Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/74

44 inclusive, yet compressed into a single phrase,—I have put together the following statement:

Poetry is rhythmical, imaginative language, expressing the invention, taste, thought, passion, and insight, of the human soul.

First of all, and as a corollary,—a resultant from '''1. The imaginitive invention and expression are Creative.''' the factors of imaginative invention and expression,—we infer that poetry is, in common with other art products, a creation, of which the poet is the creator, the maker. Expression is the avowed function of all the arts, their excuse for being; out of the need for it, art in the rude and primitive forms has ever sprung. No work of art has real import, none endures, unless the maker has something to say—some thought which he must express imaginatively, whether to the eye in stone or on canvas, or to the ear in music or artistic speech; this thought, the imaginative conception moving him to utterance, being his creative idea—his art-ideal. This simple truth, persistently befogged by the rhetoric of those who do not "see clear and think straight," and who always underrate the strength and beauty of an elementary fact, is the Metrical sterility. last to be realized by commonplace mechanicians. They go through the process of making pictures or verses without the slightest mission—really with nothing to say or reveal. They mistake the desire to beget for the begetting power. Their mimes and puppets have everything but souls. Now, the imaginative work of a true artist,