Albert Mordell

“ When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any emotion in which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine, Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial event important poetry. ”

“ If any one was so great a lover of purity, as to wish not only that no immodest desire should arise in his mind, but also that his imagination should be constantly free from every obscene idea, he could not attain his end without losing his eyes and his ears, and the remembrance of many things which he could not choose but see and hear. Such a perfection could not be hoped for, whilst we see men and beasts, and know the significance of certain words that make a necessary part of our language. It is not in our power to have, or not to have, certain ideas, when certain objects strike our senses ”

“ Neither verse poetry, nor the prose literature of ecstasy, then, is the highest literature necessarily. Shakespeare was one of the greatest poets, not only because he depicted emotions, but because his intellect, his psychological insight, his universality, his personality, all combine to make him the great figure he is. He would have continued to be as great a figure even if he had written nothing more than a diary. It is genius that counts and not the form one uses. To say that the drama or epic is the highest literary form is absurd ”

“ Every one has conceived the function of poetry as being something different, usually as something to spread his own views. Thus the theologian looks upon it as a handmaid of religion, to show the beauty of a dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with his religion. The voluptuary thinks it merely a means of arousing sexual morality. Some philosophers think it a vehicle to promulgate their own systems. Thus Nietzsche believed poetry should spread the gospel of the will to power, while Schopenhauer thought it reached its highest point when it glorified the denial of the will to live. ”

“ It is absurd to conclude that isolated incidents in a novel happened in the writer's own life. It is only when a writer harps on one plot—one motive— [18] continually—and in several works, that one's suspicions are aroused that he is really writing about himself. It is only when there is a genuine ring to the cry of distress, that the reader suspects that the work is more than a mere literary exercise. The early readers of Heine, De Musset and Leopardi, saw that the poets were singing about real sorrows. ”

“ He knew that our primitive instincts could be subdued only when they were not too strong, and that virtue was practised when it was not difficult to do so. "When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with the idea we have left them." "If we conquer our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength." "Perseverance is not deserving of blame or praise, as it is merely the continuance of tastes and feelings which we can neither create nor destroy."
He understood the great part played by vanity in the unconscious. The most modest of us are, in our unconscious, vain. ”

“ What then is literature of a high order? What is this great form of art that takes us out of ourselves because it has in it so much of ourselves? What is this magical arrangement of words enshrining what ideas and emotions that gives us a zest for life, that makes us drunk with aesthetic pleasure? It includes many species, all, as Milton would say, in a "strain of a higher mood." One of its greatest manifestations is that in which the ecstasy for social justice and a high form of idealism control the poet. We become carried away with his frenzy, for it evokes the highest emotions in us ”

“ Poetry is the result of ecstasy, the outpouring of the imagination, the expression of the unconscious. If instead of having confused it with song and dancing the critics would have taken it in its real significance as excited speech, we would have had less misunderstanding about its nature. The lover of to-day who tells his emotions to his love, or confides them to a friend, the bereaved person who relates his grief at the death of a loved one and tells of the virtues of the departed, are rude poets expressing themselves in conversation in prose. ”

“ Impressions are strongest in youth and hence molest us in old age. The finer our nerves, the less easy is it to forget. The mother who has lost a child cannot forget the misfortune even after other children are born.
It is life's grimmest tragedy that we carry within us ghosts of our old days—ghosts which take us by surprise with their vigour. ”

“ Much of the poetry of the past has sung the praises of wage slavery. The poetry of the future will sing as Amos did of old the beauty of social and economic equality. To-day the hero of the poem is the successful business man, or the submissive contented working man, just as in the past the soldier and the monk were the heroes. To-morrow it will be the man who fights for economic justice for himself or the masses. ”

“ Literature is a personal voice the source of which can be traced to the unconscious.
But an author draws not only on the past in his own life, but on the past psychic history of the human family. Unconscious race memories are revived by him in his writing; his productions are influenced by most primitive ideas and emotions, though he may not be aware what they are. Yet they emerge from his pen; for the methods of thought and ways of feeling of our early ancestors still rule us. Nor is the idea of unconscious race memories idle speculation or fanciful theorising. ”

“ A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the supernatural, even though he indulges in artificial diction, clichés and stereotyped metres, for what counts in poetry is the greatness and power of a human soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an advanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, freedom and justice, the intensity and importance of his emotion. ”

“ The genius, however, always has something of the pioneer in him; even after his work is no longer new, he retains the title of genius, though there are people who can write better works than he.
The world has agreed on some geniuses. Most people are ready to admit that a few men of letters like Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes, Goethe and Balzac were geniuses of the first order. But when we are concerned with literary men who have done good work, it is not easy to say whether they were geniuses, though we are ready enough to admit that they had the qualities that make up genius. ”

“ Really, every great literary man is a poet, for he is constantly occupied with ecstasy and human emotions. Do you think Hugo was a poet only when he chanted in verse and ceased being one when he wrote Les Misérables or Notre Dame de Paris? It is not necessary to use the old poetical machinery of rhythm, or metaphors or similes, or apostrophe or personification or any other figure of speech; one may dispense with allusions to mythology or the use of any but current expressions and idioms; one may write almost as one talks; and poetry may nevertheless be produced. ”

“ Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved by reading a great work of art. It sweeps every one who is in the throes of ambition. Those who enjoy nature, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy. Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or rejoicing in the emergence of dear ones from illness or danger, those who take pride in watching their children grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of friendship, are all in ecstasy. ”

“ Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,—there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. ”

“ Poetry and prose then are not contradictory, but prose becomes poetry when the element of ecstasy is present. We use the word prosaic in a sense, it is true, which means destitute of imagination or emotion; we even call verse of this kind prosaic. But a work in prose may be poetical, and one in verse be prosaic, and science, philosophy and morality become poetry, though in the form of prose, when bathed in the spirit of ecstasy. And the highest form of poetry is that wherein the ecstasy springs from our nature's most human and most admirable side. ”

“ Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the conditions of poetry, such as Plato's Republic, or Milton's Areopagitica, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's Cherry Orchard has as good claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess of the D'Urbervilles as The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phedre. ”

“ The grief of the oppressed and the poor goes to our own hearts, and the calamities of the woe-begone become our own. We submerge our personality in that of the human race, and the griefs of strangers lure us to cry out for them.
But it should be remembered that literature never thus becomes a weapon for reform or a piece of didacticism or propaganda. The emotion is the thing. The practical work of relief of suffering is the function of the reformer and not the poet. It is the poet's duty only to make a certain form of ecstasy contagious. ”

“ Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by the heart, prose by the mind; fancy was thought to hold sway in poetry, logic in prose. But nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. Any intellectual and even moral performance may be elevated into poetry, when emotionally and ecstatically presented. ”

“ No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters unreasonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful victories, or crowns with the garland of a hero the mere warrior who is a warrior for the pure delight of killing, is really of the higher type of literature of ecstasy. It is this martial phase that makes most of the early literature of all nations valuable only in parts; in those parts where the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt with, and where the more genial emotions are crystallized. ”