Arizona republican., 1903-04-15
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CURRENT COMMENT
Thought and Feeling iD Poetry.


 Thought and Feeling iD Poetry. What Is his idea? What thought does he try to express?" said a distin- guished critic and professor of English literature to whom I had read a brief poem of MT. Robert Loveman. I had not known that MT. Loveman Cor whom, by the way, l had not heard as much as I expect to) had tried to eS- press a thought-had supposed that his aim was to produce an emotion, a feel ing. That is all that a poet-aS a poet can do. He may be philosopher as we'll as poet-nay have a thought, IS profound thought as you please, but if he do not express it so as to produce an emotion in an emotional mind he has not spoken as a poet speaks. It Ia the philosophers trade to make us think, the poets to make us feel. If he is so fortunate as to have his thoughr, well and good; he can make us feel, with it as well as without-and with out it as well as with.
 One would not care to give up the philosophy that underruns so much of Shakespeare's work, but how little it's occasional absence affects our delight is shown by the reading of such mon sense verses" as the song in "As You Like It," beginning:
 Tt was lover and his lass,
 With hey. and a ho, and a hey
 nonino.'
 One does not need the music; the lines sing themselves, and are full of very spirit of poetry. What the dick ems they may chance to mean is quite another matter. What is poetry, any how, but glorious nonsense?" But how very glorious the nonsense hap pens to be. What thought" did Ariel try to express in his songs in "The Tempest? There is hardly the tenth part of an idea" in them; yet who that has rudimentary, or even a vestigial, susceptibility to sentiment and feeling can read them without the thrill that is stubborn to the summoning of the profoundest reflections of Hamlet in his inkiest cloak?
 Poetry may be conjoined with thought. In the great poet it com monly is-that is to say, we award the palm to him who is great in more than one direction. But the poetry is thing apart from the thought and de- manding a separate consideration The two have no more essential connection than the temple and it's granite, the statue and it's bronze. Is the scuIptor's work less great in the clay than it be- comes in the hands of the foundry man?
 One may know what is poetry-a few of us do: but no one knows what poetry is. No man. from Milton down to the acutest and most pernicious lex icographer, has been able to define it's name. To catch that butterfly the crit les net is not fine enough by much Like electricity. it is felt, not known If it could be known, if the secret were accessible to analysis, why, one could be taught to write poetry without hav- ing been born unto singing
 So it happens that the most pene- trating criticism must leave eternally unsaid the thing that is most worth saying. We can say of a poem as of picture, an Ionic column, or any work of art: Tt is charming." But who and how it charms-there we are dumb its creator no less than another. What is it in art before which all buc
 
 penitent critic confess the futility oe speech? Why does a certain disposi- tion of words affect us deeply when it differently arranged to mean the same thing they stir no emotion whatever? He who can answer that has surprised the secret of the Sphinx. and after him shall be no more poetry forever.
 Expound, who is able, the charm of these lines from "Kubla Khan:
 "A damsel with a dulcimer
 In a vision once I saw.
 It was an Abyssinian maid.
 And on her lucimer. she played,
 Singing of Mount Abora."
 There is no thought" here-nothine but the baldest nara tive in common words arranged in their natural order: but upon whose heartstrings does not that maiden play?-and who does not adore her? Take this:
 And mid this tumult Kubla heard
 from far
 Ancestral voices prophesying war" Or this:
 "A savage place! az holy and en-
 chanted
 As e'er beneath waning moon was
 haunted