Criticism deals with ideas that relate to life, and when written with ecstasy on human topics and not on technique it is poetry. The passage in Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_, beginning with the words "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments, etc.," as well as the conclusion of Poe's essay on _The Poetic Principle_ are poetry. The critics here were poets in their prose criticism, no less than in their rhymed lyrics.
As the reader will fathom by this time, my aim is to free poetry from its bondage to requirements that were thought essential to it. I object most emphatically to demands for rhyme, metre, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, parallelism, repetition of word or phrase or line, tropes or figures of speech, poetical diction, and any form of pattern. The poet has the right to use any of the above instruments as he sees fit, whenever he thinks they enhance the ecstasy in his work. But no critic has a right to lay down a definition of poetry and insist that metre or rhythm must be employed by a poet. Professor Mackail in his _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_ defines poetry as patterned language, formally and technically, adding that the technical essence of the pattern is the repeat, and that when there is no repeat there is technically no poetry. If this definition were true, then passages in the Bible full of poetry, which use no parallelism, would not be poetry. The pattern does not make the poem, it often ruins it. While it is true that when excited we repeat expressions and become rhythmical, we do not do so with regularity and uniformity. How puerile many poems by savages, and even by the early civilized Babylonians and Egyptians, sound because the first impediment of art, the repeat, is employed, and a phrase is repeated _ad nauseam_ like the words of a child learning how to talk. (!)
When we shake off our subservience to the pattern in poetry we shall have little use for the numerous works on the art of writing poetry. We shall find that many of the old books on poetry written with much learning by scholars and poets, like Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger, Vossius, Fabricius, Boileau, Pope, Opitz, Gottsched, Dante, are in part obsolete. I do not mean that these worthy works have all to be thrown on the scrap heap. But they laid down absurd rules as to how to write poetry and how to determine it; they sought to confine it by rules gleaned from older poets and insisted future poets obey these rules. Yet great poets, who never even read them, disregarded all their rules and created great poetry.