advice to would-be poets in the following poem is worth reading in this connection.

THE POET

Thou who wouldst wear the name

Of poet 'mid thy brethren of mankind,

And clothe in words of flame

Thoughts that shall live within the general mind! Deem not the framing of a deathless lay

The pastime of a drowsy summer day.

But gather all thy powers,

And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave, And in thy lonely hours,

At silent morning or at wakeful eve,

While the warm current tingles through thy veins

Set forth the burning words in fluent strains.

No smooth array of phrase,

Artfully sought and ordered though it be,
Which the cold rhymer lays

Upon his page with languid industry,

Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed,
Or fill with sudden tears the eyes that read.

The secret wouldst thou know

To touch the heart or fire the blood at will?
Let thine own eyes o'erflow;

Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill;
Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past,
And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast.

Then, should thy verse appear

Halting and harsh, and all unaptly wrought,

Touch the crude line with fear,

Save in the moment of impassioned thought;

Then summon back the original glow, and mend
The strain with rapture that with fire was penned.

Yet let no empty gust

Of passion find an utterance in thy lay,
A blast that whirls the dust

Along the howling street and dies away;
But feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,
Like currents journeying through the windless deep.

Seek'st thou, in living lays,

To limn the beauty of the earth and sky?
Before thine inner gaze

Let all that beauty in clear vision lie;
Look on it with exceeding love, and write
The words inspired by wonder and delight.

Of tempests wouldst thou sing,

Or tell of battles-make thyself a part

Of the great tumult; cling

To the tossed wreck with terror in thy heart;

Scale, with the assaulting host, the rampart's height,
And strike and struggle in the thickest fight.

So shalt thou frame a lay

That haply may endure from age to age,

And they who read shall say:

"What witchery hangs upon this poet's page!

What art is his the written spells to find

That sway from mood to mood the willing mind!"
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

It is impossible to frame a definition of poetry which will include all poetry and exclude prose. The true antithesis of poetry, as Coleridge pointed out, is not prose but science. Poetry is emotional; science is the

opposite. Science deals with facts, poetry with suggestions. The scientist calls water H2O; the poet calls it murmuring, rippling, still, or blue. It is impossible to make any exact or comprehensive distinction between the language or the subject matter of poetry and prose. Nevertheless we all feel that poetry and prose are not the same thing. Instead of attempting a definition of poetry, we shall quote a number of representative definitions, which taken together give as accurate a conception of poetry as it is possible to convey in definitions.

Ruskin defines poetry as "the presentment, in musical form, to the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions." Wordsworth also emphasizes the emotional side of poetry when he defines it as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity.' In another definition, which emphasizes the content of poetry, Wordsworth calls it "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Shelley's definition is suggestive: "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds." Poe's definition is "the rhythmical creation of Beauty" in words. The language of poetry, said Milton, should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate." In a notable article on Poetry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Theodore Watts-Dunton gives one of the most comprehensive of all definitions: "Absolute poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language." An even better definition perhaps is that of the American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson: "Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said. All poetry, great or

small, does this. And it seems to me that poetry has two characteristics. One is that it is, after all, undefinable. The other is that it is eventually unmistakable."

There are a number of things which distinguish genuine poetry from mere versifying, but the one quality which needs most to be emphasized is sincerity. No poem can be great unless its author is sincere in telling us what he sees and feels and thinks. Above all, the poet must not try to make us feel what he himself does not completely feel. The untrained reader often fails to see that the language of an inferior poem is conventional and consequently insincere. Such poems, with their outworn phrases, to quote Pope,

ring round the same unvaried chimes,

With sure return of still expected rhymes;
Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze,"
In the next line, it "whispers through the trees":
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep."

Hamlet's "take arms against a sea of troubles” is a classic instance of the poet's failure to visualize what he is saying. Longfellow's mariner, in "A Psalm of Life" "sailing o'er life's solemn main" and at the same time examining "footprints on the sands of time," is another example of confused phrasing. Walt Whitman used to go through his poems ruthlessly cutting out all these trite phrases, which today are usually called clichés. Learning to detect the trite, the insincere, depends upon practice. Taste in poetry, as in everything else, grows by feeding upon the right things.

But, one may ask, what are the right things and how do you know that they are the right things? This is a question difficult to answer. It is not enough to appeal to the great names of the past; for, contrary to the popular notion, the great poets do not enjoy an unchanging fame. We cannot accept even Homer as a great poet merely because Matthew Arnold assures us that he is one; Homer must prove himself a great poet to us.

With more recent poets, like Tennyson and Longfellow, the problem is still more difficult. The poets of the midnineteenth century are being severely tested today. There are many who deny that either Tennyson or Longfellow was a poet at all. Our fathers thought Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith” and Tennyson's "May Queen” great poems, but to us the former seems too didactic and the latter too sentimental to be great.

In the last analysis, no one can tell exactly what makes a poem a classic; and it is best for us frankly to admit that fact. Perhaps the best answer has been given by Arnold Bennett:

“A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive for any ethical reason. It does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would kill it. It survives because it is a source of pleasure, and because the passionate few can no more neglect it than a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read 'the right things' because they