Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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So the great age thought of poetry; and so the balance inclines as one comes nearer to our own days. Isaac Vossius, in a curious work^[93] published without his name, holds to his father’s view of the case. Shaftesbury^[94] is peremptory for “metred prose,” but, as both a lord and a wit, disdains to give his reasons; while another person of quality, Sir William Temple^[95] indeed, regards metred prose as a monstrosity. Trapp, in his Oxford lectures,^[96] is squarely for the rhythmic test, and will hold it in the teeth of all Aristotelians; so will another professor of poetry, Polycarp Leyser,^[97] of Helmstadt, a rationalist in his day, who thinks it high time to have a modern system of poetics not drawn altogether from the ancients.

Across the channel, meanwhile, relations of poetry and prose had been discussed, now as an eddy in the maelstrom of argument about ancients or moderns, now as a question for itself. The Télémaque of Fénelon was defended as a great poem in prose; to the objection that it was not written in verse, came answers in abundance. One of them, for example, calls upon the ancients;^[98] Aristotle, Dionysius, Strabo, said that verse is not essential to epic poetry. “One may write it in prose, as one writes tragedies without rime.” And the old saw—“one can make verses without poetry, and be quite poetic without making verse”—is followed by a definition of the whole matter; what constitutes a poem is “the lively plot, the bold figures, the beauty and variety of the images; it is the fire, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity, the force, a je ne sais quoi in the words and in the thoughts which only nature can give.” So run a dozen other elaborate pleas for prose in poetry; but the arguments usually end in contradiction, and nothing is brought forward that really sets aside the feeling long ago expressed by Tom Dekker^[99] in his sputtering, pamphleteer style, that “poetrie, like honestie and olde souldiers, goes upon lame feete unlesse there be musicke in her,” and that both poets and musicians are children of Phœbus: “the one creates the ditty and gives it the life or number, the other lends it voyce and makes it speake musicke.”