Excerpt from Poetic Symposia: A Toast to Poets of All the Ages As poets and their productions are to receive our attention in this reading, it should be a matter of deep interest to all first to consider what poetry is and under what conditions it is produced. Historically viewed, it is as ancient as prose, for both were in use as far back as history runs. It is conceded by all authorities to be one of the five major fine arts, and, in this respect, it stands on a par with architecture, music, painting and sculpture, and each of the three last named - music, painting and sculpture - lays claim to poetry as its handmaiden. When it is seen that poetry has the whole domain of the kwn and the unkwn - the real and the imaginary - to draw upon, while each of the other branches of fine art is bound in some way more closely to adhere to realty, it is apparent that poetry has some advantage over all other of the fine arts. The Century Dictionary defines poetry as one of the fine arts which addresses itself to the feelings and the imagination by the instrumentality of musical and moving words, but adds as a secondary thought, that it is the art which has for its object the exciting of intellectual pleasure by means of vivid, imaginative, passionate and inspiriting language, usually, though t necessarily, arranged in the form of measured verse or numbers. 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 techlogy 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.