POERIO 



POETRY 



259 



prosperity nor adversity ; ' any motion would up- 

 set him, and his worst falls were after successes, 

 or with success just in sight.' A mixture of the 

 seraph and the tramp, he oscillated between the 

 skies and the gutter, gravitating gradually down- 

 wards, because Tie had no god but self. Ambition, 

 aspiration, self-respect, and the strongest love of 

 which he was capable his only real love, for his 

 devoted child-wife could not keep him from the 

 brandy and opium which he knew to be his poisons. 

 As to his genius there is little room for question. 

 Weird, wild, fantastic, almost ghoulish (judged by 

 its results), finding its joy in gloom and its chief 

 inspiration in memories or imaginations of dead 

 women, dwelling by choice and habit on themes 

 of ruin and desolation, on the awful, the horrible, 

 even the foul, it was yet most genuine and notable; 

 if not of the highest order, among the most pic- 

 turesque and striking gifts ever vouchsafed to man. 

 Ideality was its strongest note, but Poe could make 

 realism serve his turn. His ratiocinative powers, 

 exercised about 1841 in deciphering cryptograms 

 and detecting the plot of Barnaby Jtudye from the 

 opening chapters, were marvellously displayed in 

 some of his tales, especially those of Parisian 

 murders, which were highly praised and widely 

 circulated in France. At home during his lifetime 

 his amazing tales were strangely neglected, and he 

 was known chiefly as a critic. In this capacity he 

 perhaps deserved less praise, and certainly less 

 blame, than has befallen him. Occasionally mis- 

 led by hatred or friendship, he was usually honest, 

 independent, and fearless even reckless; and he 

 was first in this field as a reformer, deriding 

 inflated mediocrity and discerning new-born power, 

 sometimes long before it was discovered by the 

 public. But his proper work was poetry and im- 

 aginative prose. His parade of scholarship rested 

 on the slightest foundation. Of humour he had 

 no particle, and some of his tales are poor stuff: 

 such sold more readily than his best. His verses 

 are often strained, artificial, full of mannerisms; 

 'everything is subordinate to sound.' In these, 

 and in the more personal of his tales, wherein 

 great wit and madness mingle, he was ' the poet 

 of a single mood." He will be long remembered 

 for a few poems and many masterpieces of brief, 

 powerful, and most peculiar fiction. In his own 

 walk he stands unsurpassed if not alone, with a 

 halo of mystery, gloom, and terror about him. 



Apart from earlier sketches, and Mrs Whitman's Poe 

 and ha Critic* (1860), his life has been written, gener- 

 ally for Home reprint of his works, by J. H. Ingram (1874 

 and 1880), R. H. Stoddard (1875; see the six -volume 

 edition of 1884), E. L. Didier (1876), and W. F. Gill 

 (1877). G. E. Woodberry ( 'American Men of Letters," 

 1885) unearthed some new facts. See also E. C. 

 Stedman's Poe ( 1881 ). An edition by Stedman and 

 \\'o.*ll>rry contains memoir and introduction (10 vols. 

 IMiir. !Ki); another edition (10 vols. 1895-90), published 

 I i.v Lippincott, baa neither. 



Poerio, CARLO, Italian patriot, was born on 

 the 10th of December 1803, son of a Neapolitan 

 lawyer who had suffered imprisonment and exile 

 in the cause of liberty. He accompanied his 

 father into exile, but on his return became an 

 advocate at Naples. He was repeatedly im- 

 prisoned for his services to the liberal cause ; 

 and in 1848 he organised the famous demonstra- 

 tion of the 27th January, which was destined to 

 produce the constitution of the 10th February. 

 Under it he was successively nominated director of 

 Police and minister of Public Instruction; but he 

 soon resigned, and was appointed deputy for Naples 

 to tin- parliament. On the 19th July 1849 he was 

 arrested, charged with being a member of a secret 

 society, 'the Italian Unity,' and condemned to 

 irons. With fifteen others he was confined in one 



rnpjriKht 1891, 1897, ml 

 1900 in the U.S. by J. B. 

 LtppiDuolt t'nni|in[i\ . 



small chamber in the island-prison of Nisida. Diplo- 

 matic protests from various governments Mr 

 Gladstone's was declared by Garibaldi to have 

 sounded the first trumpet-call of Italian liberty and 

 eloquent denunciations of the royal tyranny moved 

 Ferdinand II. at last in 1858 to ship sixty-six 

 prisoners to America. They persuaded the 

 captain to land them at Cork, and Poerio returned 

 by London to Turin. There he became a member 

 of the parliament, and in 1861 its vice-president. 

 He died at Florence, 28th April 1867. The elder 

 brother ALESSANDRO (1802-48), who fell in battle 

 for the liberation of Venice, shared his father's 

 exile, studied in Germany, settled in Florence, 

 and devoted his life mainly to poetry and patriot- 

 ism. His poems, which contain some of the most 

 stirring Italian songs of freedom, have been re- 

 peatedly published. See a monograph on Ales- 

 sandro by Imbriani (Naples, 1884). 



Poet Laureate. See LAUREATE. 



Poetry. That one of the fine arts which em- 

 ploy* rhythmical language as the medium of its ex- 

 pression. The present form of 

 the word is due to the old French 

 noun puetcrle, hut both are de- 

 rived from the Greek Ttoielv, ' to make.' A poet was 

 Troirirf/f, ' a maker or composer,' and poetry Trow/oif, 

 'the act of making or forming.' A poem was 

 iroiri/ia, ' a thing made and finished.' Into all these 

 expressions there entered the sense of artistic 

 fashioning, and poetry from the first was felt to be, 

 like sculpture, painting, or music, the work of a 

 creative craftsman. As we cannot conceive of 

 sculpture without something carved or modelled, 

 or of painting without something painted, so poetry 

 cannot, in the first instance, be conceived without 

 the coincident idea of language rhythmically 

 arranged. If this idea be absent the term must 

 be used allusively or figuratively, as its counter- 

 parts often and legitimately are in the cases of 

 those other arts. But to the primitive conception 

 of poetry rhythm is absolutely necessary. In 

 other words, it is only by a license, and in a sense 

 which is unscientific, that we can speak of any- 

 thing which is not composed in verse as poetry. 

 To this rule, however, there are some conventional 

 exceptions which will presently be mentioned. 



Verse, therefore, is the essential vehicle of poetry, 

 and on the varieties of versification the external 

 form of any given poetical product depends. That 

 species of rhythm on which verse is founded is 

 the law of regularly recurring succession of ar- 

 ticulate sounds. Verse was defined by Dr Edwin 

 Guest as ' a succession of articulate sounds 

 regulated by a rhythm so definite that we can 

 readily foresee the results which follow from its 

 application.' The definiteness, repetition, and 

 formal character of verse-rhythm distinguish it 

 from that laxer and more undulating rhythm which 

 gives charm to fine prose. The difference is one 

 not of amount but of kind. All good verse must 

 be severely regulated, and must obey the laws of 

 its own prosody. The rhythm of prose, on the 

 contrary, must, in order to be good of its species, 

 be unrecurrent. No greater fault can be com- 

 mitted in prose than trie intentional or even acci- 

 dental introduction of passages which can be read 

 as verse that is, as recurrent rhythm. Poetry, 

 therefore, in the English sense of the term, is, in 

 its external form, an arrangement of syllables into 

 verses or staves, distinguished by the rhythmical 

 accidents of quantity and accent, and effected by 

 the law of succession. 



This definition of the external form of poetry, 

 however, is not sufficient, and to complete it 

 is admittedly so extremely difficult as almost 

 to defy expression. In defining the term poetry, 



