hythmic words. It may have been the genius of a single dancer
that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his
separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the
others felt. He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as
his own.

Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to
liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetry
has a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September"
rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned
to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial
wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his _New
Study of English Poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that
is not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better to
recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree
of poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil,
but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have in
all these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the
"free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither
delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writings
of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is a
delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting
opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into
the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by
giving them rhymes. His satires and _The Rape of the Lock_ are, no doubt,
better poetry than the _Essay on Man_, because he poured into them a still
more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of
poetry which would exclude even Pope the "essayist" from the circle of the
poets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are
to-day, of all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately, "poetry," like "religion," is a word that we are almost
bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" in
contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry.
Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love as
opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of
Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense
classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind