most advanced analytical text-book one cannot
get a final satisfaction from "doing a sum" in English literature as
one would work a problem in arithmetic. When applied to the higher
arts, study, deep and true as one can make it, leaves one the surer
that there is a wisdom beyond, which cometh not by study alone.

Least of all can the deepest things in poetry be learned by mere
study. Poetry deals with feeling, which study excludes. Study, indeed,
seems to belong exclusively to the prose habit; it seems to be of the
intellect and not of the emotions; to be of the mind and not of the
spirit. We cannot write a text-book in poetry, nor can we ever in a
text-book written in prose put all the secret of poetry. Beyond the
text-book always lies the higher wisdom born of that which Bacon
called observation, which most of us now call insight, that immediate
apprehension of the highest relations which comes as a revelation in
our inspired moments.

In spite of all this the study of poetry has an important function,
and it is the purpose of this article to show how to use it most
effectively. Poetry is one of the most difficult of all arts to study,
so difficult that it has had few text-books and no complete
exposition. The inquirer searching for help will find only a few
hand-books, the most useful of which are these: Gummere: "Beginnings
of Poetry" and "Hand-book of Poetry"; Schipper: "Metrik"; Lanier:
"Science of English Verse"; Guest: "English Rhythms"; Stedman: "The
Nature and Elements of Poetry." Excellent as these are, he may lament
when he has read them that he has found the history of poetic forms,
and the technique of poetic method, where he hoped to find the secret
of poetry. He will be likely to get as much help from writings on
poetry that are not text-books, such as Matthew Arnold's Essays: "On
Translating Homer," "Last Words on Translating Homer," "Celtic
Poetry," "Introduction to the Poetry of Wordsworth," and the
"Introduction to Humphry Ward's English Poets"; Emerson's Essays: "The
Poet" and "Poetry and Imagination"; Wordsworth's Introduction to the
"Lyrical Ballads"; Poe's striking little essays on the art of poetry;
Aristotle's "Rhetoric"; Macaulay's "Essay on Milton"; Lowell's "Essay
on Dryden"; and many a passage of illuminative comment from Milton,
from Pope, from Dryden, from Coleridge and from many another. For one
who has not known and read much poetry the best introduction to its
study may well be the p