THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 213 



tion between the substance of poetry and that of 

 prose. The settlement of this will decide another 

 question, quite as important, Whether the series of 

 fine arts should be enlarged by the addition of prose 

 writing ? We must therefore investigate these two 

 questions briefly. 



It is plain that, since poetry is creation, it cannot 

 be limited to composition in the form of verse unless 

 we can show that imaginative creation in the medium 

 of thought and language demands verse as its only 

 normal expression. But to this there are two objec- 

 tions, which together are fatal. In the first place, it 

 is a fact that some of the greatest poems lose nothing 

 essential to their poetic character by being translated 

 into an unversified form : witness the Book of Job, 

 in our English Bible ; the translation of the Odyssey, 

 by Butcher and Lang ; and John Carlyle's version of 

 Dante's Inferno: something of effect they may and 

 do lose, but they are real poems of the highest order, 

 just as they are translated. In the second place, 

 there are unversified works of genius that are un- 

 questionable poems; for instance, Coleridge's wonder- 

 ful fragment The Wanderings of Cain, De Ouincey's 

 Vision of Sudden Death, with the Dream Fugue that 

 follows it, his Flight of a Tartar Khan, and Jean 

 Paul Richter's Dream. In fact, verse and poetry are 

 quite distinct. Verse may often be the form of 

 poetry, and is usually its most effective and most 



