the artist has to concentrate himself, the more specialized becomes the talent required for the assertion of the same in any one and no other mode of presentment; and we may add in the powers of technical execution which accompany it. The talents adapted to the poetic art, regarding the same from the point of view of an ideal envisagement in a specific _materia_, is subordinated in a less degree to such conditions; it is consequently more open to universal practice, and in this respect more independent. The need here at least is merely that of a gift for imaginative creation. Its limitation is confined merely to this, namely, that for the reason that this art is expressed in language, it has to guard itself on the one hand from deliberate rivalry with external objects in their sensuous completeness, in the form, that is, where we find the plastic artist apprehends his subject-matter in its external configuration: and, from a further point of view, it is unable to rest in the unspoken ideality, the emotional tones of which constitute the realm of music. In these respects the problem proposed to the poet, if we contrast him with artists in other arts, is at once more _facile_ and more _difficult_ It is more easy, because, although the poet, in the poetical elaboration of speech, must possess a trained talent, he is spared the relatively more manifold task of triumph over technical difficulties necessary in the other arts. It is more difficult because, just in proportion as poetry is less able to complete the objective envisagement, it is compelled to seek some compensation for this loss on the side of sense in the genuine core of Art's own ideality, in the depth of imagination and a really artistic mode of conception.
(_b_) For this reason the poet is, in the _second_ place, constrained to penetrate into all the wealth of the spiritual content, and to lay bare to the vision of mind what is concealed in its depths. For however much in the other arts, too, the ideal must shine forth through its corporeal manifestation, and does so in life itself shine forth, yet the medium of speech remains that most open to intelligence, and the means most adequate to its revelation. It is the one medium able to grasp and declare everything whatever that flows through or is present in consciousness, whether regarded in its ascent or profundity. In consequence of this the poet finds himself confronted with difficulties which the other arts are not called upon to overcome or satisfy to the like degree. In other words, for the very reason that poetry is actually operative in the world of idea or imagination itself, and is not concerned with fashioning for its images an objective existence independent of such ideality, it is placed in an element or sphere in which the religious, scientific and everyday consciousness are active; it must therefore take care to make no excursion into the domain or mode of conception proper to any of these, or to get mixed up with them. No doubt in the case of every art we find points of contact with other arts. Artistic creation of every kind proceeds from _one_ mind or spirit, which comprehends in itself all spheres of self-conscious life.
But with the other arts the distinction of conception in each case is in its mode complete, for the reason that this, in its ideal creation, persists throughout in permanent relation to the execution of its images in a definite sensuous material, and consequently is absolutely distinct, no less from the forms of the religious consciousness, than it is from the thinking of science and the intelligence of ordinary life. Poetry, on the contrary, avails itself, in its manner of objective communication, of the very means adopted in these spheres of mental activity, that is to say, human speech; it finds itself, consequently, otherwise placed than are the plastic arts and music, which occupy a different field of conception and expression.
(_c_) _Thirdly_, we have the final demand made upon the poet for the most profound and manifold transfusion of the subject-matter of his creations with the animating soul of life, because it is his art which is capable of absorbing most profoundly the entire fulness of the spiritual content. The plastic artist, in a similar way, must apply himself to a transfusion of ideal expression in the _external form_ of architectonic, plastic and the forms peculiar to painting. The musician must likewise rivet his attention on the _inner soul_ concentrated in emotion and passion and their outpouring in melodic expression.
In both cases the artist must be steeped in the most ideal intention and substance of his content. But the sphere of the poet's creative activity extends yet further, for the reason that he has not merely to elaborate an ideal world of soul-life and the self-conscious mind.
He has, in addition, to discover for this ideal realm an external mode of envisagement fitted thereto, a mode by virtue of which that ideal totality shines through in more irresistible perfection than is possible in the case of other arts. It is incumbent upon him to know human existence, both as soul-life and objective life, to receive into his inmost being the full breadth of the world and its shows, and to have felt through it there, penetrated, enlarged, deepened and revealed to himself all it implies. Only after that, and in order that he may find it in his power to create, as from his own spiritual experience outwards, a free whole,--ay, even in the case where he restricts his effort to a comparatively narrow and particular range,--he must have liberated himself from all embarrassment with his subject-matter, whether of a _technical_[18] character or otherwise, able in short to survey the ideal and external aspects thereof with the same free glance. From the point of view of _instinctive_ creative vigour[19] we may in this respect pre-eminently praise the Mahomedan poets of the East. The starting-point in such compositions is a freedom which, even in the moment of passion, remains aloof from such passion, and in all the variety of its interests retains exclusively throughout the _one_ substance as its veritable core, in contrast to which everything else appears small and transitory, and nothing of finality is left either to passion or lust. This is a philosophical outlook, a relation of spirit to the facts of the world, which comes more readily to age than youth. For in old age no doubt the interests of life are still present; but they are not there with the urgency of youthful passion, but rather in the guise of shadows, and to this extent are more readily conformable to ideal relations such as Art demands. In opposition to the ordinary view that youth with its warmth and vigour is the fairest season for poetic creation, we may rather, at least from this point of view, maintain just the opposite, that the ripest season belongs to the autumn of old age, provided that it is able to preserve its energies of outlook and emotion. It is only to a blind old man, Homer, that we ascribe those miraculous poems which have come down to us under that name. And we may also affirm of our Goethe that only in old age, after he had fully succeeded in liberating his genius from all restricting limitations of sense, that he gave us his most exalted creations.[20] [Footnote 1: That is, the essential notion (_Begriff_) of Art generally.]
[Footnote 2: _Substantiellen_, _i.e.,_ the form that most corresponds to its essence.]
[Footnote 3: _Theoretisch._ Hegel doubtless has the Greek word in his mind. It is a _Bildung_ for the mind rather than with a view to action.
It assumes contemplation rather than volition.]
[Footnote 4: It is not quite clear whether Hegel means by _Bedürfniss_ the need of spiritual life, or the profounder demand of reality. It might stand for either.]
[Footnote 5: That is, the _Vernünft._] [Footnote 6: _Das individualisirte Vernünftige_, _i.e._, reason as realized in concrete personality.]
[Footnote 7: _In seiner Gediegenheit und schlagenden Fassung.
Gediegenheit_ here thorough grasp. _Schlagenden_ may possibly mean arresting character of the conception rather than definite, precise.]
[Footnote 8: That is, the notion.]
[Footnote 9: By _aus dem Geiste_ it is quite possible that there is no reference to individual genius. In that case the translation would be "in terms of human intelligence," _i.e._, from the resources of human reason.]
[Footnote 10: This seems to be the meaning of _die Sache der Zeit._] [Footnote 11: Lit., "They do not come forth from self-substantive and immediately free vitality (Lebendigkeit)." _Lebendigkeit_ is here the ideal and creative force or bond of soul-life as above described.]
[Footnote 12: The German word would imply here an interpretation of symbolic or at least ideal significance.]
[Footnote 13: This I presume is the general meaning of the sentence: _Asien aber, das er besiegt, ist in der vielfachen Willkühr seiner Einzelnen Völkerschaften nur ein zufälliges Ganzes._] [Footnote 15: It is possible that too much stress is laid on this line of difference. The fundamental difference between oratory and poetry is that of form. At least it can hardly be denied that the power of the orator to meet the demands of local conditions is a vital feature of his art, that in this respect a Demosthenes is greater than Burke.
It is surely a mistake to assume that such limitations in themselves or necessarily are an obstacle to creative genius. It is rather the sign of supreme oratorical power that it can mould them and command them in conjunction with its more majestic spirit. In this lies an essential part of the art itself, just as a sculptor or a painter, such as Tintoret in the S. Rocco Scuola, dominates the defects of local condition.]
[Footnote 16: Infinite, that is, not in the temporal sense, but as a complete and self-realized whole.]
[Footnote 17: Hegel calls it "the poetising subjectivity"; that is, the personal activity essential to poetic composition.]
[Footnote 19: This appears to be the meaning of _des Naturells_.]
[Footnote 20: This is perhaps less true of Goethe than it is of either Milton or Shakespeare. It is possible that Hegel thought more highly of the second part of "Faust" as art than do the majority of modern critics. But the truth is there, if subject to a good deal of qualification in respect to certain aspects of poetry. As Meredith says: "Verily now is our season of seed, Now in our Autumn."
And Meredith was not one to do less than justice to the superb Dream of imaginative youth.]
II THE EXPRESSION OF POETRY The field of vision which first will occupy our attention, but the boundless expanse of which we can only traverse with a few general observations, is that which concerns the poetic generally, the content no less than the mode of conception and organic association adapted to the poetic work of art. This background will help to emphasize the _second_ aspect of our subject, which is _poetic expression_ more strictly, the idea in the ideal objectivity of the word appropriated by it as symbol of the image, and the melodious vehicle of its speech.
We may infer the nature of the relation between poetic expression generally and the mode of presentment proper to the other arts from our previous examination of the characteristics of the poetic art. Language and the sounds of words are neither a symbol of spiritual conceptions, nor an adequate mode of projecting ideality under the condition of spatial objectivity in the sense applicable to the corporeal forms of sculpture and painting, nor yet an intonation in musical sound of the entire soul. They are an abstract _sign_ simply. As the vehicle of the poetic image or conception, however, it is necessary that this side also, in theory no less than deliberate elaboration, appear as distinct from the kind of expression appropriate to prose.
We may for this purpose emphasize with more detail three main points of distinction.
Our _first_ point is this, that although poetic expression is throughout exclusively embodied in articulate words, and apparently as such is simply related to human speech, yet in so far as the words themselves are merely abstract signs representative of _ideas,_ the true source of poetic speech is not to be discovered in the selection of particular words, and in the manner they are associated in sentences and elaborated phrases, nor in harmonious rhythm, rhyme and so forth, but in the type of _conception_ employed. We have, in short, to look for our point of departure for the constructive use of expression in the choice of the idea or image, find our first and foremost question will be what kind of conception will give us an expression suitable to poetry. _Secondly_, however, it remains the fact that the imaginative idea essentially pertinent to poetry is exclusively made objective in _language._ We have consequently to investigate the expression of speech according to its purely verbal aspect, in the light of which poetic words are distinguishable from those of prose, poetic phrases from those of our ordinary life and prosaic thought, abstracting in the first instance the mere sound of them to our sense of hearing.
_Finally_, we have to recognize the fact that poetry is a mode of articulate speech, the sounding word, which in its temporal duration no less than its actual sound, must receive a definite configuration, one that implies the presence of time-measure, rhythm, melodious sound and rhyme.
I. THE POETIC CONCEPT OR IDEA What in the plastic arts the sensuous visible _form_ expressed by means of stone and colour is, or what in the realm of music animating strains of harmony and melody are, this--we must repeatedly insist on the fact--can only be, in respect to poetic expression--the idea or image itself. The force of the poet's creation centres consequently, in the fact that the art moulds a content in an ideal medium, and without bringing before us the actual forms of external Nature and the progressions of musical sound; by doing so, therefore, it translates the objective presence accepted by the other arts into an ideal form, which Spirit or intelligence expresses for the imagination under the mode which is and must remain that of our conscious life.
A distinction of this very character was already insisted on when we had occasion previously to establish a distinction between the earliest type, of poetry and its later modes of reconstruction from the data of prose.
(_a_) Imaginative poetry in its _origin_ is not as yet a consciously distinct form from those extremes of ordinary conscious life, one of which brings everything to vision under the mode of immediate and therewith contingent singularity, without grasping the ideal essence implied therein, and the manifestation of the same; while the other, in one direction, differentiates concrete existence into its various characteristics, making use of abstract generalization, and in another avails itself of the scientific faculty as the correlating and connecting focus of such abstractions. The idea is only poetical in so far as it holds these extremes in unviolable mediation, and thereby is able to maintain a position of genuine stability midway between the vision of ordinary consciousness and that of abstract thought.
In general terms we may define the poetic imagination as _plastic_[1] in so far as it brings before our vision concrete reality rather than the abstract generalization, and in the place of contingent existence an appearance of such a kind that we recognize what is substantive immediately in it by virtue of its embodiment itself and its individuality, and as inseparable from it, and by virtue of this are able to grasp the concrete conception-of the fact in question no less than its determinate existence as one and the same vital whole reposing in the ideal medium of the imagination. In this respect we find a fundamental distinction between that whereof the plastic or constructive idea is the source and all that is otherwise made vivid to us through other means of expression. The same truth will appear to us, if we analyse what we mean, by mere reading. We understand what the letters mean, which are indicative points for articulate utterance, by the mere act of sight, and without being further obliged to listen to their sound. Only the illiterate reader will find it necessary to speak aloud the separate words that he may understand their sense.
But in the case of poetry just what seems to be here the mark of stupidity is an indication of beauty and excellence. Poetry is not satisfied with an abstract effort of apprehension, nor does it bring objects before us as we find them in the form of reflection and in the unimaginative generalization of our memory. It helps us to approach the essential notion in its positive existence, the generic as clothed in its specific individuality. In the view of ordinary common sense I understand by language, both in its impression on my hearing or sight, the meaning in its immediacy, in other words, without receiving its image before the mind. The phrases, for instance, "the sun," or "in the morning," possess each of them no doubt a distinct sense; but neither the Dawn or the Sun are themselves made present to our vision. When, however, the poet says: "When now the dawning Eos soared heavenwards with rosy fingers," here without question we have the concrete fact brought home to us. The poetical expression adds, however, yet more, for it associates with the object recognized a vision of the same, or we should rather say the purely abstract relation of knowledge vanishes, and the real definition takes its place. In the same way take the phrase, "Alexander conquered the Persian empire." Here, no doubt, so far as content is concerned, we have a concrete conception; the many-sided definition of it, however, expressed here in the word "victory," is concentrated in a featureless and pure abstraction, which fails to image before us anything of the appearance and reality of the exploit accomplished by Alexander. This truth applies to every kind of similar expression. We recognize the bare fact; but it remains pale and dun, and from the point of view of individual existence undetermined and abstract. The poetic conception consequently embraces the fulness of the objective phenomenon as it essentially exists, and is able to elaborate the same united with the essential ideality of the fact in a creative totality.
What follows as a primary result of this is that it is of interest to the imagination to _linger_ near the external characteristics of the fact, to the extent at least that it seeks to express the same in its positive reality, deems this as essentially worthy of contemplation and insists on this very attitude.
Poetry is consequently in its manner of expression _descriptive_ Description is, however, not the right word for it. We are, in fact, accustomed to accept as descriptive, and in contrast to the abstract definition, in which a content is otherwise brought home to our intelligence, much that the poet passes by, so that from the point of view of ordinary speech poetic composition can only appear as a roundabout way and a useless superfluity. The poet must, however, manage to bring his imagination to bear upon the explication of the actual phenomenon he is attempting to depict with a vital interest.[2] In this way, for instance, Homer adds a descriptive epithet to every hero. So Achilles is the swift-footed, the Achaeans bright-greaved, Hector as of the glancing helm, Agamemnon the lord of peoples, and so forth. The name is no doubt descriptive of a personality, but the name alone brings nothing further to our vision. To have some distinct idea of this we require further attributes. We have in fact similar epithets attached by Homer to other objects, which are essential to our vision of the epic, such as sea, ships, sword and others, epithets which seize and place before us an essential quality of the particular object, depicting it more precisely, and which enable us to apprehend the fact in its concrete appearance.
_Secondly_, we must distinguish such reconstruction of actual facts from definition _wholly imagined_. This offers a further point of view for discussion. The real image merely places before us the fact in the reality it possesses. The expression of the poet's imagination, on the contrary, does not restrict itself to the object in its immediate appearance; it proceeds to depict something over and above this, by means of which the significance of the former picture is made clear to our mind. Metaphors, illustrations, similes become in this way an essential feature of poetic creation. We have thereby a kind of veil attached to the content, which concerns us, and which, by its difference from it, serves in part as an embellishment, and in part as a further unfolding of it, though it necessarily fails to be complete, for the reason that it only applies to a specific aspect of this content. The passage in which Homer compares Ajax, on his refusing to fly, to an obstinate ass is an illustration. To a pre-eminent degree oriental poetry possesses this splendour and wealth in pictorial comparisons. There are two main reasons of this. First, its symbolic point of view makes such a search for aspects of affinity inevitable, and in the universality of its centres of significance it offers a large field of concrete phenomena capable of comparison; secondly, on account of the sublimity of its predominant outlook there is a tendency to apply the entire variety of all that is most brilliant and glorious in its motley show to the embellishment of the One Supreme, which is held before the mind as the sole One to be exalted. This object of the imagination, moreover, is not to be apprehended as merely the work of fanciful caprice or comparison, possessing as such nothing in it essentially actual and present. On the contrary the transmutation of all particular existence into further existence in this central idea grasped and clothed by the imagination is rather to be understood as equivalent to the assertion that there is nothing else essentially present, nothing that otherwise can put forward a claim to substantive reality. The belief in the world as we apprehend it with the vision of ordinary common sense is converted into a belief in the imagination, for which the only world that verily exists is that which the poetic consciousness has created. Conversely we have the romantic imagination, which is ready enough to express itself in metaphor, because in its vision what is external is for the essentially secluded life of the soul only accepted as something incidental, something that is unable adequately to express its own reality. To reclothe this consequently unreal externality with profound emotion, with all the fulness of detail envisioned, or with the play of humour upon the conjunction of such opposites is an impulse, which constrains and charms romantic poetry to ever novel discoveries. The object of importance here is not so much to make the fact clear and distinct to the vision; on the contrary the metaphorical employment of these outlying phenomena is itself the aim proposed. The emotion of the poet concentrates itself as the centre, which the environment enriches with its wealth; it absorbs this as part of itself, adapts it with genius and wit to its adornment, steeps it in its own life, and finds in this movement to and fro, this elaboration and self-reflection of its creation its own source of delight.
(_b_) _Secondly_, we have the contrast present between the poetic mode of conception and that of _prose._ The thing of importance in the latter case is not that which is imaged, but the significance as such which constitutes the content. It is on account of the latter that the idea or image becomes a mere means to bring the content before the mind. The composition of prose is therefore neither compelled to place the more detailed reality of its objects before our vision, nor to summon before us, as is the case with the metaphorical mode of expression previously described, another idea which carries us beyond the immediate object to be expressed. No doubt it is also necessary in prose to indicate in firm and distinct outlines the positive appearance of objects; but this is so not on account of their figurative character,[3] but to meet a specific and practical purpose. Generally speaking we may therefore affirm _accuracy_ to be from one point of view the ruling principle of prose composition, and from another a _clear definition_ and intelligibility of statement. In contrast to this the language of metaphor and imagery is in general and relatively less clear and more inaccurate. For in that mode of direct expression, such as we have presented by our first form of the poetic conception, the fact in its simplicity is carried away from our immediate apprehension of it as a mere object into the actual world of concrete fact, and we have to recognize it as a part of this, while in that second and more oblique form some phenomenon of affinity merely and one even aloof from the essential significance of our subject is made present to us. We do not, therefore, wonder that prosaic commentators of our poets have no easy task when they seek to separate, by means of their scientific analyses, the image from the significance, to extract their abstract content from the vital form, and thereby expound poetic modes of composition to the prosaic mind.
In poetry this accuracy, this rigour in unfolding the content as we find it in its simplicity, is not alone the essential principle. On the contrary, though prose is forced to confine its ideas on parallel lines of almost mathematical precision with the nature of its content, poetry introduces us to a different sphere altogether, that is, the _visible appearance_ of the content itself, or other natural phenomena related to it. For it is just this objective reality which in poetry ought to appear, and while unquestionably from one point of view revealing that content, yet at the same time from another it has to liberate itself from the purely abstract content, it being essentially an object of the art to direct attention to its actual existence in the visible world, and to arouse the interest of mind in the forms of life itself.
(_c_) If these three essential requirements of poetry are conditioned by an age, in which the accuracy of the prosaic mind is become the ordinary type of conscious life, the art, so far as its figurative characteristics are concerned, is placed in a more difficult position.
That is to say, in such an epoch the type of penetration exercised by conscious life is generally a separation of emotion and the ordinary outlook from scientific thought, which either converts the ideal and external material of feeling and perception into a stimulus of knowledge and volition simply, or into a plastic medium subservient to observation and action. In such a sphere poetry calls for energies of more definite purpose in order that it may free itself from the abstraction of the prevailing mental attitude and enter into the world of concrete life. Where, however, such a goal is realized, not only do we find that this breach between thinking, which makes for generalization, and perception and feeling, which grasp the particular, vanishes, but these last-mentioned modes of conscious life are, together with their subject-matter and content, at the same time freed from their exclusive relation of service; and the process culminates in a victorious reconciliation of such modes with what is essential universality. Inasmuch, however, as both the modes of poetic and prosaic thought and general outlook are united in one and the same conscious life, we find in it indications of trouble and derangement, even possibly an actual conflict between the two, one which, as the poetry of our times testifies, only genius of the highest order is able successfully to deal with. Added to this there are other collateral hindrances, which I only propose to define now, and that briefly, in their relation to the figurative aspect already discussed. In other words, if the prosaic intelligence takes the place of that creative imagination which previously obtained, then and in that case the rejuvenescence of the poetic faculty, both in all that is associated with the positive expression of facts and what is metaphorical, readily offers the semblance of artificiality, which even where it falls short of actual purpose, is only with great difficulty reconciled with that directness of immediate truth which is demanded. Much in fact which was still fresh in former times, through repeated usage, and the habits thus originated, has itself become gradually a custom and a part of prosaic life. Moreover, where poetry strives after novelties in its composition, we often find that, despite of itself, in its figurative expressions and descriptions, even where it escapes the charge of exaggeration and an excess of such material, it none the less leaves an impression of artificiality, over nicety, a straining after what is piquant and select, work incompatible with a simple and healthy outlook and state of feeling. Such work tends to regard objects in an artificial light and reckons on mere effect. Consequently it will not permit their natural lighting and colour. Defects of this nature are still more obvious in cases where, as a rule, the metaphorical type of imaginative composition is exchanged[4] for the more direct, and our poet is driven to outbid the forces of prose; and, in order to assert an originality, plunges into the subtleties of or the fishing for effects which have still some appearance of freshness.
2. VERBAL EXPRESSION Inasmuch as the poetic imagination is distinct in its operation from that of all other artists in virtue of the fact that it necessarily clothes its images in words, and communicates the same through human _speech_, it becomes imperative that throughout this process it should endeavour to co-ordinate all its ideas, in the form which with most completeness will disclose them, through the means articulate speech thus places at its disposal. And, in short, we may affirm that the poetic content only assumes the form of poetry in its restricted sense after it has been actually embodied and rounded off in the vehicle of words.
This literary aspect of the art of poetry would readily supply us with a boundless field of discursive observation and logical argument, which I must, however, pass over in order that I may reserve space for more weighty problems which lie before us. I merely propose, therefore, to touch very briefly on a few fundamental points.
(_a_) Human art should in all its associations place us on a ground quite other than that we confront in ordinary life, or indeed in our religious consciousness, active life, or the speculations of philosophy. This is possible on the side of literary or verbal expression only in so far as another mode of speech is adopted than that obtaining in those other spheres. Art has therefore not only, from one point of view, to avoid that in its instrument of expression which will fail to rise above the trivialities of ordinary speech and ordinary prose, but it must, furthermore, avoid falling into the tone and manner of religious edification and philosophical research.
Above all it must keep aloof from the precise analyses and _methods_ of the scientific faculty, the categories of pure thinking as we find these illustrated in the logical forms of judgment and deduction.
These at once remove art from the imaginative realm to another region altogether. But in all these respects it still remains a difficult matter to determine the lines of boundary on which we may actually affirm that poetry ends and prose begins. And in fact we may admit absolute precision and confidence of statement to be impossible from the nature of the case.
(_b_) If we pass now to a discussion of the particular _means_ which poetic-speech can appropriate as instrumental to its task the following points appear to me pregnant and suggestive.
(_α_) _First_, we find particular _words_ and exclamations[5] that are obviously peculiar to poetry, whether they be used to ennoble it, or to introduce the vulgarity and excess of comedy. We find a similar novelty in the specific collocation of various words or turns of expression. In such a field poetry is no doubt entitled on the one hand to borrow from an obsolete nomenclature, obsolete at least in everyday speech, and on the other to declare itself as pre-eminently an innovator, moulding novel modes of speech. Such a field, provided only the vital genius of the language is preserved, supplies material for astonishing boldness of invention.
(_β_) _Secondly_, we have the problem of verbal order. It is here that we meet with those so-called figures of speech, in so far as, we should add, the same have reference to verbal embodiment as such. The use of these, however, easily degenerates into rhetoric and declamation in the bad sense of these terms; the vitality of individual character is destroyed where we find that such forms substitute a fixed and artificial mode of expression for the genuine impulse of feeling or passion, and thereby offer the very opposite to the personal, laconic and broken utterance required, the utterance whose emotional depth is incapable of saying much, and for this reason, in romantic poetry especially, is of great effect as a presentment of suppressed[6] states of soul. But generally speaking we may admit that the relative order of words is an instrument of the external form of poetry of quite extraordinary resource.
(_γ_) _Thirdly_, we have still to draw attention to the construction of _periods,_[7] which essentially embrace all the other aspects of composition and which, by means of either their simple or more involved course, their restless dislocations and distortions, or their quick onward motion, their acceleration and their flood contribute so materially to the reflection of such soul experience. And, in short, it is essential that the external presentment in speech should mirror and assume a character similar to the ideality of such experience in all its variety.
(_c_) In the _application_ of the means of speech above considered it will be useful to distinguish once more the several stages of poetic thought to which they correspond and to which we drew attention when we considered the nature of poetic conception or composition.
(_α_) Poetic diction can, in the first instance, appear with real vitality among a people and at an epoch when the general speech is not