Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental
achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always
been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel
of the highest argument 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
condition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's
_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the
colloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a 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_? Where are we to call a
halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge
into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in
danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon
what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.
The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.
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