[180:A] _Zwei Abhandlungen uber d. Aristotleische Theorie d. Drama._
[182:A] This work has never been completely published. Dr. B. Halper, of Dropsie College, Philadelphia, has promised us a complete translation from the Arabic manuscript. There is a synopsis of it by Schreiner in the _Revue des Etudes, Juives XXI, XXII_.
[183:A] See Isaac Husik's _Medieval Jewish Philosophy_.
[184:A] F. C. Prescott's _Dreams and Poetry_ is a magnificent essay on the subject.
[187:A] I do not however agree with Bergson, who does not believe poetry can be composed in dreams at all.
[193:A] "Poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind 'which ecstasy is very cunning in.'" Hazlitt _On Poetry_. "The imaginative faculty (has) the capabilities of ecstasy and possession." Lowell, "The Imagination." _The Function of the Poet._
Oriental poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the Persians, is notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy couched in intricate conventional forms. The Oriental poems abound numerously in far-fetched figures of speech, and are written in metres following definite laws and are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued in every line in poems of great length. In fact the greatest historian of the Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective discourse based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into verses agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a separate idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A poet was supposed to get many thousands of verses by heart before practicing his art. One of the chapters in Ibn Khaldun's famous _Prolegomena_[203:A] or introduction to his history, _Book of Examples_, has a title stating that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.
But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was taken for granted that ecstasy was the main object of poetry. There is probably more ecstasy in the poetry of the Arabs and Persians than in that of most other nations, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds of form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial forms did not utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor Edgar G. Browne in his scholarly _Literary History of Persia_ has devoted the first chapter of the second volume to Persian metres and he calls attention to the conventional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic poets who were not without influence upon the Persians.