Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WHITMAN AND TAINE How, then, did the democratic movement find official expression, so to speak, in the poetry of its day, and in what final authoritative shape was the democratic theory of poetic art placed before the world ? It is a commonplace that democracy and science were the dominant forces of that age which closed with the waning nineteenth century, and which had produced some of .the great if not the greatest poets, and some of the very greatest scholars of all time; it is well to come to terms with it, or at least with the part of it where our interest lies, and to cast up the account so far as we can command the facts. Poetry was still conceded by the nineteenth century to be the nobler part of literature. The poet of that time had not only the old ideas of freedom, of sovereignty of the people, quickened with a new life, but he had the overwhelming idea ofcosmic democracy, of a confederacy of natural forces working by uniform law, which long before and in other guise had moved Lucretius, but came now as fresh revelation, confirmed by a series of the most amazing discoveries and inventions. Political ideas, of course, worked their way into poetry, and criticism has traced their path with considerable success. Brandes, in his book on nineteenth-century literature, accounts for them, their action and reaction, their confusion with what one calls ideas of the Romantic School, and how they subdued the poet or were subdued by his genius. It is an ill critical wind which does not blow you Heine's boast that he was a poet- soldier of the war for freedom, and an explanation of his exact meaning in telling his fair friend on the Brocken that he was a Knight of the Holy Spirit. His plea — A lie Menschen, gleichgeboren, Sind ein adliges Geschlecht — is a right Hein...