Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/107

Rh intuitive pagans. No one cares for Wordsworth's division of his own verse into poems of imagination, of fancy, and the like, the truth being that they all, with the exception of a few spontaneous lyrics, are poems of reflection, often glorified by the imagination, sometimes lightened by fancy, but of whose predominant spirit their author was apparently the least successful judge. The Greeks felt that the spirit shapes the form of art, and therefore is revealed by it. Assume, then, the fitness of poetic orders, styles, and measures; that these are known to you and me, and thus we may leave dactyls and choriambs to the metrical anatomists, and rhymes to the Walkers and Barnums. Passing to But poetry is either impersonal or self-expressive. the more essential divisions of expression, you will find their types are defined by the amount of personality which they respectively hold in solution: that poetry is differentiated by the Me and the Not Me,—by the poet's self-consciousness, or by the representation of life and thought apart from his own individuality.

That which is impersonal, and so very great at its best, appears the more creative as being a statement of things discerned by free and absolute vision. The other order is so affected by relations with the maker's traits and tastes that it betokens a relative and conditioned imagination; and is thus by far the larger division, since in most periods it is inevitable that the chief impulse to song should be a conscious or unconscious longing for personal expression.