Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/111

Rh The highest faculties of vision and execution are required to design an absolutely objective poem, and to insure its greatness. There is no middle ground; it is great, or else a dull and perfunctory mechanism. The force of the heroic epics, whose authorship is in the crypt of the past, seems to be not that of a single soul, but of a people; not that of a generation, but of a round of eras. Yet the final determination of poetic utterance is toward self-expression. The minstrel's soul uses for its medium that slave of imaginative feeling, language. It is a voice—a voice; and the emotion of its possessor will not be denied. The poet is the Mariner, whose heart burns within him until his tale is told:

Races themselves have a bent toward one of the two generic types, so that with one nation Racial tendency. or people the creative poet is the exception, and with another the rule. The Asiatic inspiration, even in its narrative legacies, is more subjectively vague than that which we call the antique—that of the Hellenes. But the extreme Asia. Eastern field requires special study, and is beyond the limits of this course, so that I will only confess my belief that much of our fashionable adaptation