feel that the artificial verse forms hamper instead of beautify the expression of the poet's emotions, I do not think that such forms ever will be, nor need be utterly abandoned. Man will always love a ringing, rhyming ballad or song. 

I have devoted a chapter to the poetry of the most poetical nation, the Arabs; their poets produced the anomaly of utilizing the most artificial metres, and yet never lost sight of the fact that ecstasy was the very life of the poem. Probably no poets in the world have produced such exquisite love poetry as the Arabs; they have also had great influence on modern European poetry, for it is being recognized that modern romantic fiction, especially in its employment of the tenderness of the love sentiment as a frequent theme, was transplanted from them. 

Poetry is the soul of literature, and we should cease limiting the term to rhythmical or patterned productions, and apply it to emotional writing in general. No term for the word poet in any language that I am acquainted with includes in its etymological significance the idea of rhythm or metrical pattern. The Hebrew word for poet is one who utters prophecies or parables; the Greek word signifies a "maker"; the Latin word "seer," the Arabian word "one who knows." Critics of the Bible have especially recognized that the chief characteristic of both the true and the false prophet (Nabi) was the ecstatic state; the Bible itself is of course authority for this fact. The inferior prophet was one, however, in whom the ecstatic state was hypnotically produced, in whom the rational and moral faculties were suspended; the great prophets were those in whom a powerful sense of social justice was illuminated by the ecstatic state; hence the prophecies of the Bible are not orations wherein rhetoric is a factor, but genuine literature of ecstasy, or poetry in rhythmical prose, using parallelism. 

I need not continue to give analyses of the Greek "poetes," the Latin "vates," or the Arabian "shair," for it has been usually conceded that these words all refer in their primary significance to the imaginative work, or ecstatic state of the author, and not to the mere dabbler in verse forms. 

With theories of poetry being a product of the unconscious, as developed by Freud and his disciples, or as being expression as advanced by Croce, my task does not become so utterly devoid of reason as may appear at first sight. One must not forget that the critics of poetry have formed their conceptions of poetry by deducing rules from the verse poems of the world's literature. Instead of looking ahead, 

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