It is now some time since I wrote, somewhat vaguely (with reference to one of d’Annunzio’s books) that a novel is a poem and should be conceived and executed as such if it is to prove of worth. “The novel is based upon the same esthetic as the poem; the original novel was composed in verse: for example, the Odyssey, a novel of adventure; the Aeneid, a chivalrous romance; the first French novels, as everybody knows, were poems, and it is only at a fairly late day that they were transposed into prose to adapt them to the indolence and the ignorance of a larger reading public. From this origin the novel inherits the possibility of a certain nobility, and any genuine writer, if he concerns hims…
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