Milton is thinking, too, of this in his well-known passage in the treatise on Education. “I mean not here the prosody of a verse ...” boys learn that in their grammars; but in time they must be taught the great things,—“that sublime Art which in Aristotle’s _Poetics_ ... teaches what the laws are of a true Epic poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what Decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe.”
_Of the Origin and Progress of Language_, II. 50; IV. 41.
See the _Transactions_ of the Society, Vol. I. Warrington, 1785, pp. 54 ff.
_Biographia Literaria_, Chap. XIV.—“Poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem.”
III. iii. 3; another part of the passage is quoted above, p. 42.
_Dissertations and Discussions_, I. 89 ff., “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties.” The article first appeared in 1833.
It would be more to the purpose if one went to the sources of poetry and religion and studied the survivals of primitive rite. At seed-time in Brandenburg, the women still go out to the fields and unbind their hair in sign that the flax may grow as long as their tresses. With such a ritual act goes nearly always a song, a repeated shout, a cry to the powers of growth; and this, if one please, is poetry in its making, while it is easy to think that the symbol would sooner or later force itself into the words—“make our flax like this hair.”
_Aesthetik, Werke_, ed. 1838, X. III.: summary, pp. 269 f.—“So ist denn jedes wahrhaft poetisches Kunstwerk ein in sich unendlicher Organismus,” etc.
IX. 9. See the translation by Roberts, p. 65.
E. S. Dallas, _Poetics_, p. 8, is sound in idea, but less happy in illustration, when he says that a poem without verse can be no more than the movement of a watch without its dial-plate.
“Als der erste und einzige sinnliche Duft.” The passages to which Gayley and Scott refer—_e.g._ Hegel, p. 227—do not change this statement in the present application. Nobody pretends that rhythm is the soul of poetry; it is a necessary form, a necessary condition.
_The Power of Sound_, London, 1880. Chap. III. is on the elements of a work of art. On p. 51, again on p. 423 f., Mr. Gurney rejects poetry in prose.