Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction. Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s. Fake poetry, the decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance, recalls some one else’s dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their money’s worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of “Poetry.” Acrostics and other verses of _wit_ have, I believe, much the same ancestry in the ingenious _double entendres_ with which the harassed priestesses of Delphi insured against a wrong guess. IV CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS The suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances. But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear, grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be fighting a hopeless battle. When Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out: That Time may cease and midnight never come _O lente, lente currite noctis equi_. Scholastic commentators have actually been found to wonder at the “inappropriateness” of “Go slowly, slowly, coursers of the night,” a quotation originally spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do not even note it as marking the distance the scholar Faustus has travelled since his first dry-boned Latin quotation _Bene disserere est finis logices_ which he pedantically translates: Is, to dispute well, Logicke’s chiefest end. Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater insistence of fate:-- The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike, The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd.