d firmly preserved in tradition; it is verse, too, which best
guards the original fire. Prose discourses, whether in their first
reporting or in their subsequent tradition more readily tend to dilate and
to relax their style. Nor is any style of prose so open as the
Deuteronomic to additions, parentheses, qualifications, needless
recurrence of formulas and favourite phrases, and the like.

Therefore in the selection of materials available for estimating the range
and character of Jeremiah's activities as a prophet, we must not reject
any prose Oracles offered by the Book as his, simply because they are in
prose. This reasonable caution will be of use when we come to consider the
question of the authenticity of such important passages as those which
recount his call, or represent him as assisting in the promulgation of
Deuteronomy, and uttering the Oracle on the New Covenant.(52)

But, while it has been necessary to reject as groundless the theory that
Jeremiah was exclusively a poet of a limited temper and a single form of
verse and was not the author of any of the prose attributed to him, we
must keep in mind that he did pour himself forth in verse; that it was
natural for a rural priest such as he, aiming at the heart of what was
mainly a nation of peasants, to use the form or forms of folk-song most
familiar to them(53)--in fact the only literary forms with which they were
familiar; and that in all probability more of the man himself comes out in
the poetry than in the prose which he has left to us. By his native gifts
and his earliest associations he was a poet to begin with; and therefore
the form and character of his poetry, especially as revealing himself,
demand our attention.

* * * * *

From what has been said it is clear that we must not seek too high for
Jeremiah's rank as a poet. The temptation to this--which has overcome some
recent writers--is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations
of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which
that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was
just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was
reared--sometimes of an exquisite exactness of tone and delicacy of
feeling, but sometimes full both of what are metrical irregularities
according to modern standards, and of coarse images and similes. To reduce
the metrical irregularities, by such arbitrary methods as Duhm'