imagination capable "of projecting itself into the very consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the tone, the color and the temperature thereof." (James Russell Lowell: _The Function of the Poet._ "The Imagination." P. 70.) FOOTNOTES: I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth missed ecstasy. This is the idea in Donne's poem, _The Ecstasy_. Professor William Lyon Phelps in the preface to his _The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century_ claims that the influence of Donne has never been greater than at present. "Hebrew poetry is Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness. 'Ecstasy affords The occasion and expediency determines the form.'" MARIANNE MOORE in _Others_ (1916). CHAPTER III ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY Aristotle was the first critic who placed little stress on the importance of metre in poetry. If the critics had followed him, instead of merely referring to his _Poetics_ and trying to discover the "borderland between prose and poetry," there probably would have been little confusion as to what is poetry. He saw there was poetry in the prose mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and in the dialogues of Socrates, though these were not classified as poetry. Incidentally he found little poetry in Empedocles, who in spite of his metre was primarily a physicist. The passage from the _Poetics_ is worth quoting entire for it contains the nucleus of all arguments for prose poetry. I quote from S. H. Butcher's translation: For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegaic, or any similar metre. People, do, indeed, add the word "make" or "poet" to the name of the metre, and speak of elegaic poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, _as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name_. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as Chaeremon did in his _Centaur_, which is a medley composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet. He also says: "The Poet or maker should be the maker of plots rather than of verse; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates is
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