The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language
“The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language.” By Hudson Maxim. Illustrations by William Oberhardt. Price $2.50 net. Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York, London. The name of Hudson Maxim is one to conjure with in military ordnance, high explosives, smokeless powder, and military engineering. The public forgot if it ever knew that he was ever in the printing and publishing business, much less that he was a literary student and critic. The above noted volume will dispel the uninformation. Mr. Maxim in this volume, as in his inventions, is highly original. He says truly what has before been said, that “verse and poetry can not be the same thing, and that poetry must depend upon something other than these properties of sound — rhythm, meter, rime, reading flow, or pitch, duration, loudness, and tone-color — altho in the expression of poetic thought these properties of sound may be used just as they are used in the expression of any other thought. And they aid in the expression of poetic thought just as they aid in the expression of ordinary thought.” He therefore concludes that “verse, and not poetry, is emotional,” because “the emotions find expression in the character of the sounds uttered.” “Poetry is based on the meaning of words, while verse is based on the sounds of words, and upon the way those sounds are marshaled in a sentence to stimulate and qualify the mind of the hearer for the perception of thought, by inducing a mood in harmony with the thought expressed.” Our author ridicules the idea of Shakespeare’s poet with eye in “fine frenzy rolling;” does not think that “divine afflatus” is necessary to poetical productions. Mr. Maxim states thus the object of his book: “The main object of this book is to provide a practical method for literary criticism and analysis, and a standard of uniform judgment for determining the relative merits of literary productions, and further, to supply a more practical and efficient means than we have had heretofore for the standardization of poetry, whereby any poem may be assayed, and the amount of its poetic gold determined and separated from the slag and dross. . . . The more I have studied, the stronger has grown my conviction that no other subject of equal interest and importance to mankind has been so neglected by science, so abandoned to the chaos of misunderstanding. There is, indeed, no general agreement as to what constitutes poetry. There are as many opinions as there are critics. Often the worst poetry is pronounced the best, and often the best the worst, by some who are considered leading authorities.” The author gives us his own original definition of poetry, and also coins a new word as expressive of its peculiar power; namely, “potentry.” To the literary student the volume will be highly helpful; and we wish that it might be studied to profit by the would-be poets who write neither poetry nor passable verse.