The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetry
is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of
its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and,
therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals
with the material, the outward--humanity concreted into events; the
lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to
gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and
lyric--the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward
while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by
the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the
strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of
one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must
be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his
actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of
humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in
their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest
feelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its
highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and
all prosaic circumscriptions.
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