Excerpt from The World's Best Poetry, Vol. 9 of 10: Of Tragedy, of Humor; The Old Case of Poetry in a New Court The task of poetics, as yet almost untried, is to make clear the relations between higher and lower forms. Like war, marriage, worship, magic, per sonal adornment, and a dozen other institutions of this sort, poetry is an element in human life which seems to go back to the beginnings of so clety. Trustworthy writers even say it was one of the more conspicuous factors in the making of society; and when one is asked whether poetry, that is, emotional rhythmic utterances, must be regarded as a decreasing factor in contemporary social progress, one faces a question of socio logical as well as of literary interest, and one must answer it on broader ground than biograph ical criticism, in clearer terms than can be fur hished by those old hysterics about genius. To treat the question as it is almost invariably treated, to make it an ingenious speculation whether any more great poets can arise under our modern conditions, whether Goethe, if he were born now, would not be Simply a great naturalist, and whether Robert Browning or Huxley better solved the riddle of the painful earth, - all this is to keep up an unwholesome separation of po etics from vital and moving sciences, and to make the discussion itself mere chatter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.