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Show ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT XCI with a distinct cognition that personification is poetic. All kinds of personification thus become tropes, and mind itself is clearly understood to belong only to animate beings. Qualification, similitude, and allegory still remain with a more or less clear cognition that qualities are but qualities, simili tudes are but similitudes, and allegories are but allegories, and that they are legitimate only as metaphors and constitute only a poetical method of expression through which the wisdom of science may be expressed in such manner as to impress it deeply upon the heart. Trope, therefore, is the last and greatest acquisition to poetical art. Romance is poetry without rhythm. Poetry is romance with rhythm, but there is added to it a much higher element of metaphor- the special method of poetic expression. There has grown up in the history of poetry a recognition of four classes of poetry, namely, the lyric, the epic, the dramatic, and the idyllic. These names pretty well express the characteristics of the four kinds of poetry herein enumerated. If poetry is to be classified under these terms, they require both some restriction and enlargement in their limits. Lyric poetry is pretty well defined when we call it song poetry. Epic poetry is pretty well defined when we call it similitude poetry; but many poems which have sometimes been called epics are excluded. Dramatic poetry is not well defined as allegoric poetry if it is held to mean that poetry which is constructed as dialogue; but it is well defined if we understand it as that poetry whose principal element is dramatic, for then it will be seen that every dramatic poem is an allegory of good and evil. Idyllic poetry is well characterized as poetry whose chief element of expression inheres in trope. Read again the Idylls of the King for the purpose of seeing how their dramatic characteristics are subordinated to tropical expression, and I think you will conceive that Tennyson was right in characterizing them as the Idylls of the King rather than as the Allegories of the King. There is a fact in history that here must be considered, in order that we may not obtain an erroneous opinion about the argument set forth in this essay. The Roman and Hellenic |
