Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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One of the most consistent expositions of poetry is that given by Hegel.^[119] Here is a careful abstract of propositions as carefully formulated and proved. He has ruled out the “poetic sentence.” Specimens of the sublime, like that Let there be light, and there was light which Longinus^[120] admired, are not poetry. History, too, is excluded, Herodotus, Tacitus, and the rest,^[121] as well as eloquence, and not as Shelley rejects Cicero, on personal grounds, but because of the law in the case. Yet this summary is still inadequate as a practical test, and with it the historian is in a plight no better than when with Sidney or Coleridge he was including whatever piece of writing seemed certainly though indefinitely poetic. In the latter case he steered by a compass which was at the mercy of unnumbered hidden magnets; in the former case the signs on the card are blurred.^[122] But Hegel does not leave the matter here; purposely or not, he gives a clear test for the historian when, twenty pages later, he comes to speak of versification. Professors Gayley and Scott^[123] point out that the present writer has made too much of this concession; instead of saying that verse is “the only condition absolutely demanded by poetry,” one should say that Hegel makes verse indispensable. But this is quite enough for the purpose. The passage in question runs thus: “To be sure, prose put into verse is not poetry, but simply verse, just as mere poetic expression in what is otherwise prosaic treatment results only in a poetic prose; but nevertheless, metre or rime, being the one and only sensuous aroma,[124] is absolutely demanded for poetry, and indeed is even more necessary than store of imagery, the so-called beautiful diction.” And now for Hegel’s reason, which quite agrees with the historian’s demand for an available test. He goes on to say that the fact of verse in any piece of literature shows at once, as poetry indeed demands there should be shown, that one is in another realm from the realm of prose, of daily life; this constraint, if one likes to call it constraint, forces the poet outside the bounds of common speech into a province wholly submitted to the laws of art. That poetry has to be something more than this, that there are other canons, nobody denies; but the first step for a poet is into this realm of verse where he must prove in sterner tests and by other achievements whether he is citizen or trespasser.