Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes

With words that made them known.

Imperious thought is ashamed of this mere regularity, this recurrence, this common gift; where is the art in it? Art, said Schiller, must have something in its work that is voluntary, fresh, surprising; the voice, he said, may be beautiful, but there is no beauty in mere breathing. Has not poetry, then, it may be asked, gained in meaning for mankind, in nobility and dignity, precisely as it has loosed the bands of rhythm, forsworn this ignoble and slavish regularity, receded from the throng, spurned the chorus, turned to solitary places, and cherished the individual, the artist, the poet? Granting the throng, the dance, the rhythm, the shouts, is not all this but poetry in the nebular state, and does not real poetry begin where Aristotle makes it begin, when an individual singer detaches himself from the choral mass, improvises and recites his verses, and so sets out upon that “mindward” way which leads to Sophocles and Dante and Shakspere? We do not dance Shakspere’s poetry, we do not sing it, we hardly even scan it; why then this long pother about a lapsing and traditional form?