Lectures on Poetry - 1911 Author:John William Mackail 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: LECTURES ON POETRY THE DEFINITION OF POETRY It is a maxim of civil law that definitions are hazardous. Whoever first asked the question, What is poetry ? a... more »nd waited for an answer, stimulated thought and provoked discussion, but has perhaps not earned much gratitude. For the definition of poetry has ever since been, as it still is, the ignis fatuus of criticism. A thousand definitions have been offered, all varying from one another, sometimes to the extent of not having a single element in common. Some have been given by those whose views demand close attention and deep respect: many have been brilliant, enlightening, suggestive; all are unsatisfying. In no part of the field of letters have the Baconian idols exercised greater sway, particularly the idols of the cave and of the theatre. Definitions of poetry are nearly all infected by some fallacy due to a received system or an individual predilection. They escape from these dangers, if they do escape, only to fall victims to the idols of the market-place. For the influence exercised over men by words is greatest, and most difficult alike to estimate or to disentangle, when words themselves, the art of language, are the subject- matter as well as the medium of the enquiry. Such attempted definitions, varying infinitely as they do, fall into many different groupings according to the point of view from which they are regarded, no less than according to the position they occupy in the historical evolution of criticism, the progress and development of the human mind with regard to poetry. We may, for example, divide them into two classes accordingly as those who have framed and offered them are or are not themselves poets. A poet's definition of poetry cannot be quite negligible; for he knows, in a more intimate way than ot...« less