, the lunatic who thinks demons are prodding him, the spiritualist who imagines he talks to his dead son, the child who is in communication with animals and supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of ecstasy.
It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of ecstasy to choose, what attitude to take towards it and in what words and form to convey it.
The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware of the fact. For the great bulk of the poetry read by the people is the prose fiction that they find exciting and stimulating. This fiction is usually of a very low order. Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situations in novels, in the best passages of short stories. Prose poetry is the most democratic and natural poetry, at least in form, and you can rely on the public to appreciate some of it.
The poetry in Dickens is democratic poetry. The drawing of such characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe Gargery, wherein he shows the noble virtues residing in common people, is poetry that the public can appreciate.
Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for when it deals with ideas beyond the people, such as you find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it does not succeed in evoking the intended response and sympathy from the public, which rejects such ideas.
So when we hear people say that they do not care for poetry we see that they mean they have an aversion to verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm. But they will weep as they read of the death of Little Nell and be moved by the sorrows of Anna Karenina, and be stirred by the tragedy of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. Like the gentleman in Molière's play who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, these readers are fond of poetry without being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is touched by the ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or beautiful prose literature. Here the poetic is divested of metaphors and rhythm and trappings and verbal tricks; here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by affectation.