An introduction to poetry - 1909 Author:Raymond Macdonald Alden Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the world beyond himself, by what is often called the " objective " method, the result is narrative or epic poetry. If he speaks for himself, setting forth inner... more » experiences (not necessarily his own in fact, but made his own for the time being) by the " subjective " method, the result is lyrical poetry. If he combines these two methods, presenting an action objectively, but doing so in the words and through the emotional experiences of the actors, the result is dramatic poetry. This is the classification used by the ancient Greeks, whose tact, as Matthew Arnold observes, " in matters of this kind was infallible;" and, while it is not adapted absolutely without question to the whole body of modern poetry, it is the division of the subject which modern criticism has generally preferred. The explanation of the three classes of poetry, as here given, is substantially Hegel's. No complete exposition of the matter has come down to us from ancient times, Aristotle's work being notoriously deficient on the side of lyrical poetry. The origin of the threefold division, however, was doubtless purely natural rather than philosophical. The epic was the popular poetry of recital; the lyric (or " melic ") was song-poetry, intended for use by an individual singer with accompaniment, while from this were distinguished the elegiac and choral lyrics (as we now should call them), rather by their metrical form and manner of delivery than by any deeper considerations; the drama was of course quite distinct (although involving the choral lyric) for the same reason. Here aselsewhere the instinct to classify philosophically is a modern development. Certain minor groups of poetry, not easily conforming to these three, were however recognized by the ancients; and as the development of the art has gone...« less