they have always looked back. Whenever a new great poet appeared, like Wordsworth, Whitman or Ibsen for instance, they had to modify their theories, and to revise their books on poetics and rhetoric. If the productions of Homer and Æschylus had been entirely different, we no doubt would have had other conceptions of poetry prevailing. Yet it is only by mere accident that Homer dealt with gods, wars, mythical events and employed dactylic hexameter. It is again also by pure chance that Æschylus used various metres, made Prometheus and the Furies living beings, was sponsor for a philosophy of divine punishment and often indulged in artificial diction. Had these poets written novels instead, conveying just as much genius and ecstasy as they did in their verse works, the critics of poetry would have deduced an entirely different conception of it. 

To Democritus belongs the honor of having first recognized among the Greeks that ecstasy is the condition of the poet. To Plato goes the distinction for having fully developed this theory. Aristotle accepted also the view that poetry is ecstasy. The author of the ancient treatise _On the Sublime_ perceived that the characteristic of poetic genius is in the arousing of the ecstatic state. He says, in a passage which deserves citation: "For it is not to persuasion (i. e., rhetoric) but to ecstasy that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer." 

But the ultimate significance of my volume is not concerned with the prose form of poetry, but with poetry as a psychological process, as a social force and as a philosophical expression. 

Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and synonymous terms for the primary source of poetry. They are the fruitage of the turmoil of the soul, due to the apparently forgotten memories in us of the emotional lives in all our ancestors. They represent also the impassioned activities of our logical and rational faculties, the sum of the views of life of the past. They emanate from the dream life of man, whether this occurs in the waking or sleeping state. They are the workings of the force we call inspiration. 

My view of poetry as emotional prose literature enables me, I hope, to eliminate many of the so-called conflicts between poetry and philosophy and between poetry and morals. Philosophical and moral essays become poetry in those parts lit up by ecstasy or emotion. If philosophy deals with rare and profound truths in regard to the universe, if morals treat of the noblest relations between man and man, then I know of no higher form of poetry than a philosophical 

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