trance, and speak out of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body.*

Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of poetry is not the same as that known to mysticism. However, the ecstasy in both springs from the unconscious and is the fruit of an emotional soul because of inherited memories of past emotions. In the ecstasy of the mystic, which is usually what is called "religious experience," there is really little application of the reason. It is even often pathological and is both the product and the cause of a belief in absurd dogmas. It is often merely a sublimated passion for morality, or the result, as Freudians have shown, of a hysterical attachment to parents, or the idealization of a father. It is often a sublimated sex love due to repression. Every one has been struck with the sensuous images in the conceptions of the mystics. Broadly speaking, mysticism seeks a condition of being united to a personal God who is supposed to exist outside of nature; it craves to partake of His holiness, and to cultivate purity and be rid of the earthy. He who rejects belief in an anthropomorphic God or to the mystics' particular religions can have little of the mystics' feelings. He does not enter into sympathy with their ideas, and this militates against the university of mystic poetry. The ecstasy does not "catch." Most of the mystic poetry of the world, especially that centering around asceticism and dogma, has importance only for the believer in the mystic's philosophy. Very little of it has literary value, although it often is presented in an emotional and effective

manner.

But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism *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.

that is universal and modern, and will appeal to all in spite of their religious beliefs. When the poet recognizing God in nature seeks to identify himself with nature by love and admiration for her, by a passion for a life that is in accordance with her commands, his poetry embodying such ecstasy is universal and is lifted into a high plane. It becomes a sort of ecstatic statement of pantheistic philosophy that even the believer may accept. That is why the Persian poet, Jalalu 'l-Din Rumi, for example, appeals to us and why his works are of such high order.

Sufism or Persian mysticism began in asceticism and ended in pantheism. It became a desire of a union with nature. In fact, it was an ecstatic state of love for man, nature, God. It had its roots however in physical love, and a story is told of a man who, wanting to become a Sufi, was told first to love some woman. Some critics even declare that many of the Persian love poems are really mystical poems, and though this is only partly true, it is certain that the Persian mystical poems are really love poems.

The mystic poems of the later Mohammedan Sufis are in fact anti-Mohammedan, and yet by a curious paradox they become after much controversy acceptable to the Church.

There is also much that is modern in the Pre-buddhistic Vedas and Upanishads, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the pantheistic character of the ideas and the universality of the emotions.

The ecstasy of the pantheistic mystic is a secular feeling that we all experience, and is the substance of literature in prose and verse. We have much modern mystical poetry that has a universal appeal; it is also pantheistic in character and shows the poet's desire for union not with an anthropomorphic God, but with nature whom he recog

nizes as his God. The best illustration of it is the famous passage in Wordsworth's lines composed above Tintern Abbey, in which he tells us he hears in nature "the still, sad music of humanity." The entire passage is great poetry, not because of the blank verse but because of the mystical pantheistic ecstasy.

Sane mystical poetry may then be of a very high order. You will find examples of it in Blake, Emerson, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, Whitman's Chanting the Square Deific and Swinburne's Hertha are great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.

Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book, Hieroglyphics, where he touched the borders of the truth of the distinction between the literature of ecstasy and general literature, but he introduced too many unbalanced views about literature being unrelated to life. He was also thinking too exclusively of that religious ecstasy that is found in the Catholic Church only. He also took as his model for an example of ecstasy, Pickwick Papers, where there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in Vanity Fair where there is much. He also, strange to relate, found no ecstasy in Meredith or the later Hardy novels, and in no intellectual productions marked with liberal thought except those of Rabelais. He showed no insight into the real greatness of literature, because of his narrow conception of ecstasy.

Ecstasy in the broad sense is any excited condition of the emotions. Besides the meaning the word has in a narrow mystic and a medical sense, with neither of which sigrificances are we here concerned, it is understood generaly as referring to any condition where man is over

powered by his feelings. It is this condition which makes the poet write, and the reader is brought into a similar state with the poet by reading the poems. Hence when the prose writer describes his ecstatic state, or draws people into such a state, he is also a poet. The critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when ecstatical, are therefore poetry.

It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted piece of ecstatical writing.

Many people are under the impression that when we speak of ecstasy we mean a state where reason is utterly dethroned. Yet the Greeks, who make inspiration the source of art, never let the passions so rule that utter chaos resulted in the poet's creation. In Greek literature we have a blending of reason and ecstasy. Professor Butcher has pointed out in his excellent essay on “Art and Inspiration," in his Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, the potency of reason in Greek poetry. The ideas of the Greek writers were emotionalized, and there were ideas in their emotional products. Demosthenes was like Plato, a passionate thinker; Pindar, Æschylus and Sophocles were reasoning poets.

The Greeks used the word ecstasy in a modern secular sense rather than in a spiritual or pathological one. It was the unconscious memory of the poet coming to the fore and utilizing the intellect to pour light on the soul. It was not the mystic's ecstasy where irrational conclusions were arrived at because of some abnormality in the seer. The poet was always a critic and a philosopher who tamed his wildest thoughts. "Moderns are prone," says Butcher, "to believe that the action of poetic genius abdicates its rights and descends to the lower level of talent when it begins to reason. Greek literature decisively refutes sich

a notion. It exhibits the critical faculty as a great underlying element in the creative faculty."

Greek poetry then is the portrayal of reasoning passion, using at the same time a conscious technique. It was the outpouring of the personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It represented the breaking forth of the unconscious into expression, controlled by a censorship on the part of the poet.

Plato's idea about poetry being a form of madness may, however, still be accepted, when we understand by madness the being imbued with one's emotions in a manner not depriving the poet of his intellectual powers. Poetry is only the result of inspiration, if by this term we mean that rationalized emotions have so accumulated as suddenly to seek expression. Every poet, in prose or verse, writes from the unconscious and he usually gets lost in his own characters or speaks directly in his own person. The writer, however, is not mad, nor is his art allied to madhess. He is usually too sane, using his judgment at the same time that his emotions are aroused. So we can still subscribe to Plato's idea of unconscious art, put in the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue Ion:

All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed; like the Corybantian revellers in their dances, who are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains, yet who, when falling under the power of music and metre are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in possession of their mind. And the soul of the lyric poets does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from the honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they are like bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is