Every one has conceived the function of poetry as being something different, usually as something to spread his own views. Thus the theologian looks upon it as a handmaid of religion, to show the beauty of a dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with his religion. The voluptuary thinks it merely a means of arousing sexual morality. Some philosophers think it a vehicle to promulgate their own systems. Thus Nietzsche believed poetry should spread the gospel of the will to power, while Schopenhauer thought it reached its highest point when it glorified the denial of the will to live.
The world can never be fully agreed as to what poetry is any more than it can agree as to what beauty, truth, or duty is. A passage may appeal to one person and not to another. It all depends on the beliefs, tastes, experiences and education of the reader. Patriotic and religious poetry, whether in verse or prose, falls flat on the internationalist and free thinker respectively, because they do not adore the sentiments therein, though they might admit the beauty of the writing and recognize the appeal it makes to those who are in accord with the writer. They cannot be responsive to the soul of the singer because they are differently constituted in their beliefs and because the ideas that aroused in the poet one train of emotions, move them to a contrary passion.
Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few centuries ago was sentenced to be burned at the stake for his religious beliefs. A poet who approved of this course wrote a poem where his emotions are crystallized. He was sorry for the victim and hoped God would pardon him and make him see the error of his ways. He praised the executioner who himself was grieved that he had to take this course to save the infidel's soul. He was certain that God was pleased with the sentence. He deplored the evil effects that might follow if this man were allowed to live to spread his infamous doctrines, he rebuked the man for the trouble he brought on his family. On the whole he gave us a metrical and emotional composition actually describing his sensations, not even omitting sympathetic reference to the sufferings of the victim. This was poetry to those thousands that day who approved of this act. But most of us cannot to-day enter into the ecstasy of the writer; it is not poetry to us. But while people to-day are not burned at the stake, they are persecuted for advancing ideas that are beyond the public. The poets, who are on a low level of thought with the public, in writing poems against such individuals or the ideas or cause represented by them, are not poets to those who support the persecuted individual or his ideas. Most poets still write in defense of burning at the stake of great humanitarians, but they advocate other measures than burning by real fire.