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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/7928-8.txt b/7928-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8162b1e --- /dev/null +++ b/7928-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11234 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet's Poet, by Elizabeth Atkins + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Poet's Poet + +Author: Elizabeth Atkins + +Posting Date: December 26, 2009 [EBook #7928] +Release Date: April, 2005 +First Posted: June 1, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POET'S POET *** + + + + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + + + + + + + + +THE POET'S POET + +Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in +English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years + +By + +ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D. + +Instructor in English, University of Minnesota + + + + +TO + +HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER + + + + +PREFACE + + +Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps +received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the +majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the +last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no +means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the +part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of +æsthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer +of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the +poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic +philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only +incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, +whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider. + +The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of +individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_ +Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a +re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and +essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the +main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. +We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic +conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing +theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an +essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission. + +It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is +not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt +has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each +question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is +inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the +lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the +spiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that +practically every utterance which we may consider,--even such as deal +with the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or +his health,--falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as +the poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be +the more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been +the most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose +nature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly +harmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are +attempting to present. + +Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. In +the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesque +in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since it +is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influenced +Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that +in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where +the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a +large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to +the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small +in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It +is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the +subject of their nature than have greater ones, but some attempt is here +made to hold them within bounds, so that they may not drown out the more +meaningful utterances of the master singers. + +The last one hundred and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, +since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a +peculiarly self-conscious attitude in the poet, and brought his +personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within +the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as +enthusiasts like to term the new stirring of interest in verse) is +revealing young poets of the present day even more frank in +self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago. + +The excursion through modern English poetry involved in these studies +has been a pleasant one. The value and interest of such an investigation +was first pointed out to me by Professor Louise Pound of the University +of Nebraska. It is with sincere appreciation that I here express my +indebtedness to her, both for the initial suggestion, and for the +invaluable advice which I have received from her during my procedure. I +owe much gratitude also to President Wimam Allan Neilson of Smith +College, who was formerly my teacher in Radcliffe College, and to +Professor Hartley Burr Alexander, of the department of Philosophy at the +University of Nebraska, who has given me unstinted help and generous +encouragement. + +ELIZABETH ATKINS. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + +PREFACE + +I. THE EGO-CENTRIC CIRCLE + +Apparent futility of verse dealing with the poet.--Its +justification.--The poet's personality the hidden theme of all +verse,--The poet's egotism.--Belief that his inspirations are +divine.--Belief in the immortality of his poems.--The romantic view that +the creator is greater than his creations.--The poet's contempt for +uninspired men.--Reaction of the public to the poet's contempt.--Its +retaliation in jeers.--The poet's wounded vanity.--His morbid +self-consciousness.--His self-imposed solitude.--Enhancement of his +egotism by solitude. + +II. THE MORTAL COIL + +View that genius results from a happy combination of physical +conditions.--The poet's reluctance to embrace such a theory.--His +heredity.--Rank.--Patricians vs. children of the soil.--His +body.--Poetic beauty.--Features expressing alert and delicate +senses.--Contrary conception of poet rapt away from sense.-- +Blindness.--Physique.--Health.--Hypersensibility of invalids.-- +Escape from fleshly bondage afforded by perfect health.--The poet's +sex.--Limitations of the woman poet.--Her claims.--The poet's +habitat.--Vogue of romantic solitude.--Savage environment.--Its +advantages.--Growing popularity of the city poet.--The wanderer.-- +The financial status of the poet.--Poverty as sharpener of +sensibility.--The poet's age.--Vogue of the young poet.--Purity of +youthful emotions.--Early death.--Claims of the aged poet.-- +Contemplation after active life. + +III. THE POET AS LOVER + +The classic conception.--Love as a disturbing factor in +composition.--The romantic conception.--Love the source of +inspiration.--Fusion of intense passion with repose essential to +poetry.--Poetic love and Platonic love synonymous.--Sensual love not +suggestive.--The poet's ascent to ideal love.--Analogy with ascent +described in Plato's _Symposium_.--Discontent with ephemeralness of +passion.--Poetry a means of rendering passion eternal.--Insatiability of +the poet's affections.--Idealization of his mistress.--Ideal beauty the +real object of his love.--Fickleness.--Its justification.--Advantage in +seeing varied aspects of ideal beauty.--Remoteness as an essential +factor in ideal love.--Sluggishness resulting from complete +content.--Aspiration the poetic attitude.--Abstract love-poetry, +consciously addressed to ideal beauty.--Its merits and defects.--The +sensuous as well as the ideal indispensable to poetry. + +IV. THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + +Reticence of great geniuses regarding inspiration.--Mystery of +inspiration.--The poet's curiosity as to his inspired moments.--Wild +desire preceding inspiration.--Sudden arrest rather than satisfaction of +desire.--Ecstasy.--Analogy with intoxication.--Attitude of reverence +during inspired moments.--Feeling that an outside power is +responsible.--Attempts to give a rational account of inspiration.--The +theory of the sub-conscious.--Prenatal memory.--Reincarnation of dead +geniuses.--Varied conceptions of the spirit inspiring song as the Muse, +nature, the spirit of the universe.--The poet's absolute surrender to +this power.--Madness.--Contempt for the limitations of the human +reason.--Belief in infallibility of inspirations.--Limitations of +inspiration.--Transience.--Expression not given from without.--The work +of the poet's conscious intelligence.--Need for making the vision +intelligible.--Quarrel over the value of hard work. + +V. THE POET'S MORALITY + +The poet's reliance upon feeling as sole moral guide.--Attack upon his +morals made by philosophers, puritans, philistines.--Professedly wicked +poets.--Their rarity.--Revolt against mass-feeling.--The aesthetic +appeal of sin.--The morally frail poet, handicapped by susceptibility to +passion.--The typical poet's repudiation of immorality.--Feeling that +virtue and poetry are inseparable.--Minor explanations for this +conviction.--The "poet a poem" theory.--Identity of the good and the +beautiful.--The poet's quarrel with the philistine.--The poet's horror +of restraint.--The philistine's unfairness to the poet's innocence.--The +poet's quarrel with the puritan.--The poet's horror of asceticism.--The +poet's quarrel with the philosopher.--Feeling upon which the poet relies +allied to Platonic intuition. + +VI. THE POET'S RELIGION + +Threefold attack upon the poet's religion.--His lack of theological +temper.--His lack of reverence.--His lack of conformance.--The poet's +defense.--Materialistic belief deadening to poetry.--His idealistic +temper.--His pantheistic leanings.--His reverence for beauty.--His +repudiation of a religion that humbles him.--Compatibility of pride and +pantheism.--The poet's nonconformance.--His occasional perverseness.-- +Inspiring nature of doubt.--The poet's thirst for God.--The occasional +orthodox poet. + +VII. THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + +The poet's alleged uselessness,--His effeminacy.--His virility.--The +poet warrior.--Incompatibility of poets and materialists.--Plato'scharge +that poetry is inferior to actual life.--The concurrence of +certain soldier poets in Plato's charge.--Poetry as an amusement +only.--The value of faithful imitation.--The realists.--Poetry as a +solace.--Poetry a reflection of the ideal essence of things.--Love of +beauty the poet's guide in disentangling ideality from the accidents of +things.--Beauty as truth.--The poet as seer.--The quarrel with the +philosopher.--The truth of beauty vs. cold facts.--Proof of validity of +the poet's truth.--His skill as prophet.--The poet's mission as +reformer.--His impatience with practical reforms.--Belief in essential +goodness of men, since beauty is the essence of things.--Reform a matter +of allowing all things to express their essence.--Enthusiasm for +liberty.--Denial of the war-poet's charge.--Poets the authors of +liberty.--Poets the real rulers of mankind.--The world's appreciation of +their importance.--Their immortality. + +VIII. A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + +Denial that the views of poets on the poet are heterogeneous.--Poets' +identity of purpose in discussing poets.--Apparent contradictions in +views.-Apparent inconsistency in the thought of each poet.--The two-fold +interests of poets.--The poet as harmonizer of sensual and spiritual.-- +Balance of sense and spirit in the poetic temperament.--Injustice to +one element or the other in most literary criticism.--Limitations of +the poet's prose criticism.--Superiority of his critical expressions +in verse.--The poet's importance.--Poetry as a proof of the idealistic +philosophy. + +INDEX + + + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE + + +Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some +entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon +the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection +which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much +more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give +it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of +thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has +blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the +"egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are +but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it +"discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all +kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their +own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the +Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with +thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which +is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again +our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it +is the mortal coil. + +In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of +the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to +the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to +carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless +round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by +simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the +squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, +never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our +dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the +quietude of transcendent beauty. + +But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively +recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an +ineffable vision, but advertisement of the author's importance? His +argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you +because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my +superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the +rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered +consciousness? + +Indeed the poet's circle is likely to appear to us even more viciousthan +that of other men. To be sure, we remember Sir Philip Sidney's +contention, supported by his anecdote of the loquacious horseman, that +men of all callings are equally disposed to vaunt themselves. If the +poet seems especially voluble about his merits, this may be owing to the +fact that, words being the tools of his trade, he is more apt than other +men in giving expression to his self-importance. But our specific +objection to the poet is not met by this explanation. Even the horseman +does not expect panegyrics of his profession to take the place of +horseshoes. The inventor does not issue an autobiography in lieu of a +new invention. The public would seem justified in reminding the poet +that, having a reasonable amount of curiosity about human nature, it +will eagerly devour the poet's biography, properly labeled, but only +after he has forgotten himself long enough to write a poem that will +prove his genius, and so lend worth to the perusal of his idiosyncratic +records, and his judgments on poetic composition. + +The first impulse of our revulsion from the self-infatuated poet is to +confute him with the potent name of Aristotle, and show him his doom +foreordained in the book of poetic Revelations. "The poet should speak +as little as possible in his own person," we read, "for it is not this +that makes him an imitator." [Footnote: _Poetics_, 1460 a.] One cannot +too much admire Aristotle's canniness in thus nipping the poet's egotism +in the bud, for he must have seen clearly that if the poet began to talk +in his own person, he would soon lead the conversation around to +himself, and that, once launched on that inexhaustible subject, he would +never be ready to return to his original theme. + +We may regret that we have not Aristotle's sanction for condemning also +extra-poetical advertisements of the poet's personality, as a hindrance +to our seeing the ideal world through his poetry. In certain moods one +feels it a blessing that we possess no romantic traditions of Homer, to +get in the way of our passing impartial judgment upon his works. Our +intimate knowledge of nineteenth century poets has been of doubtful +benefit to us. Wordsworth has shaken into what promises to be his +permanent place among the English poets much more expeditiously than has +Byron. Is this not because in Wordsworth's case the reader is not +conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from +purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us +the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we +to determine whether his sonnet, _When I Have Fears,_ is great poetry or +not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love +for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard? + +Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping +generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his +contention: + +Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and +we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make +his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of +their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether +these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating +their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney +Colvin, _John Keats,_ p. 478.] + +If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in _Blackwoods,_ we may be +more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by +Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and +Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows: + +Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters into one's +soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its +subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose +their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire +me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!".... I will cut all +this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.... I +don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to +say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have +them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. [Footnote: _Ibid.,_ p. 253.] + +If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing +their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much +better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into +the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's +sonnets, + + With this key + Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more + _Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he. +[Footnote: _House._] + +Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less +the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this +our contention? + +It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are +practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of +themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron, +concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself--oh, that accursed +selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in +scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E. +Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather +hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself +at the reader's head. + +It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration +that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself +be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to +confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the +most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he +is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, +the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical +and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no +identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.] +The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a +luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself, +to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as +compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the +self-obliterating splendor of his genius: + + In poetry there is but one supreme, + Though there are many angels round his throne, + Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid. +[Footnote: _On Shakespeare_.] + +But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, +the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What +right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper +to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the +legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that +we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure +obscure our view? + +Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon +one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old +dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic +mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of +immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet +should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, +which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in +this world. + +Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way +through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the +opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and +Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying +their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet +should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, +he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we +maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone +of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have +no competitors to dispute his place as chief character. + +At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic +poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental +entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality +cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual +world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by +his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet +cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals +nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable +from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the +other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be +embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_, +"This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the +ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: § 251.] Now, +whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, +one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, +personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures +of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization +of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered +to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the +habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge: + + In our life alone does nature live, + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd. +[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._] + +The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; +his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the +philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own +toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret +of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's +personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his +conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us, + + There was a child went forth every day, + And the first object he looked upon, that object he became. + +Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet +called _The Love of Narcissus:_ + + Like him who met his own eyes in the river, + The poet trembles at his own long gaze + That meets him through the changing nights and days + From out great Nature; all her waters quiver + With his fair image facing him forever: + The music that he listens to betrays + His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways + His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor. + His dreams are far among the silent hills; + His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain; + With winds at night vague recognition thrills + His lonely heart with piercing love and pain; + He knows again his mirth in mountain rills, + His weary tears that touch him in the rain. + +Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the +poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in +poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into +realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent +mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when +we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold +representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses +his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist +gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against +"your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a +theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great +feat." [Footnote: _Poem Outlines._] + +In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse +may point to the _Canterbury Tales,_ and show us Chaucer ambling +along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of +distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our +view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet +is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern +poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all +the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the +destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached. + +We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of +Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that +criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the +personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines, + + Great poet, 'twas thy art, + To know thyself, and in thyself to be + Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, + Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart + Can make of man. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent +objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own +personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one +character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his +presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his +representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent +criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of +his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. +"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January +13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into +prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never +have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a +poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And +Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet +than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to +show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is +the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert +Browning, September 9, 1845.] + +"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes +enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of +Verlaine, "_c'est d'être absolument soi-même_." Of course if one +concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, +the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the +poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that +civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure +to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler +way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's +word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is +nature seen through a temperament." + +Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, _Mimeseis_, did mean "seeing +through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would +have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament." +Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind were +like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things. Modern +poets, on the other hand, are inclined to grant that a person has poetic +temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window, transforming +all that is seen through it, if by any chance something _is_ seen +through it. + +If the modern poet sees the world colored red or green or violet by his +personality, it is well for the interests of truth, we must admit, that +he make it clear to us that his nature is the transforming medium, but +how comes it that he fixes his attention so exclusively upon the colors +of things, for which his own nature is responsible, and ignores the +forms of things, which are not affected by him? How comes it that the +colored lights thrown on nature by the stained windows of his soul are +so important to him that he feels justified in painting for us, +notnature, but stained-glass windows? + +In part this is, as has often been said, a result of the individualizing +trend of modern art. The broad general outlines of things have been +"done" by earlier artists, and there is no chance for later artists to +vary them, but the play of light and shade offers infinite possibilities +of variation. If one poet shows us the world highly colored by his +personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their +attention caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw +upon it. The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will +be interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious," +Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet +otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.] + +This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of +course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more +plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One +wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his +inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of +creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration +is surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that +this accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in +his work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the +lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I +know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the +musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an +assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure. +Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend +of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme, +chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group, +Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently +portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that +the mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be +paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to +ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all +other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is +mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to +forget that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, +language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, +accordingly, to be dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" +for his inspiration. + +At least this mystery surrounding his creations has much to do with +removing the artist from the comparative freedom from self-consciousness +that we ascribe to the general run of men. In addition it removes him +from the comparative humility of other thinkers, who are wont to think +of their discoveries as following inevitably upon their data, so that +they themselves deserve credit only as they are persistent and +painstaking in following the clues. The genesis of Sir Isaac Newton's +discovery has been compared to poetical inspiration; yet even in this +case the difference is apparent, and Newton did not identify himself +with the universe he conceived, as the poet is in the habit of doing. + +Not being able to account for his inspirations, the poet seems to be +driven inevitably either into excessive humility, since he feels that +his words are not his own, or into inordinate pride, since he feels that +he is able to see and express without volition truths that other men +cannot glimpse with the utmost effort. He may disclaim all credit for +his performance, in the words of a nineteenth-century verse-writer: + + This is the end of the book + Written by God. + I am the earth he took, + I am the rod, + The iron and wood which he struck + With his sounding rod. +[Footnote: L. E. Mitchell, _Written at the End of a Book._] + +a statement that provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such +amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is +really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious +states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist +"experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is +considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, +not to one's self, but to the Almighty. + +The minor American poets in the middle of the last century are often +found exhorting one another to humility, quite after the prayer-meeting +tradition. Bitter is their denunciation of the poet's arrogance: + + A man that's proud--vile groveller in the dust, + Dependent on the mercy of his God + For every breath. +[Footnote: B. Saunders, _To Chatterton._] + +Again they declare that the poet should be + + Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy._] + +telling him, + + Think not of thine own self, +[Footnote: Richard Gilder, _To the Poet._] + +adding, + + Always, O bard, humility is power. +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Poet If on a Lasting Fame._] + +One is reminded of Mrs. Heep's repeated adjuration, "Be 'umble, Ury," +and the likeness is not lessened when we find them ingratiatingly +sidling themselves into public favor. We hear them timidly inquiring of +their inspiration, + + Shall not the violet bloom? +[Footnote: Mrs. Evans, _Apologetic._] + +and pleading with their critics, + + Lightly, kindly deal, + My buds were culled amid bright dews + In morn of earliest youth. +[Footnote: Lydia M. Reno, _Preface to Early Buds._] + +At times they resort to the mixed metaphor to express their innocuous +unimportance, declaring, + + A feeble hand essays + To swell the tide of song, +[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, _Invocation._] + +and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness: + + Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts, + Win in each heart and memory a home. +[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, _Dedication._] + +But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a +librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be +absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere +expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have +taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the +genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, _In a Dull Uncertain +Brain_; Whittier, _To my Namesake_; Sidney Lanier, _Ark of the Future_; +Oliver Wendell Holmes, _The Last Reader_; Bayard Taylor, _L'Envoi_; +Robert Louis Stevenson, _To Dr. Hake_; Francis Thompson, _To My +Godchild_.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong +in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the +habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so +sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of +himself: + + I am nae poet, in a sense, + But just a rhymer like, by chance, + And hae to learning nae pretense, + Yet what the matter? + Whene'er my muse does on me glance, + I jingle at her. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik._] + +Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the +title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about +the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the +minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the +average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who +casually disposes of the poet's immortality: + + Let but the verse befit a hero's fame; + Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name. +[Footnote: _Introduction to Don Roderick._] + +Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's +conceit, assuring him: + + Ye are not great because creation drew + Large revelations round your earliest sense, + Nor bright because God's glory shines for you. +[Footnote: _Mountaineer and Poet_.] + +But in her other poetry, notably in _Aurora Leigh_ and _A Vision of +Poets,_ she amply avows her sense of the preëminence of the singer, as +well as of his song. + +While it is easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the +nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical +spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it +is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. +Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are +likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a +friend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life +engenders pride and egotism!' True--I know it does: but this pride and +egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could, +so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23, +1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is +completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of +composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and +preserving it. + +Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his +verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic +type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long +tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it +appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a +beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor, + + Well I remember how you smiled + To see me write your name upon + The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child, + You think you're writing upon stone!" + I have since written what no tide + Shall ever wash away, what men + Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide, + And find Ianthe's name again, + +or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, _Ad Amicam_, which expresses +the author's purpose to + + Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time, + Telling him that he is too insolent + Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme, + Whereof to one because thou life hast given, + The other yet shall give a life to thee, + Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven, + And compassed weaker immortality, + +or Yeats' lines _Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved_, +wherein he takes pride in the reflection: + + Weigh this song with the great and their pride; + I made it out of a mouthful of air; + Their children's children shall say they have lied. + +But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the +most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony, + + Yet to me I feel + That an internal brightness is vouchsafed + That must not die, +[Footnote: _Home at Grasmere_.] + +or in Walt Whitman's injunction: + + Recorders ages hence, + Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive + Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me. +[Footnote: See also, _Long Long Hence_.] + +Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the +importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the +clutches of the old-fashioned habit of apology, to be sure, [Footnote: +See _My Country_.]--perhaps this is one reason the radicals are so +opposed to him; but in the ranks of the radicals themselves we find very +few retaining any doubt of themselves. [Footnote: Exceptions are Jessie +Rittenhouse, _Patrius_; Lawrence Houseman, _Mendicant Rhymes_; +Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Poor Faltering Rhymes_.] Self-assertion +is especially characteristic of their self-appointed leader, Ezra Pound, +in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom +he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote: +_Lustra_.] A typical assertion is that in _Salutation the Second_, + + How many will come after me, + Singing as well as I sing, none better. + +There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the +present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile +immortality" [Footnote: _Refuge._] or James Stephens' exultation in +_A Tune Upon a Reed,_ + + Not a piper can succeed + When I lean against a tree, + Blowing gently on a reed, + +and in _The Rivals,_ where he boasts over a bird, + + I was singing all the time, + Just as prettily as he, + About the dew upon the lawn, + And the wind upon the lea; + So I didn't listen to him + As he sang upon a tree. + +If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded +monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the +nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further +than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have +needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German +idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of +the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its +rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another +century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the +fashion of _A Song of Myself:_ + + I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin, + Hoping to cease not till death. + +Whitman is conscious of--perhaps even exaggerates--the novelty of his +task, + + Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited + itself (the great pride of man in himself) + Chanter of personality. + +While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of +their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not +have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older +singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted +in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The +favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, +Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as +proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by +following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's +characterization of Byron in _Julian and Maddalo_, + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light, + +has been followed by many expressions of the same thought, at first +wholly sympathetic, lately, it must be confessed, somewhat ironical. + +Consciousness of partnership with God in composition naturally lifts the +poet, in his own estimation, at least, to a super-human level. The myth +of Apollo disguised as a shepherd strikes him as being a happy +expression of his divinity. [Footnote: See James Russell Lowell, _The +Shepherd of King Admetus._] Thus Emerson calls singers + + Blessed gods in servile masks. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +The hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a +Poet_ soars to a monotheistic conception of his powers, asserting + + Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness + Is God. I suffer. I am God. + +Another poet-hero is characterized: + + He would reach the source of light, + And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might. +[Footnote: Harvey Rice, _The Visionary_ (1864). + +In recent years a few poets have modestly disclaimed equality with God. +See William Rose Benét, _Imagination,_ and Joyce Kilmer, _Trees._ The +kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of _The Lonely Poet_ +(1919), by John Hall Wheelock.] + +On the other hand, recent poets' hatred of orthodox religion has led +them to idealize the Evil One, and regard him as no unworthy rival as +regards pride. One of Browning's poets is "prouder than the devil." +[Footnote: _Waring._] Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin +to Milton through his Satan's pride." [Footnote: Sonnet, _To +Chatterton._] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares, + + You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell, + And keep the lowest circle to yourself. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_ (1911).] + +There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over +the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer +takes the trouble to declare, + + Artists truly great + Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange + Their fate for that of any potentate. +[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.] + +Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an +attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to +say, + + Think not, although my aim is art, + I cannot toy with empire easily. +[Footnote: _Nero_.] + +Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: +See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A +Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a +disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example +and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt +Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the +street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to +earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems +absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity +in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The +Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment, + + No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I + Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die. + +It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, +singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that +he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude +harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare +endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young +friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man +from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame +seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. +The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their +art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for +Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of +Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in +_Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives +indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet: + + He, from above descending, stooped to touch + The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though + It scarce deserved his verse. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of +late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young +Rice: + + I have felt the ineffable sting + Of life, though I be art's valet. + I have painted the cloud and the clod, + Who should have possessed the earth. +[Footnote: _Limitations_.] + +It depressed Alan Seeger: + + I, who, conceived beneath another star, + Had been a prince and played with life, + Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far + From the fair things my faith has merited. +[Footnote: _Liebestod_.] + +It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive: + + Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams, + Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at, + And know we be its rulers, though but dreams. +[Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] + +Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is +made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide. + +The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere +in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it +seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate +him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that +his genius is judged by a public that is vastly inferior to him. This +galling thought usually drives him into an attitude of indifference or +of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at +the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is +to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his +brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his +worth.[Footnote: See _To Darwin_.] But the average poet of the last +century and a half goes a step beyond this attitude, and appears to feel +that there is something contemptible about popularity. Literary +arrogance seems far from characteristic of Burns, yet he tells us how, +in a mood of discouragement, + + I backward mused on wasted time, + How I had spent my youthful prime, + And done naething + But stringin' blithers up in rhyme + For fools to sing. +[Footnote: _The Vision._] + +Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most +thoroughgoing expression of this contempt for the public. The sentiment +in _Childe Harold_ is one that Byron never tires of harping on: + I have not loved the world, nor the world me; + I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed + To its idolatries a patient knee. + +And this attitude of Byron's has been adopted by all his disciples, who +delight in picturing his scorn: + + With terror now he froze the cowering blood, + And now dissolved the heart in tenderness, + Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself, + But back into his soul retired alone, + Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously + On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +Of the other romantic poets, Sir Walter Scott alone remains on good +terms with the public, expressing a child's surprise and delight over +the substantial checks he is given in exchange for his imaginings. But +Shelley starts out with a chip on his shoulder, in the very +advertisements of his poems expressing his unflattering opinion of +The public's judgment, and Keats makes it plain that his own criticisms +concern him far more than those of other men. + +The consciously aristocratic, sniffing attitude toward the public, which +ran its course during Victoria's reign, is ushered in by Landor, who +confesses, + + I know not whether I am proud, + But this I know, I hate the crowd, + Therefore pray let me disengage + My verses from the motley page, + Where others, far more sure to please + Pour forth their choral song with ease. + +The same gentlemanly indifference to his plebeian readers is diffused +all through Matthew Arnold's writing, of course. He casually disposes of +popularity: + + Some secrets may the poet tell + For the world loves new ways; + To tell too deep ones is not well,-- + It knows not what he says. +[Footnote: See _In Memory of Obermann._] + +Mrs. Browning probably has her own success in mind when she makes the +young poetess, Aurora Leigh, recoil from the fulsome praise of her +readers. Browning takes the same attitude in _Sordello,_ contrasting +Eglamor, the versifier who servilely conformed to the taste of the mob, +with Sordello, the true poet, who despised it. In _Popularity_, Browning +returns to the same theme, of the public's misplaced praises, and in +_Pacchiarotto_ he outdoes himself in heaping ridicule upon his readers. +Naturally the coterie of later poets who have prided themselves on their +unique skill in interpreting Browning have been impressed by his +contempt for his readers. Perhaps they have even exaggerated it. No less +contemptuous of his readers than Browning was that other Victorian, so +like him in many respects, George Meredith. + +It would be interesting to make a list of the zoological metaphors by +which the Victorians expressed their contempt for the public. Landor +characterized their criticisms as "asses' kicks aimed at his head." +[Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Life of Swinburne_, p. 103.] Browning +alternately represented his public cackling and barking at him. +[Footnote: See Thomas J. Wise, Letters, Second Series, Vol. 2, p. 52.] +George Meredith made a dichotomy of his readers into "summer flies" and +"swinish grunters." [Footnote: _My Theme_.] Tennyson, being no +naturalist, simply named the public the "many-headed beast." [Footnote: +_In Memoriam_.] + +In America there has been less of this sort of thing openly expressed by +genuine poets. Emerson is fairly outspoken, telling us, in _The +Poet_, how the public gapes and jeers at a new vision. But one must +go to our border-line poets to find the feeling most candidly put into +words. Most of them spurn popularity, asserting that they are too +worthwhile to be appreciated. They may be even nauseated by the slight +success they manage to achieve, and exclaim, + + Yet to know + That we create an Eden for base worms! + +If the consciousness of recent writers is dominated by contempt for +mankind at large, such a mood is expressed with more caution than +formerly. Kipling takes men's stupidity philosophically. [Footnote: See +_The Story of Ung._] Edgar Lee Masters uses a fictional character +as a mask for his remarks on the subject. [Footnote: See _Having His +Way._] Other poets have expressed themselves with a degree of mildness. +[Footnote: See Watts-Dunton, _Apollo in Paris;_ James Stephens, _The +Market;_ Henry Newbolt, _An Essay in Criticism;_ William Rose Benét, +_People._] But of course Ezra Pound is not to be suppressed. He +inquires, + + Will people accept them? + (i.e., these songs) + As a timorous wench from a centaur + (or a centurion) + Already they flee, howling in terror + * * * * * + Will they be touched with the verisimilitude? + Their virgin stupidity is untemptable. + +He adds, + + I beg you, my friendly critics, + Do not set about to procure me an audience. + +Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public, + + Salute them with your thumbs to your noses. + +It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in +another poem, + + May my poems be printed this week? + +The naïveté of this last question brings up insistently a perplexing +problem. If the poet despises his readers, why does he write? He may +perhaps evade this question by protesting, with Tennyson, + + I pipe but as the linnets do, + And sing because I must. + +But why does he publish? If he were strictly logical, surely he would do +as the artist in Browning's _Pictor Ignotus,_ who so shrank from +having his pictures come into contact with fools, that he painted upon +hidden, moldering walls, thus renouncing all possibility of fame. But +one doubts whether such renunciation has been made often, especially in +the field of poetry. Rossetti buried his poems, of course, but their +resurrection was not postponed till the Last Judgment. Other writers +have coyly waved fame away, but have gracefully yielded to their +friends' importunities, and have given their works to the world. When +one reads such expressions as Byron's; + + Fame is the thirst of youth,--but I am not + So young as to regard men's frown or smile + As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot, +[Footnote: _Childe Harold._] + +one wonders. Perhaps the highest genius takes absolutely no account of +fame, as the sun-god asserts in Watts-Dunton's poem, _Apollo in Paris:_ + + I love the song-born poet, for that he + Loves only song--seeks for love's sake alone + Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown + To feudaries of fame, are known to thee. +[Footnote: See also Coventry Patmore, from _The Angel in the House,_ "I +will not Hearken Blame or Praise"; Francis Carlin, _The Home Song_ +(1918).] + +But other poets, with the utmost inconsistency, have admitted that they +find the thought of fame very sweet. [Footnote: See Edward Young, _Love +of Fame;_ John Clare, _Song's Eternity, Idle Fame, To John Milton;_ +Bulwer Lytton, _The Desire of Fame;_ James Gates Percival, _Sonnet 379;_ +Josephine Peston Peabody, _Marlowe._] Keats dwells upon the thought of +it. [Footnote: See the _Epistle to My Brother George._] Browning shows +both of his poet heroes concerned over the question. In _Pauline_ the +speaker confesses, + + I ne'er sing + But as one entering bright halls, where all + Will rise and shout for him. + +In _Sordello,_ again, Browning analyzes the desire for fame: + + Souls like Sordello, on the contrary, + Coerced and put to shame, retaining will, + Care little, take mysterious comfort still, + But look forth tremblingly to ascertain + If others judge their claims not urged in vain, + And say for them their stifled thoughts aloud. + So they must ever live before a crowd: + --"Vanity," Naddo tells you. + +Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame, + Nor can dispense + With Persia for an audience. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +Can it be that when the poet renounces fame, we must concur with Austin +Dobson's paraphrase of his meaning, + + But most, because the grapes are sour, + Farewell, renown? +[Footnote: _Farewell Renown._] + +Perhaps the poet is saved from inconsistency by his touching confidence +that in other times and places human nature is less stupid and +unappreciative than it proves itself in his immediate audience. He +reasons that in times past the public has shown sufficient insight to +establish the reputation of the master poets, and that history will +repeat itself. Several writers have stated explicitly that their quarrel +with humanity is not to be carried beyond the present generation. Thus +Arnold objects to his time because it is aesthetically dead. [Footnote: +See _Persistency of Poetry._] But elsewhere he objects because it shows +signs of coming to life, [Footnote: See _Bacchanalia._] so it is hard to +determine how our grandfathers could have pleased him. Similarly +unreasonable discontent has been expressed by later poets with our own +time. [Footnote: See William Ernest Henley, _The Gods are Dead;_ Edmund +Gosse, _On Certain Critics;_ Samuel Waddington, _The Death of Song;_ +John Payne, _Double Ballad of the Singers of the Time_(1906).] Only +occasionally a poet rebukes his brethren for this carping attitude. Mrs. +Browning protests, in _Aurora Leigh,_ + + 'Tis ever thus + With times we live in,--evermore too great + To be apprehended near.... + I do distrust the poet who discerns + No character or glory in his times, + And trundles back his soul five hundred years. +[Footnote: See Robert Browning, Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12, +1845.] + +And Kipling is a notorious defender of the present generation, but these +two stand almost alone. [Footnote: See also James Elroy Flecker, _Oak +and Olive;_ Max Ehrmann, _Give Me Today._] + +Several mythical explanations for the stupidity of the poet's own times +have been offered in verse. Browning says that poetry is like wine; it +must age before it grows sweet. [Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto +Volume._] Emerson says the poet's generation is deafened by the thunder +of his voice. [Footnote: _Solution._] A minor writer says that poetry +must be written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one +before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, _The Way of +the World_ (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is +worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, _A Poet's +Question._] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the +poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by +Shelley, in the _Defense of Poetry:_ + + No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the + jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to + all time, must be composed of his peers. + +Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not +the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost +forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition +to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much +farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most +nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words, +as + + Antidotes + Of medicated music, answering for + Mankind's forlornest uses. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese._] + +And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose. +Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as +Browning did, + + My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste + On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste! + A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick-- + I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath, + Henceforward with nettle-broth. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume._] + +Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are +hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly +to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry +hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a +stick. + +The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating. +They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does +not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, +and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his +fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious +circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the +belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result +his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public +more deliberately expressed. + +At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to +have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival +from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the _Castle +of Indolence,_ Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also _To Mr. Thomson, +Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem,_ by H. Hill.] and Thomas +Hood [Footnote: See _To the Late Lord Mayor._] both concerned +themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that +patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the _Ode +Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle._] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, +offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because +of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son. +[Footnote: _The Patron._] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for +the poet, in _Lady Geraldine's Courtship,_ and upheld the nobility of +the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him +appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified +contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose +manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People +are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to +cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there +have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who +have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of +circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in +thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See _Common Sense and +Genius,_ and _Rhymes by the Road._] Later libelers have been, usually, +writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the +course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, _The Green +Carnation,_ which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets. +[Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's _Patience_ made an even greater +sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English +ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim, + + I say an artist + Who does not wholly give himself to art, + Who has about him nothing marked or strange, + But tries to suit himself to all the world + Will ne'er attain to greatness. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo._] + +Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his +conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder +insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on +thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss +him. He repeats the world's query: + + How shall we know him? + Ye shall know him not, + Till, ended hate and scorn, + To the grave he's borne. +[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._] + +Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original +attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring + + Of these states the poet is the equable man, + Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, + fail of their full returns. +[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] + +As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the +poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet +resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the +wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth +telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the +tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's +delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys +and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G. +Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._] + +To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded +his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in +on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, +_More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an +ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new +singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for +his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is +doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who +does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of +beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: +Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ +Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The +Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, +_Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ +George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); +S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New +Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An +Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-Dunton, +_The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming +Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The +Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous +designs of the public. + +A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who +exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the +Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently +believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the +maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are +described: + + Where the heart of each should beat, + There seemed a wound instead of it, + From whence the blood dropped to their feet. + +The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally +shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit +leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter +waters, + + And toads seen crawling on his hand, + And clinging bats, but dimly scanned, + Full in his face their wings expand. + A paleness took the poet's cheek; + "Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek + The lady's will with utterance meek: + "Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:" + (And this time she spoke cheerfully) + Behooves thee know world's cruelty. + +The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which +to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. +From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems +of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides. +[Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's +Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our +poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." +[Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great +renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt +from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously +represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging, +imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, +aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare, +Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante +[Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and +Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_.] and +Tasso [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Tasso_; Shelley, _Song for +Tasso_; James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_.] have received most +attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of +several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's +poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred +Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.] + +Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those +of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement +who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme +youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that +caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody +on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James +Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_; +Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's +Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by +Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an +indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's +faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all +geniuses: + + Alas! what snows are shed + Upon thy laurelled head, + Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs! + Malignity lets none + Approach the Delphic throne; + A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's + hundred tongues. +[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.] + +The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The +centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse. + +Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, +remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the +more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, +[Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and +_Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_ +(1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by +him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought, + + The Pythian of the age one arrow drew + And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow, + They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low. +[Footnote: _Adonais._] + +The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as +formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his +critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far toward +giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the +youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._] +brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but +for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One +is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile +criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile +self-characterization into his mouth: + + I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse + They hounded on to death's untimely doom. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).] + +In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is +expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his +enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized +as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... never content till +they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they +worship her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, +1845.] + +With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have +raised the most indignant storm of protest is Shelley. Several poets, as +the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr. +Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Shelley almost part of +their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Shelley's life warrant +such sympathy. Then too, Shelley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, +is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in +his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for +Shelley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his +scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human +race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches +for the sincerity of his statement, in the _Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty_: + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. + +Accordingly Shelley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden +hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets +have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: +See E. C. Stedman, _Ariel_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Alfred +Austin, _Shelley's Death_; Stephen Vincent Benét, _The General Public_.] + +The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts +of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the +mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one + + Who in another's fate now wept his own. + +Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor +in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate +of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of +popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne +springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that +the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these +defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the +persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent +crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet +is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, +it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century +wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a +personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the +romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, +Joaquin Miller, _I Shall Remember_, and _Vale_; Francis Ledwidge, _The +Visitation of Peace_.] + +Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose +of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the _Canterbury +Tales_, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in +keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in +the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction +so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the +plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole +social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this +friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his +ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American +public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed +it." [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] Emerson tries to get on +common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to +some extent,[Footnote: See _The Enchanter_.] and it is consistent +with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as +Emerson: + + There cannot be confusion of sound forgot, + A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry. +[Footnote: _Pandeen._] + +But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, +"Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley +have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. +W. Holmes, _To Longfellow_; P. H. Hayne, _To Henry W. Longfellow_; T. B. +Read, _A Leaf from the Past_; E. C. Stedman, _J. G. H._; P. L. Dunbar, +_James Whitcombe Riley_; J. W. Riley, _Rhymes of Ironquill_.] for their +promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the +part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who +commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the +public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages +of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the +level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches. + +There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the +hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples +of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, +because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone +is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is +essential to the poet. In the _Prelude_ he relates how, from early +childhood, + + I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, + The self-sufficing power of solitude. + +Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse: + + These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk + Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night. +[Footnote: _Personal Talk_.] + +So he describes the poet's character: + + He is retired as noontide dew + Or fountain in a noonday grove. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Epitaph_.] + +In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, +and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries. +Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed +none." [Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] Emerson expressed the same mood +frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind: + + Think me not unkind and rude + That I walk alone in grove and glen; + I go to the god of the wood, + To fetch his word to men. +[Footnote: _The Apology_.] + +He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet: + + Men consort in camp and town, + But the poet dwells alone. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of +the poet's personality: + + I have no brothers and no peers + And the dearest interferes; + When I would spend a lonely day, + Sun and moon are in my way. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find +his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this +picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, +usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is +characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the +stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, +even while his heart thirsts for companionship.[Footnote: See John +Clare, _The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am_; James Gates Percival, +_The Bard_; Joseph Rodman Drake, _Brorix_ (1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade, +_My Heritage_; Whittier, _The Tent on the Beach_; Mrs. Frances Gage, +_The Song of the Dreamer_ (1867); R. H. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Abram J. +Ryan, _Poets_; Richard H. Dana, _The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet_; +Frances Anne Kemble, _The Fellowship of Genius_ (1889); F. S. Flint, +_Loneliness_(1909); Lawrence Hope, _My Paramour was Loneliness_ (1905); +Sara Teasdale, _Alone_.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last +century, asserting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet +declares: + + For me, I'd rather live + With this weak human heart and yearning blood, + Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls. + More brave, more beautiful than myself must be + The man whom I can truly call my friend. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +So the poet is limited to the companionship of rare souls, who make up +to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this +compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, +because the affections that most people expend on many human +relationships are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the +world's indifference to him, Shelley takes comfort in the assurance of +such communion, saying to Mary, + + If men must rise and stamp with fury blind + On his pure name who loves them--thou and I, + Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity + Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,-- + Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by, + That burn from year to year with inextinguished light. +[Footnote: Introduction to _The Revolt of Islam_.] + +But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's +love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his +loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and +discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most +nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as +Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: +The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, +however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth +century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal +comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the +Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas +at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from +Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes' +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the +gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in +acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his +epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal +conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish +among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no +glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The +closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary +verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an +extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for +Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in +Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the +philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is +the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists +are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from +unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and +Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on +some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the +Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_. +For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, +_To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding +Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).] + +Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships +in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so +notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were +the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his +sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines: + + Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, + And cast them into shape some other day; + Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, + And shattered with the fall, I stand alone. + +The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was +of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is +a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel +it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. +(Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and +more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate +that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which +understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the +premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for +their celebration in verse, from classic times onward. + +Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and +transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest +of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been +written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, +in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost +obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a +Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." +Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says, +"The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his +own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told, + + He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. + +Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas +Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem +he says of himself, + + He came the last, neglected and apart, + +and describes himself as + + companionless + As the last cloud of an expiring storm, + Whose thunder is its knell. + +Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's +lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in +_The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all +human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in +isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without +friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A +Renegade Poet on the Poet:_ + + He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no + company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, + and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority + of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument + I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should + ever do as other men. + +One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his +isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something +beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, +however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, +indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and +characterizes himself, + + I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, + Love their love or mine own love to them teach, + A bastard barred from their inheritance, + * * * * * + In antre of this lowly body set, + Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he +finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually +draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable +consequence of his genius,--that he + + Spares but the cloudy border of his base + To the foiled searching of mortality. +[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, _Shakespeare_.] + +The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, +when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet +he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must +exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, +for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy, +_To Shakespeare_.] + +Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure +perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds +introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride +breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility +and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation +breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second +revolution of the egocentric circle. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE MORTAL COIL + + If I might dwell where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + +sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There +is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude,--the same inconsistency that +lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees +this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,--and yet it is to +him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it +as from a prison house. + +One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the +flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler +spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a +derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all--a woman Sappho, +suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of +us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can +consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material +endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that +there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the +mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him +an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal +on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine +his spirit. + +Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to +attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his +grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in +poems even of such bulk as the _Prelude_ one does not find a complete +analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into +a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story +told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the +only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the +restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement +and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, +but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In _Aurora +Leigh_ one might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism +of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her +English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in +giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, +if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of +qualities derived from more remote ancestors. + +The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical +poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, +[Footnote: See _Thalassius_.] since it typifies the union in the +poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is +lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the +poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful +strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In +the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption +in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete +otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness. + +There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; +this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. +Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything +patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben +Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of +the woman who was "no churl" as + + A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes, + And white hair blown back softly from a face + Etherially fierce, as might have looked + Cassandra in old age. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. +Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. +[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; +Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; +J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; +Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, +_The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of +woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is +hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while +she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's +adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D. +Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might +almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage +indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as +making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A +Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.] + +The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted +upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her +Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley +Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert +and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a +double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of +versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in +heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's +career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject +of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was +Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said +to the little Viola, + + If angels have hereditary wings, + If not by Salic law is handed down + The poet's laurel crown, + To thee, born in the purple of the throne, + The laurel must belong. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in +which they grow. + +What have poets to say on the larger question of their social +inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the +nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the +varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. +The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than +to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the +genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the +beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new +exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that +the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage. + +Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of +opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, +confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd +guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble +of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns +his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of +"Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. +[Footnote: See _Lord Burleigh_, Eleanore in _A Becket_, and the Count in +_The Falcon_.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the +two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, +yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In +Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political +leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his +hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are _The +Troubadour_, Praed; _The King's Tragedy_, Rossetti; _David, Charles di +Trocca_, Cale Young Rice.] + +None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, +and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a +tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer +who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin +was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century +poet as John Hughes, in lines _On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal +Man_, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the +breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See _The +Patron_.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] also, seem +not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes +of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes +into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is +merely personal: + + Gie me ae spark of nature's fire! + That's a' the learning I desire. + Then, though I drudge through dub and mire + At plough or cart, + My muse, though homely in attire, + May touch the heart. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given +sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with +"nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns +see Thomas Campbell, _Ode to Burns_; Whittier, _Burns_; Joaquim Miller, +_Burns and Byron_; William Bennett, _To the Memory of Burns_; A. B. +Street, _Robbie Burns_ (1867); O. W. Holmes, _The Burns Centennial_; +Richard Realf, _Burns_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_ (1868); Shelley Halleck, +_Burns_.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few +of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his +belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found +in the character of the old pedlar, in the _Excursion_. The origin of +Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on +caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his +Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is presumably modeled after +Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching +realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry +with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even +while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: +Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is +Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the +Golden Shoe_; Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_.] Here and there, the +poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last +century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare, _The +Peasant Poet_; Mrs. Browning, _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_; Robert +Buchanan, _Poet Andrew_; T. E. Browne, _Tommy Big Eyes_; Whittier, +_Eliot_; J. G. Saxe, _Murillo and his Slave_.] And at present, with the +penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight +revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are +popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness +than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John +Davidson, _A Ballad in Blank Verse_; Vachel Lindsay, _The North Star +Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son_; John Masefield, _Dauber_; Francis +Carlin, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_ (1918).] Still, for the most part, the +present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of +indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than +caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would +probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning, + + What if men have found + Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll + Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul? +[Footnote: Henry van Dyke, _Sonnet_.] + +If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict +the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most +minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the +poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? +since singers tell + + us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth, + Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar. +[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.] + +as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to +frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses +it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look +for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not +troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the +phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their +father Spenser, who argues, + + So every spirit, as it is most pure, + And hath in it the more of heavenly light, + So it the fairer body doth procure + To habit in, and it more fairly dight + With cheerful grace, and amiable sight; + For of the soul the body form doth take, + For soul is form, and doth the body make. +[Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.] + +What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy +Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed +Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable +geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like +the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which + + Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive +Plant_.] + +Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his +pronouncement, admitting-- + + Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind + Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd, + Either by chance, against the course of kind, + Or through unaptness of the substance found, + Which it assumed of some stubborn ground + That will not yield unto her form's direction, + But is preformed with some foul imperfection. + +But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does +Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and +insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on +Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that +she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from +Alcæus' line, + + Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho. + +As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of +his extant portrait: + + A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of + Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright, + Low-lidded now, and luminous as love, + Anon soul-searching, ominous as night, + Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps + Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps. +[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth, _At the Mermaid_ (1889).] + +The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their +brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for +geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of +his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti, _Sonnet on Chatterton_.] +has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. +Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies +of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their +imaginations inevitably turn to + + The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair, + The lean, athletic body, deftly planned + To carry that swift soul of fire and air; + The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand + Heroic shoulders! +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a +belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face +of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire +of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have +encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes +Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever +saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the +invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in +all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident +that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into +existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the +frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made +beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert +Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, _Rupert +Brooke_.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate +days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. +Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be +led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of +the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer +to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage. + +We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the +romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made +with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a +conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of +allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication +that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary +sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic +might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by +no means universal;--that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly +bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's +_Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the +latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy, + + He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love, + Is all that these eyes can adore. + He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love, + And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore. + +Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line +with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, +likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the +brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River, + + Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street + For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk, +[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.] + +for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" +of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable. + +Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and +assures us, + + Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped, +[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.] + +but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic +topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing +features? + +Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably +wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, +there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture +of Keats, + + The real Adonis, with the hymeneal + Fresh vernal buds half sunk between + His youthful curls. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero, + + A lovely youth, + With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_ (1898); Frances Fuller, _To Edith May_ (1851); +Metta Fuller, _Lines to a Poetess_ (1851).] Someone has pointed out +that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the +heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the +same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the +poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it. + +"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, _On the Death of +James Hogg_; Browning, _Sordello_, _By the Fireside_; Mrs. Browning, +_Aurora Leigh_; Principal Shairp, _Balliol Scholars_; Alfred Noyes, +_Tales of the Mermeid Inn_.] poets invariably possess, but the less +phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The +differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, +as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of +Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its +ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas, +_The Life of Charles Lamb_, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was +especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines _To a Poet Breaking +Silence_, he asserts, + + Yes, in this silent interspace + God sets his poems in thy face, + +and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses, + + How should I gage what beauty is her dole, + Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, + As birds see not the casement for the sky. + +It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most +radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical +nature,--through his + + Dream dazzled gaze + Aflame and burning like a god in song. +[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.] + +Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he +surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there +probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward +look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." +[Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John +Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the +heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_] +Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser, + + With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But +Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a +fictitious poet that + + His steadfast eye burnt inwardly + As burning out his soul, +[Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.] + +we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before +serious damage is done. + +The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in +varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half +closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet +it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his + + Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined + Before the sovran-thought of his own mind. +[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.] + +Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and +his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. +I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.] + +But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to + + See, no longer blinded with his eyes, +[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.] + +and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's +noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, +undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is +seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse +having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial +explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton, + + The living throne, the sapphire blaze + Where angels tremble while they gaze + He saw, but blasted with excess of light, + Closed his eyes in endless night, +[Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.] + +and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John +Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in +Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C. +Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, +also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may + + By the darkness of thine eyes discern + How piercing was the light within thy soul. +[Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne, +_Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the +Sea_.] + +Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an +assertion as that of Keats, + + There is a triple sight in blindness keen. +[Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes, +Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.] + +Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, +one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth, + + Thou that, when first my quickened ear + Thy deeper harmonies might hear, + I imaged to myself as old and blind, + For so were Milton and Maeonides, +[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).] + +and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to +his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See +also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)] + +But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up +here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, +for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture +of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite +picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very +beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally +distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more +spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural +tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely +aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The +brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly +school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's +_Dispute of the Poets_. The spiritual one + + Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes, + +but his brother, + + The one with brighter hues and darker curls + Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine, + Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life + Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight + From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought. + +The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, +seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of +John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ is + + A youth whose sultry eyes + Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust. + +But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous +features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello, + + Yourselves shall trace + (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, + A sharp and restless lip, so well combine + With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive + Delight at every sense; you can believe + Sordello foremost in the regal class + Nature has broadly severed from her mass + Of men, and framed for pleasure... + * * * * * + You recognize at once the finer dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear. + +Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more +easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," +as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. +Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never +seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a +celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne +undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is +so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no +further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be +deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of +English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the +burly host, + + He in the waast is shape as wel as I; + This were a popet in an arm tenbrace + For any woman, smal and fair of face? +[Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.] + +Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. +Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from +the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the +handsome young squire, who + + Coude songes make, and wel endyte. +[Footnote: _Prologue_.] + +Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, +_The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from +Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine +unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid +flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it +philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, +interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to +remain, though it begins with the line, + + A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems. + +And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's +callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly +decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." +[Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.] + +Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as +another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent +realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could _not_ be a glorious +eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other +men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne, +_Joyce Kilmer_.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike +shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce +Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a +delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." +[Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday, _Memoir of Joyce Kilmer_, p. 62.] Of +course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic +distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the +idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's +proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and +drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut +him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a +poet. + +It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands +of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the +stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. +Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length +in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation +of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds +them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from +tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, +excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been +alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last +century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the +melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman +does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive +disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.] +and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that +it was + + Projected from the bilious Childe. +[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.] + +But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with +emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid. + +To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ +describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position +we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, +assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was +the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. +[Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his +favorite poet as + + A man who measured six feet four: + Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest, + Compact his frame, his muscles of the best. +[Footnote: _A Portrait_.] + +With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has +again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been +noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly +verse-writers, + + A heavy handed blow, I think, + Would make your veins drip scented ink. +[Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.] + +But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share +of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the +Poet_, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers +resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began +his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt +against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself +unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint, + + We are compared to that sort of person, + Who wanders about announcing his sex + As if he had just discovered it. +[Footnote: _The Condolence_.] + +The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in +poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora +Leigh's cousin Romney to argue, + + Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life, + You need the lower life to stand upon + In order to reach up unto that higher; + And none can stand a tip-toe in that place + He cannot stand in with two stable feet. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +May 6, 1845.] + +Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific +account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the +result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael +Angelo_ (1904).] + +Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is +illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, +outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of +essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention: + + In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These + semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration, + for in reality the beggars have the advantage + of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed + to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to + the point. We must dig painfully through the outer + layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the + invalids are all spirit. +[Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.] + +That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last +century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their +ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if +anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello +turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So +nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max +Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art, _Degeneration_, was +able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a +disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.] + +Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as +Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be +significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a +sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil +from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let +us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our +earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of +whom we learn, + + Too long had sickness left her pining trace + With slow still touch on each decaying grace; + Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien; + Despair upon his languid smile was seen. +[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley_.] + +We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that +tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that +he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that +Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. +Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out +of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_ +Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction, + + Death and love are yet contending for their prey, + +and in _Adonais_ he appears as + + A power + Girt round with weakness. + * * * * * + A light spear ... + Vibrated, as the everbearing heart + Shook the weak hand that grasped it. + +Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as +consumption saps his strength: + + You might see his colour come and go, + And the softest strain of music made + Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade + Amid the dew of his tender eyes; + And the breath with intermitting flow + Made his pale lips quiver and part. +[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.] + +The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, +_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so +affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough +became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the +last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to +Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame +of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the +anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. + +Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the +poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus +Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: + + More tremulous + Than the soft star that in the azure East + Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day + Was his frail soul. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in +thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: + + Some life of men unblest + He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. + He went, his piping took a troubled sound + Of storms that rage outside our happy ground. + He could not wait their passing; he is dead. + +In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark +upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by +Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse: + + The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn, + The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn, + The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell, + The almond face that Giotto drew so well, + The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._] + +Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the +_Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that +he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another, + + Behold him, how Hell's reek + Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek. +[Footnote: _Dante at Verona._] + +A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore: + + And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell. +[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._] + +In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying +hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their +genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the +mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the +realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,--in fact, +it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows +struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry +them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned +with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, +or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_.] and +Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; +Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Sapphics_, _Anactoria_; +Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy +Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in Lenkos_.] to the +long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: +Browning, _One Word More_, _Preface to The Ring and the Book_; James +Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the Death of Mrs. +Browning_.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, _Ballad of +Appeal to Christina Rossetti_, _New Year's Eve_, _Dedication to +Christina Rossetti_.] Emily Brontë, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, +_Emily Brontë_.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister +Songs_, _On her Photograph_, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] Felicia +Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans_.] Adelaide Proctor, +[Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor_.] Helen Hunt, +[Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H_. _H_.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote: +_Ibid_., _To E. Lazarus_.]--one finds woman the subject of complimentary +verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we +should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their +greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it +plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her +style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her +"manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_.] So the +feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise. + +As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing +thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, +woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were +sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of +their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal +Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe_.] both +deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could +not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The +Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed +to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations +when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: +See _The Catalogue_. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The +Squinting Poetess_.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall +took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love +rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess_. More +seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend +with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother +Does_.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the +nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a +literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer +Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and +heroine, + + In each lay poesy--for woman's heart + Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen; + And if it flow not through the tide of art, + Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween + It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked + The egress of rich words, it flows in thought, + And in its silent mirror doth reflect + Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought. +[Footnote: Milton.] + +Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on +her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, +appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an +anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written +by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober +judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of +Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, +Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but +who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,--Cythna, in +_The Revolt of Islam_. + +It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of +sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to +the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his + + Lyric love, half angel and half bird, + +reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position +on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In +_The Two Poets of Croisic_ he deals with the eighteenth century in +France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. +Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning +the admiration of the celebrities of the day--only to have his verse +tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by +her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact +that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine +_nom de plume_, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. +[Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod."] If indifference is the +attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that +her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her +entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we +must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to +approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted +to Robert Browning, "is--that there is a natural inferiority of mind in +women--of the intellect--not by any means of the moral nature--and that +the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." +[Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this +private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well. + +In a short narrative poem, _Mother and Poet_, Mrs. Browning claims +for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the +average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper +sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be +found in _Aurora Leigh_. She feels that making her imaginary poet a +woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much +of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must +have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring +insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the +charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. +Romney declares, + + Women as you are, + Mere women, personal and passionate, + You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, + Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints! + We get no Christ from you,--and verily + We shall not get a poet, in my mind. + +Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in +charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. +She confesses, + + We women are too apt to look to one, + Which proves a certain impotence in art. + +But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry +even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to +be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an +advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, +because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails +verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question +of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, +_Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.] + +Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's +physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the +chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit? + +In answer, one is haunted by the line, + + I too was born in Arcadia. + +Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In +the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of +the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: +See _Corydon_.] Collins, [Footnote: See _Selim, or the Shepherd's +Moral_.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See _Pastoral on the Death of +Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal +sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly +necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving +a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. +[Footnote: See _Huggins and Duggins_, and _The Forlorn Shepherd's +Complaint_.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes' +_Letter to a Friend in the Country_, and Sidney Dyer's _A Country +Walk_, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He +is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday. + +With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the +poet to nature becomes, of course, more intimate. But Cowper and Thomson +keep themselves out of their nature poetry to such an extent that it is +hard to tell what their ideal position would be, and not till the +publication of Beattie's _The Minstrel_ do we find a poem in which +the poet is nurtured under the influence of a natural scenery. At the +very climax of the romantic period the poet is not always bred in the +country. We find Byron revealing himself as one who seeks nature only +occasionally, as a mistress in whose novelty resides a good deal of her +charm. Shelley, too, portrays a poet reared in civilization, but +escaping to nature. [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_, and _Alastor_.] +Still, it is obvious that ever since the time of Burns and Wordsworth, +the idea of a poet nurtured from infancy in nature's bosom has been +extremely popular. + +There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the +hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth +were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were +not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too +tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. +[Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so +far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the +Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. +[Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society +every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of +Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs, + + So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth, + That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran + (And song is but the eloquence of truth). + +The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, +declaring of poetry, + + Its seat is deeper in the savage breast + Than in the man of cities. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of +acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all +singers," in Longfellow's _Hiawatha_. + +But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian +reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from +nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that +response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical +experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of +imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to +add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come +to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. +Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of +nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says + + If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach + My heart their beautiful parts of speech, + And the natural art they say these with, + My soul would sing of beauty and myth + In a rhyme and a meter none before + Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore. +[Footnote: _Preludes_.] + +The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, +was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not +intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature + + More like a man + Flying from something that he dreads, than one + Who sought the thing he loved. + +What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. +Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: +See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too, +were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting +nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's +life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See +_Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The +Prelude_.] + +Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him +to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to +the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic +solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run +its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges +the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar +Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and +preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from +civilization: + + For early didst thou leave the world, with powers + Fresh, undiverted to the world without, + Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; + Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt + Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings. + +No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality. +Stephen Phillips says of Emily Brontë's poetic gift, + + Only barren hills + Could wring the woman riches out of thee, +[Footnote: _Emily Brontë_.] + +and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. +But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was +developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See _The Palace of Art_.] and +Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See _The Poet's Vow_; Letters to Robert +Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning +as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the +eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe, +_An Escape_; J. E. Flecker, _Dirge_; Madison Cawein, _Comrading_; Yeats, +_The Lake Isle of Innisfree_.] he does not have everything his own way. + +For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely +anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared +in +London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter +of course, + + The coy muse, with me she would not live + In this dark city, +[Footnote: _Epistle to George Felton Mathew_. Wordsworth's sonnet, +"Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at +this time.] + +and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet, + + In cities he was low and mean; + The mountain waters washed him clean. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse, + + She can find a nobler theme for song + In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight + Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore. +[Footnote: _L'Envoi_.] + +A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in +London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to +the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of +the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, +_The Rossettis_, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral +verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. +Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they +were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this +regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the +city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See _The +City of Dreadful Night_.] this is not the same thing as the romantic +poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment. + +Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an +anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: +See _On London Stones_.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious +about his city poets. [Footnote: See _Fleet Street Eclogues_.] But as +landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the +most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more +and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to +take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. +Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. +[Footnote: See _Paris_.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl +Sandburg, _Chicago Poems_; Edgar Lee Masters, _The Loop_; William +Griffith, _City Pastorals_; Charles H. Towne, _The City_.] are beginning +to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called _A Winter +Night_ reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the +most bucolic shepherd among his flocks. + +To poets' minds the only unæsthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the +country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry +inspired by it, the reader of the _Spoon River Anthology_ is still +disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist +whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment. + +So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern +poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of +course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, +but usually, as in the Old English poem, _The Wanderer_, he has been +unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the +habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See +_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] But Byron set the fashion among poets +of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] +and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since +Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] +The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's +autobiographical novels, _Rest Harrow_ and _Open Country_, and William +H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. +[Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, _Denby the Rhymer_ (1918); Henry +Herbert Knibbs, _Songs of the Trail_ (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, +concurred in the view, declaring, + + Down the free roads of human happiness + I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Sidney_.] + +"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels +with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as +has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? +What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's +_Complaint to His Empty Purse_, onward, English poetry has borne +the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled +with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for +their destitution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camöens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, +Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want +exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse. + +The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well +inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of +course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time +on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, +also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from +illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there +are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's _Bohemia_ reveals the +fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of +his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller +the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, +the cost _per caput_ will be _nil_. Not only so, but the poet is likely +to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready +cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of +contemptuous amusement from a poet's statement, + + Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay! + One would I sell and daffodils buy + To feed my soul. +[Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.] + +What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually +asking. + +What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking +of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but +only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines +_Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_ + + Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased + And yet can starve the author of the pleasure. + +Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as +bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in +poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public, + + You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me + After you've starved me and driven me dead. + Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread. +[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.] + +Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's +_Ina_, the author himself appears, raving, + + A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool! + Would you know what it means to be a poet? + It is to want a friend, to want a home, + A country, money,--aye, to want a meal. +[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.] + +But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to +pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious +horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. +Browning boasts, + + The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented + Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, + But culls his Faustus from philosophers + And not from poets. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true +artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his +mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington +Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a +Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to +remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the +couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See +_Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, +Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been +held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry +Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see +Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are +comparatively safe from a poet's strike. + +Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his +financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A +Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their +terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this +subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy, + + Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes + Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers; + What is a world of vanities + To a world as fair as ours? + +In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle +to Davie, Fellow Poet_: + + To lie in kilns and barns at e'en + When bones are crazed, and blind is thin + Is doubtless great distress, + Yet then content would make us blest. + +Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_, + + Our simple life wants little, and true taste + Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste + The scene it would adorn. + +Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward +poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston +Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G. +Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G. +Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf +of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet, +_In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The +poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish +it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take +away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only +the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. +With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries, + + Starving, still I smile, + Laugh at want and wrong, + He is fed and clothed + To whom God giveth song. +[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, _A Crowned Poet_.] + +It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's +satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect, + + One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye, + The cave of Poverty and Poetry. + Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, + Emblem of music caused by emptiness, +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of +compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates +on the poet, + + The Muse gave special charge + His learning should be deep and large,-- + * * * * * + His flesh should feel, his eyes should read + Every maxim of dreadful need. + * * * * * + By want and pain God screeneth him + Till his appointed hour. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal +conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's +physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as +the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is +appalling. What can account for it? + +In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of +constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another +popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes +it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him, + + For I had the share of life that might have filled a century, + Before its fourth in time had passed me by. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] + +A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects, + + ... For my thirty years, + Dashed with sun and splashed with tears, + Wan with revel, red with wine, + Other wiser happier men + Take the full three score and ten. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with +recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily +Brontë, of whom it is written: + + They live not long of thy pure fire composed; + Earth asks but mud of those that will endure. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Brontë_.] + +Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness. +Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death + + Far from the trembling throng + Whose souls are never to the tempest given. +[Footnote: _Adonais_.] + +With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis +Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home +to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong +for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are +screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream +about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his +article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne +speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has +written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is +nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense +must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less +wild-winged." + +It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or +to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to +mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with +regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not +wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a +departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to +overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to +retract his superlative claims for his protégé's promise. + +More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In +Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic +muses, + + He died--'twas shrewd: + And came with all his youth and unblown hopes + On the world's heart, and touched it into tears. + +In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses +this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been +expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_: + + I have seen more glory in sunrise + Than in the deepening of azure noon, + +or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_: + + I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, + In predecease of his just-sickening song, + Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme, + Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long. + +Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in +English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east +must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a +poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth +and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot +Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the +Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_; +George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a +Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson, +_From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis +Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_; +Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The +Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919); +Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The +Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died +Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes +through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_: + + Youth rambles on life's arid mount, + And strikes the rock and finds the vein, + And brings the water from the fount. + The fount which shall not flow again. + + The man mature with labor chops + For the bright stream a channel grand, + And sees not that the sacred drops + Ran off and vanished out of hand. + + And then the old man totters nigh + And feebly rakes among the stones; + The mount is mute, the channel dry, + And down he lays his weary bones. + +But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if +nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. +For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by +prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might +bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them +to do so [Footnote: See Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Landor, _Dull is +my Verse_; J. G. Percival, _Invocation_; Matthew Arnold, _Growing Old_; +Longfellow, _My Books_; O. W. Holmes, _The Silent Melody_; C. W. +Stoddard, _The Minstrel's Harp_; P. H. Hayne, _The Broken Chords_; J. C. +MacNiel, _A Prayer_; Harvey Hubbard, _The Old Minstrel_.]--but it would +never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we +have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their +unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, _Age and Song, The Centenary +of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo_; O. W. Holmes, _Whittier's Eightieth +Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday_; E. E. Stedman, _Ad Vatem_; P. +H. Hayne, _To Longfellow_; Richard Gilder, _Jocoseria_; M. F. Tupper, +_To the Poet of Memory_; Edmund Gosse, _To Lord Tennyson on his +Eightieth Birthday_; Alfred Noyes, _Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of +Swinburne_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Eightieth Birthday_; Lucy Larcom, +_J. G. Whittier_; Mary Clemmer, _To Whittier_; Percy Mackaye, _Browning +to Ben Ezra_.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating +the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still +singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, +Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman +continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may +have had a genuine influence on younger writers. + +Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the +self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is +equivocal, as Landor's + + Dull is my verse: not even thou + Who movest many cares away + From this lone breast and weary brow + Canst make, as once, its fountains play; + No, nor those gentle words that now + Support my heart to hear thee say, + The bird upon the lonely bough + Sings sweetest at the close of day. + +It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding +convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. +Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_ +and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for +his belief in + + The last of life for which the first was made, + +as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found +its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get +the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself +at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and +Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by +their longevity. + +But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and +in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the +youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems +indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the +Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's +minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. +[Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of +these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. +The poet in Campbell's poem explains, + + 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore. + +Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the +old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can +express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares, + + I count it strange and hard to understand + That nearly all young poets should write old. + ... It may be perhaps + Such have not settled long and deep enough + In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still + The memory mixes with the vision, spoils + And works it turbid. Or perhaps again + In order to discover the Muse Sphinx + The melancholy desert must sweep around + Behind you as before. + +Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She +sighs, remembering her own youth, + + Alas, near all the birds + Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take + The chaffering swallow for the holy lark. + +Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment: + ... Many men are poets in their youth, + But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong + Even through all age the indomitable song. + [Footnote: _Genius in Beauty_.] + +Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See _To any Poet_.] too, and Richard Watson +Gilder [Footnote: See _Life is a Bell_.] feel that increasing power of +song comes with age. + +It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon +the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas +old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them +to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required +before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not +surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at +thirty, asserting, + + In me thou seest the glowing of such fire + As on the ashes of his youth doth lie, + +and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come +from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own +day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See +_There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, +[Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of +Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his +inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their +future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling +and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, +Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his +juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later +poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, +into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, +once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and +passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection, + + White-bearded and with eyes that look afar + From their still region of perpetual snow, + Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men. +[Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.] + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +THE POET AS LOVER + + +Do the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ leave anything to be said on the +relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The +poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new +philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the +power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his +gratitude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that +love has received many encomiums before. + +It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the +part of the uninitiated. + + Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle, + +Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been +no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the +fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which associates +all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion, +which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the +contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the +singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like +the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by +the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of classic +Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly +escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of +the present time says much for himself. + +In the first place, our non-lover may assure us, the nature of love is +such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard. For love is a mad +pursuit of life at first hand, in its most engrossing aspect, and it +renders one deaf and blind to all but the object of the chase; while +poetry is, as Plato points out, [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, § +599-601; and _Phaedrus_, § 248.] only a pale and lifeless imitation +of the ardors and delights which the lover enjoys at first hand. +Moreover, one who attempts to divide his attention between the muse and +an earthly mistress, is likely not only to lose the favor of the former, +but, as the ubiquity of the rejected poet in verse indicates, to lose +the latter as well, because his temperament will incline him to go into +retirement and meditate upon his lady's charms, when he should be +flaunting his own in her presence. It will not be long, indeed, before +he has so covered the object of his affection with the leafage of his +fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all. The +non-lover may remind us that even so ardent an advocate of love as Mrs. +Browning voices this danger, confessing, in _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, +[Footnote: Sonnet XXIX.] + + My thoughts do twine and bud + About thee, as wild vines about a tree + Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see + Except the straggling green that hides the wood. + +The non-lover may also recall to our minds the notorious egotism and +self-sufficiency of the poet, which seem incompatible with the humility +and insatiable yearning of the lover. He exults in the declaration of +Keats, + + My solitude is sublime,--for, instead of what I have + described (_i.e._, domestic bliss) there is sublimity + to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and + the stars through the windowpanes are my children; the + mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have, + stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. + [Footnote: Letter to George Keats, October 31, 1818.] + +Borne aloft by his admiration for this passage, the non-lover may +himself essay to be sublime. He may picture to us the frozen heights on +which genius resides, where the air is too rare for earthly affection. +He may declare that Keats' Grecian Urn is a symbol of all art, which +must be + + All breathing human passion far above. + +He will assert that the mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and +see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure +out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw +his view out of perspective. + +Finally, the enemy of love may call as witnesses poets whom he fancies +he has led astray. Strangely enough, considering the dedication of the +_Ring and the Book_, he is likely to give most conspicuous place among +these witnesses to Browning. Like passages of Holy Writ, lines from +Browning have been used as the text for whatever harangue a new +theorist sees fit to give us. In _Youth and Art_, the non-lover +will point out the characteristic attitude of young people who are +"married to their art," and consequently have no capacity for other +affection. In _Pauline_, he will gloat over the hero's confession +that he is inept in love because he is concerned with his perceptions +rather than with their objects, and his explanation, + + I am made up of an intensest life; + Of a most clear idea of consciousness + Of self ... + And I can love nothing,--and this dull truth + Has come at last: but sense supplies a love + Encircling me and mingling with my life. + +He will point out that Sordello is another example of the same type, for +though Sordello is ostensibly the lover of Palma, he really finds +nothing outside himself worthy of his unbounded adoration. [Footnote: +Compare Browning's treatment of Sordello with the conventional treatment +of him as lover, in _Sordello_, by Mrs. W. Buck (1837).] Turning to +Tennyson, in _Lucretius_ the non-lover will note the tragic death +of the hero that grows out of the asceticism in love engendered by his +absorption in composition. With the greatest pride the enemy of love +will point to his popularity in the 1890's, when the artificial and +heartless artist enjoyed his greatest vogue. As his most scintillating +advocate he will choose Oscar Wilde. Assuring us of many prose passages +in his favor, he will read to us the expression of conflict between love +and art in _Flower of Love_, where Wilde exclaims, + + I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and though my youth is + gone in wasted days, + I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's + crown of bays, + +and he will read the record of the same sense of conflict, in different +mood, expressed in the sonnet _Hélas_: + + To drift with every passion till my soul + Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, + Is it for this that I have given away + Mine ancient wisdom and austere control? + Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll + Scrawled over on some boyish holiday + With idle songs for pipe and virelai, + Which do but mar the secret of the whole. + Surely there was a time I might have trod + The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance + Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God. + Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod + I did but touch the honey of romance, + And must I lose a soul's inheritance? + +And yet, when the non-lover has finally arrived at the peroration of his +defense, we may remain unshaken in our conviction that from the _Song +of Solomon_ to the _Love Songs of Sara Teasdale_, the history of poetry +constitutes an almost unbroken hymn to the power of love, "the poet, and +the source of poetry in others," [Footnote: _The Symposium_ of Plato, § +196.] as Agathon characterized him at the banquet in Love's honour. +Within the field of our especial inquiry, the last century, we may rest +assured that there is no true poet whose work, rightly interpreted, is +out of tune with this general acclaim. Even Browning and Oscar Wilde are +to be saved, although, it may be, only as by fire. + +The influence of love upon poetry, which we are assuming with such _a +priori_ certainty, is effected in various ways. The most obvious, of +course, is by affording new subject matter. The confidence of +Shakespeare, + + How can my muse want subject to invent + While thou dost breathe, that pourest into my verse + Thine own sweet argument? + +is at least as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth +century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to +the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to +contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon +poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, with any +number of other personal experiences that have thrilled the poet to +composition. + +The scope of love's influence is widened when one reflects upon its +efficacy as a prize held up before the poet, spurring him on to express +himself. In this aspect poetry is often a form of spiritual display +comparable to the gay plumage upon the birds at mating season. In the +case of women poets, verse often affords an essentially refined and +lady-like manner of expressing one's sentiments toward a possible +suitor. The convention so charmingly expressed in William Morris' lines, +_Rhyme Slayeth Shame_, seems to be especially grateful to them. At +times the ruse fails, as a writer has recently admitted: + + All sing it now, all praise its artless art, + But ne'er the one for whom the song was made, +[Footnote: Edith Thomas, _Vos non Nobis_.] + +but perhaps the worth of the poetry is not affected by the stubbornness +of its recipient. Sara Teasdale very delicately names her anthology of +love poems by women, _The Answering Voice_, but half the poems reveal +the singer speaking first, while a number of them show her expressing an +open-minded attitude toward any possible applicant for her hand among +her readers. But it is not merely for its efficacy as a matrimonial +agency that poets are indebted to love. + +Since the nineteenth century is primarily the age of the love story, +personal experience of love has been invaluable to the poet in a third +way. The taste of the time has demanded that the poet sing of the tender +theme almost exclusively, whether in dramatic, lyric or narrative, +whether in historical or fictional verse. This is, of course, one reason +that, wherever the figure of a bard appears in verse, he is almost +always portrayed as a lover. Not to illustrate exhaustively, three of +the most widely read poems with poet heroes, of the beginning, middle +and end of the century respectively, _i. e._, Moore's _Lalla +Rookh_, Mrs. Browning's _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, and +Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, all depend for plot +interest upon their hero's implication in a love affair. The authors' +love affairs were invaluable, no doubt, since a poet is not be expected +to treat adequately a passion which he has not experienced himself. It +is true that one hears from time to time, notably in the 1890's, that +the artist should remain apart from, and coldly critical of the emotions +he portrays. But this is not the typical attitude of our period. When +one speaks thus, he is usually thought to be confusing the poet with the +literary man, who writes from calculation rather than from inspiration. +The dictum of Aristotle, "Those who feel emotion are most convincing +through a natural sympathy with the characters they represent," +[Footnote: _Poetics_ XVII, Butcher's translation.] has appeared +self-evident to most critics of our time. + +But the real question of inspiration by love goes deeper and is +connected with Aristotle's further suggestion that poetry involves "a +strain of madness," a statement which we are wont to interpret as +meaning that the poet is led by his passions rather than by his reason. +This constitutes the gist of the whole dispute between the romanticist +and the classicist, and our poets are such ardent devotees of love as +their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the +temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is +obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the +offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then +equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is +doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not +as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel +filled from without. His afflatus comes upon him and departs, without +his control or understanding. Poetical inspiration, to such a +temperament, naturally assumes the shape of passion. Bryant's expression +of this point of view is so typical of the general attitude as to seem +merely commonplace. He tells us, in _The Poet_, + + No smooth array of phrase, + Artfully sought and ordered though it be, + Which the cold rhymer lays + Upon his page languid industry + Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed. + * * * * * + The secret wouldst thou know + To touch the heart or fire the blood at will? + Let thine own eyes o'erflow; + Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill. + Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past, + And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast. + +Coleridge's comprehension of this fact led him to cry, "Love is the +vital air of my genius." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1799.] + +All this, considering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps +only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most +sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal +of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to +understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of +emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar +Lee Masters' _Monsieur D---- and the Psycho-Analyst_.] + +Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their +passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his +biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably +passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet +being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life +afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly +assures us, + +Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to +write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by +my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. +[Footnote: See Arthur Symons, _The Romantic Movement_, p. 92 (from +Myers, _Life of Wordsworth_).] + +Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who +shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of +temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in +_My Namesake_, says of himself, + + Few guessed beneath his aspect grave + What passions strove in chains. + +Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion, + + But you are blind, and to the blind + The touch of ice and fire is one. + +The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled _Our +Elder Poets_.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an +expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet +somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from +the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion. + +Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine +of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity +for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned +themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life +writing them up. Childe Harold is + + Grown aged in this world of woe, + In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, + So that no wonder waits him, nor below + Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife, + Cut to his heart again with the keen knife + Of silent, sharp endurance. + +The very imitative hero of Praed's _The Troubadour_, after +disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six +dismisses passion forever. We are assured that + + The joys that wound, the pains that bless, + Were all, were all departed, + And he was wise and passionless + And happy and cold-hearted. + +The popularity of this sort of poet was, however, ephemeral. Of late +years poets have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who +attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely, +beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted +poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy +of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he +had not wantonly wasted his emotions. + +One is justified in asking why, on the other hand, the poet should not +be one who, instead of spending his love on a finite mistress, should +devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry +is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are +portrayed in Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, where the hero agonizes for +relief from his too ardent love: + + O that my heart was quiet as a grave + Asleep in moonlight! + For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold + Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul + A passion burns from basement to the cope. + Poesy, poesy! +But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly +unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly +with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to +the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher +described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, +is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to +be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without +doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. +One of our minor American poets declares, + + The bard who yields to flesh his emotion + Knows naught of the frenzy divine. +[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest +against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.] + +But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a +Platonist--and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B. +Alexander, _Poetry and the Individual_, p. 46.]--the poet is led upward +to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of +sense. Thus in one of the most Platonic of our poems, G. E. Woodberry's +_Agathon_, Eros says of the hero, who is the young poet of the +_Symposium_, + + A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed, + Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense + In him is amorous and passionate. + Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out + So with pure thought and care of things divine + To touch his soul that it partake the gods. + +This does not imply that romantic love is the only avenue to ideal +beauty. Rupert Brooke's _The Great Lover_ might dissipate such an +idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for +sensuousbeauty. + + These I have loved, + +Brooke begins, + + White plates and cups, clean gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood. + +And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of +his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than +such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to +result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design, +unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great passion, +which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously, +affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other +impressions. Of course the exceptionally idealistic poet, who is +conscious of a religious ideal, can say with Milton, "I am wont day and +night to seek the _idea_ of beauty through all the forms and faces +of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it +leading me on with certain assured traces." [Footnote: _Prose +Works_, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symmons ed.] To him there is no need of +the unifying influence of romantic love. In his case the mission of a +strong passion is rather to humanize the ideal, lest it become purely +philosophical (as that of G. E. Woodberry is in danger of doing) or +purely ethical, as is the case of our New England poets. On the other +hand, to the poet who denies the ideal element in life altogether, the +unifying influence of love is indispensable. Such deeply tragic poetry +as that of James Thomson, B. V., for instance, which asserts Macbeth's +conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter +chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the +memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and +beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair. + +In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that +the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as +the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual +beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's +perturbation. He inquires: + + Can proportion of the outward part + Move such affection in the inward mind + That it can rob both sense and reason blind? + Why do not then the blossoms of the field, + Which are arrayed with much more orient hue + And to the sense most daintie odors yield, + Work like impression in the looker's view? +[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.] + +Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic +mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in +asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the +senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all +creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they +declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love +poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such +heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most +beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's. + +It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its +most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit +kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an +instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the +analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames +that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of +Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the +title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he +learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court. + + Thou art a glorious madman, + +Lodge exclaims, + + Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, + And rise again to immortality. + +Marlowe replies, + + Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, + What if? I shall have drained my splendor down + To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness, + And mirk and mire and black oblivion, + Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, + Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest + To be so damned. + +Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for +the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her +living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See +Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip +Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_; +Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_; +Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice, +_Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho +and Phaon_; Zoë Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander +Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims +this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for +sympathy, + + For all my days as all thy days from birth + My heart as thy heart was in me as thee + Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea + Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth + Is fuel enough to feed, + While day sows night, and night sows day for seed. + +This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the +poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. +The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical +quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is +needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, +in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal +love and beauty, declaring, + + Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; + Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; + Love has no habitation but the heart: + Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, + Cling, and are borne into the night apart, + The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover. + +Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love. +Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct, +Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, +arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, + + What had all we done + That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, + And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, + And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins? + +Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal +the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, +[Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire." +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to +immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea: + + Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, + But mine are beauty and immortal love. + Therefore I will be tyrant of myself-- + Mine own law will I be! And I will make + Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms + Are wrought of loveliness without decay, + And wild desire without satiety, + And joy and aspiration without death. + And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho! + Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, + Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens + Are fallen and withered. + +To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to +note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho. +[Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in +Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our +enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope +to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have +been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable +matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as +mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her +love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her +temperament, + + Night and day + A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, + And all her veins ran fever, +[Footnote: _Sappho_.] + +conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her, + + Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, + Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love. +[Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.] + +It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her +genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing +her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert, + + But having made me, me he shall not slay: + Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his, + Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss + Contents them. + +It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in +the body as in an oyster shell," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, § 250.] +while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the +senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara +Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself, + + Who would run at dusk + Along the surges creeping up the shore + When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, + And running, running till the night was black, + Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand, + And quiver with the winds from off the sea. + Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides + Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me + Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest. +[Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, +in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this +destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite, + + If I sing no more + To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, + It is that thou hast made my life too sweet + To hold the added sweetness of a song. + * * * * * + I taught the world thy music; now alone + I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.] + +Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in +her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In _Anactoria_ +she tells the object of her infatuation: + + I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated + With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead. + * * * * * + I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, + Intense device and superflux of pain. + +And after detailing with gusto the bloody ingenuities of her plan of +torture, she states that her motive is, + + To wring thy very spirit through the flesh. + +The myth that Sappho's agony resulted from an offense done to Aphrodite, +is several times alluded to. In _Sappho and Phaon_ she asserts her +independence of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the goddess turns +Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thalassa, the mother of his +children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest +of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning +passion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is +mentioned. This is the sole theme of _Sapphics_, in which poem the +goddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual +delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her: + + Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho," + Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not + Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids.... + Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, + Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, + Full of music; only beheld among them + Soar as a bird soars + Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel + Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, + Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, + Clothed with the wind's wings. + +It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory +indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while +incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits +of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's +drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who +conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in +her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a +meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in +the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is +more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus +Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely +spiritual conception. + +Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having +no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual +beauty which is shining through the flesh, and which is the real object +of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it +seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is +some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual +loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking +the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as +the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of +his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for +the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would +be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess. +Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no +impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is +the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith +and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes +under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the +meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, _Hélas_, quoted above. + +While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must +remember that Burns, in some of his accounts of inspiration, ascribes +quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the +barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as +much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one. +The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the +"swinish trough," which Alfred Austin asserts them to be. [Footnote: In +_Off Mesolonghi_.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it constitutes the +strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote: +In _Lines To a Lady_.] + + Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke + Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak, + Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near, + Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere. + The puny heart within him swells to view, + The man grows loftier and the poet too. + +Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence. +The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance +sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the +finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his +beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's + + Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts + Which I by lacking have supposed dead, + +is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compass_, + + Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone, + But as the meaning of all things that are; + A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar + Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon, + Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; + Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar, + Being of its furthest fires oracular, + The evident heart of all life sown and mown. + +Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves, + + Their shining fronts, + Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same, + As river water hallowed into founts) + Met in thee. +[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.] + +Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the +conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of +Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_: + + Lady, I fain would tell how evermore + Thy soul I know not from thy body nor + Thee from myself, neither our love from God. + +The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here +implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti +identifies her lover with her Christian faith: + + Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such + I cannot love you if I love not Him, + I cannot love Him if I love not you. +[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of +Love_ (a sonnet sequence).] + +It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there +is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of +the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a +matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has +affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture +their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent +of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form +is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general +is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty +in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: _Symposium_, Jowett +translation, §210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting +enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In _Epipsychidion_ +Shelley declares, + + I never was attached to that great sect + Whose doctrine is that each one should select + Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, + And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend + To cold oblivion.... + + True love in this differs from gold and clay, + That to divide is not to take away. + Love is like understanding, that grows bright + Gazing on many truths.... + + Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, + The life that wears, the spirit that creates + One object and one form, and builds thereby + A sepulchre for its eternity. + +These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the +goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to +another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has +departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See +Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke +is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which +begins, + + There was a damned successful poet, + There was a woman like the Sun. + And they were dead. They did not know it. + They did not know his hymns + Were silence; and her limbs + That had served love so well, + Dust, and a filthy smell. + +The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through +manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at +least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses +his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration: + + As a bathtub lined with white porcelain + When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,-- + So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, + My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady. + +As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal +beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting +affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible +vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through +first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of +the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This +is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our +writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and +blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the +ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or +belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho +compares her sensations + + Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year + When I love thee. + +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love +of the poetess, she asserts of herself, + + I doubt if ever she saw form of man + Or maiden either whom, being beautiful, + She hath not loved. + +When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins, + + All + That breathes to her is passion, love itself + All passionate. + +The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills +her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the +nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines +wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her: + + How should they know that Sappho lived and died + Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, + Never transfused and lost in what she loved, + Never so wholly loving nor at peace. + I asked for something greater than I found, + And every time that love has made me weep + I have rejoiced that love could be so strong; + For I have stood apart and watched my soul + Caught in a gust of passion as a bird + With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind + Struggles and frees itself to find the sky. + +She continues, apostrophizing beauty, + + In many guises didst thou come to me; + I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, + Phaon allured me with a look of thine, + In Anactoria I knew thy grace. + I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, + But never wholly, soul and body mine + Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. + +The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as +for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists +of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the +rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the +half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her +passion: + + I love thee to the depth and breadth and height + My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight + For the ends of Being and ideal grace. + +It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate +response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences +that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of +philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude +with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. +[Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's +passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On +the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne +Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_ +(1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and Fanny Brawne_ (1919); James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).] + +Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it +follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the +fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the +transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy +object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted +for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is +beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phædrus_, +255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an +unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara +Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool, + + O wondrous deep, + I love you, I give you my light to keep. + Oh, more profound than the moving sea, + That never has shown myself to me. + * * * * * + But out of the woods as night grew cool + A brown pig came to the little pool; + It grunted and splashed and waded in + And the deepest place but reached its chin. + +The tragedy in such love is the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe, +_At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. The dramatist comes to London as +a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His +innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman: + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + +But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her +revelation of her character: + + Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay, + Wedded and one with it, he moaned. + * * * * * + Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace + Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew, + Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face. + +It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that +he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen +woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into +forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan +only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller's _The Ideal and the +Real_ is an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into +this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet +idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's +_Jenny_, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem, +_A Vision of Woman_. [Footnote: See also Kirke White, _The Prostitute_; +Whitman, _To a Common Prostitute_; Joaquin Miller, _A Dove of St. Mark_; +and Olive Dargan, _A Magdalen to Her Poet_.] + +To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious +denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is +purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes +with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's _Non Sum +Qualis Eram Bonæ sub Regno Cynaræ_: + + Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine + There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed + Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; + And I was desolate and sick of an old passion; + Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: + I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. + +The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of +his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is irresistibly impelled +to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her +touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a _reductio +ad absurdum_ of a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort +can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in the +_Vita Nuova_. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, +by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote: _Dante_] and by Sara King Wiley. +[Footnote: _Dante and Beatrice_] Both these writers, however, show +a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents +their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by +apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting +Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, +stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his gratitude +for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists +are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their +plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's +double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another +famous Renaissance lover for the hero of _A Night in Avignon_, a +play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his +long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for +consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate +Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this +inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's +devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering +the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the +subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of +contrition. + +Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his +admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the +dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the +other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When +he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the +object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, +comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his +burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of +good and evil. He explains, + + I serve a lady so imperial fair, + June paled when she was born. Indeed no star, + No dream, no distance, but a very woman, + Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake; + Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit + That thou hast heard of ... + ... I would eat, and have all human joy, + And know,--and know. + +He continues, + + But, for the Evening Star, I have it there. + I would not have it nearer. Is that love + As thou dost understand? Yet is it mine + As I would have it: to look down on me, + Not loving and not cruel; to be bright, + Out of my reach; to lighten me the dark + When I lift eyes to it, and in the day + To be forgotten. But of all things, far, + Far off beyond me, otherwise no star. + +Marlowe's closing words bring us to another important question, _i. e._, +the stage of love at which it is most inspiring. This is the subject of +much difference of opinion. Mrs. Browning might well inquire, in one of +her love sonnets, + + How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use? + A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine + Sad memory with thy songs to interfuse? + A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine? + A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, XVII.] +Each of these situations has been celebrated as begetting the poet's +inspiration. + +To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the +married state as least likely to be spiritually creative. It is true +that we find a number of poems addressed by poets to their wives. But +these are more likely to be the contented purring of one who writes by a +cozy fireside, than the passionate cadence of one whose genius has been +fanned to flame. One finds but a single champion of the married state +considered abstractly. This is Alfred Austin, in whose poem, _The Poet +and the Muse_, his genius explains to the newly betrothed poet: + + How should you, poet, hope to sing? + The lute of love hath a single string. + Its note is sweet as the coo of the dove, + But 'tis only one note, and the note is love. + + But when once you have paired and built your nest, + And can brood thereon with a settled breast, + You will sing once more, and your voice will stir + All hearts with the sweetness gained from her. + +And perhaps even Alfred Austin's vote is canceled by his inconsistent +statement in his poem on Petrarch, _At Vaucluse_, + + Let this to lowlier bards atone, + Whose unknown Laura is their own, + Possessing and possessed: + + Of whom if sooth they do not sing, + 'Tis that near her they fold their wing + To drop into her nest. + +Let us not forget Shelley's expression of his need for his wife: + + Ah, Mary dear, come to me soon; + I am not well when thou art far; + As twilight to the sphered moon, + As sunset to the evening star, + Thou, beloved, art to me. +[Footnote: _To Mary_.] + +Perhaps it is unworthy quibbling to object that the figure here suggests +too strongly Shelley's consciousness of the merely atmospheric function +of Mary, in enhancing his own personality, as contrasted with the +radiant divinity of Emilia Viviani, to whom he ascribes his +creativeness. [Footnote: Compare Wordsworth, _She Was a Phantom of +Delight_, _Dearer Far than Life_; Tennyson, _Dedication of +Enoch Arden_.] + +It is customary for our bards gallantly to explain that the completeness +of their domestic happiness leaves them no lurking discontent to spur +them onto verse writing. This is the conclusion of the happily wedded +heroes of Bayard Taylor's _A Poet's Journal_, and of Coventry +Patmore's _The Angel in the House_; likewise of the poet in J. G. +Holland's _Kathrina_, who excuses his waning inspiration after his +marriage: + + She, being all my world, had left no room + For other occupation than my love. + ... I had grown enervate + In the warm atmosphere which I had breathed. + +Taken as a whole, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the remote love, +prevented in some way from reaching its culmination. To requote Alfred +Noyes, the poet knows that ideal love must be + + Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star. +[Footnote: Marlowe.] + +In _Sister Songs_ Francis Thompson asserts that such remoteness is +essential to his genius: + + I deem well why life unshared + Was ordained me of yore. + In pairing time, we know, the bird + Kindles to its deepmost splendour, + And the tender + Voice is tenderest in its throat. + Were its love, forever by it, + Never nigh it, + It might keep a vernal note, + The crocean and amethystine + In their pristine + Lustre linger on its coat. +[Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. +Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in _Monna Innominata_ +XIV, mourning for + + The silence of a heart that sang its songs + When youth and beauty made a summer morn, + Silence of love that cannot sing again.] + +Byron, in the _Lament of Tasso_, causes that famous lover likewise +to maintain that distance is necessary to idealization. He sighs, + + Successful love may sate itself away. + The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate + To have all feeling save the one decay, + And every passion into one dilate, + As rapid rivers into ocean pour. + But ours is bottomless and hath no shore. + +The manner of achieving this necessary remoteness is a nice problem. Of +course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss +Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt's _Cormac, +Son of Ogmond_. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are +often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is +something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not +till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in +poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. +Browning, Sonnet VII. + + And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday, + Are only dear, the singing angels know + Because thy name moves right in what they say.] + +The minor poet, to be sure, is often discovered solicitously feeling his +pulse to gauge the effect of love on his rhymes, but one does not feel +that his verse gains by it. Therefore, an external obstacle is usually +made to intervene. + +As often as not, this obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One +finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. +The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and +poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not +be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility +and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, +she being unaware that it is the reflection of his own soul that the +poet is worshipping in her. One can feel some sympathy with the lady in +Thomas Hardy's _I Rose Up as My Custom Is_, who, when her lover's +ghost discovers her beside a snoring spouse, confesses that she is +content with her lot: + + He makes no quest into my thoughts, + But a poet wants to know + What one has felt from earliest days, + Why one thought not in other ways, + And one's loves of long ago. + +It may be, too, that an instinct for protection has something to do with +the lady's rejection, for a recent poet has openly proclaimed the effect +of attaining, in successful love, one step toward absolute beauty: + + O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows + In tender yielding unto me, + A vast desire awakes and grows + Unto forgetfulness of thee. +[Footnote: "A. E.," _The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty_.] + +Rejection is apt to prove an obstacle of double worth to the poet, since +it not only removes him to a distance where his lady's human frailties +are less visible, so that the divine light shining through her seems +less impeded, but it also fires him with a very human ambition to prove +his transcendent worth and thus "get even" with his unappreciative +beloved. [Footnote: See Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; G. L. Raymond, +_"Loving,"_ from _A Life in Song_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_. + +Richard Realf in _Advice Gratis_ satirically depicts the lady's +altruism in rejecting her lover: + + It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verse + If you dropped some aloes into his wine, + They write supremely under a curse.] + +There is danger, of course, that the disillusionment produced by the +revelation of low ideals which the lady makes in her refusal will +counterbalance these good effects. Still, though the poet is so +egotistical toward all the world beside, in his attitude toward his lady +the humility which Emerson expresses in _The Sphinx_ is not without +parallel in verse. Many singers follow him in his belief that the only +worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is +impossible. [Footnote: See _The Sphinx_-- + + Have I a lover who is noble and free? + I would he were nobler than to love me. + +See also Walt Whitman, _Sometimes with One I Love_, and Mrs. Browning, +"I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to love +me--the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to Robert +Browning, December 24, 1845.] + +To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided +attachments, Alexander Smith's _A Life Drama_ is a treasury of +suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at +sufficient distance to be useful. With the aid of intercalations Smith +exhibits the poet removed from his lady by scornful rejection, by +parental restraint, by an unhappy marriage, by self-reproach, and by +death. All these devices have been popular in our poetry. + +The lady's marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love, +though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for +idealization. The poet's worship is so supersensual as to be +inoffensive. To confine ourselves to poetic dramas treating historical +poets,--Beatrice,[Footnote: G. L. Raymond's and S. K. Wiley's dramas, +_Dante_, and _Dante and Beatrice_.] Laura, [Footnote: Cale Young Rice, +_A Night in Avignon_.] Vittoria Colonna, [Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael +Angelo_.] and Alison [Footnote: Peabody, _Marlowe_.] are all married to +one man while inspiring another. A characteristic autobiographical love +poem of this type, is that of Francis Thompson, who asserts the ideality +of the poet's affection in his reference to + + This soul which on thy soul is laid, + As maid's breast upon breast of maid. +[Footnote: See also _Ad Amicam_, _Her Portrait_, _Manus Animon Pinxit_.] + +There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death. +Translation of love into Platonic idealism is then almost inevitable. +Alexander Smith describes the change accomplished by the death of the +poet's sweetheart: + + Two passions dwelt at once within his soul, + Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky. + And as the sunset dies along the west, + Eve higher lifts her front of trembling stars + Till she is seated in the middle sky, + So gradual one passion slowly died + And from its death the other drew fresh life, + Until 'twas seated in the soul alone, + The dead was love, the living, poetry. + +The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, +mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, +perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: See _On the Vita Nuova of Dante_; +also _Dante at Verona_.] Much the same kind of translation is +described in _Vane's Story_, by James Thomson, B.V., which appears +to be a sort of mystic autobiography. + +The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote: +_Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase +of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense +to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this +increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last +step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's passion for +disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, +indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in +his sonnet sequence, _Ideal Passion_, thus exalts his mistress, the +abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets: + + Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go + From star to star, upward, all heavens above, + The grave forgot, forgot the human woe. + Though glorified, their love was human love, + One unto one; a greater love I know. + +But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its +brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love. + +Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love +as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, +who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar +very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to +vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole +way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to +supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and +twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of +their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic +character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most +idealistic verse. + +However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and +philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of +abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. +Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing +than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take +his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to +appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our +"muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies. + +Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of +widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical +love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it +seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See +Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.] + +Bulwer Lytton's _Milton_ was, if one may believe the press notices, +the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of +aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the +intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long +lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too +physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this +vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he +abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after +death. Bulwer Lytton cites the _Phædrus_ of Plato as the basis of +his allegory, reminding us, + + The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend + From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be), + Dim broken memories of the state before, + Form what we call our reason... + ... Is not Love, + Of all those memories which to parent skies + Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above, + In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:) + Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest? + +Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George +Edward Woodberry. His poem, _Agathon_, dealing with the young poet of +Plato's _Symposium_, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism. +Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize +his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He +chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, +one of those + + Whose eyes were more divinely touched + In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth. + +As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of +nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the +beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the _Symposium_, +he expresses his unhappiness: + + Still must I mourn + That every lovely thing escapes the heart + Even in the moment of its cherishing. + +Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he +may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be +ennobled: + + Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts. + Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace; + So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb, + Their music linger here, the joy of men. + +Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros, +corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros +for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes +the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love: + + The waste desire be his, and sightless fate, + Him light shall not revisit; late he knows + The love that mates the heaven weds the grave. + +Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable +decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying, + + In its fiery womb I saw + The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene, + And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell. + +In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to +him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality: + + Let not dejection on thy heart take hold + That nature hath in thee her sure effects, + And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes, + Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress, + The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain? + +But, he continues, + + In fair things + There is another vigor, flowing forth + From heavenly fountains, the glad energy + That broke on chaos, and the outward rush + Of the eternal mind;... + ... Hence the poet's eye + That mortal sees, creates immortally + The hero more than men, not more than man, + The type prophetic. + +Agathon, in an ecstasy of comprehension, chants the praises of love +which Plato puts into his mouth in the _Symposium_. In conclusion, +Urania sums up the mystery of love and genius: + + For truth divine is life, not love, + Creative truth, and evermore + Fashions the object of desire + Through love that breathes the spirit's fire. + +We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with +the _Epipsychidion_, not merely because it is the most idealistic of +the interpretations of Platonic love given by nineteenth century poets, +but because by virtue of the fact that it describes Shelley's personal +experience, it should be most valuable in revealing the attitude toward +love of one possessing the purest of poetic gifts. [Footnote: Treatment +of this theme is foreshadowed in _Alastor_.] + +The prominence given to Shelley's earthly loves in this poem has led J. +A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks, + +While Shelley's doctrine in _Epipsychidion_ seems Platonic, it will +not square with the _Symposium_.... When a man has formed a just +conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who +find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested +by this standard, Shelley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with +so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is +spurious Platonism.[Footnote: _Shelley_, p. 142.] + +Perhaps this failure to break altogether with the physical is precisely +the distinction between the love of the poet and the love of the +philosopher with whom Plato is concerned. I do not believe that the +Platonism of this poem is intrinsically spurious; the conception of +Emilia seems to be intended simply as a poetic personification of +abstract beauty, but it is undeniable that at times this vision does not +mean abstract beauty to Shelley at all, but the actual Emilia Viviani. +He has protested against this judgment, "The _Epipsychidion_ is a +mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal with +those articles." The revulsion of feeling that turned him away from +Emilia, however, taught him how much of his feeling for her had entered +into the poem, so that, in June, 1822, Shelley wrote, + + The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot bear to look at. I think + one is always in love with something or other; the + error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in + flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a + mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal. + +Shelley begins his spiritual autobiography with his early mystical +intuition of the existence of spiritual beauty, which is to be the real +object of his love throughout life. By Plato, of course, this love is +made prenatal. Shelley says, + + She met me, robed in such exceeding glory + That I beheld her not. + +As this vision was totally disjoined from earthly objects, it won the +soul away from all interest in life. Therefore Shelley says, + + She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way + And lured me towards sweet death. + +This early vision passed away, however, + + Into the dreary cone of our life's shade. + +This line is evidently Shelley's Platonic fashion of referring to the +obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision +has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its +concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is +regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, +but an abiding presence in the soul. + +The first step toward this goal was a mistaken one. Shelley describes +his marriage with Harriet as a yielding to the senses merely, in other +words, as slavery to the Venus Pandemos. He describes this false vision, + + Whose voice was venomed melody. + * * * * * + The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers, + Her touch was as electric poison. + +Shelley was more successful in his second love, for Mary, whom he calls +the "cold, chaste moon." The danger of this stage in the ascent toward +beauty is that one is likely to be content with the fragmentary glimpse +of beauty gained through the loved one, and by losing sight of its other +embodiments fail to aspire to more complete vision. So Shelley says of +this period, "I was laid asleep, spirit and limb." By a great effort, +however, the next step was taken,--the agonizing one of breaking away +from the bondage of this individual, in order that beauty in all its +forms may appeal to one. Shelley writes, + + What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, + Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lips + Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse. + +Finally, the dross of its earthly embodiments being burned away by this +renunciation, ideal beauty is revealed to the poet, not merely in a +flash of inspiration, as at the beginning of his quest, but as an +abiding presence in the soul. At least this is the ideal, but, being a +poet, Shelley cannot claim the complete merging with the ideal that the +philosopher possesses. At the supersensual consummation of his love, +Shelley sinks back, only half conceiving of it, and cries, + + Woe is me! + The winged words on which my soul would pierce + Into the height of Love's rare universe + Are chains of lead around its flight of fire; + I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + + +Dare we venture into the holy of holies, where the gods are said to come +upon the poet? Is there not danger that the divine spark which kindles +his song may prove a bolt to annihilate us, because of our presumptuous +intrusion? What voice is this, which meets us at the threshold? + + Beware! Beware! + His flashing eyes, his floating hair! + Weave a circle round him thrice, + And close your eyes in holy dread-- + +It is Coleridge, warning us of our peril, if we remain open-eyed and +curious, trying to surprise the secret of the poet's visitation. + +Yet are we not tolerably safe? We are under the guidance of an initiate; +the poet himself promises to unveil the mystery of his inspiration for +us. As Vergil kept Dante unscathed by the flames of the divine vision, +will not our poet protect us? Let us enter. + +But another doubt, a less thrilling one, bids us pause. Is it indeed the +heavenly mystery that we are bid gaze upon, or are we to be the dupe of +self-deceived impostors? Our intimacy is with poets of the last two +centuries,--not the most inspired period in the history of poetry. And +in the ranks of our multitudinous verse-writers, it is not the most +prepossessing who are loudest in promising us a fair spectacle. How +harsh-voiced and stammering are some of these obscure apostles who are +offering to exhibit the entire mystery of their gift of tongues! We see +more impressive figures, to be sure. Here is the saturnine Poe, who with +contemptuous smile assures us that we are welcome to all the secrets of +his creative frenzies. Here is our exuberant Walt Whitman, crying, "Stop +this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all +poems." [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] But though we scan every face +twice, we find here no Shakespeare promising us the key to creation of a +_Hamlet_. + +Still, is it not well to follow a forlorn hope? Among the less +vociferous, here are singers whose faces are alight with a mysterious +radiance. Though they promise us little, saying that they themselves are +blinded by the transcendent vision, so that they appear as men groping +in darkness, yet may they not unawares afford us some glimpse of their +transfiguration? + +If we refuse the poet's revelation, we have no better way of arriving at +the truth. The scientist offers us little in this field; and his account +of inspiration is as cold and comfortless as a chemical formula. Of +course the scientist is amused by this objection to him, and asks, "What +more do you expect from the effusions of poets? Will not whatever secret +they reveal prove an open one? What will it profit you to learn that the +milk of Paradise nourishes the poetic gift, since it is not handled by +an earthly dairy?" But when he speaks thus, our scientific friend is +merely betraying his ignorance regarding the nature of poetry. Longinus, +[Footnote: _On the Sublime,_ I.] and after him, Sidney, [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry._] long ago pointed out its peculiar action, +telling us that it is the poet's privilege to make us partakers of his +ecstasy. So, if the poet describes his creative impulses, why should he +not make us sharers of them? + +This is not an idle question, for surely Plato, that involuntary poet, +has had just this effect upon his readers. Have not his pictures, in the +_Phaedrus_ and the _Ion_, of the artist's ecstasy touched Shelley and +the lesser Platonic poets of our time with the enthusiasm he depicts? +Incidentally, the figure of the magnet which Plato uses in the +Ion may arouse hope in the breasts of us, the humblest readers of +Shelley and Woodberry. For as one link gives power of suspension to +another, so that a ring which is not touched by the magnet is yet +thrilled with its force, so one who is out of touch with Plato's +supernal melodies, may be sensitized by the virtue imparted to his +nineteenth century disciples, who are able to "temper this planetary +music for mortal ears." + +Let us not lose heart, at the beginning of our investigation, though our +greatest poets admit that they themselves have not been able to keep +this creative ecstasy for long. To be sure this is disillusioning. We +should prefer to think of their silent intervals as times of insight too +deep for expression; as Anna Branch phrases it, + + When they went + Unto the fullness of their great content + Like moths into the grass with folded wings. +[Footnote: _The Silence of the Poets._] + +This pleasing idea has been fostered in us by poems of appeal to silent +singers. [Footnote: See Swinburne, _A Ballad of Appeal to Christina +Rossetti_; and Francis Thompson, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] +But we have manifold confessions that it is not commonly thus with the +non-productive poet. Not merely do we possess many requiems sung by +erst-while makers over their departed gift, [Footnote: See especially +Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Kirke White, _Hushed is the Lyre_; +Landor, _Dull is My Verse_, and _To Wordsworth_; James Thomson, B. V., +_The Fire that Filled My Heart of Old_, and _The Poet and the Muse_; +Joaquin Miller, _Vale_; Andrew Lang, _The Poet's Apology_; Francis +Thompson, _The Cloud's Swan Song_.] but there is much verse indicating +that, even in the poet's prime, his genius is subject to a mysterious +ebb and flow. [Footnote: See Burns, _Second Epistle to Lapraik_; Keats, +_To My Brother George_; Winthrop Mackworth Praed, _Letter from Eaton_; +William Cullen Bryant, _The Poet_; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _Invita +Minerva_; Emerson, _The Poet, Merlin_; James Gates Percival, _Awake My +Lyre_, _Invocation_; J. H. West, _To the Muse_, _After Silence_; Robert +Louis Stevenson, _The Laureate to an Academy Class Dinner_; Alice +Meynell, _To one Poem in Silent Time_; Austin Dobson, _A Garden Idyl_; +James Stevens, _A Reply_; Richard Middleton, _The Artist_; Franklin +Henry Giddings, _Song_; Benjamin R. C. Low, _Inspiration_; Robert +Haven Schauffler, _The Wonderful Hour_; Henry A. Beers, _The Thankless +Muse_; Karl Wilson Baker, _Days_.] Though he has faith that he is not +"widowed of his muse," [Footnote: See Francis Thompson, _The Cloud's +Swan Song_.] she yet torments him with all the ways of a coquette, so +that he sadly assures us his mistress "is sweet to win, but bitter to +keep." [Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ballade of the Poet's Thought_.] The +times when she solaces him may be pitifully infrequent. Rossetti, musing +over Coleridge, says that his inspired moments were + + Like desert pools that show the stars + Once in long leagues. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Coleridge_.] + +Yet, even so, upon such moments of insight rest all the poet's claims +for his superior personality. It is the potential greatness enabling him +at times to have speech with the gods that makes the rest of his life +sacred. Emerson is more outspoken than most poets; he is not perhaps at +variance with their secret convictions, when he describes himself: + + I, who cower mean and small + In the frequent interval + When wisdom not with me resides. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +However divine the singer considers himself in comparison with ordinary +humanity, he must admit that at times + + Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn, + The child of genius sits forlorn, + * * * * * + A cripple of God, half-true, half-formed. +[Footnote: Emerson, _The Poet_. See also George Meredith, _Pegasus_.] + +Like Dante, we seem disposed to faint at every step in our revelation. +Now a doubt crosses our minds whether the child of genius in his +crippled moments is better fitted than the rest of us to point out the +pathway to sacred enthusiasm. It appears that little verse describing +the poet's afflatus is written when the gods are actually with him. In +this field, the sower sows by night. Verse on inspiration is almost +always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the +intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful +curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual +introspection he is seeking the charm, so to speak, that will render his +afflatus permanent. The rigidity in much of such verse surely betrays, +not the white heat of genius, but a self-conscious attitude of readiness +for the falling of the divine spark. + +One wonders whether such preparation has been of much value in hastening +the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the +loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged +that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive +divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a +number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange +hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge +liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through +straggling branches.] This, however, is Emerson in a singularly +flat-footed moment. The real poet scoffs at such suggestions. Instead, +he feels that it is not for him to know the times and seasons of his +powers. Indeed, it seems to him, sometimes, that pure contrariety marks +the god's refusal to come when entreated. Thus we are told of the god of +song, + + Vainly, O burning poets! + Ye wait for his inspiration. + * * * * * + Hasten back, he will say, hasten back + To your provinces far away! There, at my own good time + Will I send my answer to you. +[Footnote: E. C. Stedman, _Apollo_. _The Hillside Door_ by the same +author also expresses this idea. See also Browning, _Old Pictures +in Florence_, in which he speaks "of a gift God gives me now and then." +See also Longfellow, _L'Envoi_; Keats, _On Receiving a Laurel Crown_; +Cale Young Rice, _New Dreams for Old_; Fiona Macleod, _The Founts of +Song_.] + +Then, at the least expected moment, the fire may fall, so that the poet +is often filled with naïve wonder at his own ability. Thus Alice Meynell +greets one of her poems, + + Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine? + This winter of a silent poet's heart + Is suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art, + Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine. + +But if the poet cannot predict the time of his afflatus, he indicates +that he does know the attitude of mind which will induce it. In certain +quarters there is a truly Biblical reliance upon faith as bringer of the +gift. A minor writer assures us, "Ah, if we trust, comes the song!" +[Footnote: Richard Burton, _Singing Faith_.] Emerson says, + + The muses' hill by fear is guarded; + A bolder foot is still rewarded. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +And more extreme is the counsel of Owen Meredith to the aspiring artist: + + The genius on thy daily walks + Shall meet, and take thee by the hand; + But serve him not as who obeys; + He is thy slave if thou command. +[Footnote: _The Artist_.] + +The average artist is probably inclined to quarrel with this last +high-handed treatment of the muse. Reverent humility rather than +arrogance characterizes the most effectual appeals for inspiration. The +faith of the typical poet is not the result of boldness, but of an +aspiration so intense that it entails forgetfulness of self. Thus one +poet accounts for his inspired hour: + + Purged with high thoughts and infinite desire + I entered fearless the most holy place; + Received between my lips the sacred fire, + The breath of inspiration on my face. +[Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ave_.] + +Another writer stresses the efficacy of longing no less strongly; +speaking of + + The unsatiated, insatiable desire + Which at once mocks and makes all poesy. +[Footnote: William Alexander, _The Finding of the Book_. See also Edward +Dowden, _The Artist's Waiting_.] + +There is nothing new in this. It is only what the poet has implied in +all his confessions. Was he inspired by love? It was because thwarted +love filled him with intensest longing. So with his thirst for purity, +for religion, for worldly vanities. Any desire, be it fierce enough, and +hindered from immediate satisfaction, may engender poetry. As Joyce +Kilmer phrases it, + + Nothing keeps a poet + In his high singing mood, + Like unappeasable hunger + For unattainable food. +[Footnote: _Apology_.] + +But the poet would not have us imagine that we have here sounded the +depths of the mystery. Aspiration may call down inspiration, but it is +not synonymous with it. Mrs. Browning is fond of pointing out this +distinction. In _Aurora Leigh_ she reminds us, "Many a fervid man +writes books as cold and flat as gravestones." In the same poem she +indicates that desire is merely preliminary to inspiration. There are, +she says, + + Two states of the recipient artist-soul; + One forward, personal, wanting reverence, + Because aspiring only. We'll be calm, + And know that when indeed our Joves come down, + We all turn stiller than we have ever been. + +What is this mysterious increment, that must be added to aspiration +before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can +understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the +poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and +leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the contrary, seems +to give him a fictitious satisfaction; it is an arrest of his desire +that affords him a delicate poise and repose, on tiptoe, so to speak. +[Footnote: Compare Coleridge's statement that poetry is "a more than +usual state of emotion with more than usual order." _Biographia +Literaria_, Vol. II, Chap. I, p. 14, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge.] + +Does not the fact that inspiration works in this manner account for the +immemorial connection of poetic creativeness with Bacchic frenzy? To the +aspiring poet wine does not bring his mistress, nor virtue, nor +communion with God, nor any object of his longing. Yet it does bring a +sudden ease to his craving. So, wherever there is a romantic conception +of poetry, one is apt to find inspiration compared to intoxication. + +Such an idea did not, of course, find favor among typical eighteenth +century writers. Indeed, they would have seen more reason in ascribing +their clear-witted verse to an ice-pack, than to the bibulous hours +preceding its application to the fevered brow. We must wait for William +Blake before we can expect Bacchus to be reinstated among the gods of +song. Blake does not disappoint us, for we find his point of view +expressed, elegantly enough, in his comment on artists, "And when they +are drunk, they always paint best." [Footnote: _Artist Madmen: On the +Great Encouragement Given by the English Nobility and Gentry to +Correggio, etc_.] + +As the romantic movement progresses, one meets with more lyrical +expositions of the power in strong drink. Burns, especially, is never +tired of sounding its praise. He exclaims, + + There's naething like the honest nappy. + * * * * * + I've seen me daist upon a time + I scarce could wink or see a styme; + Just ae half mutchkin does me prime; + Aught less is little, + Then back I rattle with the rhyme + As gleg's a whittle. +[Footnote: _The First Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Again he assures us, + + But browster wives and whiskey stills, + They are my muses. +[Footnote: _The Third Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Then, in more exalted mood: + + O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink! + Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink, + Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink + In glorious faem, + Inspire me, till I lisp and wink + To sing thy name. +[Footnote: _Scotch Drink_.] + +Keats enthusiastically concurs in Burns' statements. [Footnote: See the +_Sonnet on the Cottage Where Burns Was Born_, and _Lines on the Mermaid +Tavern_.] + +Landor, also, tells us meaningly, + + Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingales + Sing cheerily but when the throat is moist. +[Footnote: _Homer_; _Laertes_; _Agatha_.] + +James Russell Lowell, in _The Temptation of Hassan Khaled_, +presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy: + + The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom + The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume, + And when the sun is warm within his blood + It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood, + Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they find + Interpretation in the poet's mind. + If wine be evil, song is evil too. + +His _Bacchic Ode_ is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received +his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in +England. Swinburne, [Footnote: See _Burns_.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote: +See _Vinum Daemonum_.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: See _A Villanelle of +the Poet's Road_.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: See _A Sequence to +Wine_.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent. +Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: See _A Toast to Omar Khayyam_.] +was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme. + +Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats +[Footnote: See _Lines on the Mermaid Inn_.] to Josephine Preston +Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan +dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially +stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the +centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group +keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson: + + And Ben was there, + Humming a song upon the old black settle, + "Or leave a kiss within the cup + And I'll not ask for wine," + But meanwhile, he drank malmsey. + [Footnote: _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +Fortunately for the future of American verse, there is another side to +the picture. The teetotaler poet is by no means non-existent in the last +century. Wordsworth takes pains to refer to himself as "a simple, +water-drinking bard," [Footnote: See _The Waggoner_.] and in lines +_To the Sons of Burns_ he delivers a very fine prohibition lecture. +Tennyson offers us _Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue, a reductio ad +absurdum_ of the claims of the bibulous bard. Then, lest the +temperance cause lack the support of great names, Longfellow causes the +title character of _Michael Angelo_ to inform us that he "loves not +wine," while, more recently, E. A. Robinson pictures Shakespeare's +inability to effervesce with his comrades, because, Ben Jonson confides +to us, + + Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, + He's wondering what's to pay on his insides. +[Footnote: _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_. See also +Poe's letter, April 1, 1841, to Snodgrass, on the unfortunate results of +his intemperance.] + +No, the poet will not allow us to take his words too seriously, lest we +drag down Apollo to the level of Bacchus. In spite of the convincing +realism in certain eulogies, it is clear that to the poet, as to the +convert at the eucharist, wine is only a symbol of a purely spiritual +ecstasy. But if intoxication is only a figure of speech, it is a +significant one, and perhaps some of the other myths describing the +poet's sensations during inspiration may put us on the trail of its +meaning. Of course, in making such an assumption, we are precisely like +the expounder of Plato's myths, who is likely to say, "Here Plato was +attempting to shadow forth the inexpressible. Now listen, and I will +explain exactly what he meant." Notwithstanding, we must proceed. + +The device of Chaucer's _House of Fame_, wherein the poet is carried to +celestial realms by an eagle, occasionally occurs to the modern poet as +an account of his _Aufschwung_. Thus Keats, in _Lines to Apollo_, avers, + + Aye, when the soul is fled + Too high above our head, + Affrighted do we gaze + After its airy maze + As doth a mother wild + When her young infant child + Is in an eagle's claws. + +"Poetry, my life, my eagle!" [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] cries Mrs. +Browning, likening herself to Ganymede, ravished from his sheep to the +summit of Olympus. The same attitude is apparent in most of her poems, +for Mrs. Browning, in singing mood, is precisely like a child in a +swing, shouting with delight at every fresh sensation of soaring. +[Footnote: See J. G. Percival, _Genius Awaking_, for the same +figure.] + +Again, the crash of the poet's inspiration upon his ordinary modes of +thought is compared to "fearful claps of thunder," by Keats [Footnote: +See _Sleep and Poetry_.] and others. [Footnote: See _The Master_, A. E. +Cheney.] Or, more often, his moment of sudden insight seems a lightning +flash upon the dark ways in which he is ordinarily groping. Keats says +that his early visions were seen as through a rift of sheet lightning. +[Footnote: See _The Epistle to George Keats_.] Emerson's impression is +the same; visions come "as if life were a thunderstorm wherein you can +see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand." [Footnote: +_Essay on Inspiration_.] Likewise Alexander Smith declares, + + Across the midnight sea of mind + A thought comes streaming like a blazing ship + Upon a mighty wind, + A terror and a glory! Shocked with light, + His boundless being glares aghast. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Perhaps this is a true expression of the poet's feelings during the +deepest inspiration, yet we are minded of Elijah's experience with the +wind and the fire and the still small voice. So we cannot help +sympathizing with Browning's protest against "friend Naddo's" view that +genius is a matter of bizarre and grandiose sensations. [Footnote: +_Sordello_.] At least it is pleasant to find verse, by minor +writers though it be, describing the quietude and naturalness of the +poet's best moments. Thus Holmes tells us of his inspiration: + + Soft as the moonbeams when they sought + Endymion's fragrant bower, + She parts the whispering leaves of thought + To show her full-leaved flower. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +Edwin Markham says, + + She comes like the hush and beauty of the night. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same: + + How to the singer comes his song? + How to the summer fields + Come flowers? How yields + Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night + Bring stars? +[Footnote: _How to the Singer Comes His Song?_] + +Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired +moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such +moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to +him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet, _Wise Passiveness_, says this +plainly: + + Think you I choose or that or this to sing? + I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream + Dreaming among green fields its summer dream, + Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring + Into its quiet bosom. + +To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, _Accident in Art_, +by Richard Hovey. He inquires, + + What poet has not found his spirit kneeling + A sudden at the sound of such or such + Strange verses staring from his manuscript, + Written, he knows not how, but which will sound + Like trumpets down the years. + +Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this +creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his +afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and +Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a +ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse +describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare +Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor in _Sordello_, +Book II.] In _The Song-Tree_ Alfred Noyes describes his first sensation +as a conscious poet: + + The first note that I heard, + A magical undertone, + Was sweeter than any bird + --Or so it seemed to me-- + And my tears ran wild. + This tale, this tale is true. + The light was growing gray, + And the rhymes ran so sweet + (For I was only a child) + That I knelt down to pray. + +But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense +were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess, + + She almost shrank + To feel the secret and expanding might + Of her own mind, +[Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.] + +the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. +Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple +Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of +her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, +when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent +reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is +"all me." + +However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good +his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged +divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack +of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal +to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his +verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of +his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, +some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent +scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on +Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And +in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of +thought: + + The everlasting universe of things + Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, + Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom-- + Now lending splendor, where from secret springs + The source of human thought its tribute brings + Of waters. + +Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says, + + The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible + influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory + brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a + flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the + conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its + approach or departure. + +Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his +mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us, + + A plastic power + Abode with me, a forming hand, at times + Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, + A local spirit of its own, at war + With general tendency, but for the most + Subservient strictly to external things + With which it communed. An auxiliary light + Came from my mind which on the setting sun + Bestowed new splendor-- +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] + +Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness +is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon +her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken, + + As the earth + Plunges in fury, when the internal fires + Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat + The marts and temples, the triumphal gates + And towers of observation, clears herself + To elemental freedom. + +We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who +relates how the vision of _Sordello_ arises to consciousness: + + Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, + Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears + Its outline, kindles at the core--. + +Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have +really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it +is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a +mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the +poet. + +"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The +Poet's Sleep_.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. +There was surely no reason why Keats' title, _Sleep and Poetry_, +should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of +Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. +The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in +the middle ages,--and even the prominence of _Night Thoughts_ in +eighteenth century verse--testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep +has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his +account of the composition of _Kubla Khan_.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: +See _Alastor_, and _Prince Athanase_. See also Edmund Gosse, +_Swinburne_, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three +stanzas of _A Vision of Spring_ in his sleep.]--it is the romanticists +who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And +once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, +asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. +Thus he tells us of the singer in _Prince Athanase:_ + + And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour + Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes, + Were driven within him by some secret power + Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar, + Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower. + +Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, +even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, +Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as +something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of +modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of +myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to +account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to +be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually +swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in +any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things +to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world. + + Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold, +[Footnote: _A Life Drama._] + +says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the +line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the +poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair. + +Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure +than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain +artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory +of one's past youth, or--to stay closer home--Wordsworth, with his +theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,--such artists +have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably +representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory +to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers +are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation, + + Live in the past; await no more + The rush of heaven-sent wings; + Earth still has music left in store + While memory sighs and sings. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, +like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to +admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her +title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we +have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their +existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, +reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the +body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a +vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries ... beholding +apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; +shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the +living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the +body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.] + +For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to +himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is +always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in +recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which +He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.] + +If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he +is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the +visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of +memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious +of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the +soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince +Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.] +Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on +Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in +verse of other poets. One writer inquires, + + Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes, + Indeed the product of my heart and brain? +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.] + +and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of +insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. +Another maintains of poetry, + + Her touch is a vibration and a light + From worlds before and after. +[Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal +inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by +Dorothea Laurence Mann.] + +Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural +and unforced of these verses. She muses: + + ... Mixed with memories not my own + The sweet streams throng into my breast. + Before this life began to be + The happy songs that wake in me + Woke long ago, and far apart. + Heavily on this little heart + Presses this immortality. + +This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic +theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather +than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. +She continues, + + I come from nothing, but from where + Come the undying thoughts I bear? + Down through long links of death and birth, + From the past poets of the earth, + My immortality is there. + +Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical +argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last +statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing +itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding +expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this +attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he +attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells +his brother poets: + + I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried + To work his will, the hand that moved my pen + Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask + Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps + With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, + Oracular glories, visionary gleams, + And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's +appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead +wife shall inspire his poetry. + +One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have +nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as +this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their +special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works +which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what +is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in +some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to +Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good +genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often +called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests +such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to +be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into +his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes: + + I do but rave, for it is better thus; + Were once thy starry nature given to mine, + In the one life which would encircle us + My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine; + Better to bear the far sublimer pain + Of thought that has not ripened into speech. + To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing + Divinely to the brain; + For thus the poet at the last shall reach + His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string. +[Footnote: _Ode to Shelly._] + +In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there +is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It +tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright +plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret +Steele Anderson, _Other People's Wreaths,_ and John Drinkwater, +_My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power +outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly +his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the +suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She +wistfully inquires: + + My own best poets, am I one with you? + . . . When my joy and pain, + My thought and aspiration, like the stops + Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb + Unless melodious, do you play on me, + My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play, + Would no sound come? Or is the music mine; + As a man's voice or breath is called his own, + Inbreathed by the life-breather? + +Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his +own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as +compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naïve dependence +upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as +a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses +her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the +Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, +to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of +the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not +be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante +impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call +upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is +conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth +century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any +Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of +invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory +flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the +century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept +up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of +the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the +Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See _On +Lucinda's Tea-table_.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It +is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses _On the Death of His +Mother_, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that +his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement +progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth +century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the +goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen +from the sty." [Footnote: See _On a Report of a Monument to a Late +Author_.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled +hizzie," [Footnote: See the _Epistle to Lapraik_.] and sets the +fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that +each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom +he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer +nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than +apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he +confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift: + + 'Twas not much at any time + She could hitch into a rhyme, + Never was the muse sublime + Who has fled. +[Footnote: _A Poet's Apology_.] + +Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day +feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's +earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as +always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as +little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse +that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who +inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she +is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One +doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with +Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner +nature through our own." [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry_.] + +What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. +There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of +genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is +a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that +the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the +power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up +with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, +namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the +poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of +God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the +world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, +in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last +century, his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. All poets are +idealists. + +There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may +seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It +is expressed in the opening of Shelley's _Alastor_, and informs the +whole of the _Ode to the West Wind_. It pervades Wordsworth, for if +he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet +profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of +nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers +that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. +There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern +poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, +going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth +century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song +into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than +most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the +intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern +conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing +himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise +chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute +poetry. + +Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or +to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming +"into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his +communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that +it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the +revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe +the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel +that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be +deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the +singer, + + One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; + The next he writes his soul's memorial. +[Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.] + +So Shelley describes the experience: + + Meaning on his vacant mind + Flashed like strong inspiration. +[Footnote: _Alastor_.] + +The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He +becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the +flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, +enabling them, like Lucy, to be + + Rolled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees. + +Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer +cannot escape Plato's conclusion, + + There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been + inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer + in him: when he has not attained to this state he is + powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: + _Ion_, §534.] + +And again, + + There is a ... kind of madness which is a possession of the + Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and + there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other + numbers.... But he who, not being inspired, and having no + touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks + he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, + and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at + all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote: + _Phaedrus_, § 245.] + +Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as +to say, + + Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of + madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any + character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. + [Footnote: _Poetics_, XVII.] + +One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier +ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no +longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation +of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally +he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a +hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot +was + + Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting + Of all too greatly giving + The kingdom of his mind to those + Who for it deemed him mad. +[Footnote: Cale Young Rice, _Meredith_.] + +In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to +which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of +madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See _Gladys +and Her Island_.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See _Tasso to +Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's +Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward +Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur +in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply +because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the +cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he +prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than +the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the +writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, +are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he +leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered +in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal +realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is +not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The +tone of his poem, _Tasso and Leonora_, is very gloomy. The Italian +poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms +where eternal beauty dwells. He muses, + + Yes--as Love is truer far + Than all other things; so are + Life and Death, the World and Time + Mere false shows in some great Mime + By dreadful mystery sublime. + +But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders, + + For were life no flitting dream, + Were things truly what they seem, + Were not all this world-scene vast + But a shade in Time's stream glassed; + Were the moods we now display + Less phantasmal than the clay + In which our poor spirits clad + Act this vision, wild and sad, + I must be mad, mad,--how mad! + +However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly +convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the +manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not +merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come +upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not +understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal +inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been +applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: See _Kathrina_, by J. +G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern +poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares, + + As for the old seers + Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life + Of the unfolding ages, I must doubt + Whether they comprehended what they saw.] + +Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare +commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way +granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting +Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the +poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are +typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she +makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects, + + And ah, we poets, I misdoubt + Are little more than thou. + We speak a lesson taught, we know not how, + And what it is that from us flows + The hearer better than the utterer knows. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs._] + +One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this +inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as +a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much +attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the +romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John +Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the +mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: See _Song for Tasso_, +Shelley; _Tasso to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_, +E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles, _The Harp and Despair +of Cowper_; Mrs. Browning, _Cowper's Grave_; Lord Houghton, _On Cowper's +Cottage at Olney_.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last +century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during +periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is +not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing +the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional +poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed +madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_; +Shelley, _Rosalind and Helen_.] while the American, J. G. Holland, +represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a +hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland, +_Kathrina_. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benét, +_Mad Blake_; Amy Lowell, _Clear, With Light Variable Winds_; Cale Young +Rice, _The Mad Philosopher_; Edmund Blunden, _Clare's Ghost_.] + +It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly +incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced +by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad +poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries, + + All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought + Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat. +[Footnote: See fragment CI.] + +What chance did he have of recognition? + +This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired +poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic +madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines, + + Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense) + And once betrayed me into common sense. +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon +dry reason alone: + + A set o' dull, conceited hashes + Confuse their brains in college classes! + They gang in sticks and come out asses, + Plain truth to speak, + And syne they think to climb Parnassus + By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century +classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the _Prelude_.] +and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: +See _The Scholar_.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See _The Master of the +Dance_. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the +persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants +varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful +or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies +the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns +the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the +poet's mind. [Footnote: See _The Poet's Mind_.] So Richard Gilder +maintains of the singer, + + He was too wise + Either to fear, or follow, or despise + Whom men call science--for he knew full well + All she had told, or still might live to tell + Was known to him before her very birth. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J. +E. Flecker.] + +The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that +his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the +scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes +Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus: + + Yours is the living pall, + The aloof and frozen place of listeners + And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine + The fount of life itself, the burning fount + Pierian. I pity you. +[Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.] + +Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the +average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are +infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of +reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many +cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young: + + How proud the poet's billow swells! + The God! the God! his boast: + A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! + Dead bards stench every coast. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of +inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning +is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She +muses over the title of poet: + + The name + Is royal, and to sign it like a queen + Is what I dare not--though some royal blood + Would seem to tingle in me now and then + With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes + And manias usual to the race. Howbeit + I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad + And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; + The thing's too common. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, + For me, I wrote + False poems, like the rest, and thought them true + Because myself was true in writing them.] + +Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? +Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of +posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. +Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether +they be of God. What is his proof? + +Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers, + + I hung my verses in the wind. + Time and tide their faults may find. + All were winnowed through and through: + Five lines lasted sound and true; + Five were smelted in a pot + Than the south more fierce and hot. +[Footnote: _The Test_.] + +The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's +passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by +time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once +troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a +certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he +inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which +Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it +does." [Footnote: _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, "A Memorable +Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is +doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious +enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence. + +The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of +the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse +by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender +to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with +the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season +of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, +and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, +though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay on +_Imagination_.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief +in his visions by Tertullian's motto, _Credo quod absurdum_. + +If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence +arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning +matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred +pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer +seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he +ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his +moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete. + +The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the +poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain +men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of +Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of _Kubla Khan_, +are notorious. Tennyson, in _The Poet's Mind_, warns all intruders +away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them, + + In your eye there is death; + There is frost in your breath + Which would blight the plants. + * * * * * + In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; + It would fall to the ground if you came in. + +But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to +an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so +delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says, + + There are open hours + When the God's will sallies free, + And the dull idiot might see + The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;-- + Sudden, at unawares, + Self-moved, fly to the doors, + Nor sword of angels could reveal + What they conceal. +[Footnote: _Merlin_.] + +What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a +frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded +from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was +finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he +declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But +the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of +casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is +never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is +already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been +communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original +conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem +is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly +sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as +Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to +be dead. + +There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is +most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' +composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem +Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, +_How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the +Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert +Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the +other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter: + + Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke. + Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed, + Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke + Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed + Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul! + Indeed? + Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare: + Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage + Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: + Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age + Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in +the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James +Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.] + +Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be +as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden +gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a +poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and +phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we +misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets +bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not +because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but +because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words +was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says +William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable +and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the +poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage." + +Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression +of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he +works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to +Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any +other artist possesses, [Footnote: See _The Republic_, IX, 588 D.] +yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis +Thompson, + + Our untempered speech descends--poor heirs! + Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers; + Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, + Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit! +[Footnote: _Her Portrait_.] + +Walt Whitman voices the same complaint: + + Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself; + It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically, + "Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?" +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] + +Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the +singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, +"For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my +Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily +and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and +the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, +_Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; +Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The +Sculptor_; William Rose Benét, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman +Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and +Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, +_Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing +the Song of Her_.] + +Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are +coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which +refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly +unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep +for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is +likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his +hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an +impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is +significant that the singers who are most aware of their +inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no +thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are +obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, +herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the +problem for us. She avers, + + I found the phrase to every thought + I ever had, but one; + And that defies me,--as a hand + Did try to chalk the sun. + + To races nurtured in the dark;-- + How would your own begin? + Can blaze be done in cochineal, + Or noon in mazarin? + +"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the +poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of +his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their +darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of +Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the +apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.] + +Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most +often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the +question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a +divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth +century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of +adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too +frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He +may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not +attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his +thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his +public. + +Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less +aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, +throughout, the tenor of the first stanza: + + My counsel to the budding bard + Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard." + Your "gentle public," my good friend, + Won't read what they can't comprehend. + +This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and +one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's +audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. +Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is +enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to +face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall +the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own +delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse? + +There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the +intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been +reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments +that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to +make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his +materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for +his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And +he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries, + + O for ten years, that I may overwhelm + Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed + My soul has to herself decreed. +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother +George, April, 1817.] + +Bryant warns the poet, + + Deem not the framing of a deathless lay + The pastime of a drowsy summer day; + But gather all thy powers + And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of +avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet, + + Touch the crude line with fear + But in the moments of impassioned thought. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so +deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of +it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the +poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to +beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of +artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to +wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his +hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered +robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form +which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, +not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it. +Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson +delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger +of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than +these others, no doubt, even though he did not illustrate the efficacy +of his search, when he described his interest in reading old manuscripts +with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and +anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing +one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these. +The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped +off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with +more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the +beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the +conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an +accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they +are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn +his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the +cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades +and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is +proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of +most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning +advises them, + + Keep up the fire + And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or +whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation +of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he +realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than +this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of +revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers +of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does +not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over +the poet, + + When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, + Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead, + And though he cherisheth + The babe most strangely born from out her death, + Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, + It is not she. + [Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the +blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of +contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his +arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes +into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks +the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's +attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. Alice Gary +pleads, + + Hear me tell + How much my will transcends my feeble powers, + As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowers + Their tender hues. +[Footnote: _To the Spirit of Song_.] + +And there is not a poet in the last century of such prominence that he +does not reverence such a confession, [Footnote: Some poems showing the +similarity in such an attitude of great and small alike, follow: +_Epistle to Charles C. Clarke_, Keats; _The Soul's Expression_, Mrs. +Browning; _Memorial Verses to Wm. B. Scott_, Swinburne; _Sister Songs_, +_Proemion to Love in Dian's Lap_, _A Judgment in Heaven_, Francis +Thompson; _Urania_, Matthew Arnold; _There Have Been Vast Displays of +Critic Wit_, Alexander Smith; _Invita Minerva_ and _L'Envoi to the +Muse_, J. R. Lowell; _The Voiceless_, O. W. Holmes; _Fata Morgana_, and +_Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought_, Longfellow; _L'Envoi_, +Kipling; _The Apology_, and _Gleam on Me, Fair Ideal_, Lewis Morris; +_Dedication to Austin Dobson_, E. Gosse; _A Country Nosegay_, and +_Gleaners of Fame_, Alfred Austin; _Another Tattered Rhymster in the +Ring_, G. K. Chesterton; _To Any Poet_, Alice Meynell; _The Singer_, and +_To a Lady on Chiding Me For Not Writing_, Richard Realf; _The Will and +the Wing_ and _Though Dowered with Instincts Keen and High_, P. H. +Haynes; _Dull Words_, Trumbull Stickney; _The Inner Passion_, Alfred +Noyes; _The Veiled Muse_, William Winter; _Sonnet_, William Bennett; +_Tell Me_, Max Ehrmann; _The Singer's Plea_, Edward Dowden; _Genius_, R. +H. Home; _My Country_, George Woodberry; _Uncalled_, Madison Cawein; +Thomas Bailey Aldrich, _At the Funeral of a Minor Poet_; Robert Haven +Schauffler, _Overtones, The Silent Singers_; Stephen Vincent Benét, _A +Minor Poet_; Alec de Candole, _The Poets_.] and aver that he too is an +earnest and humble suppliant in the temple of beauty. For the clearer +his glimpse of the transcendent vision has been, the more conscious he +is of his blindness after the glory has passed, and the more +unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE POET'S MORALITY + + +If English poets of the last century are more inclined to parade their +moral virtue than are poets of other countries, this may be the result +of a singular persistency on the part of England in searching out and +punishing sins ascribed to poetic temperament. Byron was banished; +Shelley was judged unfit to rear his own children; Keats was advertised +as an example of "extreme moral depravity"; [Footnote: By _Blackwoods_.] +Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; Swinburne was castigated as "an unclean +fiery imp from the pit." [Footnote: By _The Saturday Review_.] These are +some of the most conspicuous examples of a refusal by the British public +to countenance what it considers a code of morals peculiar to poets. It +is hardly to be wondered at that verse-writers of the nineteenth and +twentieth centuries have not been inclined to quarrel with Sir Philip +Sidney's statement that "England is the stepmother of poets," [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry_.] and that through their writings should run a vein +of aggrieved protest against an unfair discrimination in dragging their +failings ruthlessly out to the light. + +It cannot, however, be maintained that England is unique in her +prejudice against poetic morals. The charges against the artist have +been long in existence, and have been formulated and reformulated in +many countries. In fact Greece, rather than England, might with some +justice be regarded as the parent of the poet's maligners, for Plato has +been largely responsible for the hue and cry against the poet throughout +the last two millennia. Various as are the counts against the poet's +conduct, they may all be included under the declaration in the +_Republic_, "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of +withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." +[Footnote: Book X, 606, Jowett translation.] + +Though the accusers of the poet are agreed that the predominance of +passion in his nature is the cause of his depravity, still they are a +heterogeneous company, suffering the most violent disagreement among +themselves as to a valid reason for pronouncing his passionate impulses +criminal. Their unfortunate victim is beset from so many directions that +he is sorely put to it to defend himself against one band of assailants +without exposing himself to attack from another quarter. + +This hostile public may be roughly divided into three camps, made up, +respectively, of philistines, philosophers, and puritans. Within recent +years the distinct grievance of each group has been made articulate in a +formal denunciation of the artist's morals. + +There is, first, that notorious indictment, _Degeneration_, by Max +Nordau. Nordau speaks eloquently for all who claim the name "average +plain citizen," all who would hustle off to the gallows anyone found +guilty of breaking the lockstep imposed upon men by convention. +Secondly, there is a severe criticism of the poet from an ostensibly +unbiased point of view, _The Man of Genius_, by Césare Lombroso. +Herein are presented the arguments of the thinkers, who probe the poet's +foibles with an impersonal and scientific curiosity. Last, there is the +severe arraignment, _What Is Art?_ by Tolstoi. In this book are +crystallized the convictions of the ascetics, who recognize in beauty a +false goddess, luring men from the stern pursuit of holiness. + +How does it come about that, in affirming the perniciousness of the +poet's passionate temperament, the man of the street, the philosopher, +and the puritan are for the nonce in agreement? The man of the street is +not averse to feeling, as a rule, even when it is carried to egregious +lengths of sentimentality. A stroll through a village when all the +victrolas are in operation would settle this point unequivocally for any +doubter. It seems that the philistine's quarrel with the poet arises +from the fact that, unlike the makers of phonograph records, the poet +dares to follow feeling in defiance of public sentiment. Like the +conservative that he is, the philistine gloats over the poet's lapses +from virtue because, in setting aside mass-feeling as a gauge of right +and wrong, and in setting up, instead, his own individual feelings as a +rule of conduct, the poet displays an arrogance that deserves a fall. +The philosopher, like the philistine, may tolerate feeling within +limits. His sole objection to the poet lies in the fact that, far from +making emotion the handmaiden of the reason, as the philosopher would +do, the poet exalts emotion to a seat above the reason, thus making +feeling the supreme arbiter of conduct. The puritan, of course, gives +vent to the most bitter hostility of all, for, unlike the philistine and +the philosopher, he regards natural feeling as wholly corrupt. Therefore +he condemns the poet's indulgence of his passionate nature with equal +severity whether he is within or without the popular confines of proper +conduct, or whether or not his conduct may be proved reasonable. + +Much of the inconsistency in the poet's exhibitions of his moral +character may be traced to the fact that he is addressing now one, now +another, of his accusers. The sobriety of his arguments with the +philosopher has sometimes been interpreted by the man of the street as +cowardly side-stepping. On the other hand, the poet's bravado in defying +the man of the street might be interpreted by the philosopher as an +acknowledgment of imperviousness to reason. + +It seems as though the first impulse of the poet were to set his back +against the wall and deal with all his antagonists at once, by +challenging their right to pry into his private conduct. It is true that +certain poets of the last century have believed it beneath their dignity +to pay any attention to the insults and persecution of the public. But +though a number have maintained an air of stolid indifference so long as +the attacks have remained personal, few or none have been content to +disregard defamation of a departed singer. + +The public cannot maintain, in many instances, that this vicarious +indignation arises from a sense of sharing the frailties of the dead +poet who is the direct object of attack. Not thus may one account for +the generous heat of Whittier, of Richard Watson Gilder, of Robert +Browning, of Tennyson, in rebuking the public which itches to make a +posthumous investigation of a singer's character. [Footnote: See +Whittier, _My Namesake_; Richard W. Gilder, _A Poet's Protest_, and +_Desecration_; Robert Browning, _House_; Tennyson, _In Memoriam_.] +Tennyson affords a most interesting example of sensitiveness with +nothing, apparently, to conceal. There are many anecdotes of his morbid +shrinking from public curiosity, wholly in key with his cry of +abhorrence, + + Now the poet cannot die + Nor leave his music as of old, + But round him ere he scarce be cold + Begins the scandal and the cry: + Proclaim the faults he would not show, + Break lock and seal; betray the trust; + Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but just + The many-headed beast should know. + +In protesting against the right of the public to judge their conduct, +true poets refuse to bring themselves to a level with their accusers by +making the easiest retort, that they are made of exactly the same clay +as is the _hoi polloi_ that assails them. This sort of recrimination is +characteristic of a certain blustering type of claimant for the title of +poet, such as Joaquin Miller, a rather disorderly American of the last +generation, who dismissed attacks upon the singer with the words, + + Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealed + That he was more than man or less? +[Footnote: _Burns_ and _Byron_.] + +The attitude is also characteristic of another anomalous type which +flourished in America fifty years ago, whose verse represents an +attempted fusion of emasculated poetry and philistine piety. A writer of +this type moralizes impartially over the erring bard and his accusers, + + Sin met thy brother everywhere, + And is thy brother blamed? + From passion, danger, doubt and care + He no exemption claimed. +[Footnote: Ebenezer Eliot, _Burns_.] + +But genuine poets refuse to compromise themselves by admitting that they +are no better than other men. + +They are not averse, however, to pointing out the unfitness of the +public to cast the first stone. So unimpeachable a citizen as Longfellow +finds even in the notoriously spotted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, an +advantage over his maligners because + + He is not + That despicable thing, a hypocrite. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Most of the faults charged to them, poets aver, exist solely in the evil +minds of their critics. Coleridge goes so far as to expurgate the poetry +of William Blake, "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from +the too probable want of it in the readers." [Footnote: Letter to Charles +Augustus Tulk, Highgate, Thursday Evening, 1818, p. 684, Vol. II, +_Letters_, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge.] + +The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the +more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak +of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for +autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in +which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says +of Burns, "We can see horribly clear in the work of such a man his whole +life, as if we were God's spies." [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, +p. 285.] The Rousseau-like nudity of the poet's soul is sometimes put +forward as a plea that the public should close its eyes to possible +shortcomings. Yet, as a matter of fact, it is precisely in the lack of +privacy characterizing the poet's life that his enemies find their +justification for concerning themselves with his morality. Since by +flaunting his personality in his verse he propagates his faults among +his admirers, the public is surely justified in pointing out and +denouncing his failings. + +Poets cannot logically deny this. To do so, they would have to confess +that their inspirations are wholly unaffected by their personalities. +But this is, naturally, a very unpopular line of defense. That unhappy +worshiper of puritan morals and of the muses, J. G. Holland, does make +such a contention, averring, + + God finds his mighty way + Into his verse. The dimmest window panes + Let in the morning light, and in that light + Our faces shine with kindled sense of God + And his unwearied goodness, but the glass + Gets little good of it; nay, it retains + Its chill and grime beyond the power of light + To warm or whiten ... + ... The psalmist's soul + Was not a fitting place for psalms like his + To dwell in overlong, while wanting words. +[Footnote: _Kathrina._] + +But the egotism of the average poet precludes this explanation. No more +deadly insult could be offered him than forgiveness of his sins on the +ground of their unimportance. Far from holding that his personality does +not affect his verse, he would have us believe that the sole worth of +his poetry lies in its reflection of his unique qualities of soul. +Elizabeth Barrett, not Holland, exhibits the typical poetic attitude +when she asks Robert Browning, "Is it true, as others say, that the +productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature,--that in the +minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is _not_ true, +to my mind." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 3, 1845.] + +The glass houses in which the poet's accusers may reside really have +nothing to do with the question. The immorality of these men is of +comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's +personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his +works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn +have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne +muses happily over the sins of Villon, + + But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire, +[Footnote: _A Ballad of François Villon._] +it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a +claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without +recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral +history from his writings. + +Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the +ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them +that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead +him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and +philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of +virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by +making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous +charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition. + +There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the +obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness +of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their +voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which +finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly +ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege. + +So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its +members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to +present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are +heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose +only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days +when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting +their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is +untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to +dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say +when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing +at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to +choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and +the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. +Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period +wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted +morality, towers above most of his contemporaries? + +Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an +addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine +element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes +too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling +conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under +the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the +sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among +men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law. + +Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking +back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to + + Come down and redeem us from virtue, + +upon his youthful zest in leaving + + The lilies and languors of virtue + For the roses and raptures of vice, + +he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic +ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous +life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, +there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish +and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse, +_Life of Swinburne,_ p. 309.] + +So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, +however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the +contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression +must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most +conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the +time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration +of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes +did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore: + + If on his cheek unholy blood + Burned for one youthful hour, + 'Twas but the flushing of the bud + That bloomed a milk-white flower. +[Footnote: _After a Lecture on Moore_.] + +One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures +must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's +moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is +unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, +"I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to +the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have +recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent +to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to +feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of +Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his +obligatory feelings did not flower in a _Christabel_ or a _Kubla Khan_. + +The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of +poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from +conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what +even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if +unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness +added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of +virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its +æsthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains +unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been +on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose +aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic +expression. + +The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect +life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it. +He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to +tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to +indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until +he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, +Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, +A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No Lust Like to +Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth +century. A characteristic renaissance attitude toward life and art was +caught by Browning in a passage of _Sordello_. The hero, in a momentary +reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from +vice and exclaims, + + Leave untried + Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze + Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees + Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust, + All tyrannies in every shape be thrust + Upon this now. + +Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a +passing impulse in Sordello's life. + +The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in +the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If +the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a +very short-lived one. The blasé note is so dominant in Byron's +autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don +Juan_--as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably +in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's +_Villanelle of the Poet's Road_ is a typical expression of the +mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines, + + Wine and women and song, + Three things garnish our way: + Yet is day overlong. + Three things render us strong, + Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. + Yet is day overlong. +Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, +rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices +is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an +inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover +it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic +feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. +This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian +period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to +it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the +most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the +_Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and +Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these +youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so +innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance +for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of +Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but +inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss +Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that +everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly +by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; +May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and +Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which +would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor, +cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into +their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." +[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.] + +Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as +yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him +into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a +yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take +an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the +_Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, +as in the lines, + + There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me, + I like the lassies--Gude forgie me. + +But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his +artist's temperament. The muse tells him, + + I saw thy pulses' maddening play, + Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way, + And yet the light that led astray + Was light from Heaven. + +And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided +poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time. + +Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height +about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor +over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_; +Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of François Villon_.] At the same time +Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, +_Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis +Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared +to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this +time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving +cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded + + What expiating agony + May for him damned to poesy + Shut in that little sentence be,-- + What deep austerities of strife,-- + He lived his life. He lived his life. +[Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.] + +Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case +more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, +puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as +the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their +charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to +temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper +course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but +to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a +disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. +[Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease +is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the +overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his +nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand +temptation. + +Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders +to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in +sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that +this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major +conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting +every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a +sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds +only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the +perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each +expression of his theories. + +In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, +[Footnote: See _Edmund Shore_, _Villars_.] Praed [Footnote: See _The +Talented Man_, _To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry_.] and Landor. [Footnote: +See _Few Poets Beckon_, _Apology for Gebir_.] Later, when the wave of +Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the +cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, +in _Michael Angelo_.] Protest against the group of decadents who +flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, +though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as +seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to +dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the +laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet +reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus: + + There will be fools that in the name of art + Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, + I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard + From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves + Far, far above them. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. See also +Richard Le Gallienne, _The Decadent to his Soul_, _Proem to the +Reader in English Poems_; Joyce Kilmer, _A Ballad of New Sins_.] + +Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral +natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. +In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is +ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of +wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if +a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all +scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth +century this mode of passing judgment was most naïvely manifest in +verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal +lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, +without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In +the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to +prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same +simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral +reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, +Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective +attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.] + +It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that +considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The +highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though +poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his +critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his +protégé, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, +Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been +represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of +their poetical wares. + +Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead +one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain +quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate +connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously +moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that +the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing +the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in _In Memoriam_: + + Loveliness of perfect deeds, + More strong than all poetic thought, + +and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the +tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's _Letters of Life and Morning_, in +which she exhorts the young poet, + + Learn to sing, + But first in all thy learning, learn to be. + +The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the +conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, +not poetry, holds his first allegiance. + + He held his manly name + Far dearer than the muse, +[Footnote: J. G. Saxe, _A Poet's Elegy_.] + +we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan +carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' +talent and their respectability, averring, + + They are like angels, but some angels fell. +[Footnote: _Poets_.] + +Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be +mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes, + + Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these + The poet seems beside the man; + His life is now his noblest strain. +[Footnote: _To Bryant on His Birthday_.] + +When the poet of more firmly grounded conviction attempts to show reason +for his confidence in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument +for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by +Carlyle in his essay, _The Hero as Poet_. This is the theory that, far +from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, +the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as +preëminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry +is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from +certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have +been unlimited. Longfellow has seized upon this conception of the poet +in his drama, _Michael Angelo_, as has G. L. Raymond in his drama, +_Dante_. In the latter poem the argument for the poet's moral supremacy +is baldly set forth. + +Artistic sensibility, Dante says, far from excusing moral laxity, binds +one to stricter standards of right living. So when Cavalcanti argues in +favor of free love, + + Your humming birds may sip the sweet they need + From every flower, and why not humming poets? + +Raymond makes Dante reply, + + The poets are not lesser men, but greater, + And so should find unworthy of themselves + A word, a deed, that makes them seem less worthy. + +Owing to the growth of specialization in modern life, this argument, +despite Carlyle, has not attained much popularity. Even in idealized +fictions of the poet, it is not often maintained that he is equally +proficient in every line of activity. Only one actual poet within our +period, William Morris, can be taken as representative of such a type, +and he does not afford a strong argument for the poet's distinctive +virtue, inasmuch as tradition does not represent him as numbering +remarkable saintliness among his numerous gifts. + +There is a decided inconsistency, moreover, in claiming unusual strength +of will as one of the poet's attributes. The muscular morality resulting +from training one's will develops in proportion to one's ability to +overthrow one's own unruly impulses. It is almost universally maintained +by poets, on the contrary, that their gift depends upon their yielding +themselves utterly to every fugitive impulse and emotion. Little modern +verse vaunts the poet's stern self-control. George Meredith may cry, + + I take the hap + Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails + Propels, but I am helmsman. +[Footnote: _Modern Love_.] + +Henley may thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, +however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry +than is this one. + +Hardly more popular than the superman theory is another argument for the +poet's virtue that appears sporadically in verse. It has occurred to a +few poets that their virtue is accounted for by the high subject-matter +of their work, which exercises an unconscious influence upon their +lives. Thus in the eighteenth century Young finds it natural that in +Addison, the author of _Cato_, + + Virtues by departed heroes taught + Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame, + Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame. +[Footnote: _Lines to Mr. Addison_.] + +Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same +view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live + + With pureness in youth and religion in age. +[Footnote: _What Is a Poet_.] + +since he conceives as the function of poetry + + To raise and purify the grovelling soul, + * * * * * + And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a +Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of +the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming +his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more +efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps. + +These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real +ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his +subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,--the +fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful. + +There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility +with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves +his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: See the +_Republic_, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher +are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is +riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the +confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that +the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are +unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its +most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an +irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher. + +Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged +throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain +of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the +erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one +phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England, +where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again +in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading +across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The +only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the +Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to +English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his +Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian æsthetics, +he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his +creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to +make of his own life a true poem. + +"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the +beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the +shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain +assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] +The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of +beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and +repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering +sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry, + + Tis not in + The harmony of things--this hard decree, + This ineradicable taint of sin, + This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree + Whose root is earth. +[Footnote: _Childe Harold_.] + +If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it +is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been +undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems +wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and +the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, _Ode on the Poetical Character_; +John Hughes, _Ode on Divine Poetry_.] Among the romantic poets, the +Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he +says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the +opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad +feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this +particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's +allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in +the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the +poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. +One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor +poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet, + + O singing heart, think not of aught save song, + Beauty can do no wrong. +[Footnote: _Song_.] + +Again one hears of the singer, + + Pure must he be; + Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear + Where others hear not; see where others see + With a dazed vision, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_.] + +and again, + + To write a poem, a man should be as pure + As frost-flowers. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_.] + +Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who + + Lived beyond men, and so stood + Admitted to the brotherhood + Of beauty. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _The Dreamer of Dreams_.] + +It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all +of them look to a single standard to govern them æsthetically and +morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises, + +Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread +save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of +sin. [Footnote: _The Silent Voices_.] + +Such is the poet's case for himself. But no matter how eloquently he +presents his case, his quarrel with his three enemies remains almost as +bitter as before, and he is obliged to pay some attention to their +individual charges. + +The poet's quarrel with the philistine, in particular, is far from +settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the +good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What +is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the +plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any +charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which +reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? +Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary +folk are. If the poet professes to be able to achieve righteousness +without effort, the only way to prove it is to conform his conduct to +that of men who achieve righteousness with groaning of spirit. It is too +easy for the poet to justify any and every aberration with the +announcement, "My sixth sense for virtue, which you do not possess, has +revealed to me the propriety of such conduct." Thus reasons the +philistine. + +The beauty-blind philistine doubtless has some cause for bewilderment, +but the poet takes no pains to placate him. The more genuine is one's +impulse toward goodness, the more inevitably, the poet says, will it +bring one into conflict with an artificial code of morals. Shelley +indicated this at length in _The Defense of Poetry_, and in both +_Rosalind and Helen_ and _The Revolt of Islam_ he showed his bards +offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of +the poet-hero in _Prince Athanase_ Shelley tells us, + + Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise. + What he dared do or think, though men might start + He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes. + +It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative +verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a +typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora +Leigh_, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid, +and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and +chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage +with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical +resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too +respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath +with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry +Patmore. In Patmore's poem, _Olympus_, the bard decides to spend an +evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the +coarse jests, and flees home to + + The milk-soup men call domestic bliss. + +Likewise, in _The Angel in the House_, the poet follows a most +domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he +fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself. This sin +consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after +shamefacedly confessing it, he adds, + + And ere I slept, on bended knee + I owned myself, with many a tear + Unseasonable, disorderly. + +But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience +to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other +extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands +of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from +conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being + + Tall galleons, + Out of their very beauty driven to dare + The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_, Alfred Noyes.] + +He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such +courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine +Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public, + + My sins they learn by rote, + And never miss one; no, no miser of them, + * * * * * + Avid of foulness, so they hound me out + Away from blessing that they prate about, + But never saw, and never dreamed upon, + And know not how to long for with desire. +[Footnote: _Marlowe_.] + +In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in lines _On the Morals of +Poets_, warns their detractor, + + Bigot, one folly of the man you flout + Is more to God than thy lean life is whole. + +If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out +that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He +acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps, +but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a +childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the +world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The +innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and +purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical +pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's _The Minstrel_, +suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the +world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The +innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by +like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating +him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the +shock of awakening to conditions as they are. But environment alone does +not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of +whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize +evil motives when they are face to face with them. + +Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic +nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. +Browning, [Footnote: See _A Vision of Poets_.] Swinburne [Footnote: +See _A New Year's Ode_.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See _Sister +Songs_.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it +has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an +ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so +noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the +poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in +literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley, + + The curse of Cain + Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast + And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest. + +Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the +poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes of _Rosalind and Helen, +The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion_ and _Prince Athanase_, +share the disposition of the last-named one: + + Naught of ill his heart could understand, + But pity and wild sorrow for the same. + +It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of +Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic +readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is +reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many +respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's +character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting +glimpses of Shelley in _Sordello_, and to have acknowledged them in +his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's +revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of +Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley +as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of +later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven. +Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the +earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the +saint's white purity," being + + A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong, + * * * * * + With heavenly inspiration, too divine + For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine. +[Footnote: _Shelley_.] + +Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven +heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission. + +Aside from Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently +chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the +poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, _The +Death of Marlowe_, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's +depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it +moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted +Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye. In the drama by +Josephine Preston Peabody, the persecutions of hypocritical puritans +hound Marlowe to his death. [Footnote: _Marlowe._] + +The most representative view of Marlowe as an innocent, deceived youth +is that presented by Alfred Noyes, in _At the Sign of the Golden +Shoe_. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group +thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies + + Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl, + Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown. + +While there float in from the street, at intervals, the cries of the +ballad-mongers hawking their latest doggerel, + + Blaspheming Tamborlin must die, + And Faustus meet his end; + Repent, repent, or presently + To hell you must descend, + +Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringing +his possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also, + All unshielded, all unarmed, + A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams. + +His manner, + + Untamed, adventurous, but still innocent, + +exposed him to the clutches of the underworld. One woman, in particular, + + Used all her London tricks + To coney-catch the country greenhorn. + +Won by her pathetic account of her virtues and trials Marlowe tried to +help her to escape from London-then, because he was utterly unused to +the wiles of women, and was + + Simple as all great, elemental things, + +when she expressed an infatuation for him, then + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + * * * * * + And all that God had meant to wake one day + Under the Sun of Love, suddenly woke + By candle-light, and cried, "The Sun, the Sun." + +At last, holding him wrapped in her hair, the woman attempted to +tantalize him by revealing her promiscuous amours. In a horror of agony +and loathing, Marlowe broke away from her. The next day, as Nash was +loitering in a group including this woman and her lover, Archer, someone +ran in to warn Archer that a man was on his way to kill him. As Marlowe +strode into the place, Nash was struck afresh by his beauty: + + I saw his face, + Pale, innocent, just the clear face of that boy + Who walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick, + The little cobbler's son. Yet--there I caught + My only glimpse of how the sun-god looked-- + +Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that + + His were, perchance, the noblest steeds of all, + And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawn + Above the world.... Before his hand + Had learned to quell them, he was dashed to earth. + +Minor writers are most impartial in clearing the names of any and all +historical artists by such reasoning as this. By negligible American +versifiers one too often finds Burns lauded as one whom "such purity +inspires," [Footnote: A. S. G., _Burns_.] and, more astonishingly, +Byron conceived of as a misjudged innocent. If one is surprised to hear, +in verse on Byron's death, + + His cherub soul has passed to its eclipse, +[Footnote: T. H. Chivers, _On the Death of Byron_.] + +this fades into insignificance beside the consolation offered Byron by +another writer for his trials in this world, + + Peace awaits thee with caressings, + Sitting at the feet of Jesus. + +Better known poets are likely to admit a streak of imperfection in a few +of their number, while maintaining their essential goodness. It is +refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find +James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of +philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines +Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first +of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that +ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly +toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the +end, Burns' great charity is felt to offset all his failings, and Lowell +adds, of poets in general, + + These larger hearts must feel the rolls + Of stormier-waved temptation; + These star-wide souls beneath their poles + Bear zones of tropic passion. +[Footnote: _At the Burns Centennial_.] + +Browning is willing to allow even fictitious artists to be driven into +imperfect conduct by the failure of those about them to live up to their +standards. For example, Fra Lippo Lippi, disgusted with the barren +virtue of the monks, confesses, + + I do these wild things in sheer despite + And play the fooleries you catch me at + In sheer rage. + +But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author +assures the philistine public that it is entirely to blame. + +If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which +he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with +the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain +man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be +satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and +systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to +him. + +The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in +the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. +Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and +consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that +time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. +Robert Browning devoted a poem, _With Francis Furini_, to exposing the +incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in _The +Poet's Vow_, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken +determination to retire from the world, + + That so my purged, once human heart, + From all the human rent, + May gather strength to pledge and drink + Your wine of wonderment, + While you pardon me all blessingly + The woe mine Adam sent. + +In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the +best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts. + +No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a +flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in +their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's +mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a +failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is +truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives +in _Sordello_. + +One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument +again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than +Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and +sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing +himself into all phases of life. + +It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop +from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to +develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in +_Pauline_, + + I had resolved + No age should come on me ere youth was spent, + For I would wear myself out, + +Omar Khayyam's + + While you live + Drink!--for once dead you never shall return, + +Swinburne's cry of despair, + + Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has + grown gray with thy breath; + We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the + fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.] + +show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less +than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become +easy for the poet to carry his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His +talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to +guide aright his + + principle of restlessness + That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all +[Footnote: _Pauline_.] + +The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses +that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times. +Emerson admits this, telling us, in _The Poet_, that although the +singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which + + Turn his heart from lovely maids, + And make the darlings of the earth + Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth, + +these moments of exaltation pass, and the singer finds himself a mere +man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature, + + Eager for good, not hating ill; + On his tense chords all strokes are felt, + The good, the bad, with equal zeal. + +It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions +of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage +at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is +quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's +_Ode to Duty_ does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception +of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the +grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for +poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic +principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of +Arthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the +disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She +reflected grimly, + + Does the road wind uphill all the way? + Yes, to the very end! + Will the day's journey take the whole long day? + From morn till night, my friend. +[Footnote: _Uphill._] + +It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern +conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty +is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough +and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas +in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness +is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then +so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights. +Thus in the _Prelude_ he described an unconscious purification of +his life by his worship of physical beauty, saying of nature, + + If in my youth I have been pure in heart, + If, mingling with the world, I am content + With my own modest pleasures, and have lived + With God and Nature communing, removed + From little enmities and low desires, + The gift is yours. + +Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature +in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical +aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to +Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem +to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as +possible--as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The +Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing +incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for +they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to +Duty,_ + + When love is an unerring light, + And joy its own felicity. + +For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has +capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's +life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such +misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_ +wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, +because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted. +He resolves, + + The world shall bow to me conceiving all + Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small + Afar--not tasting any; no machine + To exercise my utmost will is mine, + Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive + What I could do, a mastery believe + Asserted and established to the throng + By their selected evidence of song, + Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek + To be, I am. + +The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet +the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser +whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the +philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the +good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion? +What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the +essential nature of the highest good as is the reason? + +There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on +this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and +the poet who + + dares to take + Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake, +[Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._] + +there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the +rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic +of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but +not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the +world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, +not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of +the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically asserting, "I hold +virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the +disposition, each a _feeling,_ not a principle." [Footnote: _Letter to +Charles Dallas,_ January 21, 1808.] + +On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as +that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher, +is governed by reason solely,--that the poetic imagination is a purely +intellectual function. [Footnote: See the _Southern Literary +Messenger,_ II, 328, April, 1836.] + +The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes +are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,--Browning, Tennyson, +Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual +pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral +conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their +natures. + +The most profound utterances of poets on this subject, however, show +them to be, not rationalists, but thoroughgoing Platonists. The feeling +in which they trust is a Platonic intuition which includes the reason, +but exists above it. At least this is the view of Shelley, and Shelley +has, more largely than any other man, moulded the beliefs of later +English poets. It is because he judges imaginative feeling to be always +in harmony with the deepest truths perceived by the reason that he +advertises his intention to purify men by awakening their feelings. +Therefore, in his preface to _The Revolt of Islam_ he says "I would +only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of +true virtue." in the preface to the _Cenci,_ again, he declares, +"Imagination is as the immortal God which should take flesh for the +redemption of human passion." + +The poet, while thus expressing absolute faith in the power of beauty to +redeem the world, yet is obliged to take into account the Platonic +distinction between the beautiful and the lover of the beautiful. +[Footnote: _Symposium,_ § 204.] + +No man is pure poet, he admits, but in proportion as he approaches +perfect artistry, his life is purified. Shelley is expressing the +beliefs of practically all artists when he says, "The greatest poets +have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate +prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the +most fortunate of men; and the exceptions, as they regard those who +possess the poetical faculty in a high, yet an inferior degree, will be +found upon consideration to confirm, rather than to destroy, the rule." +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry._] + +Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Shelley precisely. In +_The Crystal,_ Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been +embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts +their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And in _Life +and Song_ he repeats the same idea: + + None of the singers ever yet + Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, + Or truly sung his true, true thought. + +Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life +arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and +the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the +poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with +the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges, +instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote: +Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the +senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal. + +Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic +expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence +to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in +the nature of a farewell to verse writing. In _The Symbol Seduces,_ +"A. E." exclaims, + + I leave + For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower, + For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive; + For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower. + +But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as +Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging +to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does +not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him, +and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the +imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to +him "a dome of many colored glass" that reveals, yet stains, "the white +radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty +apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her +ravishing. + +This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic +problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the +revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a +great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of +his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in +contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands +that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly +passions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to +separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may, +according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of +Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this +time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the +preëminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the +disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was +compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel +that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede +to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature +of the artist is manifest. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE POET'S RELIGION + + +There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the +priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not +tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed +of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing +no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest +critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, assert +with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with +their interpretation of that word. + +As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the +refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are +in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as +incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is +unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic +philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is, +as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the +poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The +poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society. + +The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in +evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry +is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn +pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions +of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the +period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for +art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers +could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had +said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we +must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This +narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within +the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be +characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in +what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their +philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds +and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send +their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue +philosophers. + +Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a +sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his +thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not +unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. +But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because +he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot +conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting +philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world +of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of +philosophy to which he objected, as follows: + + To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant + to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first + sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome + hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and + _species_ and _differentia_, into formal classes, + under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels + fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or + physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our + flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: _Plato and + Platonism._] + +But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which +is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet +demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we +may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most +purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, +"The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. +Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other +the image." [Footnote: _The Romantic Movement,_ p. 129.] That is, +to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual. + +Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true +that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of +subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Shelley is +the classic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's +theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of +his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, in _Queen Mab_. +But Shelley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the +incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that +Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under +the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely +able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the +course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more +truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with +spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, +were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who +declared, "After I had read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary,_ +I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart." +[Footnote: James Gillman, _Life of Coleridge_, p. 23.] + +A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at +the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing +materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their +admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in +his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that +materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the +curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the +reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If +idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which +poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the +_fin de siècle_ school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, +already drooping. + +It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, +Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these +men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, +the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible +explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for +poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic +views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To +Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that +one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. +"I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about +which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life." +[Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.] + +It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the +poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only +where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the +horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the +most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from +obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which +expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank +paper. + +One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the +notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose +atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of _The City of Dreadful +Night_. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, +with the words, + + And now at last authentic word I bring + Witnessed by every dead and living thing; + Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: + There is no God; no fiend with name divine + Made us and tortures us; if we must pine + It is to satiate no Being's gall. + +But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of +James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically +speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of +his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world +in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of +him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It +would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. +Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City +of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William +Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful +envy, + + He came to the desert of London town, + Mirk miles broad; + He wandered up and he wandered down, + Ever alone with God. +[Footnote: _William Blake._] + +Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner +world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be +distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his +impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of +his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it +is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the +"aesthetic repose." + +Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third +element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim +sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the +eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning, + + Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells + Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine. +[Footnote: _Poets._] + +Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every +verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of +the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, +John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benét, +_The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged +persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the +present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his +birds are + + Summer-saulting for God's sake. + +Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and +spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at +best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas +Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought +"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously +excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause +of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas +which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, +however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost +reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the +flower itself. He muses, + + Flower in the crannied wall, + I pluck you out of the crannies;-- + I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, + Little flower--but if I could understand + What you are, root and all and all in all, + I should know what God and man is. + +By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets +designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning +of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the +instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All +poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the +sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one. + +A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's +unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as +Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to +do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If +he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina +Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by + + The foolishest fond folly of a heart + Divided, neither here nor there at rest, + That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth. +[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.] + +On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely +physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his +nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. +Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both +elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him. + +Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a +conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the +unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Shelley devoted +a large part of _Prometheus Unbound_ and the conclusion of _Adonais_ to +his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the +sense world which was yet spiritual, + + The Being that is in the clouds and air, + That is in the green leaves among the groves, +[Footnote: _Hart Leap Well._] + +and was led to the conclusion, + + It is my faith that every flower + Enjoys the air it breathes. +[Footnote: _Lines Written in Early Spring._] + +Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever +returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. +Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now +rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in _Empedocles on +Ætna,_ in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and +out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is +most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's +pantheistic faith. Swinburne's _Hertha_ is one of the most thorough +going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much +of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit. +One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne's +_Natural Religion,_ wherein he explains the grounds of his faith, + + Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air + I cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?" + Sudden the answer like a flute I heard; + It was an angel, though it seemed a bird. + +On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's +charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the +realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to +establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe +with him. + +The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of +the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, +that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly +incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards +himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a +religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. +Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated +"without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter +to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the +same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does +poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence +from this power of revelation. + +But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the +poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit +characteristic of religious reverence. + +It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is +one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings. + + There is no God, O son! + If thou be none, +[Footnote: _On the Downs._] + +Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet +exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry +the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter +of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any +qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the +ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, +any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I +wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but +assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, +p. 309.] + +Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by +Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the +other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the +third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's +divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification +of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own +image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet +God." [Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of +the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in +carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. +In the _Prophetic Books_, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all +that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not +humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it. + +Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, +in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not +flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the +puritan himself feels the power of Emily Brontë's _Last Lines,_ in which +she cries with proud and triumphant faith, + + Though earth and man were gone, + And suns and universes ceased to be, + And Thou wert left alone, + Every existence would exist in Thee. + + There is not room for Death, + Nor atom that his might could render void; + Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, + And what Thou art may never be destroyed. + +There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has +the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical +illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome +importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if +these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully +repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious +demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the +romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him. + +In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to +placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the +appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this +attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. +So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of +the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also +was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the +unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch +as Byron's _A Vision of Judgment,_ with its irresistible satire on +Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet. + +The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the +romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance +of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century +inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest +of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring +conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of +yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I _do_ believe," +said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but +the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the +orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of +religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the +Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See +also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] _Cain,_ +however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief +significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in +arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians. + +Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional +religion. In _Julian and Maddalo_, he causes Byron to say of him, + + You were ever still + Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel. + +Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was +persecuted by the church. In _Rosalind and Helen_, the hero was +hated by the clergy, + + For he made verses wild and queer + Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear, + +and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in +Lionel's death, for + + The ministers of misrule sent + Seized on Lionel and bore + His chained limbs to a dreary tower, + For he, they said, from his mind had bent + Against their gods keen blasphemy. + +The most notable illustration of this phase of Shelley's thought is +_The Revolt of Islam,_ wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put +to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies. + +Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets +have gloried in his attitude. + +Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he + + Smote the God of base men's choice + At God's own gate. +[Footnote: _Burns._] + +Young poets have not yet lost their taste for religious persecution. It +is a great disappointment to them to find it difficult to strike fire +from the faithful in these days. Swinburne in his early poetry denounced +the orthodox God with such vigor that he roused a momentary flutter of +horror in the church, but nowadays the young poet who craves to manifest +his spiritual daring is far more likely to find himself in the position +of Rupert Brooke, of whom someone has said, "He imagines the poet as +going on a magnificent quest to curse God on his throne of fire, and +finding--nothing." + +The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, +however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his +finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, +indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in +which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, +frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter +Day._] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See _In Memoriam._] of Arnold, [Footnote: +See _Dover Beach._] of Clough. [Footnote: See _The New Sinai, Qui +Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium._] So, too, James Thomson muses +with regret, + + How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray + With all the others whom we love so well! + All disbelief and doubt might pass away, + And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell. + Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, + Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast. +[Footnote: _The Reclusant._] + +In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet +sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious +questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick +to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, +rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his +contemporaries, + + There lives more faith in honest doubt, + Believe me, than in half the creeds. + +Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he +expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any +more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the +heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and +love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards +proved spurious).] + +The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who +prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a +shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very +satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in +that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the +quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question +that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious +doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has +been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious +poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is +good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will +seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the +last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in +purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold. + +Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet +can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is +strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a +thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a +recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest +doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry, + + Ah, but there should be one! + There should be one. And there's the bitterness + Of this unending torture-place for men, + For the proud soul that craves a perfectness + That might outwear the rotting of all things + Rooted in earth. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe._] + +The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his +quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free +himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures +purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward +religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of +Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to +the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than +Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious +satisfaction. Thus the hero of _Pauline_ comes to no triumphant +issue, though he maintains, + + I have always had one lode-star; now + As I look back, I see that I have halted + Or hastened as I looked towards that star, + A need, a trust, a yearning after God. + +The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses, + + Of a power above you still, + Which, utterly incomprehensible, + Is out of rivalry, which thus you can + Love, though unloving all conceived by man-- + What need! And of--none the minutest duct + To that out-nature, naught that would instruct + And so let rivalry begin to live-- + But of a Power its representative + Who, being for authority the same, + Communication different, should claim + A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed, + This human clear, as that Divine concealed-- + What utter need! + +There is, after all, small need that the public should charge the poet +with deliberate failure to gain a satisfactory view of the deity. The +quest of a God who satisfies the poet's demand that He shall include all +life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and +embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears +inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and +troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in + + The too-bold dying song of her whose soul + Knew no fellow for might, + Passion, vehemence, grief, + Daring, since Byron died. +[Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, _Haworth Churchyard._] + +A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous +as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him, + + Who dropped his plummet down the broad + Deep universe, and said, "No God," + Finding no bottom. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets._] + +If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful +issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the +conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel +with Tennyson, + + Our little systems have their day, + They have their day and cease to be; + They are but broken lights of thee, + And thou, O Lord, art more than they, +[Footnote: _In Memoriam._] + +yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to + + Let lore of all theology + Be to thy soul what it can be. +[Footnote: _Soothsay._] + +Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of +tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the +part of the church. + +In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with +thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of +the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the +frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as +akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who +causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, _A Life in Song,_ +and _The Real and the Ideal,_ to begin by being poets, and end by +becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly +less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's _Bitter Sweet_ is a +thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman +who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and +hers likewise. In _Kathrina,_ though the hero, rebellious on account of +the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the +end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his +incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an +irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the +tradition of the poet-revivalist. + +Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina +Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean +Ingelow, in _Letters of Life and Morning_, offers most conventional +religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's _The +Angel in the House_, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the +eighteenth century could afford. + +The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother +of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson, +Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a +more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived, +perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in +evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded +in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute. +There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a +formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God +and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June +28, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert +Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the +suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically +advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline +Kilmer, April 21, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters_, +ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers +the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors. + +Perhaps a history of art would not square with the repugnance one feels +toward such censorship. Conformance to the religious beliefs of his time +certainly does not seem to have handicapped Homer or Dante, to say +nothing of the preëminent men in other fields of art, Phidias, Michael +Angelo, Raphael, etc. Yet in the modern consciousness, the theory of art +for art's sake has become so far established that we feel that any +compromise of the purely aesthetic standard is a loss to the artist. The +deity of the artist and the churchman may be in some measure the same, +since absolute beauty and absolute goodness are regarded both by poets +and theologians as identical, but there is reason to believe that the +poet may not go so far astray if he cleaves to his own immediate +apprehension of absolute beauty as he will if he fashions his beliefs +upon another man's stereotyped conception of the absolute good. + +Then, too, it is not unlikely that part of the poet's reluctance to +embrace the creed of his contemporaries arises from the fact that he, in +his secret heart, still hankers for his old title of priest. He knows +that it is the imaginative faculty of the poet that has been largely +instrumental in building up every religious system. The system that +holds sway in society is apt to be the one that he himself has just +outgrown; he has, accordingly, an artist's impatience for its +immaturity. There is much truth to the poet's nature in verses entitled +_The Idol Maker Prays_: + + Grant thou, that when my art hath made thee known + And others bow, I shall not worship thee, + But as I pray thee now, then let me pray + Some greater god,--like thee to be conceived + Within my soul. +[Footnote: By Arthur Guiterman.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + + +No matter how strong our affection for the ingratiating ne'er-do-well, +there are certain charges against the poet which we cannot ignore. It is +a serious thing to have an alleged madman, inebriate, and experimenter +in crime running loose in society. But there comes a time when our +patience with his indefatigable accusers is exhausted. Is not society +going a step too far if, after the poet's positive faults have been +exhausted, it institutes a trial for his sins of omission? Yet so it is. +If the poet succeeds in proving to the satisfaction of the jury that his +influence is innocuous, he must yet hear the gruff decision, "Perhaps, +as you say, you are doing no real harm. But of what possible use are +you? Either become an efficient member of society, or cease to exist." +Must we tamely look on, while the "light, winged, and holy creature," as +Plato called the poet, is harnessed to a truck wagon, and made to +deliver the world's bread and butter? Would that it were more common for +poets openly to defy society's demands for efficiency, as certain +children and malaperts of the poetic world have done! It is pleasant to +hear the naughty advice which that especially impractical poet, Emily +Dickinson, gave to a child: "Be sure to live in vain, dear. I wish I +had." [Footnote: Gamaliel Bradford, _Portraits of American Women_, +p. 248 (Mrs. Bianchi, p. 37).] And one is hardly less pleased to hear +the irrepressible Ezra Pound instruct his songs, + + But above all, go to practical people, go, jangle their door-bells. + Say that you do no work, and that you will live forever. +[Footnote: _Salutation the Second_.] + +Surely no one else has had so bad a time with efficiency experts as has +the poet, even though everyone whose occupation does not bring out sweat +on the brow is likely to fall under their displeasure. The scholar, for +instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he +has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have +dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even +bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to +maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is +often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging +aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to +loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him? + +The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be +confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of +his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James +Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_ (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. +Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, _The Poet and the Fisher_, +and _Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship_; +Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman, +_Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P. H. Hayne, +_An Idle Poet Dreaming_; Henry Timrod, _They Dub Thee Idler_; Washington +Allston, _Sylphs of the Seasons_; C. W. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Alan Seeger, +_Oneata_; J. G. Neihardt, _The Poet's Town_.] Sometimes he gives them +the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But +occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries +to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his +bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet. + +When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers +laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to +make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional +fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and +Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_, and _The Real +and the Ideal_.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few +scattered figures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.] +Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of +Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio, +Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See +_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must +admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the +poet-politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to +celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a +protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look +to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as +following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, +for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing +Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist +is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the +citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. +[Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama, +Richard Garnett.] + +If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he +may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will +vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He +is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer, + + When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's + work, + You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. + There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the + Turk, + And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword + in his hand. + It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, + And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was + strong, + And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, + Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song. +[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.] + +It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, +Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet +lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the +poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. +From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer +may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in +war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet +as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, +The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, +Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of +the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the +Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley, +_Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates, +Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David, +Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert +Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud +Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, +Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the +Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter +Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _Hell Gate of Soissons_; +Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace +Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the +Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_; +Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said, +"The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: +See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the +poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The +verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that +warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might +have done Byron's, + + When the true lightning of his soul was bared, + Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Brontë_.] + +But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his +character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does +not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be +pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him +that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of +strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he +has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too +likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet? +Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his +title as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some +merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims +for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at +fault when he excused his occupation: + + I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse, + And wrote verse. +[Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.] + +How can the poet satisfy the philistine world that his songs are worth +while? Need we ask? Business men will vouch for their utility, if he +will but conform to business men's ideas of art. Here is a typical +expression of their views, couched in verse for the singer's better +comprehension: + + The days of long-haired poets now are o'er, + The short-haired poet seems to have the floor; + For now the world no more attends to rhymes + That do not catch the spirit of the times. + The short-haired poet has no muse or chief, + He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef. +[Footnote: "The Short-haired Poet," in _Common-Sense_, by E. F. Ware.] + +But the poet utterly repudiates such a view of himself as this, for he +cannot draw his breath in the commercial world. [Footnote: Several poems +lately have voiced the poet's horror of materialism. See Josephine +Preston Peabody, _The Singing Man_; Richard Le Gallienne, _To R. W. +Emerson, Richard Watson Gilder_; Mary Robinson, _Art and Life_.] In vain +he assures his would-be friends that the intangibilities with which he +deals have a value of their own. Emerson says, + + One harvest from thy field + Homeward brought the oxen strong; + A second crop thine acres yield + Which I gather in a song. +[Footnote: _Apology_] + +But for this second crop the practical man says he can find absolutely +no market; hence overtures of friendliness between him and the poet end +with sneers and contempt on both sides. Doubtless the best way for the +poet to deal with the perennial complaints of the practical-minded, is +simply to state brazenly, as did Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite +useless." [Footnote: Preface to _Dorian Gray_.] + +Is the poet justified, then, in stopping his ears to all censure, and +living unto himself? Not so; when the hub-bub of his sordid accusers +dies away, he is conscious of another summons, before a tribunal which +he cannot despise or ignore. For once more the poet's equivocal position +exposes him to attacks from all quarters. He stands midway between the +spiritual and the physical worlds, he reveals the ideal in the sensual. +Therefore, while the practical man complains that the poet does not +handle the solid objects of the physical world, but transmutes them to +airy nothings, the philosopher, on the contrary, condemns the poet +because he does not wholly sever connections with this same physical +world, but is continually hovering about it, like a homesick ghost. + +Like the plain man, the philosopher gives the poet a chance to vindicate +his usefulness. Plato's challenge is not so age-worn that we may not +requote it. He makes Socrates say, in the _Republic_, + +Let us assure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation +that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered state, +we shall be delighted to receive her.... We are very conscious of her +charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth.... Shall I +propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this +condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some +other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are +lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on +her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful +to states and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. +[Footnote: _Republic_, Book X, 607.] + + * * * * * + +One wonders why the lovers of Poetry have been so much more solicitous +for her cause than Poetry herself has appeared to be. Aristotle, and +after him many others,--in the field of English literature, Sidney, +Shelley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,--have made most eloquent +defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been +forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to +attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the +last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the +impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them +to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but +here are some things I might say for myself, if I wished." + +Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal +conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give +the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy. +But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded +man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the +philosopher assures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than +is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at +least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the +philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet +distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet +pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, +but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious +system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of +himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is +really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body. + +Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical +man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of +the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and +one by the poet. [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, 596 B ff.] Now +the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well +known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the +room: + + "I know what is and what has been; + Not anything to me comes strange, + Who in so many years have seen + And lived through every kind of change. + I know when men are bad or good, + When well or ill," he slowly said, + "When sad or glad, when sane or mad + And when they sleep alive or dead." +[Footnote: _In the Room_] + +Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious +memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not +come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript +product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is +on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror +across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a +person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would +seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow +imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing +higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport." +[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.] + +It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake +their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd +enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of +dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel +the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow +assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude: + + Painting and sculpture are but images; + Are merely shadows cast by outward things + On stone or canvas, having in themselves + No separate existence. Architecture, + As something in itself, and not an image, + A something that is not, surpasses them + As substance shadow. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us +as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and +buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has +become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's +charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. +The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney +and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find +that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not +from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries +of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we +have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak +of commonness in the speaker's nature,--of a disposition to value the +clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined +to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, +"I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect. +It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an +earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of +the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than +one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A. +E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing, + + He who might have wrought in flame + Only traced upon the foam. +[Footnote: _Epilogue_] + +In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his +death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty +in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: +Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le +Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet +who died a soldier: + + A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, + Are greater than a poet's art, + And greater than a poet's fame + A little grave that has no name. +[Footnote: _Soliloquy_.] + +Is not our idealization of poets who died in war a confession that we +ourselves believe that they chose the better part,--that they did well +to discard imitation of life for life itself? + +It is not fair to force an answer to such a question till we have more +thoroughly canvassed poets' convictions on this matter. Do they all +admit the justice of Plato's characterization of poetry as a sport, +comparable to golf or tennis? In a few specific instances, poets have +taken this attitude toward their own verse, of course. There was the +"art for art's sake" cry, which at the end of the last century surely +degenerated into such a conception of poetry. There have been a number +of poets like Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang, who have frankly regarded +their verse as a pastime to while away an idle hour. There was +Swinburne, who characterized many of his poems as being idle and light +as white butterflies. [Footnote: See the _Dedication to Christina +Rossetti_, and _Envoi_.] But when we turn away from these +prestidigitators of rhymes and rhythms, we find that no view of poetry +is less acceptable than this one to poets in general. They are far more +likely to earn the world's ridicule by the deadly seriousness with which +they take verse writing. If the object of his pursuit is a sport, the +average poet is as little aware of it as is the athlete who suffers a +nervous collapse before the big game of the season. + +But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an +imitation of life? It depends, of course, upon how broadly we interpret +the phrase, "imitation of life." In one sense almost every poet would +say that Plato was right in characterizing poetry thus. The usual +account of inspiration points to passive mirroring of life. Someone has +said of the poet, + + As a lake + Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, + Shall he reflect our great humanity. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's +function, but they leave us leeway to quarrel over the nature of the +reflection mentioned, just as we quarrel over the exact connotations of +Plato's and Aristotle's word, imitation. Even if we hold to the narrower +meaning of imitation, there are a few poets who intimate that imitation +alone is their aim in writing poetry. Denying that life has an ideal +element, they take pains to mirror it, line for line, and blemish for +blemish. How can they meet Plato's question as to their usefulness? If +life is a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear +what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the +case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war +poetry. [Footnote: See _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_.] Perhaps his +defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication +contained in his two lines, + + If there's good in war and crime, + There may be in my bits of rhyme. +[Footnote: See _Ibid_.] + +Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least +James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most +thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in +English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_. +Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he +says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence +may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade +before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But +would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is +doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of +life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the +despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than +reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from +its realism, but from the idealism of the writer. + +We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection +of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. +Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its +misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let +the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and +dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple +haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, +for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is. + + And they shall be accounted poet-kings + Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose +inevitably calls up William Morris: + + Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, + Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? + Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme + Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, + Telling a tale, not too importunate + To those who in the sleepy region stay, + Lulled by the singer of an empty day. +[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.] + +Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He +would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's +minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about +ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead +for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, +_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other +justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of +man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea +that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought +of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the +breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to +suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says, + + 'Tis the privilege of art + Thus to play its cheerful part + Man on earth to acclimate + And bend the exile to his fate. +[Footnote: _Art_.] + +It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings +this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art +accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of +life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, +and is its essence. + +Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems +strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to +render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the +artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not +precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally +Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. +Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the +essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's +light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who +portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives +usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that +gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover +of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is +truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a +mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a +representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a +service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All +that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning +says, + + Paint a body well, + You paint a soul by implication. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual +accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is +useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward +a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and +that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he +tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye +and save the soul beside," [Footnote: _The Ring and the Book_.] as +Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things +under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest +insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, +without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers, + + If you get simple beauty and naught else, + You get about the best thing God invents. +[Footnote: _Fra, Lippo Lippi_.] + +Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of +the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be +expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy +Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist +simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword +Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. +Cook, June 28, 1918.] + +Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that +the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal +and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should +this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, +harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity. + +The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it +has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as + + A many-sided mirror, + Which could distort to many a shape of error + This true, fair world of things. +[Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the +artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of +things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him +irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in +this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described +the poet's achievement: + + With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, + The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes. +[Footnote: _Ode_.] + +"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is +truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different +mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the +artist's imitation of life, inquiring, + + What is art + But life upon the larger scale, the higher, + When, graduating up a spiral line + Of still expanding and ascending gyres + It pushes toward the intense significance + Of all things, hungry for the infinite. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, +then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their +objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely +superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things +than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work: + + He will watch from dawn to gloom + The lake-reflected sun illume + The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, + Nor heed nor see, what things they be; + But from these create he can + Forms more real than living man, + Nurslings of immortality. +[Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of +imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees +walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the +essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of +essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the +discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; +[Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only +teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are +some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: +Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a +Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_ +Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_ +Rossetti, _Sonnet, Shelley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_ +Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow, +_The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_; +Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_; +Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on +_Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the +Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren +Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_; +Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_; +Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of +the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The +Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.] + +Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher +and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook +human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same +pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one +another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to +the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth, +Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of +the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? +Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher +rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies +himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_; +Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the +quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows +trivial, but let us see how the case stands. + +From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of +methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being + + Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes. +[Footnote: _To William Wordsworth_.] + +Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts, + + Think you, mid all this mighty sum + Of things forever speaking, + That nothing of itself will come, + We must be ever seeking? +[Footnote: _Expostulation and Reply_.] + +But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate +intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he +asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can +only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the +breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression +which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the +poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, +"Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the +body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: _A +Defense of Poetry_.] + +To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making +discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a +sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends, + + True science investigates and brings to human perception such + truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and + society consider most important. Art transmits these truths + from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And + thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a + correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: _What is + Art?_] + +Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to +acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has +pronounced the philosopher's attitude of mind wholly antagonistic to +poetry. + + Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, + Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: +_A Poet's Epitaph_.] + +Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other +poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a +flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a +recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers, + + We are they who dream no dreams, + Singers of a rising day, + Who undaunted, + Where the sword of reason gleams, + Follow hard, to hew away + The woods enchanted. +[Footnote: E. Flecker, _Donde Estan_.] + +One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He +declares, + + Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art! + Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, + Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, + Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? + How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, + Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering + To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, + Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? + Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, + And driven the Hamadryad from the wood + To seek for shelter in some happier star? + Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, + The Elfin from the green grass, and from me + The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? +[Footnote: _To Science_.] + +If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the +philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's +hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which +must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the +poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed, + + Most true it is that I have looked on truth + Askance and strangely, + +and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, +the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." +[Footnote: Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_.] If poets complain that + all charms fly + At the mere touch of cold philosophy, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of +distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars? + +In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has +identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for +the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the +realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to +the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to +make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower +of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things. + +What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has +just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet +answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the +scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for +the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need +laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his +love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and +reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this +subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning, +_Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein, +_Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of + + The loftiest star of unascended heaven, + Pinnacled dim in the intense inane, + +in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense +against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his +non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his +sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to +sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the +philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they +represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly +medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's +thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a +somber tapestry. + +It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to +fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, +as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth +century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, +he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, +"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled +conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See +_The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both +warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry. +Even Landor reflected, + + A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, + And showing but the broken sky + Too surely is the sweetest lay + That wins the ear and wastes the day + Where youthful Fancy pouts alone + And lets not wisdom touch her zone. +[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.] + +But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such +distinctions. + +If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal +values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of +things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his +test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this +poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge +that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works. + +The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points +out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The +poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney +Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with +nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is +to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on +Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there +is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must +be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: +Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination +may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." +[Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] + +If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, +that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a +prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic +shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the +phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the +one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are +not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing +with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association +of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of +superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can +foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The +Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, +_Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many +poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. +[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_, +_Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_; +Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry +Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J. R. Lowell, _Massaccio_, Sonnet +XVIII; Owen Meredith, _The Prophet_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; O. W. +Holmes, _Shakespeare_; T. H. Olivers, _The Poet_, _Dante_; Alfred +Austin, _The Poet's Corner_; Swinburne, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_; +Herbert Trench, _Stanzas on Poetry_.] Holmes' view is typical: + + We call those poets who are first to mark + Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,-- + Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark + While others only note that day is gone; + For them the Lord of light the curtain rent + That veils the firmament. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Shelley +does; as a more recent poet has phrased it: + + Strange hints + Of things past, present and to come there lie + Sealed in the magic pages of that music, + Which, laying hold on universal laws, + Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +The poet's defense is not finished when he establishes the truth of his +vision. How shall the world be served, he is challenged, even though it +be true that the poet's dreams are of reality? Plato demanded of his +philosophers that they return to the cave of sense, after they had seen +the heavenly vision, and free the slaves there. Is the poet willing to +do this? It has been charged that he is not. Browning muses, + + Ah, but to find + A certain mood enervate such a mind, + Counsel it slumber in the solitude + Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good + Its nature just, as life and time accord. + --Too narrow an arena to reward + Emprize--the world's occasion worthless since + Not absolutely fitted to evince + Its mastery! +[Footnote: _Sordello_.] + +But one is inclined to question the justice of Browning's charge, at +least so far as it applies peculiarly to the poet. Logically, he should +devote himself to sense-blinded humanity, not reluctantly, like the +philosopher descending to a gloomy cave which is not his natural +habitat, but eagerly, since the poet is dependent upon sense as well as +spirit for his vision. "This is the privilege of beauty," says Plato, +"that, being the loveliest of the ideas, she is also the most palpable +to sight." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_.] Accordingly the poet has no +horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an +enthusiasm to make the world of sense a more transparent medium of +beauty. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet's humanitarian +aspect, see Bowles, _The Visionary Boy_, _On the Death of the +Rev. Benwell_; Wordsworth, _The Poet and the Caged Turtle Dove_; +Arnold, _Heine's Grave_; George Eliot, _O May I Join the Choir +Invisible_; Lewis Morris, _Food Of Song_; George Meredith, _Milton_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Swinburne, +_Centenary of Landor_, _Victor Hugo_, _Victor Hugo in 1877_, _Ben +Jonson_, _Thomas Decker_; Whittier, _To J. P._, and _The Tent on the +Beach_; J. R. Lowell, _To The Memory of Hood_; O. W. Holmes, _At a +Meeting of the Burns Club_; Emerson, _Solution_; R. Realf, _Of Liberty +and Charity_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the +Golden Age_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_; C. W. Hubner, _The Poet_; J. +H. West, _O Story Teller Poet_; Gerald Massey, _To Hood Who Sang the +Song of the Shirt_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; +Sidney Lanier, _Wagner_, _Clover_; C. A. Pierce, _The Poet's Ideal_; E. +Markham, _The Bard_, _A Comrade Calling Back_, _An April Greeting_; G. +L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_; Richard Gilder, _The City_, _The Dead +Poet_; E. L. Cox, _The Master_, _Overture_; R. C. Robbins, _Wordsworth_; +Carl McDonald, _A Poet's Epitaph_.] It is inevitable that every poet's +feeling for the world should be that of Shelley, who says to the spirit +of beauty, + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. +[Footnote: _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_.] +For, unlike the philosopher, the poet has never departed from the world +of sense, and it is hallowed to him as the incarnation of beauty. +Therefore he is eager to make other men ever more and more transparent +embodiments of their true selves, in order that, gazing upon them, the +poet may have ever deeper inspiration. This is the central allegory in +_Enydmion_, that the poet must learn to help humanity before the mystery +of poetship shall be unlocked to him. Browning comments to this effect +upon Bordello's unwillingness to meet the world: + + But all is changed the moment you descry + Mankind as half yourself. + +Matthew Arnold is the sternest of modern poets, perhaps, in pointing out +the poet's responsibility to humanity: + + The poet, to whose mighty heart + Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, + Subdues that energy to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. + Though he move mountains, though his day + Be passed on the proud heights of sway, + Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, + Though he hath borne immortal pains, + Action and suffering though he know, + He hath not lived, if he lives so. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by +which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their +essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is +peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the +moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must +be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something +beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to +the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. If beauty is the +heart of the universe (and it must be, the poet argues, since it abides +in sense as well as spirit), there is no place for the corrupt will. If +men are free, they are expressing their real natures; they are +beautiful. + +Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise +men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do +not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of +tyranny." [Footnote: _Republic._] Few enemies of poets nowadays +would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas +Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry, +asserted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's +potentates. [Footnote: See _The Four Ages of Poetry._] Once, it must +be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into +disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his +friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim, + + If thou hast ever done amiss + It was, O Southey, but in this, + That, to redeem the lost estate + Of the poor Muse, a man so great + Abased his laurels where some Georges stood + Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood. + Was ever genius but thyself + Friend or befriended of a Guelf? + +But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization +of the modern poet as liberty-lover. + +Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented +to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's +allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like +the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French +revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against +oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the +loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward +monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of +poet-laureate. + +The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of +history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry +during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our +history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles +II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be +expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and +virtue." Gray, in _The Progress of Poesy_, draws the same +conclusion as Shelley: + + Her track, where'er the goddess roves, + Glory pursue, and generous shame, + The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame. + +Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert +no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. +[Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's +Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The +Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, +_Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here +Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The +Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To +Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, +_Miriam_; Shelley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, +_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, +_Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, +_To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, +_The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in +a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, +Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; +Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Shore_, _For You_, +_O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; +Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of +Liberty and Charity_; Henry van Dyke, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; +Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles +Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit +of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, +_MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce +Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert +Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden +Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that +in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, +though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose +themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming, + + Where's the poet? Show him, show him, + Muses mine, that I may know him! + 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king + Or poorest of the beggar clan. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, +but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be +false to poetry, and he answers his detractors, + + Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise, + That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope + Of his pure song. + +In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent +champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for +ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom: + + Poets (hear the word) + Half-poets even, are still whole democrats. + Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high, + But loyal to the low, and cognizant + Of the less scrutable majesties. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote: +_See The Poet_.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the +liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See _Mater Triumphilis_, _Prelude_, +_Epilogue_, _Litany of Nations_, and _Hertha_.] till our new group of +singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident. + +It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always +synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to +distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise +Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs. +Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate +socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as +is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is +simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his +truest self. + +If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager +to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains +against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings +in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall +become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society +is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" +[Footnote: See _Sordello_.] of the world, here amending a law, here +building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the +poet. Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, makes much of the issue, +and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's +inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world + + Forgets + To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back + Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down + To the empty grave of Christ ... + ... Who has time, + An hour's time--think!--to sit upon a bank + And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +February 17, 1845.] + +The poet has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and +proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas +Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the +Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization in +reform the gauge of a poet's merit. Where, in that case, would Keats be +beside Hood? In our day, where would Sara Teasdale be beside Edwin +Markham? Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as +an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his +claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See +_Aurora Leigh_.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely +unsettling society,--for what end? He himself will soon have +forgotten--will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is +more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other +men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the +beauty of holiness. Let reformers beware how they assert the poet's +uselessness, our singers say, for it is an indication that they +themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be +leading men. The work of the reformer inevitably degenerates into the +mere strenuosity of the campaign, + + Unless the artist keep up open roads + Betwixt the seen and unseen, bursting through + The best of our conventions with his best, + The speakable, imaginable best + God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond + Both speech and imagination. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Thus speaks Mrs. Browning. + +The reforms that make a stir in the world, being merely external, mean +little or nothing apart from the impulse that started them, and the poet +alone is powerful to stir the impulse of reform in humanity. "To be +persuaded rests usually with ourselves," said Longinus, "but genius +brings force sovereign and irresistible to bear upon every hearer." +[Footnote: _On the Sublime_.] The poet, in ideal mood, is as +innocent of specific designs upon current morality as was Pippa, when +she wandered about the streets of Asolo, but the power of his songs is +ever as insuperable as was that of hers. It is for this reason that +Emerson advises the poet to leave hospital building and statute revision +for men of duller sight than he: + + Oft shall war end and peace return + And cities rise where cities burn + Ere one man my hill shall climb + Who can turn the golden rhyme. + Let them manage how they may, + Heed thou only Saadi's lay. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Here the philosopher may demur. If the poet were truly an idealist,--if +he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, +which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he +might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's +failing that he gives men no vision of abstract beauty. He represents +his visions in the contemporary dress of his times. Thus he idealizes +the past and the present, showing beauty shining through the dullness +and error of human history. Is he not, then, the enemy of progress, +since he will lead his readers to imagine that things are ideal as they +are? + +Rather, men will be filled with reverence for the idealized portrait of +themselves that the poet has drawn, and the intervention of the reformer +will be unnecessary, since they will voluntarily tear off the shackles +that disfigure them. The poet, said Shelley, "redeems from decay the +visitations of the divinity in man." Emerson said of Wordsworth, "He +more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." Mrs. +Browning said (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet--by analyzing +humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions +of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] +This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of +life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines +through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty +incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through which +beauty does not shine. + +Therefore, the poet repeats, he is the true author of reform. Tennyson +says of freedom, + + No sword + Of wrath her right arm whirled, + But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word + She shook the world. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +This brings us back to our war poets who have so recently died. Did they +indeed disparage the Muse whom they deserted? Did they not rather die to +fulfill a poet's prophesy of freedom? A poet who did not carry in his +heart the courage of his song--what could be more discreditable to +poetry than that? The soldier-poets were like a general who rushes into +the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a +man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the +engagement, that saved the day. + +If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his +reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says, + + The gods talk in the breath of the woods, + They talk in the shaken pine, + And fill the long reach of the old seashore + With dialogue divine. + And the poet who overhears + Some random word they say + Is the fated man of men + Whom the nations must obey. +[Footnote: Fragment on _The Poet_.] + +What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his +vision is true he shall join + + The choir invisible + Of those immortal dead who live again + In minds made better by their presence: live + In pulses stirred to generosity, + In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, + And with their mild persistence urge man's search + To vaster issues. +[Footnote: George Eliot, _The Choir Invisible_.] + +Does this mean simply the immortality of fame? It is a higher thing than +that. The beauty which the poet creates is itself creative, and having +the principle of life in it, can never perish. Whitman cries, + + Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! + Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for, + But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, + greater than before known, + Arouse! for you must justify me! +[Footnote: _Poets to Come_.] + +Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the +snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his +name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the +_Symposium_, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of +beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he +is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself. +So, though he be as fragile as a windflower, he may assure himself, + + I shall not die; I shall not utterly die, + For beauty born of beauty--that remains. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _To a Windflower_.] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + + +Not even a paper shortage has been potent to give the lie to the author +of _Ecclesiastes_, but it has fanned into flame the long smouldering +resentment of those who are wearily conscious that of making many books +there is no end. No longer is any but the most confirmed writer suffered +to spin out volume after volume in complacent ignorance of his readers' +state of mind, for these victims of eye-strain and nerves turn upon the +newest book, the metaphorical last straw on the camel's load, with the +exasperated cry, Why? Why? and again Why? + +Fortunately for themselves, most of the poets who have taken the poet's +character as their theme, indulged their weakness for words before that +long-suffering bookworm, the reader, had turned, but one who at the +present day drags from cobwebby corners the accusive mass of material on +the subject, must seek to justify, not merely the loquacity of its +authors, but one's own temerity as well, in forcing it a second time +upon the jaded attention of the public. + +If one had been content merely to make an anthology of poems dealing +with the poet, one's deed would perhaps have been easier to excuse, for +the public has been so often assured that anthologies are an economical +form of publication, and a time-saving form of predigested food, that it +usually does not stop to consider whether the material was worth +collecting in the first place. Gleaner after gleaner has worked in the +field of English literature, sorting and sifting, until almost the last +grain, husk, straw and thistle have been gathered and stored with their +kind. But instead of making an anthology, we have gone on the assumption +that something more than accidental identity of subject-matter holds +together the apparently desultory remarks of poets on the subject of the +poet's eyebrows, his taste in liquors, his addiction to midnight +rambles, and whatnot. We have followed a labyrinthine path through the +subject with faith that, if we were but patient in observing the clues, +we should finally emerge at a point of vantage on the other side of the +woods. + +The primary grounds of this faith may have appeared to the skeptic +ridiculously inadequate. Our faith was based upon the fact that, more +than two thousand years ago, a serious accusation had been made against +poets, against which they had been challenged to defend themselves. This +led us to conclude that there must be unity of intention in poetry +dealing with the poet, for we believed that when English poets talked of +themselves and their craft, they were attempting to remove the stigma +placed upon the name of poet by Plato's charge. + +Now it is easy for a doubter to object that many of the poems on the +subject show the poet, not arraying evidence for a trial, but leaning +over the brink of introspection in the attitude of Narcissus. One need +seek no farther than self-love, it may be suggested, to find the motive +for the poet's absorption in his reflection. Yet it is incontrovertible +that the self-infatuation of our Narcissus has its origin in the +conviction that no one else understands him, and that this conviction is +founded upon a very real attitude of hostility on the part of his +companions. The lack of sympathy between the English poet and the public +is so notorious that Edmund Gosse is able to state as a truism: + While in France poetry has been accustomed to reflect the + general tongue of the people, the great poets of England have + almost always had to struggle against a complete dissonance + between their own aims and interests and those of the nation. + The result has been that England, the most inartistic of the + modern races, has produced the largest number of exquisite + literary artists. [Footnote: _French Profiles_, p. 344.] + +Furthermore, even though everyone may agree that a lurking sense of +hostile criticism is back of the poet's self-absorption, another ground +for skepticism may lie in our assumption that Plato is the central +figure in the opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy +of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the +student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt +their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal +and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in +classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher +North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces +of cipher foolishness, abstractions which we named the puritan, the +philosopher, the philistine. Possibly by so doing we have given the +impression that poets are beating the air against an abstraction when +they are in reality delivering thumping blows upon the body of a +personal enemy. And if these generalizations appear indefensible, still +more misleading, it may be urged, is an attempt to represent that the +poet, when he takes issue with this and that opponent, is answering a +challenge hidden away from the unstudious in the tenth book of Plato's +_Republic_. It is doubtful even whether a number of our poets are +aware of the existence of Plato's challenge, and much more doubtful +whether they have it in mind as they write. + +Second thought must make it clear, however, that to prove ignorance of +Plato's accusation on the part of one poet and another does not at all +impair the possibility that it is his accusation which they are +answering. So multiple are the threads of influence leading from the +_Republic_ through succeeding literatures and civilizations that it +is unsafe to assert, offhand, that any modern expression of hostility to +poetry may not be traced, by a patient untangler of evidence, to a +source in the _Republic_. But even this is aside from the point. +One might concede that the wide-spread modern antagonism to poetry would +have been the same if Plato had never lived, and still maintain that in +the _Republic_ is expressed for all time whatever in anti-aesthetic +criticism is worthy of a serious answer. Whether poets themselves are +aware of it or not, we have a right to assert that in concerning +themselves with the character of the ideal poet, they are responding to +Plato's challenge. + +This may not be enough to justify our faith that these defensive +expositions lead us anywhere. Let us agree that certain poets of the +nineteenth and twentieth centuries have answered Plato's challenge. But +has the Poet likewise answered it? If from their independent efforts to +paint the ideal poet there has emerged a portrait as sculpturally clear +in outline as is Plato's portrait of the ideal philosopher, we shall +perhaps be justified in saying, Yes, the Poet, through a hundred mouths, +has spoken. + +Frankly, the composite picture which we have been considering has not +sculptural clarity. To the casual observer it bears less resemblance to +an alto-relief than to a mosaic; no sooner do distinct patterns spring +out of myriad details than they shift under the onlooker's eyes to a +totally different form. All that we can claim for the picture is +excellence as a piece of impressionism, which one must scan with +half-closed eyes at a calculated distance, if one would appreciate its +central conception. + +Apparently readers of English poetry have not taken the trouble to scan +it with such care. They may excuse their indifference by declaring that +an attempt to discover a common aesthetic principle in a collection of +views as catholic as those with which we have dealt is as absurd as an +attempt to discover philosophical truth by taking a census of general +opinion. Still, obvious as are the limitations of a popular vote in +determining an issue, it has a certain place in the discovery of truth. +One would not entirely despise the benefit derived from a general survey +of philosophers' convictions, for instance. Into the conclusions of each +philosopher, even of the greatest, there are bound to enter certain +personal whimsicalities of thought, which it is profitable to eliminate, +by finding the common elements in the thought of several men. If the +quest of a universal least common denominator forces one to give up +everything that is of significance in the views of philosophers, there +is profit, at least, in learning that the title of philosopher does not +carry with it a guarantee of truth-telling. On the other hand if we find +universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common _cogito ergo +sum_, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a +discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex +system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no +real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar +census of the views of poets. + +After hearkening to the general suffrage of poets on the question of the +poet's character, we must bring a serious charge against them if a +deafening clamor of contradiction reverberates in our ears. In such a +case their claim that they are seers, or masters of harmony, can be +worth little. The unbiased listener is likely to assure us that +clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets' +speaking amounts to, but we shall be slow to acknowledge as much. Have +we been merely the dupe of pretty phrasing when we felt ourselves +insured against discord by the testimony of Keats? Hear him: + + How many bards gild the lapses of time! + * * * * * + ... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme, + These will in throngs before my mind intrude, + But no confusion, no disturbance rude + Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. + +However incompatible the characteristics of the poets celebrated by +Wordsworth and by Swinburne, by Christina Rossetti and by Walt Whitman +may have seemed in immediate juxtaposition, we have trusted that we need +only retire to a position where "distance of recognizance bereaves" +their individual voices, in order to detect in their mingled notes +"pleasing music, and not wild uproar." + +The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our +multitudinous verse-writers may point out that we should have had more +right to expect concord if we had shown some discernment in sifting true +poets from false. Those who have least claim to the title of poet have +frequently been most garrulous in voicing their convictions. Moreover, +these pseudo-poets outnumber genuine poets one hundred to one, yet no +one in his right mind would contend that their expressions of opinion +represent more than a straw vote, if they conflict with the judgment of +a single true poet. + +Still, our propensity for listening to the rank breath of the multitude +is not wholly indefensible. In the first place pseudo-poets have not +created so much discord as one might suppose. A lurking sense of their +own worthlessness has made them timid of utterance except as they echo +and prolong a note that has been struck repeatedly by singers of +reputation. This echoing, it may be added, has sometimes been effective +in bringing the traditions of his craft to the attention of a young +singer as yet unaware of them. Thus Bowles and Chivers, neither of whom +has very strong claim to the title of bard, yet were in a measure +responsible for the minor note in Coleridge's and Poe's description of +the typical poet. + +Even when the voices of spurious bards have failed to chime with the +others, the resulting discord has not been of serious moment. A +counterfeit coin may be as good a touchstone for the detection of pure +silver, as is pure silver for the detection of counterfeit. Not only are +a reader's views frequently clarified by setting a poetaster beside a +poet as a foil, but poets themselves have clarified their views because +they have been incited by declarations in false verse to express their +convictions more unreservedly than they should otherwise have done. +Pseudo-poets have sometimes been of genuine benefit by their +exaggeration of some false note which they have adopted from poetry of +the past. No sooner do they exaggerate such a note, than a concerted +shout of protest from true poets drowns the erroneous statement, and +corrects the misleading impression which careless statements in earlier +verse might have left with us. Thus the morbid singer exhibited in minor +American verse of the last century, and the vicious singer lauded in one +strain of English verse, performed a genuine service by calling forth +repudiation, by major poets, of traits which might easily lead a singer +in the direction of morbidity and vice. + +The confusion of sound which our critic complains of is not to be +remedied merely by silencing the chorus of echoic voices. If we dropped +from consideration all but poets of unquestionable merit, we should not +be more successful in detecting a single clear note, binding all their +voices together. When the ideal poet of Shelley is set against that of +Byron, or that of Matthew Arnold against that of Browning, there is no +more unison than when great and small in the poetic world are allowed to +speak indiscriminately. + +Does this prove that only the supreme poet speaks truly, and that we +must hush all voices but his if we would learn what is the essential +element in the poetic character? Then we are indeed in a hard case. +There is no unanimity of opinion among us regarding the supreme English +poet of the last century, and if we dared follow personal taste in +declaring one of higher altitude than all the others only a small +percentage of readers would be satisfied when we set up the _Prelude_ or +_Adonais_ or _Childe Harold_ or _Sordello_ beside the _Republic_ as +containing the one portrait of the ideal singer worthy to stand beside +the portrait of the ideal philosopher. And this is not the worst of the +difficulty. Even if we turn from Shelley to Byron, from Wordsworth to +Browning, in quest of the one satisfactory conception of the poet, we +shall not hear in anyone of their poems the single clear ringing note +for which we are listening. When anyone of these men is considering the +poetic character, his thought behaves like a pendulum, swinging back and +forth between two poles. + +Thus we ourselves have admitted the futility of our quest of truth, the +critic may conclude. But no, before we admit as much, let us see exactly +what constitutes the lack of unity which troubles us. After its +persistence in verse of the same country, the same period, the same +tradition, the same poet, even, has led us to the brink of despair, its +further persistence rouses in us fresh hope, or at least intense +curiosity, for what impresses us as the swinging of a pendulum keeps up +its rhythmical beat, not merely in the mind of each poet, but in each +phase of his thought. We find the same measured antithesis of thought, +whether he is considering the singer's environment or his health, his +inspiration or his mission. + +In treatment even of the most superficial matters related to the poet's +character, this vibration forces itself upon our attention. Poets are +sofar from subscribing to Taine's belief in the supreme importance of +environment as molder of genius that the question of the singer's proper +habitat is of comparative indifference to them, yet the dualism that we +have noted runs as true to form here as in more fundamental issues. When +one takes the suffrage of poets in general on the question of +environment, two voices are equally strong. Genius is fostered by +solitude, we hear; but again, genius is fostered by human companionship. +At first we may assume that this divergence of view characterizes +separate periods. Writers in the romantic period, we say, praised the +poet whose thought was turned inward by solitude; while writers in the +Victorian period praised the poet whose thought was turned upon the +spectacle of human passions. But on finding that this classification is +true only in the most general way, we go farther. Within the Victorian +period Browning, we say, is the advocate of the social poet, as Arnold +is the advocate of the solitary one. But still our classification is +inadequate. Is Browning the expositor of the gregarious poet? It is true +that he feels it necessary for the singer to "look upon men and their +cares and hopes and fears and joys." [Footnote: _Pauline_.] But he +makes Sordello flee like a hunted creature back to Goito and solitude in +quest of renewed inspiration. Is Arnold the expositor of the solitary +poet? True, he urges him to fly from "the strange disease of modern +life". [Footnote: _The Scholar Gypsy_.] Yet he preaches that the +duty of the poet is + + to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +Within the romantic period the same phenomenon is evident. Does +Wordsworth paint the ideal poet dwelling apart from human distractions? +Yet he declares that his deepest insight is gained by listening to "the +still sad music of humanity". In Keats, Shelley, Byron, the same +antithesis of thought is not less evident. + +We cannot justly conclude that a compromise between contradictions, an +avoidance of extremes, is what anyone of these poets stands for. It is +complete absorption in the drame of human life that makes one a poet, +they aver; but again, it is complete isolation that allows the inmost +poetry of one's nature to rise to consciousness. At the same time they +make it clear that the supreme poet needs the gifts of both +environments. To quote Walt Whitman, + + What the full-grown poet came, + Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe + with all its shows of day and night) saying, He + is mine; + But out spake too the Soul of men, proud, jealous + and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone; + --Then the full-grown poet stood between the two and + took each by the hand; + And today and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly + holding hands, + Which he will never release till he reconciles the two, + And wholly and joyously blends them. + +The paradox in poets' views was equally perplexing, no matter what phase +of the poetic character was considered. A mere resumé of the topics +discussed in these essays is enough to make the two horns of the dilemma +obtrude themselves. Did we consider the financial status of the poet? We +heard that he should experience all the luxurious sensations that wealth +can bring; on the other hand we heard that his poverty should shield him +from distractions that might call him away from accumulation of +spiritual treasure. Did we consider the poet's age? We heard that the +freshness of sensation possessed only by youth carries the secret of +poetry; on the other hand we heard that the secret lies in depth of +spiritual insight possible only to old age. So in the allied question of +the poet's body. He should have + + The dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear, + +that no beauty in the physical world may escape him. Yet he should be +absorbed in the other world to such a degree that blindness, even, is a +blessing to him, enabling him to "see, no longer blinded by his eyes." +The question of the poet's health arose. He should have the exuberance +and aplomb of the young animal; no, he should have a body frail enough +to enable him, like the mediæval mystic, to escape from its +importunatedemands upon the spirit. + +In the more fundamental questions that poets considered, relating to the +poet's temperament, his loves, his inspiration, his morality, his +religion, his mission, the same cleavage invariably appeared. What +constitutes the poetic temperament? It is a fickle interchange of joy +and grief, for the poet is lifted on the wave of each new sensation; it +is an imperturbable serenity, for the poet dwells apart with the eternal +verities. What is the distinguishing characteristic of his love? The +object of his worship must be embodied, passionate, yet his desire is +for purely spiritual union with her. What is the nature of his +inspiration? It fills him with trancelike impassivity to sensation; it +comes upon him with such overwhelming sensation that he must touch the +walls to see whether they or his visions are the reality. [Footnote: See +Christopher Wordsworth, _Memoirs of Wordsworth_, Vol. II, p. 480.] +How is his moral life different from that of other men? He is more +fiercely tempted, because he is more sensitive to human passions; he is +shut away from all temptations because his interest is solely in the +principle of beauty. What is the nature of his religious instinct? He is +mad with thirst for God; he will have no God but his own humanity. What +is his mission? He must awaken men to the wonder of the physical world +and fit them to abide therein; he must redeem them from physical +bondage, and open their eyes to the spiritual world. + +The impatient listener to this lengthy catalogue of the poet's views may +assert that it has no significance. It merely shows that there are many +kinds of poets, who attempt to imitate many aspects of human life. But +surely our catalogue does not show just this. There is no multiform +picture of the poet here. The pendulum of his desire vibrates +undeviatingly between two points only. Sense and spirit, spirit and +sense, the pulse of his nature seems to reiterate incessantly. There is +no poet so absorbed in sensation that physical objects do not +occasionally fade into unreality when he compares them with the spirit +of life. Even Walt Whitman, most sensuous of all our poets, exclaims, + + Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul + That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, + concepts, non-realities. +[Footnote: _Apparitions_.] + +On the other hand there is no poet whose taste is so purely spiritual +that he is indifferent to sensation. The idealism of Wordsworth, even, +did not preclude his finding in sensation + + An appetite, a feeling and a love + That had no need of a remoter charm + By thought supplied. + +Is this systole and diastole of the affection from sense to spirit, from +spirit to sense, peculiarly characteristic of English poets? There may +be some reason for assuming that it is. Historians have repeatedly +pointed out that there are two strains in the English blood, the one +northern and ascetic, the other southern and epicurean. In the modern +English poet the austere prophetic character of the Norse scald is +wedded to the impressionability of the troubadour. No wonder there is a +battle in his breast when he tries to single out one element or the +other as his most distinctive quality of soul. Yet, were it not unsafe +to generalize when our data apply to only one country, we should venture +the assertion that the dualism of the poet's desires is not an insular +characteristic, but is typical of his race in every country. + +Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world, +shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an +irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves +singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over +and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is +harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says +Eurymachus in the _Symposium_. It is union of the finite and the +infinite, says Socrates in the _Philebus_. Do the poet's desires +point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that +stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole +secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. +His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in +two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the +spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot +tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity +in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and +barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination +which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of +sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a +little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this +power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is +called _Voyage à L'Infine_: + + The swan existing + Is like a song with an accompaniment + Imaginary. + + Across the grassy lake, + Across the lake to the shadow of the willows + It is accompanied by an image, + --as by Debussy's + "Réflets dans l'eau." + + The swan that is + Reflects + Upon the solitary water--breast to breast + With the duplicity: + "The other one!" + + And breast to breast it is confused. + O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession! + It is accompanied by the image of itself + Alone. + + At night + The lake is a wide silence, + Without imagination. + +But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic +answering of sense to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered +by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and +spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the +spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense; +yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is +clearly either physical or spiritual; therefore they do not stand poised +between the two worlds with the perfect balance of interests which marks +the poet. The philosopher and the man of religion recognize their goal +as a spiritual and ascetic one. If they concern themselves more than is +needful with the temporal and sensual, they feel that they are false to +their ideal. The scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand, +are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss +consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of +course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius +of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But +if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph +just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the +invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is +not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us +conscious of the two worlds of sense and spirit, reflecting one another. + +Supposing that all this is true, what is gained by discovering, from a +consensus of poets' views, that the distinctive characteristic of the +poet is harmony of sense and spirit? Is not this so obvious as to be a +truism? It is perhaps so obvious that like all the truest things in the +world it is likely to be ignored unless insisted upon occasionally. +Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English +criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written +criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually +ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own +goal. + +It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of +English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of +the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's _School of +Abuse_, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who +had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry +were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan +criticism, that of Lodge, [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry, Musick and +Stage Plays._] Harrington, [Footnote: _Apology for Poetry._] Meres, +[Footnote: _Palladis Tamia._] Campion, [Footnote: _Observations in the +Art of English Poetry._] Daniel, [Footnote: _Defense of Rhyme._] and +even in lesser degree of Sidney, obscures the aesthetic problem by +turning it into an ethical one. + +In the criticism of Sidney, himself a poet, one does find implied a +recognition of the twofold significance of the poet's powers. He asserts +his spiritual pre-eminence strongly, declaring that the poet, unlike the +scientist, is not bound to the physical world.[Footnote: "He is not +bound to any such subjection, as scientists, to nature." _Defense of +Poetry._] On the other hand he is clearly aware of the need for a +sensuous element in poetry, since by it, Sidney declares, the poet may +lead men by "delight" to follow the forms of virtue. + +The next critic of note, Dryden, in his revulsion from the ascetic +character which the puritans would develop in the poet, swung too far to +the other extreme, and threw the poetic character out of balance by +belittling its spiritual insight. He did justice to the physical element +in poetry, defining poetic drama, the type of his immediate concern, as +"a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions, and +traverses of fortune," [Footnote: _English Garner,_ III, 513.] but +he appears to have felt the ideal aspect of the poet's nature as merely +a negation of the sensual, so that he was driven to the absurdity of +recommending a purely mechanical device, rhyme, as a means of elevating +poetry above the sordid plane of "a bare imitation." In the eighteenth +century, Edmund Burke likewise laid too much stress upon the physical +aspect of the poet's nature, in accounting for the sublime in poetry as +originating in the sense of pain, and the beautiful as originating in +pleasure. Yet he comes closer than most critics to laying his finger +onthe particular point which distinguishes poets from philosophers, +namely, their dependence upon sensation. + +With the single exception of Burke, however, the critics of the +eighteenth century labored under a misapprehension no less blind than +the moral obsession which twisted Elizabethan criticism. In the +eighteenth century critics were prone to confuse the spiritual element +in the poet's nature with intellectualism, and the sensuous element with +emotionalism. Such criticism tended to drive the poet either into an +arid display of wit, on the one hand, or into sentimental excess, on the +other, and the native English distrust of emotion led eighteenth century +critics to praise the poet when the intellect had the upper hand. But +surely poets have made it clear enough that the intellect is not the +distinctive characteristic of the poet. To be intelligent is merely to +be human. Intelligence is only a tool, poets have repeatedly insisted, +in their quarrel with philosophers. In proportion as one is intelligent +within one's own field, one excels, poets would admit. If one is +intelligent with respect to fisticuffs one is likely to become a good +prize-fighter, but no matter how far refinement of intelligence goes in +this direction, it will not make a pugilist into a poet. Intelligence +must belong likewise, in signal degree, to the great poet, but it is +neither one of the two essential elements in his nature. Augustan +critics starved the spiritual element in poetry, even while they +imagined that they were feeding it, for in sharpening his wit the poet +came no nearer expressing the "poor soul, the center of his sinful +earth" than when he reveled in emotion. We no longer believe that in the +most truly poetic nature the intelligence of a Pope is joined with the +emotionalism of a Rousseau. We believe that the spirituality of a +Crashaw is blent with the sensuousness of a Swinburne. + +Nineteenth century criticism, since it is almost entirely the work of +poets, should not be thus at odds with the conception of the poet +expressed in poetry. But although nineteenth century prose criticism +moves in the right direction, it is not entirely adequate. The poet is +not at his best when he is working in a prose medium. He works too +consciously in prose, hence his intuitive flashes are not likely to find +expression. After he has tried to express his buried life there, he +himself is likely to warn us that what he has said "is well, is +eloquent, but 'tis not true." Even Shelley, the most successful of +poet-critics, gives us a more vivid comprehension of the poetical +balance of sense and spirit through his poet-heroes than through _The +Defense of Poetry_, for he is almost exclusively concerned, in that +essay, with the spiritual aspect of poetry. He expresses, in fact, the +converse of Dryden's view in that he regards the sensuous as negation or +dross merely. He asserts: + + Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the + beauty of their conception in naked truth and splendor, and it + is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not + necessary to temper this planetary music to mortal ears. + +The harmony in Shelley's nature which made it possible for his +contemporaries to believe him a gross sensualist, and succeeding +generations to believe him an angel, is better expressed by Browning, +who says: + + His noblest characteristic I call his simultaneous perception + of Power and Love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in + the concrete, while he throws, from his poet-station between + them both, swifter, subtler and more numerous films for the + connection of each with each than have been thrown by any + modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.[Footnote: Preface + to the letters of Shelley (afterward found spurious).] + +Yet Browning, likewise, gives a more illuminating picture of the poetic +nature in his poetry than in his prose. + +The peculiar merit of poetry about the poet is that it makes a valuable +supplement to prose criticism. We have been tempted to deny that such +poetry is the highest type of art. It has seemed that poets, when they +are introspective and analytical of their gift, are not in the highest +poetic mood. But when we are on the quest of criticism, instead of +poetry, we are frankly grateful for such verse. It is analytical enough +to be intelligible to us, and still intuitive enough to convince us of +its truthfulness. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ has been condemned in +certain quarters as "a talking about poetry, not poetry itself," but in +part, at least, the _Prelude_ is truly poetry. For this reason it +gives us more valuable ideas about the nature of poetry than does the +_Preface to the Lyrical Ballads_. If it is worth while to analyze +the poetic character at all, then poetry on the poet is invaluable to +us. + +Perhaps it is too much for us to decide whether the picture of the poet +at which we have been gazing is worthy to be placed above Plato's +picture of the philosopher. The poet does not contradict Plato's charge +against him. His self-portrait bears out the accusation that he is +unable to see "the divine beauty--pure and clear and unalloyed, not +clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and +varieties of human life." [Footnote: _Symposium_, 212.] Plato would +agree with the analysis of the poetic character that Keats once +struggled with, when he exclaimed, + +What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in +literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean +_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in +uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after +fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine +isolated verisimilitude caught from the Pentralium of mystery, from +being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge--With a great +poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather +obliterates all consideration. + +Plato would agree with this,--all but the last sentence. Only, in place +of the phrase "negative capability," he would substitute "incapability," +and reflect that the poet fails to see absolute beauty because he is not +content to leave the sensual behind and press on to absolute reality. + +It may be that Plato is right, yet one cannot help wishing that sometime +a poet may arise of greater power of persuasion than any with whom we +have dealt, who will prove to Plato what he appears ever longing to be +convinced of, that absolute ideality is not a negation of the sensual, +and that poetry, in revealing the union of sense and spirit, is the +strongest proof of idealism that we possess. A poet may yet arise who +will prove that he is right in refusing to acknowledge that this world +is merely a surface upon which is reflected the ideals which constitute +reality and which abide in a different realm. The assumption in that +conception is that, if men have spiritual vision, they may apprehend +ideals directly, altogether apart from sense. On the contrary, the +impression given by the poet is that ideality constitutes the very +essence of the so-called physical world, and that this essence is +continually striving to express itself through refinement and remolding +of the outer crust of things. So, when the world of sense comes to +express perfectly the ideal, it will not be a mere representation of +reality. It will be reality. If he can prove this, we must acknowledge +that, not the rationalistic philosopher, but the poet, grasps reality +_in toto_. + +However inconclusive his proof, the claims of the poet must fascinate +one with their implications. The two aspects of human life, the physical +and the ideal, focus in the poet, and the result is the harmony which is +art. The fact is of profound philosophical significance, surely, for +union of the apparent contradictions of the sensual and the spiritual +can only mean that idealism is of the essence of the universe. What is +the poetic metaphor but the revelation of an identical meaning in the +physical and spiritual world? The sympathetic reader of poetry cannot +but see the reflection of the spiritual in the sensual, and the sensual +in the spiritual, even as does the poet, and one, as the other, must be +by temperament an idealist. + + + + +INDEX + + + Addison, Joseph, + "A.E." (see George William Russell), + Aeschylus, + Agathon, + Akins, Zoe, + Alcaeus, + Aldrich, Anne Reeve, + Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, + Alexander, Hartley Burr, + Alexander, William, + Allston, Washington, + Ambercrombe, Lascelles, + Anderson, Margaret Steele, + Angelo, Michael, + Arensberg, Walter Conrad, + Aristotle, + Arnold, Edwin, + Arnold, Matthew, + his discontent; + on the poet's death; + inspiration; + loneliness; morality; + religion; + usefulness; + youth; + his sense of superiority. + Arnold, Thomas, + Asquith, Herbert, + Austin, Alfred, + + Bacon, Josephine Dodge Daskam, + Baker, Karle Wilson, + Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, + Beatrice, + Beattie, James, + Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, + Beers, Henry A., + Benét, Stephen Vincent, + Benét, William Rose, + Bennet, William, + Binyon, Robert Lawrence, + Blake, William, + later poets on; + on inspiration; + on the poet as truthteller; + on the poet's religion. + Blunden, Edmund, + Boccaccio, + Boker, George Henry, + Borrow, George, + Bowles, William Lisle, + Branch, Anna Hempstead, + Brawne, Fanny H., + Bridges, Robert, + Brontë, Emily, + Brooke, Rupert, + Browne, T. E., + Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, + appearance; + _Aurora Leigh_; + on Keats; + on the poet's age; + content with his own time; + democracy; + eyes; + habitat; + health, + humanitarianism, + inferiority to his creations, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + pain, + personality, + religion, + resentment at patronage, + self-consciousness, + self-expression, + sex, + usefulness, + other poets on, + + Browning, Robert, + on fame, + on inspiration, + on the poet's beauty, + loneliness, + love, + morals, + persecutions, + pride, + religion, + self-expression, + sex, + superiority, + usefulness, + on Shakespeare, + on Shelley, + _Sordello_, + other poets on + Bryant, William Cullen + Buchanan, Robert + Bunker, John Joseph + Burke, Edmund + Burleigh, William Henry + Burnet, Dana + Burns, Robert, + his self-depreciation, + on the poet's caste, + habitat, + inspiration, + love of liberty, + morals, persecutions, + poverty, + superiority, + other poets on + Burton, Richard + Butler, Samuel + Byron, Lord, + his body, + escape from himself in poetry, + friendship with Shelley, + indifference to fame, + later poets on, + his morals, + his mother, + his religion, + self-portraits in verse, + superiority, + on Tasso + + Camöens + Campbell, Thomas + Campion, Thomas + Candole, Alec de + Carlin, Francis + Carlyle, Thomas + Carman, Bliss + Carpenter, Rhys + Cary, Alice + Cary, Elisabeth Luther + Cassells, S. J. + Cavalcanti, Guido + Cawein, Madison + Cellini, Benvenuto + Cervantes + Chapman, George + Chatterton, Thomas + Chaucer, Geoffrey + Cheney, Annie Elizabeth + Chénièr, André + Chesterton, Gilbert Keith + Chivers, Thomas Holley + Clare, John + Clough, Arthur Hugh + Coleridge, Hartley + Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, + appearance; + on Blake; + on Chatterton; + friendship with Wordsworth; + on the poet's habitat; + health; + love; + morals; + reflection in nature; + religion; + youth; + usefulness; + later poets on + Collins, William, + Colonna, Vittoria, + Colvin, Sidney, + Conkling, Grace Hazard, + Cornwall, Barry (see Procter, Bryan Waller), + Cowper, William, + Cox, Ethel Louise, + Crabbe, George, + Crashaw, Richard, + Cratylus, + + Dana, Richard Henry, + Daniel, Samuel, + D'Annunzio, Gabriele, + Dante, + G.L. Raymond on; + Oscar Wilde on; + Sara King Wiley on; + Dargan, Olive, + David, + Davidson, John, + Davies, William Henry, + Dermody, Thomas, + Descartes, + Dickinson, Emily, + Dionysodorus, + Dobell, Sidney, + Dobson, Austin, + Dommett, Alfred, + Donne, John, + Dowden, Edward, + Dowson, Ernest, + Drake, Joseph Rodman, + Drinkwater, John, + Druce, C.J., + Dryden, John, + Dunbar, Paul Laurence, + Dunroy, William Reed, + Dunsany, Lord Edward, + Dyer, Sidney, + Ehrman, Max, + Elijah, + Eliot, Ebenezer, + Eliot, George, + Emerson, Ralph Waldo, + his contempt for the public; + his democracy; + his humility; + on inspiration; + on love of fame; + on the poet's divinity; + love; + morals; + poverty; + solitude; + usefulness + Euripedes, + Euthydemus, + Evans, Mrs. E.H., + + Fainier, C.H., + Fairfield, S. L., + Field, Eugene., + Flecker, James Elroy, + Flint, F.S., + French, Daniel Chester, + Freneau, Philip Morin, + Fuller, Frances, + Fuller, Metta, + + Gage, Mrs. Frances, + Garnett, Richard, + Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, + Giddings, Franklin Henry, + Gilbert, Sir William Schwenek + Gilder, Richard Watson; + on Helen Hunt Jackson; + on Emma Lazarus; + on the poet's age; + blindness; + inspiration; + morality; + normality; + poverty + Gillman, James + Giltinan, Caroline + Goethe + Gosse, Edmund + Gosson, Stephen + Graves, Robert + Gray, Thomas + Grenfil, Julian + Griffith, William + Guiterman, Arthur + + Hake, Thomas Gordon + Halleck, Shelley + Halpine, Charles Graham + Hardy, Thomas + Harris, Thomas Lake + Harrison, Birge + Hayne, Paul Hamilton + Hazlitt, William + Hemans, Felicia + Henderson, Daniel + Henley, William Ernest + Herbert, George + Herrick, Robert + Hewlett, Maurice + Hildreth, Charles Latin + Hill, H., + Hilliard, George Stillman + Hillyer, Robert Silliman + Hoffman, C. F. + Hogg, Thomas Jefferson + Holland, Josiah Gilbert + Holmes, Oliver Wendell + Homer + Hood, Thomas + Hooper, Lucy + "Hope, Lawrence" (see Violet + Nicolson) + Horne, Richard Hengest + Houghton, Lord + Houseman, Laurence + Hovey, Richard + Hubbard, Harvey + Hubner, Charles William + Hughes, John + Hugo, Victor + Hunt, Leigh + + Ingelow, Jean + + Jackson, Helen Hunt + Jameson, Mrs. Anna Brownell + Johnson, Donald F. Goold + Johnson, Lionel + Johnson, Robert Underwood, + Johnson, Rossiter + Johnson, Dr. Samuel + Jonson, Ben + + Kaufman, Herbert + Keats, John; + his body; + on Burns; + Christopher North on; + on his desire for fame; + his egotism; + on Elizabethan poets; + on expression; + on the harmony of poets + Homer's blindness; + on his indifference to the public; + on inspiration; + later poets on Keats; + on love; + quarrel with philosophy; + on the poet's democracy, + gift of prophecy, + habitat, + morals, + persecutions, + unpoetical character, + unobtrusiveness, + usefulness + Keble, John + Kemble, Frances Anne + Kent, Charles + Kenyon, James Benjamin + Kerl, Simon + Khayyam, Omar + Kilmer, Joyce + Kingsley, Charles + Kipling, Rudyard + Knibbs, Harry Herbert + + Lamb, Charles + Landor, Walter Savage; + on Byron; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + on Homer; + on intoxication and inspiration; + on the poet's age, + morals, + pride; + on poetry and reason; + on Shakespeare; + on Southey + Lang, Andrew + Lanier, Sidney + Larcom, Lucy + Laura + Lazarus, Emma + Ledwidge, Francis + Le Gallienne, Richard + Leonard, William Ellery + Lindsay, Vachel + Lockhart, John Gibson + Lodge, Thomas + Lombroso, Césare + Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; + his democracy; + on grief and poetry; + _Michael Angelo_; + on the poet's morals, + solitude; + on the savage poet; + on inspiration + Longinus + Lord, William W. + Low, Benjamin R. C. + Lowell, Amy + Lowell, James Russell; + on Burns; + on the poet's age, + divinity, + habitat, + inspiration, + usefulness + Lucan + Lucretius + Lytton, Bulwer, on André Chénier; + on the female poet; + on Milton; + on the poet's appearance, + fame, + persecution, + usefulness + + McDonald, Carl + Mackaye, Percy + Maclean, L. E. + "Macleod, Fiona" (see William Sharp) + MacNiel, J. C. + Mann, Dorothea Lawrence + Mansfield, Richard + Map, Walter + Markham, Edwin + Marlowe, Christopher, + Alfred Noyes on, + Josephine Preston Peabody on, + Marquis, Don, + Masefield, John, + Massey, Gerald, + Masters, Edgar Lee, + Meres, Francis, + Meredith, George, + Meredith, Owen, + Meynell, Alice, + Meynell, Viola, + Middleton, Richard, + Millay, Edna St. Vincent, + Miller, Joaquin, + Milton, John, + Miriam, + Mitchell, L. E., + Mitchell, Stewart + Mitford, Mary Russell, + Montgomery, James, + Moody, William Vaughan, + Moore, Thomas, + Morley, Christopher, + Morris, Lewis, + Morris, William, + Myers, Frederick W. H. + + Naden, Constance, Nash, Thomas, + Neihardt, John Gneisenau, + Nero, + Nerval, Gerard de, + Newbolt, Henry, + Newman, Henry, + Newton, Sir Isaac, + Nicolson, Violet, + Nordau, Max Simon, + North, Christopher, + Noyes, Alfred, + + O'Connor, Norreys Jephson, + Osborne, James Insley, + O'Sheel, Shaemus, + Otway, Thomas, + + Pater, Walter, + Patmore, Coventry, on the + poet's expression, + indifference to fame, + love, + morals, + religion, + usefulness + Payne, John, + Peabody, Josephine Preston, + Percival, James Gates, + Percy, William Alexander, + Petrarch, + Phidias, + Phillips, Stephen, + Phillpotts, Eden, + Pierce, C. A., + Plato, + _Ion_, + _Phaedo_ + _Philebus_, + _Phaedrus_, + _Republic_, + _Symposium_, + Poe, Edgar Allan, + Pollock, Robert, + Pope, Alexander, + Pound, Ezra, + Praed, Winthrop Mackworth + Price, C. Augustus + Procter, Adelaide Anne + Procter, Bryan Cornwall + + Rand, Theodore Harding + Raphael + Raymond, George Lansing + Reade, Thomas Buchanan + Realf, Richard + Reno, Lydia M. + Rice, Cale Young + Rice, Harvey + Riley, James Whitcomb + Rittenhouse, Jessie + Rives, Hallie Erven + Robbins, Reginald Chauncey + Roberts, Cecil + Roberts, Charles George Douglas + Robinson, Edwin Arlington + Robinson, Mary + Rossetti, Christina + Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, + on Chatterton, + on Dante, + on Marston, + on the poet's age, + expression, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + usefulness + Rousseau, Jean Jacques + Ruskin, John + Russell, George William + Ryan, Abram J. + + Sampson, Henry Aylett + Sandburg, Carl + Sappho; + Alcaeus on, + modern poets on her genius, + on her passion + Savage, John + Saxe, John Godfrey + Scala, George Augustus + Schauffler, Robert Haven + Schiller, Johann Christoff Friedrich + Scott, Sir Walter + Seeger, Alan + Service, Robert + Shairp, Principal + Shakespeare, William + Sharp, William + Shelley, Percy Bysshe, + and Byron, + on female poets, + his hostility to the public, + his indifference to his body, + on Keats, + on the poet's early death, + habitat, + inspiration, + love, + madness, + loneliness, + morals, + persecutions, + poverty, + religion, + seership, + usefulness, + on prenatal life, + on Tasso + Shenstone, William + Sidney, Sir Philip + Sinclair, May + Smart, Christopher + Smith, Alexander, + Smith, J. Thorne, jr., + Socrates, + Solomon, + Soran, Charles, + Southey, Robert, + Spenser, Edmund, + Sprague, E.L., + Stedman, Edmund Clarence, + Stephens, James, + Stickney, Trumbull, + Stoddard, Charles Warren, + Sullivan, Sir Arthur, + Swinburne, Algernon, + chafing against moral restraints; + on Victor Hugo; + on Marston; + on his mother; + on the poet's age; + love of liberty; + morals; + parentage; + religion; + usefulness; + on Christina Rossetti; + on Sappho; + on Shelley + Symons, Arthur, + + Taine, Hippolyte Adolph, + Tannahill, John, + Tasso, Torquato, + Taylor, Bayard, + Teasdale, Sara, + Tennyson, Alfred, + burlesque on inspiration in wine; + his contempt for the public; + on the poet's death; + expression; + inspiration; + intuitions; + love of liberty; + lovelessness; + morality; + pantheism; + persecution; + rank; + religion; + superiority to art; + usefulness + Tertullian, Thomas, Edith, + Thompson, Francis, + confidence in immortality; + humility; + on inspiration; + on love and poetry; + on Alice Meynell; + on Viola Meynell; + on the poet's body; + expression; + grief; + habitat; + loneliness; + morals; + youth + Thomson, James, + Thomson, James (B.V.), + his atheism; + on Mrs. Browning; + on inspiration; + on pessimistic poetry; + on Platonic love; + on Shelley; + on Tasso; + on Weltschmerz + Timrod, Henry, + Tolstoi, Count Leo, + Towne, Charles Hanson, + Trench, Herbert, + Tupper, Martin Farquhar, + + Van Dyke, Henry, + Vergil, + Verlaine, Paul Marie, + Villon, François, + Viviani, Emilia, + + Waddington, Samuel + Ware, Eugene + Watts-Dunton, Theodore + Wesley, Charles + West, James Harcourt + Wheelock, John Hall + White, Kirke + Whitman, Walt; + confidence in immortality; + democracy; + on expression; + on the poet's idleness, + inspiration, + morals, + normality, + protean nature, + love, + reconciling of man and nature; + on the poet-warrior; + his zest + Whittier, John Greenleaf + Wilde, Oscar, on Byron; + on Dante; + on Keats; + on love and art; + his morals; + on the poet's prophecy; + on the uselessness of art + Wiley, Sara King + Winter, William + Woodberry, George Edward; + apology; + on friendship; on the poet's love; + on inspiration; + on Shelley + Wordsworth, William; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + his friendship with Coleridge; + on James Hogg; + on inspiration; + Keats' annoyance with Wordsworth; + on love poetry; + on the peasant poet; + on the poet's democracy, + habitat, + morals, + religion, + solitude; + the _Prelude_; + on prenatal life; + quarrel with philosophy; + repudiation of inspiration through wine + Wright, Harold Bell + + Yeats, William Butler + Young, Edmund + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet's Poet, by Elizabeth Atkins + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POET'S POET *** + +***** This file should be named 7928-8.txt or 7928-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/7/9/2/7928/ + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/7928-8.zip b/7928-8.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..fa620f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/7928-8.zip diff --git a/7928.txt b/7928.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..74860e2 --- /dev/null +++ b/7928.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11234 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet's Poet, by Elizabeth Atkins + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Poet's Poet + +Author: Elizabeth Atkins + +Posting Date: December 26, 2009 [EBook #7928] +Release Date: April, 2005 +First Posted: June 1, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POET'S POET *** + + + + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + + + + + + + + +THE POET'S POET + +Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in +English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years + +By + +ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D. + +Instructor in English, University of Minnesota + + + + +TO + +HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER + + + + +PREFACE + + +Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps +received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the +majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the +last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no +means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the +part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of +aesthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer +of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the +poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic +philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only +incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, +whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider. + +The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of +individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_ +Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a +re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and +essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the +main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. +We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic +conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing +theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an +essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission. + +It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is +not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt +has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each +question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is +inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the +lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the +spiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that +practically every utterance which we may consider,--even such as deal +with the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or +his health,--falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as +the poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be +the more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been +the most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose +nature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly +harmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are +attempting to present. + +Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. In +the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesque +in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since it +is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influenced +Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that +in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where +the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a +large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to +the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small +in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It +is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the +subject of their nature than have greater ones, but some attempt is here +made to hold them within bounds, so that they may not drown out the more +meaningful utterances of the master singers. + +The last one hundred and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, +since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a +peculiarly self-conscious attitude in the poet, and brought his +personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within +the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as +enthusiasts like to term the new stirring of interest in verse) is +revealing young poets of the present day even more frank in +self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago. + +The excursion through modern English poetry involved in these studies +has been a pleasant one. The value and interest of such an investigation +was first pointed out to me by Professor Louise Pound of the University +of Nebraska. It is with sincere appreciation that I here express my +indebtedness to her, both for the initial suggestion, and for the +invaluable advice which I have received from her during my procedure. I +owe much gratitude also to President Wimam Allan Neilson of Smith +College, who was formerly my teacher in Radcliffe College, and to +Professor Hartley Burr Alexander, of the department of Philosophy at the +University of Nebraska, who has given me unstinted help and generous +encouragement. + +ELIZABETH ATKINS. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + +PREFACE + +I. THE EGO-CENTRIC CIRCLE + +Apparent futility of verse dealing with the poet.--Its +justification.--The poet's personality the hidden theme of all +verse,--The poet's egotism.--Belief that his inspirations are +divine.--Belief in the immortality of his poems.--The romantic view that +the creator is greater than his creations.--The poet's contempt for +uninspired men.--Reaction of the public to the poet's contempt.--Its +retaliation in jeers.--The poet's wounded vanity.--His morbid +self-consciousness.--His self-imposed solitude.--Enhancement of his +egotism by solitude. + +II. THE MORTAL COIL + +View that genius results from a happy combination of physical +conditions.--The poet's reluctance to embrace such a theory.--His +heredity.--Rank.--Patricians vs. children of the soil.--His +body.--Poetic beauty.--Features expressing alert and delicate +senses.--Contrary conception of poet rapt away from sense.-- +Blindness.--Physique.--Health.--Hypersensibility of invalids.-- +Escape from fleshly bondage afforded by perfect health.--The poet's +sex.--Limitations of the woman poet.--Her claims.--The poet's +habitat.--Vogue of romantic solitude.--Savage environment.--Its +advantages.--Growing popularity of the city poet.--The wanderer.-- +The financial status of the poet.--Poverty as sharpener of +sensibility.--The poet's age.--Vogue of the young poet.--Purity of +youthful emotions.--Early death.--Claims of the aged poet.-- +Contemplation after active life. + +III. THE POET AS LOVER + +The classic conception.--Love as a disturbing factor in +composition.--The romantic conception.--Love the source of +inspiration.--Fusion of intense passion with repose essential to +poetry.--Poetic love and Platonic love synonymous.--Sensual love not +suggestive.--The poet's ascent to ideal love.--Analogy with ascent +described in Plato's _Symposium_.--Discontent with ephemeralness of +passion.--Poetry a means of rendering passion eternal.--Insatiability of +the poet's affections.--Idealization of his mistress.--Ideal beauty the +real object of his love.--Fickleness.--Its justification.--Advantage in +seeing varied aspects of ideal beauty.--Remoteness as an essential +factor in ideal love.--Sluggishness resulting from complete +content.--Aspiration the poetic attitude.--Abstract love-poetry, +consciously addressed to ideal beauty.--Its merits and defects.--The +sensuous as well as the ideal indispensable to poetry. + +IV. THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + +Reticence of great geniuses regarding inspiration.--Mystery of +inspiration.--The poet's curiosity as to his inspired moments.--Wild +desire preceding inspiration.--Sudden arrest rather than satisfaction of +desire.--Ecstasy.--Analogy with intoxication.--Attitude of reverence +during inspired moments.--Feeling that an outside power is +responsible.--Attempts to give a rational account of inspiration.--The +theory of the sub-conscious.--Prenatal memory.--Reincarnation of dead +geniuses.--Varied conceptions of the spirit inspiring song as the Muse, +nature, the spirit of the universe.--The poet's absolute surrender to +this power.--Madness.--Contempt for the limitations of the human +reason.--Belief in infallibility of inspirations.--Limitations of +inspiration.--Transience.--Expression not given from without.--The work +of the poet's conscious intelligence.--Need for making the vision +intelligible.--Quarrel over the value of hard work. + +V. THE POET'S MORALITY + +The poet's reliance upon feeling as sole moral guide.--Attack upon his +morals made by philosophers, puritans, philistines.--Professedly wicked +poets.--Their rarity.--Revolt against mass-feeling.--The aesthetic +appeal of sin.--The morally frail poet, handicapped by susceptibility to +passion.--The typical poet's repudiation of immorality.--Feeling that +virtue and poetry are inseparable.--Minor explanations for this +conviction.--The "poet a poem" theory.--Identity of the good and the +beautiful.--The poet's quarrel with the philistine.--The poet's horror +of restraint.--The philistine's unfairness to the poet's innocence.--The +poet's quarrel with the puritan.--The poet's horror of asceticism.--The +poet's quarrel with the philosopher.--Feeling upon which the poet relies +allied to Platonic intuition. + +VI. THE POET'S RELIGION + +Threefold attack upon the poet's religion.--His lack of theological +temper.--His lack of reverence.--His lack of conformance.--The poet's +defense.--Materialistic belief deadening to poetry.--His idealistic +temper.--His pantheistic leanings.--His reverence for beauty.--His +repudiation of a religion that humbles him.--Compatibility of pride and +pantheism.--The poet's nonconformance.--His occasional perverseness.-- +Inspiring nature of doubt.--The poet's thirst for God.--The occasional +orthodox poet. + +VII. THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + +The poet's alleged uselessness,--His effeminacy.--His virility.--The +poet warrior.--Incompatibility of poets and materialists.--Plato'scharge +that poetry is inferior to actual life.--The concurrence of +certain soldier poets in Plato's charge.--Poetry as an amusement +only.--The value of faithful imitation.--The realists.--Poetry as a +solace.--Poetry a reflection of the ideal essence of things.--Love of +beauty the poet's guide in disentangling ideality from the accidents of +things.--Beauty as truth.--The poet as seer.--The quarrel with the +philosopher.--The truth of beauty vs. cold facts.--Proof of validity of +the poet's truth.--His skill as prophet.--The poet's mission as +reformer.--His impatience with practical reforms.--Belief in essential +goodness of men, since beauty is the essence of things.--Reform a matter +of allowing all things to express their essence.--Enthusiasm for +liberty.--Denial of the war-poet's charge.--Poets the authors of +liberty.--Poets the real rulers of mankind.--The world's appreciation of +their importance.--Their immortality. + +VIII. A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + +Denial that the views of poets on the poet are heterogeneous.--Poets' +identity of purpose in discussing poets.--Apparent contradictions in +views.-Apparent inconsistency in the thought of each poet.--The two-fold +interests of poets.--The poet as harmonizer of sensual and spiritual.-- +Balance of sense and spirit in the poetic temperament.--Injustice to +one element or the other in most literary criticism.--Limitations of +the poet's prose criticism.--Superiority of his critical expressions +in verse.--The poet's importance.--Poetry as a proof of the idealistic +philosophy. + +INDEX + + + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE + + +Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some +entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon +the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection +which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much +more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give +it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of +thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has +blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the +"egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are +but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it +"discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all +kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their +own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the +Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with +thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which +is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again +our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it +is the mortal coil. + +In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of +the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to +the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to +carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless +round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by +simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the +squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, +never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our +dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the +quietude of transcendent beauty. + +But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively +recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an +ineffable vision, but advertisement of the author's importance? His +argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you +because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my +superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the +rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered +consciousness? + +Indeed the poet's circle is likely to appear to us even more viciousthan +that of other men. To be sure, we remember Sir Philip Sidney's +contention, supported by his anecdote of the loquacious horseman, that +men of all callings are equally disposed to vaunt themselves. If the +poet seems especially voluble about his merits, this may be owing to the +fact that, words being the tools of his trade, he is more apt than other +men in giving expression to his self-importance. But our specific +objection to the poet is not met by this explanation. Even the horseman +does not expect panegyrics of his profession to take the place of +horseshoes. The inventor does not issue an autobiography in lieu of a +new invention. The public would seem justified in reminding the poet +that, having a reasonable amount of curiosity about human nature, it +will eagerly devour the poet's biography, properly labeled, but only +after he has forgotten himself long enough to write a poem that will +prove his genius, and so lend worth to the perusal of his idiosyncratic +records, and his judgments on poetic composition. + +The first impulse of our revulsion from the self-infatuated poet is to +confute him with the potent name of Aristotle, and show him his doom +foreordained in the book of poetic Revelations. "The poet should speak +as little as possible in his own person," we read, "for it is not this +that makes him an imitator." [Footnote: _Poetics_, 1460 a.] One cannot +too much admire Aristotle's canniness in thus nipping the poet's egotism +in the bud, for he must have seen clearly that if the poet began to talk +in his own person, he would soon lead the conversation around to +himself, and that, once launched on that inexhaustible subject, he would +never be ready to return to his original theme. + +We may regret that we have not Aristotle's sanction for condemning also +extra-poetical advertisements of the poet's personality, as a hindrance +to our seeing the ideal world through his poetry. In certain moods one +feels it a blessing that we possess no romantic traditions of Homer, to +get in the way of our passing impartial judgment upon his works. Our +intimate knowledge of nineteenth century poets has been of doubtful +benefit to us. Wordsworth has shaken into what promises to be his +permanent place among the English poets much more expeditiously than has +Byron. Is this not because in Wordsworth's case the reader is not +conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from +purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us +the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we +to determine whether his sonnet, _When I Have Fears,_ is great poetry or +not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love +for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard? + +Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping +generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his +contention: + +Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and +we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make +his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of +their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether +these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating +their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney +Colvin, _John Keats,_ p. 478.] + +If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in _Blackwoods,_ we may be +more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by +Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and +Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows: + +Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters into one's +soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its +subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose +their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire +me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!".... I will cut all +this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.... I +don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to +say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have +them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. [Footnote: _Ibid.,_ p. 253.] + +If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing +their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much +better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into +the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's +sonnets, + + With this key + Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more + _Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he. +[Footnote: _House._] + +Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less +the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this +our contention? + +It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are +practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of +themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron, +concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself--oh, that accursed +selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in +scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E. +Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather +hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself +at the reader's head. + +It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration +that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself +be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to +confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the +most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he +is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, +the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical +and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no +identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.] +The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a +luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself, +to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as +compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the +self-obliterating splendor of his genius: + + In poetry there is but one supreme, + Though there are many angels round his throne, + Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid. +[Footnote: _On Shakespeare_.] + +But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, +the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What +right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper +to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the +legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that +we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure +obscure our view? + +Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon +one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old +dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic +mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of +immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet +should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, +which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in +this world. + +Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way +through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the +opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and +Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying +their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet +should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, +he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we +maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone +of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have +no competitors to dispute his place as chief character. + +At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic +poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental +entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality +cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual +world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by +his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet +cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals +nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable +from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the +other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be +embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_, +"This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the +ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: Sec. 251.] Now, +whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, +one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, +personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures +of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization +of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered +to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the +habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge: + + In our life alone does nature live, + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd. +[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._] + +The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; +his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the +philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own +toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret +of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's +personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his +conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us, + + There was a child went forth every day, + And the first object he looked upon, that object he became. + +Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet +called _The Love of Narcissus:_ + + Like him who met his own eyes in the river, + The poet trembles at his own long gaze + That meets him through the changing nights and days + From out great Nature; all her waters quiver + With his fair image facing him forever: + The music that he listens to betrays + His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways + His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor. + His dreams are far among the silent hills; + His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain; + With winds at night vague recognition thrills + His lonely heart with piercing love and pain; + He knows again his mirth in mountain rills, + His weary tears that touch him in the rain. + +Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the +poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in +poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into +realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent +mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when +we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold +representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses +his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist +gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against +"your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a +theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great +feat." [Footnote: _Poem Outlines._] + +In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse +may point to the _Canterbury Tales,_ and show us Chaucer ambling +along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of +distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our +view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet +is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern +poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all +the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the +destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached. + +We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of +Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that +criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the +personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines, + + Great poet, 'twas thy art, + To know thyself, and in thyself to be + Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, + Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart + Can make of man. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent +objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own +personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one +character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his +presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his +representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent +criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of +his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. +"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January +13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into +prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never +have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a +poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And +Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet +than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to +show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is +the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert +Browning, September 9, 1845.] + +"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes +enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of +Verlaine, "_c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme_." Of course if one +concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, +the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the +poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that +civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure +to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler +way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's +word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is +nature seen through a temperament." + +Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, _Mimeseis_, did mean "seeing +through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would +have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament." +Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind were +like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things. Modern +poets, on the other hand, are inclined to grant that a person has poetic +temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window, transforming +all that is seen through it, if by any chance something _is_ seen +through it. + +If the modern poet sees the world colored red or green or violet by his +personality, it is well for the interests of truth, we must admit, that +he make it clear to us that his nature is the transforming medium, but +how comes it that he fixes his attention so exclusively upon the colors +of things, for which his own nature is responsible, and ignores the +forms of things, which are not affected by him? How comes it that the +colored lights thrown on nature by the stained windows of his soul are +so important to him that he feels justified in painting for us, +notnature, but stained-glass windows? + +In part this is, as has often been said, a result of the individualizing +trend of modern art. The broad general outlines of things have been +"done" by earlier artists, and there is no chance for later artists to +vary them, but the play of light and shade offers infinite possibilities +of variation. If one poet shows us the world highly colored by his +personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their +attention caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw +upon it. The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will +be interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious," +Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet +otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.] + +This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of +course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more +plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One +wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his +inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of +creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration +is surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that +this accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in +his work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the +lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I +know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the +musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an +assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure. +Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend +of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme, +chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group, +Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently +portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that +the mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be +paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to +ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all +other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is +mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to +forget that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, +language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, +accordingly, to be dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" +for his inspiration. + +At least this mystery surrounding his creations has much to do with +removing the artist from the comparative freedom from self-consciousness +that we ascribe to the general run of men. In addition it removes him +from the comparative humility of other thinkers, who are wont to think +of their discoveries as following inevitably upon their data, so that +they themselves deserve credit only as they are persistent and +painstaking in following the clues. The genesis of Sir Isaac Newton's +discovery has been compared to poetical inspiration; yet even in this +case the difference is apparent, and Newton did not identify himself +with the universe he conceived, as the poet is in the habit of doing. + +Not being able to account for his inspirations, the poet seems to be +driven inevitably either into excessive humility, since he feels that +his words are not his own, or into inordinate pride, since he feels that +he is able to see and express without volition truths that other men +cannot glimpse with the utmost effort. He may disclaim all credit for +his performance, in the words of a nineteenth-century verse-writer: + + This is the end of the book + Written by God. + I am the earth he took, + I am the rod, + The iron and wood which he struck + With his sounding rod. +[Footnote: L. E. Mitchell, _Written at the End of a Book._] + +a statement that provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such +amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is +really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious +states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist +"experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is +considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, +not to one's self, but to the Almighty. + +The minor American poets in the middle of the last century are often +found exhorting one another to humility, quite after the prayer-meeting +tradition. Bitter is their denunciation of the poet's arrogance: + + A man that's proud--vile groveller in the dust, + Dependent on the mercy of his God + For every breath. +[Footnote: B. Saunders, _To Chatterton._] + +Again they declare that the poet should be + + Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy._] + +telling him, + + Think not of thine own self, +[Footnote: Richard Gilder, _To the Poet._] + +adding, + + Always, O bard, humility is power. +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Poet If on a Lasting Fame._] + +One is reminded of Mrs. Heep's repeated adjuration, "Be 'umble, Ury," +and the likeness is not lessened when we find them ingratiatingly +sidling themselves into public favor. We hear them timidly inquiring of +their inspiration, + + Shall not the violet bloom? +[Footnote: Mrs. Evans, _Apologetic._] + +and pleading with their critics, + + Lightly, kindly deal, + My buds were culled amid bright dews + In morn of earliest youth. +[Footnote: Lydia M. Reno, _Preface to Early Buds._] + +At times they resort to the mixed metaphor to express their innocuous +unimportance, declaring, + + A feeble hand essays + To swell the tide of song, +[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, _Invocation._] + +and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness: + + Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts, + Win in each heart and memory a home. +[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, _Dedication._] + +But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a +librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be +absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere +expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have +taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the +genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, _In a Dull Uncertain +Brain_; Whittier, _To my Namesake_; Sidney Lanier, _Ark of the Future_; +Oliver Wendell Holmes, _The Last Reader_; Bayard Taylor, _L'Envoi_; +Robert Louis Stevenson, _To Dr. Hake_; Francis Thompson, _To My +Godchild_.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong +in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the +habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so +sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of +himself: + + I am nae poet, in a sense, + But just a rhymer like, by chance, + And hae to learning nae pretense, + Yet what the matter? + Whene'er my muse does on me glance, + I jingle at her. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik._] + +Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the +title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about +the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the +minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the +average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who +casually disposes of the poet's immortality: + + Let but the verse befit a hero's fame; + Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name. +[Footnote: _Introduction to Don Roderick._] + +Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's +conceit, assuring him: + + Ye are not great because creation drew + Large revelations round your earliest sense, + Nor bright because God's glory shines for you. +[Footnote: _Mountaineer and Poet_.] + +But in her other poetry, notably in _Aurora Leigh_ and _A Vision of +Poets,_ she amply avows her sense of the preeminence of the singer, as +well as of his song. + +While it is easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the +nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical +spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it +is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. +Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are +likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a +friend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life +engenders pride and egotism!' True--I know it does: but this pride and +egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could, +so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23, +1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is +completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of +composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and +preserving it. + +Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his +verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic +type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long +tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it +appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a +beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor, + + Well I remember how you smiled + To see me write your name upon + The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child, + You think you're writing upon stone!" + I have since written what no tide + Shall ever wash away, what men + Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide, + And find Ianthe's name again, + +or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, _Ad Amicam_, which expresses +the author's purpose to + + Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time, + Telling him that he is too insolent + Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme, + Whereof to one because thou life hast given, + The other yet shall give a life to thee, + Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven, + And compassed weaker immortality, + +or Yeats' lines _Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved_, +wherein he takes pride in the reflection: + + Weigh this song with the great and their pride; + I made it out of a mouthful of air; + Their children's children shall say they have lied. + +But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the +most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony, + + Yet to me I feel + That an internal brightness is vouchsafed + That must not die, +[Footnote: _Home at Grasmere_.] + +or in Walt Whitman's injunction: + + Recorders ages hence, + Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive + Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me. +[Footnote: See also, _Long Long Hence_.] + +Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the +importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the +clutches of the old-fashioned habit of apology, to be sure, [Footnote: +See _My Country_.]--perhaps this is one reason the radicals are so +opposed to him; but in the ranks of the radicals themselves we find very +few retaining any doubt of themselves. [Footnote: Exceptions are Jessie +Rittenhouse, _Patrius_; Lawrence Houseman, _Mendicant Rhymes_; +Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Poor Faltering Rhymes_.] Self-assertion +is especially characteristic of their self-appointed leader, Ezra Pound, +in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom +he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote: +_Lustra_.] A typical assertion is that in _Salutation the Second_, + + How many will come after me, + Singing as well as I sing, none better. + +There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the +present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile +immortality" [Footnote: _Refuge._] or James Stephens' exultation in +_A Tune Upon a Reed,_ + + Not a piper can succeed + When I lean against a tree, + Blowing gently on a reed, + +and in _The Rivals,_ where he boasts over a bird, + + I was singing all the time, + Just as prettily as he, + About the dew upon the lawn, + And the wind upon the lea; + So I didn't listen to him + As he sang upon a tree. + +If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded +monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the +nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further +than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have +needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German +idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of +the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its +rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another +century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the +fashion of _A Song of Myself:_ + + I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin, + Hoping to cease not till death. + +Whitman is conscious of--perhaps even exaggerates--the novelty of his +task, + + Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited + itself (the great pride of man in himself) + Chanter of personality. + +While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of +their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not +have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older +singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted +in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The +favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, +Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as +proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by +following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's +characterization of Byron in _Julian and Maddalo_, + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light, + +has been followed by many expressions of the same thought, at first +wholly sympathetic, lately, it must be confessed, somewhat ironical. + +Consciousness of partnership with God in composition naturally lifts the +poet, in his own estimation, at least, to a super-human level. The myth +of Apollo disguised as a shepherd strikes him as being a happy +expression of his divinity. [Footnote: See James Russell Lowell, _The +Shepherd of King Admetus._] Thus Emerson calls singers + + Blessed gods in servile masks. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +The hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a +Poet_ soars to a monotheistic conception of his powers, asserting + + Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness + Is God. I suffer. I am God. + +Another poet-hero is characterized: + + He would reach the source of light, + And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might. +[Footnote: Harvey Rice, _The Visionary_ (1864). + +In recent years a few poets have modestly disclaimed equality with God. +See William Rose Benet, _Imagination,_ and Joyce Kilmer, _Trees._ The +kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of _The Lonely Poet_ +(1919), by John Hall Wheelock.] + +On the other hand, recent poets' hatred of orthodox religion has led +them to idealize the Evil One, and regard him as no unworthy rival as +regards pride. One of Browning's poets is "prouder than the devil." +[Footnote: _Waring._] Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin +to Milton through his Satan's pride." [Footnote: Sonnet, _To +Chatterton._] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares, + + You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell, + And keep the lowest circle to yourself. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_ (1911).] + +There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over +the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer +takes the trouble to declare, + + Artists truly great + Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange + Their fate for that of any potentate. +[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.] + +Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an +attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to +say, + + Think not, although my aim is art, + I cannot toy with empire easily. +[Footnote: _Nero_.] + +Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: +See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A +Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a +disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example +and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt +Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the +street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to +earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems +absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity +in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The +Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment, + + No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I + Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die. + +It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, +singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that +he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude +harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare +endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young +friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man +from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame +seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. +The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their +art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for +Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of +Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in +_Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives +indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet: + + He, from above descending, stooped to touch + The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though + It scarce deserved his verse. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of +late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young +Rice: + + I have felt the ineffable sting + Of life, though I be art's valet. + I have painted the cloud and the clod, + Who should have possessed the earth. +[Footnote: _Limitations_.] + +It depressed Alan Seeger: + + I, who, conceived beneath another star, + Had been a prince and played with life, + Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far + From the fair things my faith has merited. +[Footnote: _Liebestod_.] + +It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive: + + Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams, + Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at, + And know we be its rulers, though but dreams. +[Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] + +Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is +made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide. + +The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere +in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it +seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate +him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that +his genius is judged by a public that is vastly inferior to him. This +galling thought usually drives him into an attitude of indifference or +of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at +the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is +to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his +brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his +worth.[Footnote: See _To Darwin_.] But the average poet of the last +century and a half goes a step beyond this attitude, and appears to feel +that there is something contemptible about popularity. Literary +arrogance seems far from characteristic of Burns, yet he tells us how, +in a mood of discouragement, + + I backward mused on wasted time, + How I had spent my youthful prime, + And done naething + But stringin' blithers up in rhyme + For fools to sing. +[Footnote: _The Vision._] + +Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most +thoroughgoing expression of this contempt for the public. The sentiment +in _Childe Harold_ is one that Byron never tires of harping on: + I have not loved the world, nor the world me; + I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed + To its idolatries a patient knee. + +And this attitude of Byron's has been adopted by all his disciples, who +delight in picturing his scorn: + + With terror now he froze the cowering blood, + And now dissolved the heart in tenderness, + Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself, + But back into his soul retired alone, + Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously + On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +Of the other romantic poets, Sir Walter Scott alone remains on good +terms with the public, expressing a child's surprise and delight over +the substantial checks he is given in exchange for his imaginings. But +Shelley starts out with a chip on his shoulder, in the very +advertisements of his poems expressing his unflattering opinion of +The public's judgment, and Keats makes it plain that his own criticisms +concern him far more than those of other men. + +The consciously aristocratic, sniffing attitude toward the public, which +ran its course during Victoria's reign, is ushered in by Landor, who +confesses, + + I know not whether I am proud, + But this I know, I hate the crowd, + Therefore pray let me disengage + My verses from the motley page, + Where others, far more sure to please + Pour forth their choral song with ease. + +The same gentlemanly indifference to his plebeian readers is diffused +all through Matthew Arnold's writing, of course. He casually disposes of +popularity: + + Some secrets may the poet tell + For the world loves new ways; + To tell too deep ones is not well,-- + It knows not what he says. +[Footnote: See _In Memory of Obermann._] + +Mrs. Browning probably has her own success in mind when she makes the +young poetess, Aurora Leigh, recoil from the fulsome praise of her +readers. Browning takes the same attitude in _Sordello,_ contrasting +Eglamor, the versifier who servilely conformed to the taste of the mob, +with Sordello, the true poet, who despised it. In _Popularity_, Browning +returns to the same theme, of the public's misplaced praises, and in +_Pacchiarotto_ he outdoes himself in heaping ridicule upon his readers. +Naturally the coterie of later poets who have prided themselves on their +unique skill in interpreting Browning have been impressed by his +contempt for his readers. Perhaps they have even exaggerated it. No less +contemptuous of his readers than Browning was that other Victorian, so +like him in many respects, George Meredith. + +It would be interesting to make a list of the zoological metaphors by +which the Victorians expressed their contempt for the public. Landor +characterized their criticisms as "asses' kicks aimed at his head." +[Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Life of Swinburne_, p. 103.] Browning +alternately represented his public cackling and barking at him. +[Footnote: See Thomas J. Wise, Letters, Second Series, Vol. 2, p. 52.] +George Meredith made a dichotomy of his readers into "summer flies" and +"swinish grunters." [Footnote: _My Theme_.] Tennyson, being no +naturalist, simply named the public the "many-headed beast." [Footnote: +_In Memoriam_.] + +In America there has been less of this sort of thing openly expressed by +genuine poets. Emerson is fairly outspoken, telling us, in _The +Poet_, how the public gapes and jeers at a new vision. But one must +go to our border-line poets to find the feeling most candidly put into +words. Most of them spurn popularity, asserting that they are too +worthwhile to be appreciated. They may be even nauseated by the slight +success they manage to achieve, and exclaim, + + Yet to know + That we create an Eden for base worms! + +If the consciousness of recent writers is dominated by contempt for +mankind at large, such a mood is expressed with more caution than +formerly. Kipling takes men's stupidity philosophically. [Footnote: See +_The Story of Ung._] Edgar Lee Masters uses a fictional character +as a mask for his remarks on the subject. [Footnote: See _Having His +Way._] Other poets have expressed themselves with a degree of mildness. +[Footnote: See Watts-Dunton, _Apollo in Paris;_ James Stephens, _The +Market;_ Henry Newbolt, _An Essay in Criticism;_ William Rose Benet, +_People._] But of course Ezra Pound is not to be suppressed. He +inquires, + + Will people accept them? + (i.e., these songs) + As a timorous wench from a centaur + (or a centurion) + Already they flee, howling in terror + * * * * * + Will they be touched with the verisimilitude? + Their virgin stupidity is untemptable. + +He adds, + + I beg you, my friendly critics, + Do not set about to procure me an audience. + +Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public, + + Salute them with your thumbs to your noses. + +It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in +another poem, + + May my poems be printed this week? + +The naivete of this last question brings up insistently a perplexing +problem. If the poet despises his readers, why does he write? He may +perhaps evade this question by protesting, with Tennyson, + + I pipe but as the linnets do, + And sing because I must. + +But why does he publish? If he were strictly logical, surely he would do +as the artist in Browning's _Pictor Ignotus,_ who so shrank from +having his pictures come into contact with fools, that he painted upon +hidden, moldering walls, thus renouncing all possibility of fame. But +one doubts whether such renunciation has been made often, especially in +the field of poetry. Rossetti buried his poems, of course, but their +resurrection was not postponed till the Last Judgment. Other writers +have coyly waved fame away, but have gracefully yielded to their +friends' importunities, and have given their works to the world. When +one reads such expressions as Byron's; + + Fame is the thirst of youth,--but I am not + So young as to regard men's frown or smile + As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot, +[Footnote: _Childe Harold._] + +one wonders. Perhaps the highest genius takes absolutely no account of +fame, as the sun-god asserts in Watts-Dunton's poem, _Apollo in Paris:_ + + I love the song-born poet, for that he + Loves only song--seeks for love's sake alone + Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown + To feudaries of fame, are known to thee. +[Footnote: See also Coventry Patmore, from _The Angel in the House,_ "I +will not Hearken Blame or Praise"; Francis Carlin, _The Home Song_ +(1918).] + +But other poets, with the utmost inconsistency, have admitted that they +find the thought of fame very sweet. [Footnote: See Edward Young, _Love +of Fame;_ John Clare, _Song's Eternity, Idle Fame, To John Milton;_ +Bulwer Lytton, _The Desire of Fame;_ James Gates Percival, _Sonnet 379;_ +Josephine Peston Peabody, _Marlowe._] Keats dwells upon the thought of +it. [Footnote: See the _Epistle to My Brother George._] Browning shows +both of his poet heroes concerned over the question. In _Pauline_ the +speaker confesses, + + I ne'er sing + But as one entering bright halls, where all + Will rise and shout for him. + +In _Sordello,_ again, Browning analyzes the desire for fame: + + Souls like Sordello, on the contrary, + Coerced and put to shame, retaining will, + Care little, take mysterious comfort still, + But look forth tremblingly to ascertain + If others judge their claims not urged in vain, + And say for them their stifled thoughts aloud. + So they must ever live before a crowd: + --"Vanity," Naddo tells you. + +Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame, + Nor can dispense + With Persia for an audience. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +Can it be that when the poet renounces fame, we must concur with Austin +Dobson's paraphrase of his meaning, + + But most, because the grapes are sour, + Farewell, renown? +[Footnote: _Farewell Renown._] + +Perhaps the poet is saved from inconsistency by his touching confidence +that in other times and places human nature is less stupid and +unappreciative than it proves itself in his immediate audience. He +reasons that in times past the public has shown sufficient insight to +establish the reputation of the master poets, and that history will +repeat itself. Several writers have stated explicitly that their quarrel +with humanity is not to be carried beyond the present generation. Thus +Arnold objects to his time because it is aesthetically dead. [Footnote: +See _Persistency of Poetry._] But elsewhere he objects because it shows +signs of coming to life, [Footnote: See _Bacchanalia._] so it is hard to +determine how our grandfathers could have pleased him. Similarly +unreasonable discontent has been expressed by later poets with our own +time. [Footnote: See William Ernest Henley, _The Gods are Dead;_ Edmund +Gosse, _On Certain Critics;_ Samuel Waddington, _The Death of Song;_ +John Payne, _Double Ballad of the Singers of the Time_(1906).] Only +occasionally a poet rebukes his brethren for this carping attitude. Mrs. +Browning protests, in _Aurora Leigh,_ + + 'Tis ever thus + With times we live in,--evermore too great + To be apprehended near.... + I do distrust the poet who discerns + No character or glory in his times, + And trundles back his soul five hundred years. +[Footnote: See Robert Browning, Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12, +1845.] + +And Kipling is a notorious defender of the present generation, but these +two stand almost alone. [Footnote: See also James Elroy Flecker, _Oak +and Olive;_ Max Ehrmann, _Give Me Today._] + +Several mythical explanations for the stupidity of the poet's own times +have been offered in verse. Browning says that poetry is like wine; it +must age before it grows sweet. [Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto +Volume._] Emerson says the poet's generation is deafened by the thunder +of his voice. [Footnote: _Solution._] A minor writer says that poetry +must be written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one +before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, _The Way of +the World_ (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is +worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, _A Poet's +Question._] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the +poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by +Shelley, in the _Defense of Poetry:_ + + No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the + jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to + all time, must be composed of his peers. + +Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not +the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost +forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition +to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much +farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most +nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words, +as + + Antidotes + Of medicated music, answering for + Mankind's forlornest uses. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese._] + +And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose. +Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as +Browning did, + + My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste + On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste! + A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick-- + I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath, + Henceforward with nettle-broth. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume._] + +Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are +hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly +to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry +hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a +stick. + +The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating. +They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does +not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, +and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his +fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious +circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the +belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result +his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public +more deliberately expressed. + +At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to +have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival +from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the _Castle +of Indolence,_ Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also _To Mr. Thomson, +Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem,_ by H. Hill.] and Thomas +Hood [Footnote: See _To the Late Lord Mayor._] both concerned +themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that +patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the _Ode +Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle._] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, +offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because +of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son. +[Footnote: _The Patron._] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for +the poet, in _Lady Geraldine's Courtship,_ and upheld the nobility of +the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him +appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified +contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose +manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People +are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to +cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there +have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who +have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of +circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in +thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See _Common Sense and +Genius,_ and _Rhymes by the Road._] Later libelers have been, usually, +writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the +course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, _The Green +Carnation,_ which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets. +[Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's _Patience_ made an even greater +sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English +ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim, + + I say an artist + Who does not wholly give himself to art, + Who has about him nothing marked or strange, + But tries to suit himself to all the world + Will ne'er attain to greatness. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo._] + +Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his +conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder +insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on +thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss +him. He repeats the world's query: + + How shall we know him? + Ye shall know him not, + Till, ended hate and scorn, + To the grave he's borne. +[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._] + +Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original +attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring + + Of these states the poet is the equable man, + Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, + fail of their full returns. +[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] + +As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the +poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet +resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the +wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth +telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the +tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's +delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys +and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G. +Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._] + +To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded +his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in +on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, +_More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an +ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new +singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for +his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is +doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who +does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of +beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: +Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ +Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The +Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, +_Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ +George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); +S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New +Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An +Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-Dunton, +_The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming +Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The +Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous +designs of the public. + +A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who +exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the +Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently +believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the +maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are +described: + + Where the heart of each should beat, + There seemed a wound instead of it, + From whence the blood dropped to their feet. + +The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally +shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit +leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter +waters, + + And toads seen crawling on his hand, + And clinging bats, but dimly scanned, + Full in his face their wings expand. + A paleness took the poet's cheek; + "Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek + The lady's will with utterance meek: + "Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:" + (And this time she spoke cheerfully) + Behooves thee know world's cruelty. + +The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which +to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. +From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems +of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides. +[Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's +Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our +poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." +[Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great +renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt +from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously +represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging, +imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, +aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare, +Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante +[Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and +Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_.] and +Tasso [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Tasso_; Shelley, _Song for +Tasso_; James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_.] have received most +attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of +several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's +poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred +Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.] + +Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those +of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement +who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme +youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that +caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody +on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James +Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_; +Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's +Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by +Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an +indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's +faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all +geniuses: + + Alas! what snows are shed + Upon thy laurelled head, + Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs! + Malignity lets none + Approach the Delphic throne; + A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's + hundred tongues. +[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.] + +The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The +centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse. + +Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, +remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the +more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, +[Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and +_Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_ +(1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by +him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought, + + The Pythian of the age one arrow drew + And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow, + They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low. +[Footnote: _Adonais._] + +The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as +formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his +critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far toward +giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the +youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._] +brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but +for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One +is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile +criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile +self-characterization into his mouth: + + I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse + They hounded on to death's untimely doom. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).] + +In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is +expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his +enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized +as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... never content till +they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they +worship her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, +1845.] + +With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have +raised the most indignant storm of protest is Shelley. Several poets, as +the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr. +Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Shelley almost part of +their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Shelley's life warrant +such sympathy. Then too, Shelley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, +is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in +his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for +Shelley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his +scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human +race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches +for the sincerity of his statement, in the _Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty_: + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. + +Accordingly Shelley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden +hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets +have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: +See E. C. Stedman, _Ariel_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Alfred +Austin, _Shelley's Death_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _The General Public_.] + +The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts +of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the +mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one + + Who in another's fate now wept his own. + +Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor +in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate +of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of +popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne +springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that +the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these +defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the +persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent +crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet +is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, +it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century +wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a +personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the +romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, +Joaquin Miller, _I Shall Remember_, and _Vale_; Francis Ledwidge, _The +Visitation of Peace_.] + +Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose +of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the _Canterbury +Tales_, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in +keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in +the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction +so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the +plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole +social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this +friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his +ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American +public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed +it." [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] Emerson tries to get on +common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to +some extent,[Footnote: See _The Enchanter_.] and it is consistent +with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as +Emerson: + + There cannot be confusion of sound forgot, + A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry. +[Footnote: _Pandeen._] + +But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, +"Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley +have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. +W. Holmes, _To Longfellow_; P. H. Hayne, _To Henry W. Longfellow_; T. B. +Read, _A Leaf from the Past_; E. C. Stedman, _J. G. H._; P. L. Dunbar, +_James Whitcombe Riley_; J. W. Riley, _Rhymes of Ironquill_.] for their +promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the +part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who +commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the +public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages +of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the +level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches. + +There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the +hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples +of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, +because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone +is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is +essential to the poet. In the _Prelude_ he relates how, from early +childhood, + + I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, + The self-sufficing power of solitude. + +Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse: + + These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk + Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night. +[Footnote: _Personal Talk_.] + +So he describes the poet's character: + + He is retired as noontide dew + Or fountain in a noonday grove. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Epitaph_.] + +In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, +and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries. +Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed +none." [Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] Emerson expressed the same mood +frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind: + + Think me not unkind and rude + That I walk alone in grove and glen; + I go to the god of the wood, + To fetch his word to men. +[Footnote: _The Apology_.] + +He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet: + + Men consort in camp and town, + But the poet dwells alone. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of +the poet's personality: + + I have no brothers and no peers + And the dearest interferes; + When I would spend a lonely day, + Sun and moon are in my way. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find +his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this +picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, +usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is +characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the +stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, +even while his heart thirsts for companionship.[Footnote: See John +Clare, _The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am_; James Gates Percival, +_The Bard_; Joseph Rodman Drake, _Brorix_ (1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade, +_My Heritage_; Whittier, _The Tent on the Beach_; Mrs. Frances Gage, +_The Song of the Dreamer_ (1867); R. H. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Abram J. +Ryan, _Poets_; Richard H. Dana, _The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet_; +Frances Anne Kemble, _The Fellowship of Genius_ (1889); F. S. Flint, +_Loneliness_(1909); Lawrence Hope, _My Paramour was Loneliness_ (1905); +Sara Teasdale, _Alone_.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last +century, asserting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet +declares: + + For me, I'd rather live + With this weak human heart and yearning blood, + Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls. + More brave, more beautiful than myself must be + The man whom I can truly call my friend. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +So the poet is limited to the companionship of rare souls, who make up +to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this +compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, +because the affections that most people expend on many human +relationships are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the +world's indifference to him, Shelley takes comfort in the assurance of +such communion, saying to Mary, + + If men must rise and stamp with fury blind + On his pure name who loves them--thou and I, + Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity + Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,-- + Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by, + That burn from year to year with inextinguished light. +[Footnote: Introduction to _The Revolt of Islam_.] + +But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's +love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his +loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and +discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most +nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as +Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: +The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, +however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth +century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal +comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the +Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas +at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from +Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes' +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the +gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in +acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his +epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal +conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish +among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no +glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The +closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary +verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an +extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for +Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in +Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the +philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is +the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists +are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from +unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and +Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on +some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the +Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_. +For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, +_To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding +Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).] + +Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships +in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so +notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were +the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his +sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines: + + Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, + And cast them into shape some other day; + Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, + And shattered with the fall, I stand alone. + +The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was +of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is +a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel +it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. +(Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and +more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate +that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which +understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the +premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for +their celebration in verse, from classic times onward. + +Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and +transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest +of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been +written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, +in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost +obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a +Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." +Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says, +"The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his +own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told, + + He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. + +Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas +Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem +he says of himself, + + He came the last, neglected and apart, + +and describes himself as + + companionless + As the last cloud of an expiring storm, + Whose thunder is its knell. + +Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's +lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in +_The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all +human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in +isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without +friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A +Renegade Poet on the Poet:_ + + He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no + company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, + and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority + of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument + I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should + ever do as other men. + +One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his +isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something +beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, +however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, +indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and +characterizes himself, + + I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, + Love their love or mine own love to them teach, + A bastard barred from their inheritance, + * * * * * + In antre of this lowly body set, + Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he +finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually +draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable +consequence of his genius,--that he + + Spares but the cloudy border of his base + To the foiled searching of mortality. +[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, _Shakespeare_.] + +The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, +when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet +he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must +exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, +for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy, +_To Shakespeare_.] + +Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure +perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds +introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride +breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility +and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation +breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second +revolution of the egocentric circle. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE MORTAL COIL + + If I might dwell where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + +sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There +is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude,--the same inconsistency that +lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees +this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,--and yet it is to +him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it +as from a prison house. + +One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the +flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler +spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a +derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all--a woman Sappho, +suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of +us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can +consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material +endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that +there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the +mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him +an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal +on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine +his spirit. + +Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to +attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his +grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in +poems even of such bulk as the _Prelude_ one does not find a complete +analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into +a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story +told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the +only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the +restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement +and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, +but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In _Aurora +Leigh_ one might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism +of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her +English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in +giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, +if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of +qualities derived from more remote ancestors. + +The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical +poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, +[Footnote: See _Thalassius_.] since it typifies the union in the +poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is +lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the +poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful +strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In +the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption +in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete +otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness. + +There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; +this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. +Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything +patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben +Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of +the woman who was "no churl" as + + A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes, + And white hair blown back softly from a face + Etherially fierce, as might have looked + Cassandra in old age. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. +Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. +[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; +Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; +J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; +Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, +_The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of +woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is +hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while +she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's +adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D. +Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might +almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage +indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as +making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A +Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.] + +The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted +upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her +Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley +Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert +and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a +double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of +versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in +heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's +career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject +of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was +Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said +to the little Viola, + + If angels have hereditary wings, + If not by Salic law is handed down + The poet's laurel crown, + To thee, born in the purple of the throne, + The laurel must belong. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in +which they grow. + +What have poets to say on the larger question of their social +inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the +nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the +varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. +The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than +to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the +genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the +beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new +exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that +the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage. + +Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of +opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, +confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd +guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble +of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns +his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of +"Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. +[Footnote: See _Lord Burleigh_, Eleanore in _A Becket_, and the Count in +_The Falcon_.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the +two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, +yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In +Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political +leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his +hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are _The +Troubadour_, Praed; _The King's Tragedy_, Rossetti; _David, Charles di +Trocca_, Cale Young Rice.] + +None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, +and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a +tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer +who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin +was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century +poet as John Hughes, in lines _On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal +Man_, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the +breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See _The +Patron_.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] also, seem +not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes +of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes +into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is +merely personal: + + Gie me ae spark of nature's fire! + That's a' the learning I desire. + Then, though I drudge through dub and mire + At plough or cart, + My muse, though homely in attire, + May touch the heart. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given +sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with +"nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns +see Thomas Campbell, _Ode to Burns_; Whittier, _Burns_; Joaquim Miller, +_Burns and Byron_; William Bennett, _To the Memory of Burns_; A. B. +Street, _Robbie Burns_ (1867); O. W. Holmes, _The Burns Centennial_; +Richard Realf, _Burns_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_ (1868); Shelley Halleck, +_Burns_.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few +of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his +belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found +in the character of the old pedlar, in the _Excursion_. The origin of +Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on +caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his +Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is presumably modeled after +Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching +realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry +with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even +while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: +Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is +Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the +Golden Shoe_; Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_.] Here and there, the +poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last +century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare, _The +Peasant Poet_; Mrs. Browning, _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_; Robert +Buchanan, _Poet Andrew_; T. E. Browne, _Tommy Big Eyes_; Whittier, +_Eliot_; J. G. Saxe, _Murillo and his Slave_.] And at present, with the +penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight +revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are +popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness +than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John +Davidson, _A Ballad in Blank Verse_; Vachel Lindsay, _The North Star +Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son_; John Masefield, _Dauber_; Francis +Carlin, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_ (1918).] Still, for the most part, the +present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of +indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than +caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would +probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning, + + What if men have found + Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll + Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul? +[Footnote: Henry van Dyke, _Sonnet_.] + +If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict +the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most +minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the +poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? +since singers tell + + us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth, + Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar. +[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.] + +as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to +frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses +it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look +for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not +troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the +phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their +father Spenser, who argues, + + So every spirit, as it is most pure, + And hath in it the more of heavenly light, + So it the fairer body doth procure + To habit in, and it more fairly dight + With cheerful grace, and amiable sight; + For of the soul the body form doth take, + For soul is form, and doth the body make. +[Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.] + +What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy +Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed +Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable +geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like +the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which + + Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive +Plant_.] + +Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his +pronouncement, admitting-- + + Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind + Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd, + Either by chance, against the course of kind, + Or through unaptness of the substance found, + Which it assumed of some stubborn ground + That will not yield unto her form's direction, + But is preformed with some foul imperfection. + +But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does +Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and +insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on +Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that +she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from +Alcaeus' line, + + Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho. + +As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of +his extant portrait: + + A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of + Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright, + Low-lidded now, and luminous as love, + Anon soul-searching, ominous as night, + Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps + Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps. +[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth, _At the Mermaid_ (1889).] + +The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their +brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for +geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of +his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti, _Sonnet on Chatterton_.] +has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. +Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies +of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their +imaginations inevitably turn to + + The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair, + The lean, athletic body, deftly planned + To carry that swift soul of fire and air; + The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand + Heroic shoulders! +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a +belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face +of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire +of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have +encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes +Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever +saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the +invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in +all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident +that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into +existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the +frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made +beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert +Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, _Rupert +Brooke_.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate +days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. +Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be +led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of +the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer +to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage. + +We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the +romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made +with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a +conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of +allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication +that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary +sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic +might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by +no means universal;--that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly +bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's +_Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the +latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy, + + He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love, + Is all that these eyes can adore. + He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love, + And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore. + +Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line +with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, +likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the +brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River, + + Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street + For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk, +[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.] + +for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" +of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable. + +Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and +assures us, + + Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped, +[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.] + +but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic +topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing +features? + +Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably +wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, +there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture +of Keats, + + The real Adonis, with the hymeneal + Fresh vernal buds half sunk between + His youthful curls. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero, + + A lovely youth, + With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_ (1898); Frances Fuller, _To Edith May_ (1851); +Metta Fuller, _Lines to a Poetess_ (1851).] Someone has pointed out +that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the +heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the +same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the +poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it. + +"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, _On the Death of +James Hogg_; Browning, _Sordello_, _By the Fireside_; Mrs. Browning, +_Aurora Leigh_; Principal Shairp, _Balliol Scholars_; Alfred Noyes, +_Tales of the Mermeid Inn_.] poets invariably possess, but the less +phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The +differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, +as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of +Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its +ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas, +_The Life of Charles Lamb_, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was +especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines _To a Poet Breaking +Silence_, he asserts, + + Yes, in this silent interspace + God sets his poems in thy face, + +and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses, + + How should I gage what beauty is her dole, + Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, + As birds see not the casement for the sky. + +It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most +radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical +nature,--through his + + Dream dazzled gaze + Aflame and burning like a god in song. +[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.] + +Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he +surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there +probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward +look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." +[Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John +Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the +heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_] +Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser, + + With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But +Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a +fictitious poet that + + His steadfast eye burnt inwardly + As burning out his soul, +[Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.] + +we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before +serious damage is done. + +The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in +varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half +closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet +it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his + + Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined + Before the sovran-thought of his own mind. +[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.] + +Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and +his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. +I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.] + +But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to + + See, no longer blinded with his eyes, +[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.] + +and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's +noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, +undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is +seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse +having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial +explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton, + + The living throne, the sapphire blaze + Where angels tremble while they gaze + He saw, but blasted with excess of light, + Closed his eyes in endless night, +[Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.] + +and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John +Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in +Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C. +Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, +also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may + + By the darkness of thine eyes discern + How piercing was the light within thy soul. +[Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne, +_Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the +Sea_.] + +Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an +assertion as that of Keats, + + There is a triple sight in blindness keen. +[Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes, +Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.] + +Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, +one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth, + + Thou that, when first my quickened ear + Thy deeper harmonies might hear, + I imaged to myself as old and blind, + For so were Milton and Maeonides, +[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).] + +and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to +his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See +also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)] + +But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up +here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, +for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture +of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite +picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very +beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally +distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more +spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural +tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely +aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The +brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly +school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's +_Dispute of the Poets_. The spiritual one + + Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes, + +but his brother, + + The one with brighter hues and darker curls + Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine, + Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life + Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight + From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought. + +The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, +seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of +John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ is + + A youth whose sultry eyes + Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust. + +But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous +features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello, + + Yourselves shall trace + (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, + A sharp and restless lip, so well combine + With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive + Delight at every sense; you can believe + Sordello foremost in the regal class + Nature has broadly severed from her mass + Of men, and framed for pleasure... + * * * * * + You recognize at once the finer dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear. + +Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more +easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," +as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. +Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never +seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a +celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne +undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is +so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no +further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be +deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of +English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the +burly host, + + He in the waast is shape as wel as I; + This were a popet in an arm tenbrace + For any woman, smal and fair of face? +[Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.] + +Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. +Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from +the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the +handsome young squire, who + + Coude songes make, and wel endyte. +[Footnote: _Prologue_.] + +Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, +_The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from +Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine +unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid +flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it +philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, +interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to +remain, though it begins with the line, + + A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems. + +And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's +callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly +decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." +[Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.] + +Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as +another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent +realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could _not_ be a glorious +eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other +men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne, +_Joyce Kilmer_.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike +shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce +Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a +delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." +[Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday, _Memoir of Joyce Kilmer_, p. 62.] Of +course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic +distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the +idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's +proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and +drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut +him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a +poet. + +It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands +of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the +stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. +Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length +in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation +of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds +them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from +tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, +excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been +alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last +century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the +melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman +does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive +disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.] +and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that +it was + + Projected from the bilious Childe. +[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.] + +But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with +emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid. + +To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ +describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position +we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, +assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was +the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. +[Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his +favorite poet as + + A man who measured six feet four: + Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest, + Compact his frame, his muscles of the best. +[Footnote: _A Portrait_.] + +With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has +again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been +noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly +verse-writers, + + A heavy handed blow, I think, + Would make your veins drip scented ink. +[Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.] + +But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share +of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the +Poet_, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers +resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began +his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt +against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself +unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint, + + We are compared to that sort of person, + Who wanders about announcing his sex + As if he had just discovered it. +[Footnote: _The Condolence_.] + +The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in +poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora +Leigh's cousin Romney to argue, + + Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life, + You need the lower life to stand upon + In order to reach up unto that higher; + And none can stand a tip-toe in that place + He cannot stand in with two stable feet. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +May 6, 1845.] + +Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific +account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the +result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael +Angelo_ (1904).] + +Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is +illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, +outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of +essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention: + + In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These + semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration, + for in reality the beggars have the advantage + of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed + to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to + the point. We must dig painfully through the outer + layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the + invalids are all spirit. +[Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.] + +That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last +century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their +ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if +anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello +turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So +nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max +Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art, _Degeneration_, was +able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a +disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.] + +Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as +Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be +significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a +sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil +from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let +us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our +earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of +whom we learn, + + Too long had sickness left her pining trace + With slow still touch on each decaying grace; + Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien; + Despair upon his languid smile was seen. +[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley_.] + +We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that +tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that +he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that +Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. +Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out +of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_ +Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction, + + Death and love are yet contending for their prey, + +and in _Adonais_ he appears as + + A power + Girt round with weakness. + * * * * * + A light spear ... + Vibrated, as the everbearing heart + Shook the weak hand that grasped it. + +Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as +consumption saps his strength: + + You might see his colour come and go, + And the softest strain of music made + Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade + Amid the dew of his tender eyes; + And the breath with intermitting flow + Made his pale lips quiver and part. +[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.] + +The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, +_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so +affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough +became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the +last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to +Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame +of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the +anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. + +Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the +poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus +Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: + + More tremulous + Than the soft star that in the azure East + Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day + Was his frail soul. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in +thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: + + Some life of men unblest + He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. + He went, his piping took a troubled sound + Of storms that rage outside our happy ground. + He could not wait their passing; he is dead. + +In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark +upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by +Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse: + + The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn, + The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn, + The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell, + The almond face that Giotto drew so well, + The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._] + +Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the +_Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that +he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another, + + Behold him, how Hell's reek + Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek. +[Footnote: _Dante at Verona._] + +A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore: + + And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell. +[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._] + +In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying +hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their +genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the +mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the +realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,--in fact, +it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows +struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry +them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned +with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, +or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_.] and +Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; +Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Sapphics_, _Anactoria_; +Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy +Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in Lenkos_.] to the +long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: +Browning, _One Word More_, _Preface to The Ring and the Book_; James +Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the Death of Mrs. +Browning_.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, _Ballad of +Appeal to Christina Rossetti_, _New Year's Eve_, _Dedication to +Christina Rossetti_.] Emily Bronte, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, +_Emily Bronte_.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister +Songs_, _On her Photograph_, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] Felicia +Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans_.] Adelaide Proctor, +[Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor_.] Helen Hunt, +[Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H_. _H_.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote: +_Ibid_., _To E. Lazarus_.]--one finds woman the subject of complimentary +verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we +should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their +greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it +plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her +style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her +"manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_.] So the +feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise. + +As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing +thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, +woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were +sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of +their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal +Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe_.] both +deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could +not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The +Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed +to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations +when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: +See _The Catalogue_. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The +Squinting Poetess_.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall +took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love +rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess_. More +seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend +with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother +Does_.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the +nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a +literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer +Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and +heroine, + + In each lay poesy--for woman's heart + Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen; + And if it flow not through the tide of art, + Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween + It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked + The egress of rich words, it flows in thought, + And in its silent mirror doth reflect + Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought. +[Footnote: Milton.] + +Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on +her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, +appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an +anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written +by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober +judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of +Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, +Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but +who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,--Cythna, in +_The Revolt of Islam_. + +It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of +sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to +the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his + + Lyric love, half angel and half bird, + +reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position +on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In +_The Two Poets of Croisic_ he deals with the eighteenth century in +France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. +Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning +the admiration of the celebrities of the day--only to have his verse +tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by +her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact +that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine +_nom de plume_, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. +[Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod."] If indifference is the +attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that +her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her +entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we +must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to +approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted +to Robert Browning, "is--that there is a natural inferiority of mind in +women--of the intellect--not by any means of the moral nature--and that +the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." +[Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this +private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well. + +In a short narrative poem, _Mother and Poet_, Mrs. Browning claims +for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the +average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper +sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be +found in _Aurora Leigh_. She feels that making her imaginary poet a +woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much +of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must +have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring +insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the +charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. +Romney declares, + + Women as you are, + Mere women, personal and passionate, + You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, + Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints! + We get no Christ from you,--and verily + We shall not get a poet, in my mind. + +Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in +charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. +She confesses, + + We women are too apt to look to one, + Which proves a certain impotence in art. + +But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry +even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to +be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an +advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, +because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails +verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question +of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, +_Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.] + +Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's +physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the +chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit? + +In answer, one is haunted by the line, + + I too was born in Arcadia. + +Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In +the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of +the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: +See _Corydon_.] Collins, [Footnote: See _Selim, or the Shepherd's +Moral_.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See _Pastoral on the Death of +Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal +sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly +necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving +a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. +[Footnote: See _Huggins and Duggins_, and _The Forlorn Shepherd's +Complaint_.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes' +_Letter to a Friend in the Country_, and Sidney Dyer's _A Country +Walk_, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He +is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday. + +With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the +poet to nature becomes, of course, more intimate. But Cowper and Thomson +keep themselves out of their nature poetry to such an extent that it is +hard to tell what their ideal position would be, and not till the +publication of Beattie's _The Minstrel_ do we find a poem in which +the poet is nurtured under the influence of a natural scenery. At the +very climax of the romantic period the poet is not always bred in the +country. We find Byron revealing himself as one who seeks nature only +occasionally, as a mistress in whose novelty resides a good deal of her +charm. Shelley, too, portrays a poet reared in civilization, but +escaping to nature. [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_, and _Alastor_.] +Still, it is obvious that ever since the time of Burns and Wordsworth, +the idea of a poet nurtured from infancy in nature's bosom has been +extremely popular. + +There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the +hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth +were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were +not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too +tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. +[Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so +far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the +Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. +[Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society +every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of +Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs, + + So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth, + That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran + (And song is but the eloquence of truth). + +The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, +declaring of poetry, + + Its seat is deeper in the savage breast + Than in the man of cities. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of +acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all +singers," in Longfellow's _Hiawatha_. + +But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian +reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from +nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that +response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical +experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of +imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to +add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come +to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. +Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of +nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says + + If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach + My heart their beautiful parts of speech, + And the natural art they say these with, + My soul would sing of beauty and myth + In a rhyme and a meter none before + Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore. +[Footnote: _Preludes_.] + +The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, +was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not +intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature + + More like a man + Flying from something that he dreads, than one + Who sought the thing he loved. + +What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. +Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: +See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too, +were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting +nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's +life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See +_Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The +Prelude_.] + +Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him +to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to +the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic +solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run +its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges +the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar +Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and +preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from +civilization: + + For early didst thou leave the world, with powers + Fresh, undiverted to the world without, + Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; + Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt + Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings. + +No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality. +Stephen Phillips says of Emily Bronte's poetic gift, + + Only barren hills + Could wring the woman riches out of thee, +[Footnote: _Emily Bronte_.] + +and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. +But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was +developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See _The Palace of Art_.] and +Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See _The Poet's Vow_; Letters to Robert +Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning +as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the +eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe, +_An Escape_; J. E. Flecker, _Dirge_; Madison Cawein, _Comrading_; Yeats, +_The Lake Isle of Innisfree_.] he does not have everything his own way. + +For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely +anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared +in +London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter +of course, + + The coy muse, with me she would not live + In this dark city, +[Footnote: _Epistle to George Felton Mathew_. Wordsworth's sonnet, +"Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at +this time.] + +and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet, + + In cities he was low and mean; + The mountain waters washed him clean. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse, + + She can find a nobler theme for song + In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight + Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore. +[Footnote: _L'Envoi_.] + +A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in +London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to +the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of +the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, +_The Rossettis_, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral +verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. +Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they +were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this +regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the +city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See _The +City of Dreadful Night_.] this is not the same thing as the romantic +poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment. + +Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an +anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: +See _On London Stones_.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious +about his city poets. [Footnote: See _Fleet Street Eclogues_.] But as +landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the +most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more +and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to +take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. +Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. +[Footnote: See _Paris_.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl +Sandburg, _Chicago Poems_; Edgar Lee Masters, _The Loop_; William +Griffith, _City Pastorals_; Charles H. Towne, _The City_.] are beginning +to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called _A Winter +Night_ reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the +most bucolic shepherd among his flocks. + +To poets' minds the only unaesthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the +country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry +inspired by it, the reader of the _Spoon River Anthology_ is still +disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist +whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment. + +So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern +poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of +course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, +but usually, as in the Old English poem, _The Wanderer_, he has been +unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the +habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See +_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] But Byron set the fashion among poets +of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] +and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since +Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] +The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's +autobiographical novels, _Rest Harrow_ and _Open Country_, and William +H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. +[Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, _Denby the Rhymer_ (1918); Henry +Herbert Knibbs, _Songs of the Trail_ (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, +concurred in the view, declaring, + + Down the free roads of human happiness + I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Sidney_.] + +"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels +with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as +has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? +What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's +_Complaint to His Empty Purse_, onward, English poetry has borne +the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled +with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for +their destitution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camoeens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, +Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want +exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse. + +The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well +inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of +course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time +on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, +also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from +illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there +are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's _Bohemia_ reveals the +fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of +his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller +the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, +the cost _per caput_ will be _nil_. Not only so, but the poet is likely +to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready +cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of +contemptuous amusement from a poet's statement, + + Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay! + One would I sell and daffodils buy + To feed my soul. +[Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.] + +What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually +asking. + +What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking +of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but +only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines +_Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_ + + Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased + And yet can starve the author of the pleasure. + +Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as +bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in +poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public, + + You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me + After you've starved me and driven me dead. + Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread. +[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.] + +Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's +_Ina_, the author himself appears, raving, + + A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool! + Would you know what it means to be a poet? + It is to want a friend, to want a home, + A country, money,--aye, to want a meal. +[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.] + +But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to +pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious +horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. +Browning boasts, + + The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented + Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, + But culls his Faustus from philosophers + And not from poets. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true +artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his +mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington +Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a +Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to +remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the +couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See +_Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, +Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been +held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry +Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see +Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are +comparatively safe from a poet's strike. + +Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his +financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A +Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their +terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this +subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy, + + Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes + Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers; + What is a world of vanities + To a world as fair as ours? + +In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle +to Davie, Fellow Poet_: + + To lie in kilns and barns at e'en + When bones are crazed, and blind is thin + Is doubtless great distress, + Yet then content would make us blest. + +Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_, + + Our simple life wants little, and true taste + Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste + The scene it would adorn. + +Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward +poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston +Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G. +Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G. +Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf +of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet, +_In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The +poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish +it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take +away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only +the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. +With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries, + + Starving, still I smile, + Laugh at want and wrong, + He is fed and clothed + To whom God giveth song. +[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, _A Crowned Poet_.] + +It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's +satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect, + + One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye, + The cave of Poverty and Poetry. + Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, + Emblem of music caused by emptiness, +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of +compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates +on the poet, + + The Muse gave special charge + His learning should be deep and large,-- + * * * * * + His flesh should feel, his eyes should read + Every maxim of dreadful need. + * * * * * + By want and pain God screeneth him + Till his appointed hour. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal +conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's +physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as +the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is +appalling. What can account for it? + +In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of +constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another +popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes +it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him, + + For I had the share of life that might have filled a century, + Before its fourth in time had passed me by. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] + +A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects, + + ... For my thirty years, + Dashed with sun and splashed with tears, + Wan with revel, red with wine, + Other wiser happier men + Take the full three score and ten. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with +recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily +Bronte, of whom it is written: + + They live not long of thy pure fire composed; + Earth asks but mud of those that will endure. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Bronte_.] + +Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness. +Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death + + Far from the trembling throng + Whose souls are never to the tempest given. +[Footnote: _Adonais_.] + +With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis +Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home +to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong +for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are +screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream +about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his +article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne +speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has +written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is +nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense +must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less +wild-winged." + +It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or +to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to +mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with +regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not +wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a +departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to +overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to +retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise. + +More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In +Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic +muses, + + He died--'twas shrewd: + And came with all his youth and unblown hopes + On the world's heart, and touched it into tears. + +In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses +this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been +expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_: + + I have seen more glory in sunrise + Than in the deepening of azure noon, + +or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_: + + I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, + In predecease of his just-sickening song, + Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme, + Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long. + +Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in +English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east +must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a +poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth +and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot +Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the +Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_; +George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a +Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson, +_From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis +Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_; +Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The +Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919); +Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The +Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died +Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes +through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_: + + Youth rambles on life's arid mount, + And strikes the rock and finds the vein, + And brings the water from the fount. + The fount which shall not flow again. + + The man mature with labor chops + For the bright stream a channel grand, + And sees not that the sacred drops + Ran off and vanished out of hand. + + And then the old man totters nigh + And feebly rakes among the stones; + The mount is mute, the channel dry, + And down he lays his weary bones. + +But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if +nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. +For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by +prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might +bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them +to do so [Footnote: See Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Landor, _Dull is +my Verse_; J. G. Percival, _Invocation_; Matthew Arnold, _Growing Old_; +Longfellow, _My Books_; O. W. Holmes, _The Silent Melody_; C. W. +Stoddard, _The Minstrel's Harp_; P. H. Hayne, _The Broken Chords_; J. C. +MacNiel, _A Prayer_; Harvey Hubbard, _The Old Minstrel_.]--but it would +never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we +have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their +unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, _Age and Song, The Centenary +of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo_; O. W. Holmes, _Whittier's Eightieth +Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday_; E. E. Stedman, _Ad Vatem_; P. +H. Hayne, _To Longfellow_; Richard Gilder, _Jocoseria_; M. F. Tupper, +_To the Poet of Memory_; Edmund Gosse, _To Lord Tennyson on his +Eightieth Birthday_; Alfred Noyes, _Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of +Swinburne_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Eightieth Birthday_; Lucy Larcom, +_J. G. Whittier_; Mary Clemmer, _To Whittier_; Percy Mackaye, _Browning +to Ben Ezra_.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating +the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still +singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, +Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman +continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may +have had a genuine influence on younger writers. + +Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the +self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is +equivocal, as Landor's + + Dull is my verse: not even thou + Who movest many cares away + From this lone breast and weary brow + Canst make, as once, its fountains play; + No, nor those gentle words that now + Support my heart to hear thee say, + The bird upon the lonely bough + Sings sweetest at the close of day. + +It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding +convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. +Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_ +and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for +his belief in + + The last of life for which the first was made, + +as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found +its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get +the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself +at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and +Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by +their longevity. + +But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and +in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the +youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems +indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the +Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's +minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. +[Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of +these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. +The poet in Campbell's poem explains, + + 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore. + +Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the +old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can +express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares, + + I count it strange and hard to understand + That nearly all young poets should write old. + ... It may be perhaps + Such have not settled long and deep enough + In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still + The memory mixes with the vision, spoils + And works it turbid. Or perhaps again + In order to discover the Muse Sphinx + The melancholy desert must sweep around + Behind you as before. + +Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She +sighs, remembering her own youth, + + Alas, near all the birds + Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take + The chaffering swallow for the holy lark. + +Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment: + ... Many men are poets in their youth, + But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong + Even through all age the indomitable song. + [Footnote: _Genius in Beauty_.] + +Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See _To any Poet_.] too, and Richard Watson +Gilder [Footnote: See _Life is a Bell_.] feel that increasing power of +song comes with age. + +It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon +the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas +old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them +to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required +before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not +surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at +thirty, asserting, + + In me thou seest the glowing of such fire + As on the ashes of his youth doth lie, + +and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come +from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own +day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See +_There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, +[Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of +Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his +inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their +future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling +and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, +Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his +juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later +poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, +into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, +once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and +passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection, + + White-bearded and with eyes that look afar + From their still region of perpetual snow, + Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men. +[Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.] + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +THE POET AS LOVER + + +Do the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ leave anything to be said on the +relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The +poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new +philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the +power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his +gratitude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that +love has received many encomiums before. + +It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the +part of the uninitiated. + + Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle, + +Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been +no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the +fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which associates +all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion, +which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the +contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the +singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like +the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by +the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of classic +Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly +escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of +the present time says much for himself. + +In the first place, our non-lover may assure us, the nature of love is +such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard. For love is a mad +pursuit of life at first hand, in its most engrossing aspect, and it +renders one deaf and blind to all but the object of the chase; while +poetry is, as Plato points out, [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, Sec. +599-601; and _Phaedrus_, Sec. 248.] only a pale and lifeless imitation +of the ardors and delights which the lover enjoys at first hand. +Moreover, one who attempts to divide his attention between the muse and +an earthly mistress, is likely not only to lose the favor of the former, +but, as the ubiquity of the rejected poet in verse indicates, to lose +the latter as well, because his temperament will incline him to go into +retirement and meditate upon his lady's charms, when he should be +flaunting his own in her presence. It will not be long, indeed, before +he has so covered the object of his affection with the leafage of his +fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all. The +non-lover may remind us that even so ardent an advocate of love as Mrs. +Browning voices this danger, confessing, in _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, +[Footnote: Sonnet XXIX.] + + My thoughts do twine and bud + About thee, as wild vines about a tree + Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see + Except the straggling green that hides the wood. + +The non-lover may also recall to our minds the notorious egotism and +self-sufficiency of the poet, which seem incompatible with the humility +and insatiable yearning of the lover. He exults in the declaration of +Keats, + + My solitude is sublime,--for, instead of what I have + described (_i.e._, domestic bliss) there is sublimity + to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and + the stars through the windowpanes are my children; the + mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have, + stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. + [Footnote: Letter to George Keats, October 31, 1818.] + +Borne aloft by his admiration for this passage, the non-lover may +himself essay to be sublime. He may picture to us the frozen heights on +which genius resides, where the air is too rare for earthly affection. +He may declare that Keats' Grecian Urn is a symbol of all art, which +must be + + All breathing human passion far above. + +He will assert that the mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and +see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure +out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw +his view out of perspective. + +Finally, the enemy of love may call as witnesses poets whom he fancies +he has led astray. Strangely enough, considering the dedication of the +_Ring and the Book_, he is likely to give most conspicuous place among +these witnesses to Browning. Like passages of Holy Writ, lines from +Browning have been used as the text for whatever harangue a new +theorist sees fit to give us. In _Youth and Art_, the non-lover +will point out the characteristic attitude of young people who are +"married to their art," and consequently have no capacity for other +affection. In _Pauline_, he will gloat over the hero's confession +that he is inept in love because he is concerned with his perceptions +rather than with their objects, and his explanation, + + I am made up of an intensest life; + Of a most clear idea of consciousness + Of self ... + And I can love nothing,--and this dull truth + Has come at last: but sense supplies a love + Encircling me and mingling with my life. + +He will point out that Sordello is another example of the same type, for +though Sordello is ostensibly the lover of Palma, he really finds +nothing outside himself worthy of his unbounded adoration. [Footnote: +Compare Browning's treatment of Sordello with the conventional treatment +of him as lover, in _Sordello_, by Mrs. W. Buck (1837).] Turning to +Tennyson, in _Lucretius_ the non-lover will note the tragic death +of the hero that grows out of the asceticism in love engendered by his +absorption in composition. With the greatest pride the enemy of love +will point to his popularity in the 1890's, when the artificial and +heartless artist enjoyed his greatest vogue. As his most scintillating +advocate he will choose Oscar Wilde. Assuring us of many prose passages +in his favor, he will read to us the expression of conflict between love +and art in _Flower of Love_, where Wilde exclaims, + + I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and though my youth is + gone in wasted days, + I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's + crown of bays, + +and he will read the record of the same sense of conflict, in different +mood, expressed in the sonnet _Helas_: + + To drift with every passion till my soul + Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, + Is it for this that I have given away + Mine ancient wisdom and austere control? + Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll + Scrawled over on some boyish holiday + With idle songs for pipe and virelai, + Which do but mar the secret of the whole. + Surely there was a time I might have trod + The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance + Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God. + Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod + I did but touch the honey of romance, + And must I lose a soul's inheritance? + +And yet, when the non-lover has finally arrived at the peroration of his +defense, we may remain unshaken in our conviction that from the _Song +of Solomon_ to the _Love Songs of Sara Teasdale_, the history of poetry +constitutes an almost unbroken hymn to the power of love, "the poet, and +the source of poetry in others," [Footnote: _The Symposium_ of Plato, Sec. +196.] as Agathon characterized him at the banquet in Love's honour. +Within the field of our especial inquiry, the last century, we may rest +assured that there is no true poet whose work, rightly interpreted, is +out of tune with this general acclaim. Even Browning and Oscar Wilde are +to be saved, although, it may be, only as by fire. + +The influence of love upon poetry, which we are assuming with such _a +priori_ certainty, is effected in various ways. The most obvious, of +course, is by affording new subject matter. The confidence of +Shakespeare, + + How can my muse want subject to invent + While thou dost breathe, that pourest into my verse + Thine own sweet argument? + +is at least as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth +century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to +the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to +contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon +poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, with any +number of other personal experiences that have thrilled the poet to +composition. + +The scope of love's influence is widened when one reflects upon its +efficacy as a prize held up before the poet, spurring him on to express +himself. In this aspect poetry is often a form of spiritual display +comparable to the gay plumage upon the birds at mating season. In the +case of women poets, verse often affords an essentially refined and +lady-like manner of expressing one's sentiments toward a possible +suitor. The convention so charmingly expressed in William Morris' lines, +_Rhyme Slayeth Shame_, seems to be especially grateful to them. At +times the ruse fails, as a writer has recently admitted: + + All sing it now, all praise its artless art, + But ne'er the one for whom the song was made, +[Footnote: Edith Thomas, _Vos non Nobis_.] + +but perhaps the worth of the poetry is not affected by the stubbornness +of its recipient. Sara Teasdale very delicately names her anthology of +love poems by women, _The Answering Voice_, but half the poems reveal +the singer speaking first, while a number of them show her expressing an +open-minded attitude toward any possible applicant for her hand among +her readers. But it is not merely for its efficacy as a matrimonial +agency that poets are indebted to love. + +Since the nineteenth century is primarily the age of the love story, +personal experience of love has been invaluable to the poet in a third +way. The taste of the time has demanded that the poet sing of the tender +theme almost exclusively, whether in dramatic, lyric or narrative, +whether in historical or fictional verse. This is, of course, one reason +that, wherever the figure of a bard appears in verse, he is almost +always portrayed as a lover. Not to illustrate exhaustively, three of +the most widely read poems with poet heroes, of the beginning, middle +and end of the century respectively, _i. e._, Moore's _Lalla +Rookh_, Mrs. Browning's _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, and +Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, all depend for plot +interest upon their hero's implication in a love affair. The authors' +love affairs were invaluable, no doubt, since a poet is not be expected +to treat adequately a passion which he has not experienced himself. It +is true that one hears from time to time, notably in the 1890's, that +the artist should remain apart from, and coldly critical of the emotions +he portrays. But this is not the typical attitude of our period. When +one speaks thus, he is usually thought to be confusing the poet with the +literary man, who writes from calculation rather than from inspiration. +The dictum of Aristotle, "Those who feel emotion are most convincing +through a natural sympathy with the characters they represent," +[Footnote: _Poetics_ XVII, Butcher's translation.] has appeared +self-evident to most critics of our time. + +But the real question of inspiration by love goes deeper and is +connected with Aristotle's further suggestion that poetry involves "a +strain of madness," a statement which we are wont to interpret as +meaning that the poet is led by his passions rather than by his reason. +This constitutes the gist of the whole dispute between the romanticist +and the classicist, and our poets are such ardent devotees of love as +their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the +temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is +obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the +offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then +equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is +doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not +as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel +filled from without. His afflatus comes upon him and departs, without +his control or understanding. Poetical inspiration, to such a +temperament, naturally assumes the shape of passion. Bryant's expression +of this point of view is so typical of the general attitude as to seem +merely commonplace. He tells us, in _The Poet_, + + No smooth array of phrase, + Artfully sought and ordered though it be, + Which the cold rhymer lays + Upon his page languid industry + Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed. + * * * * * + The secret wouldst thou know + To touch the heart or fire the blood at will? + Let thine own eyes o'erflow; + Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill. + Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past, + And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast. + +Coleridge's comprehension of this fact led him to cry, "Love is the +vital air of my genius." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1799.] + +All this, considering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps +only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most +sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal +of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to +understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of +emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar +Lee Masters' _Monsieur D---- and the Psycho-Analyst_.] + +Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their +passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his +biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably +passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet +being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life +afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly +assures us, + +Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to +write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by +my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. +[Footnote: See Arthur Symons, _The Romantic Movement_, p. 92 (from +Myers, _Life of Wordsworth_).] + +Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who +shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of +temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in +_My Namesake_, says of himself, + + Few guessed beneath his aspect grave + What passions strove in chains. + +Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion, + + But you are blind, and to the blind + The touch of ice and fire is one. + +The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled _Our +Elder Poets_.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an +expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet +somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from +the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion. + +Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine +of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity +for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned +themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life +writing them up. Childe Harold is + + Grown aged in this world of woe, + In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, + So that no wonder waits him, nor below + Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife, + Cut to his heart again with the keen knife + Of silent, sharp endurance. + +The very imitative hero of Praed's _The Troubadour_, after +disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six +dismisses passion forever. We are assured that + + The joys that wound, the pains that bless, + Were all, were all departed, + And he was wise and passionless + And happy and cold-hearted. + +The popularity of this sort of poet was, however, ephemeral. Of late +years poets have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who +attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely, +beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted +poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy +of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he +had not wantonly wasted his emotions. + +One is justified in asking why, on the other hand, the poet should not +be one who, instead of spending his love on a finite mistress, should +devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry +is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are +portrayed in Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, where the hero agonizes for +relief from his too ardent love: + + O that my heart was quiet as a grave + Asleep in moonlight! + For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold + Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul + A passion burns from basement to the cope. + Poesy, poesy! +But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly +unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly +with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to +the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher +described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, +is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to +be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without +doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. +One of our minor American poets declares, + + The bard who yields to flesh his emotion + Knows naught of the frenzy divine. +[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest +against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.] + +But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a +Platonist--and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B. +Alexander, _Poetry and the Individual_, p. 46.]--the poet is led upward +to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of +sense. Thus in one of the most Platonic of our poems, G. E. Woodberry's +_Agathon_, Eros says of the hero, who is the young poet of the +_Symposium_, + + A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed, + Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense + In him is amorous and passionate. + Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out + So with pure thought and care of things divine + To touch his soul that it partake the gods. + +This does not imply that romantic love is the only avenue to ideal +beauty. Rupert Brooke's _The Great Lover_ might dissipate such an +idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for +sensuousbeauty. + + These I have loved, + +Brooke begins, + + White plates and cups, clean gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood. + +And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of +his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than +such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to +result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design, +unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great passion, +which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously, +affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other +impressions. Of course the exceptionally idealistic poet, who is +conscious of a religious ideal, can say with Milton, "I am wont day and +night to seek the _idea_ of beauty through all the forms and faces +of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it +leading me on with certain assured traces." [Footnote: _Prose +Works_, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symmons ed.] To him there is no need of +the unifying influence of romantic love. In his case the mission of a +strong passion is rather to humanize the ideal, lest it become purely +philosophical (as that of G. E. Woodberry is in danger of doing) or +purely ethical, as is the case of our New England poets. On the other +hand, to the poet who denies the ideal element in life altogether, the +unifying influence of love is indispensable. Such deeply tragic poetry +as that of James Thomson, B. V., for instance, which asserts Macbeth's +conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter +chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the +memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and +beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair. + +In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that +the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as +the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual +beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's +perturbation. He inquires: + + Can proportion of the outward part + Move such affection in the inward mind + That it can rob both sense and reason blind? + Why do not then the blossoms of the field, + Which are arrayed with much more orient hue + And to the sense most daintie odors yield, + Work like impression in the looker's view? +[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.] + +Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic +mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in +asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the +senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all +creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they +declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love +poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such +heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most +beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's. + +It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its +most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit +kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an +instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the +analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames +that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of +Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the +title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he +learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court. + + Thou art a glorious madman, + +Lodge exclaims, + + Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, + And rise again to immortality. + +Marlowe replies, + + Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, + What if? I shall have drained my splendor down + To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness, + And mirk and mire and black oblivion, + Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, + Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest + To be so damned. + +Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for +the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her +living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See +Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip +Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_; +Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_; +Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice, +_Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho +and Phaon_; Zoe Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander +Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims +this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for +sympathy, + + For all my days as all thy days from birth + My heart as thy heart was in me as thee + Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea + Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth + Is fuel enough to feed, + While day sows night, and night sows day for seed. + +This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the +poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. +The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical +quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is +needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, +in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal +love and beauty, declaring, + + Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; + Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; + Love has no habitation but the heart: + Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, + Cling, and are borne into the night apart, + The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover. + +Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love. +Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct, +Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, +arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, + + What had all we done + That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, + And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, + And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins? + +Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal +the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, +[Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire." +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to +immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea: + + Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, + But mine are beauty and immortal love. + Therefore I will be tyrant of myself-- + Mine own law will I be! And I will make + Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms + Are wrought of loveliness without decay, + And wild desire without satiety, + And joy and aspiration without death. + And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho! + Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, + Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens + Are fallen and withered. + +To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to +note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho. +[Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in +Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our +enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope +to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have +been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable +matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as +mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her +love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her +temperament, + + Night and day + A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, + And all her veins ran fever, +[Footnote: _Sappho_.] + +conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her, + + Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, + Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love. +[Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.] + +It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her +genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing +her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert, + + But having made me, me he shall not slay: + Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his, + Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss + Contents them. + +It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in +the body as in an oyster shell," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, Sec. 250.] +while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the +senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara +Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself, + + Who would run at dusk + Along the surges creeping up the shore + When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, + And running, running till the night was black, + Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand, + And quiver with the winds from off the sea. + Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides + Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me + Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest. +[Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, +in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this +destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite, + + If I sing no more + To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, + It is that thou hast made my life too sweet + To hold the added sweetness of a song. + * * * * * + I taught the world thy music; now alone + I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.] + +Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in +her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In _Anactoria_ +she tells the object of her infatuation: + + I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated + With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead. + * * * * * + I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, + Intense device and superflux of pain. + +And after detailing with gusto the bloody ingenuities of her plan of +torture, she states that her motive is, + + To wring thy very spirit through the flesh. + +The myth that Sappho's agony resulted from an offense done to Aphrodite, +is several times alluded to. In _Sappho and Phaon_ she asserts her +independence of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the goddess turns +Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thalassa, the mother of his +children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest +of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning +passion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is +mentioned. This is the sole theme of _Sapphics_, in which poem the +goddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual +delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her: + + Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho," + Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not + Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids.... + Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, + Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, + Full of music; only beheld among them + Soar as a bird soars + Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel + Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, + Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, + Clothed with the wind's wings. + +It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory +indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while +incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits +of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's +drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who +conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in +her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a +meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in +the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is +more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus +Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely +spiritual conception. + +Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having +no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual +beauty which is shining through the flesh, and which is the real object +of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it +seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is +some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual +loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking +the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as +the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of +his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for +the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would +be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess. +Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no +impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is +the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith +and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes +under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the +meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, _Helas_, quoted above. + +While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must +remember that Burns, in some of his accounts of inspiration, ascribes +quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the +barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as +much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one. +The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the +"swinish trough," which Alfred Austin asserts them to be. [Footnote: In +_Off Mesolonghi_.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it constitutes the +strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote: +In _Lines To a Lady_.] + + Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke + Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak, + Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near, + Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere. + The puny heart within him swells to view, + The man grows loftier and the poet too. + +Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence. +The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance +sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the +finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his +beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's + + Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts + Which I by lacking have supposed dead, + +is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compass_, + + Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone, + But as the meaning of all things that are; + A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar + Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon, + Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; + Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar, + Being of its furthest fires oracular, + The evident heart of all life sown and mown. + +Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves, + + Their shining fronts, + Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same, + As river water hallowed into founts) + Met in thee. +[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.] + +Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the +conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of +Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_: + + Lady, I fain would tell how evermore + Thy soul I know not from thy body nor + Thee from myself, neither our love from God. + +The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here +implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti +identifies her lover with her Christian faith: + + Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such + I cannot love you if I love not Him, + I cannot love Him if I love not you. +[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of +Love_ (a sonnet sequence).] + +It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there +is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of +the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a +matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has +affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture +their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent +of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form +is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general +is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty +in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: _Symposium_, Jowett +translation, Sec.210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting +enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In _Epipsychidion_ +Shelley declares, + + I never was attached to that great sect + Whose doctrine is that each one should select + Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, + And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend + To cold oblivion.... + + True love in this differs from gold and clay, + That to divide is not to take away. + Love is like understanding, that grows bright + Gazing on many truths.... + + Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, + The life that wears, the spirit that creates + One object and one form, and builds thereby + A sepulchre for its eternity. + +These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the +goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to +another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has +departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See +Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke +is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which +begins, + + There was a damned successful poet, + There was a woman like the Sun. + And they were dead. They did not know it. + They did not know his hymns + Were silence; and her limbs + That had served love so well, + Dust, and a filthy smell. + +The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through +manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at +least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses +his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration: + + As a bathtub lined with white porcelain + When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,-- + So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, + My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady. + +As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal +beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting +affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible +vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through +first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of +the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This +is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our +writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and +blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the +ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or +belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho +compares her sensations + + Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year + When I love thee. + +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love +of the poetess, she asserts of herself, + + I doubt if ever she saw form of man + Or maiden either whom, being beautiful, + She hath not loved. + +When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins, + + All + That breathes to her is passion, love itself + All passionate. + +The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills +her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the +nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines +wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her: + + How should they know that Sappho lived and died + Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, + Never transfused and lost in what she loved, + Never so wholly loving nor at peace. + I asked for something greater than I found, + And every time that love has made me weep + I have rejoiced that love could be so strong; + For I have stood apart and watched my soul + Caught in a gust of passion as a bird + With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind + Struggles and frees itself to find the sky. + +She continues, apostrophizing beauty, + + In many guises didst thou come to me; + I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, + Phaon allured me with a look of thine, + In Anactoria I knew thy grace. + I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, + But never wholly, soul and body mine + Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. + +The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as +for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists +of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the +rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the +half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her +passion: + + I love thee to the depth and breadth and height + My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight + For the ends of Being and ideal grace. + +It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate +response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences +that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of +philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude +with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. +[Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's +passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On +the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne +Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_ +(1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and Fanny Brawne_ (1919); James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).] + +Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it +follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the +fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the +transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy +object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted +for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is +beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, +255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an +unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara +Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool, + + O wondrous deep, + I love you, I give you my light to keep. + Oh, more profound than the moving sea, + That never has shown myself to me. + * * * * * + But out of the woods as night grew cool + A brown pig came to the little pool; + It grunted and splashed and waded in + And the deepest place but reached its chin. + +The tragedy in such love is the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe, +_At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. The dramatist comes to London as +a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His +innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman: + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + +But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her +revelation of her character: + + Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay, + Wedded and one with it, he moaned. + * * * * * + Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace + Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew, + Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face. + +It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that +he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen +woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into +forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan +only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller's _The Ideal and the +Real_ is an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into +this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet +idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's +_Jenny_, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem, +_A Vision of Woman_. [Footnote: See also Kirke White, _The Prostitute_; +Whitman, _To a Common Prostitute_; Joaquin Miller, _A Dove of St. Mark_; +and Olive Dargan, _A Magdalen to Her Poet_.] + +To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious +denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is +purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes +with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's _Non Sum +Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae_: + + Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine + There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed + Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; + And I was desolate and sick of an old passion; + Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: + I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. + +The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of +his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is irresistibly impelled +to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her +touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a _reductio +ad absurdum_ of a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort +can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in the +_Vita Nuova_. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, +by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote: _Dante_] and by Sara King Wiley. +[Footnote: _Dante and Beatrice_] Both these writers, however, show +a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents +their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by +apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting +Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, +stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his gratitude +for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists +are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their +plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's +double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another +famous Renaissance lover for the hero of _A Night in Avignon_, a +play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his +long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for +consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate +Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this +inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's +devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering +the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the +subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of +contrition. + +Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his +admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the +dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the +other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When +he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the +object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, +comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his +burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of +good and evil. He explains, + + I serve a lady so imperial fair, + June paled when she was born. Indeed no star, + No dream, no distance, but a very woman, + Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake; + Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit + That thou hast heard of ... + ... I would eat, and have all human joy, + And know,--and know. + +He continues, + + But, for the Evening Star, I have it there. + I would not have it nearer. Is that love + As thou dost understand? Yet is it mine + As I would have it: to look down on me, + Not loving and not cruel; to be bright, + Out of my reach; to lighten me the dark + When I lift eyes to it, and in the day + To be forgotten. But of all things, far, + Far off beyond me, otherwise no star. + +Marlowe's closing words bring us to another important question, _i. e._, +the stage of love at which it is most inspiring. This is the subject of +much difference of opinion. Mrs. Browning might well inquire, in one of +her love sonnets, + + How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use? + A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine + Sad memory with thy songs to interfuse? + A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine? + A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, XVII.] +Each of these situations has been celebrated as begetting the poet's +inspiration. + +To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the +married state as least likely to be spiritually creative. It is true +that we find a number of poems addressed by poets to their wives. But +these are more likely to be the contented purring of one who writes by a +cozy fireside, than the passionate cadence of one whose genius has been +fanned to flame. One finds but a single champion of the married state +considered abstractly. This is Alfred Austin, in whose poem, _The Poet +and the Muse_, his genius explains to the newly betrothed poet: + + How should you, poet, hope to sing? + The lute of love hath a single string. + Its note is sweet as the coo of the dove, + But 'tis only one note, and the note is love. + + But when once you have paired and built your nest, + And can brood thereon with a settled breast, + You will sing once more, and your voice will stir + All hearts with the sweetness gained from her. + +And perhaps even Alfred Austin's vote is canceled by his inconsistent +statement in his poem on Petrarch, _At Vaucluse_, + + Let this to lowlier bards atone, + Whose unknown Laura is their own, + Possessing and possessed: + + Of whom if sooth they do not sing, + 'Tis that near her they fold their wing + To drop into her nest. + +Let us not forget Shelley's expression of his need for his wife: + + Ah, Mary dear, come to me soon; + I am not well when thou art far; + As twilight to the sphered moon, + As sunset to the evening star, + Thou, beloved, art to me. +[Footnote: _To Mary_.] + +Perhaps it is unworthy quibbling to object that the figure here suggests +too strongly Shelley's consciousness of the merely atmospheric function +of Mary, in enhancing his own personality, as contrasted with the +radiant divinity of Emilia Viviani, to whom he ascribes his +creativeness. [Footnote: Compare Wordsworth, _She Was a Phantom of +Delight_, _Dearer Far than Life_; Tennyson, _Dedication of +Enoch Arden_.] + +It is customary for our bards gallantly to explain that the completeness +of their domestic happiness leaves them no lurking discontent to spur +them onto verse writing. This is the conclusion of the happily wedded +heroes of Bayard Taylor's _A Poet's Journal_, and of Coventry +Patmore's _The Angel in the House_; likewise of the poet in J. G. +Holland's _Kathrina_, who excuses his waning inspiration after his +marriage: + + She, being all my world, had left no room + For other occupation than my love. + ... I had grown enervate + In the warm atmosphere which I had breathed. + +Taken as a whole, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the remote love, +prevented in some way from reaching its culmination. To requote Alfred +Noyes, the poet knows that ideal love must be + + Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star. +[Footnote: Marlowe.] + +In _Sister Songs_ Francis Thompson asserts that such remoteness is +essential to his genius: + + I deem well why life unshared + Was ordained me of yore. + In pairing time, we know, the bird + Kindles to its deepmost splendour, + And the tender + Voice is tenderest in its throat. + Were its love, forever by it, + Never nigh it, + It might keep a vernal note, + The crocean and amethystine + In their pristine + Lustre linger on its coat. +[Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. +Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in _Monna Innominata_ +XIV, mourning for + + The silence of a heart that sang its songs + When youth and beauty made a summer morn, + Silence of love that cannot sing again.] + +Byron, in the _Lament of Tasso_, causes that famous lover likewise +to maintain that distance is necessary to idealization. He sighs, + + Successful love may sate itself away. + The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate + To have all feeling save the one decay, + And every passion into one dilate, + As rapid rivers into ocean pour. + But ours is bottomless and hath no shore. + +The manner of achieving this necessary remoteness is a nice problem. Of +course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss +Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt's _Cormac, +Son of Ogmond_. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are +often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is +something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not +till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in +poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. +Browning, Sonnet VII. + + And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday, + Are only dear, the singing angels know + Because thy name moves right in what they say.] + +The minor poet, to be sure, is often discovered solicitously feeling his +pulse to gauge the effect of love on his rhymes, but one does not feel +that his verse gains by it. Therefore, an external obstacle is usually +made to intervene. + +As often as not, this obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One +finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. +The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and +poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not +be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility +and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, +she being unaware that it is the reflection of his own soul that the +poet is worshipping in her. One can feel some sympathy with the lady in +Thomas Hardy's _I Rose Up as My Custom Is_, who, when her lover's +ghost discovers her beside a snoring spouse, confesses that she is +content with her lot: + + He makes no quest into my thoughts, + But a poet wants to know + What one has felt from earliest days, + Why one thought not in other ways, + And one's loves of long ago. + +It may be, too, that an instinct for protection has something to do with +the lady's rejection, for a recent poet has openly proclaimed the effect +of attaining, in successful love, one step toward absolute beauty: + + O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows + In tender yielding unto me, + A vast desire awakes and grows + Unto forgetfulness of thee. +[Footnote: "A. E.," _The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty_.] + +Rejection is apt to prove an obstacle of double worth to the poet, since +it not only removes him to a distance where his lady's human frailties +are less visible, so that the divine light shining through her seems +less impeded, but it also fires him with a very human ambition to prove +his transcendent worth and thus "get even" with his unappreciative +beloved. [Footnote: See Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; G. L. Raymond, +_"Loving,"_ from _A Life in Song_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_. + +Richard Realf in _Advice Gratis_ satirically depicts the lady's +altruism in rejecting her lover: + + It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verse + If you dropped some aloes into his wine, + They write supremely under a curse.] + +There is danger, of course, that the disillusionment produced by the +revelation of low ideals which the lady makes in her refusal will +counterbalance these good effects. Still, though the poet is so +egotistical toward all the world beside, in his attitude toward his lady +the humility which Emerson expresses in _The Sphinx_ is not without +parallel in verse. Many singers follow him in his belief that the only +worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is +impossible. [Footnote: See _The Sphinx_-- + + Have I a lover who is noble and free? + I would he were nobler than to love me. + +See also Walt Whitman, _Sometimes with One I Love_, and Mrs. Browning, +"I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to love +me--the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to Robert +Browning, December 24, 1845.] + +To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided +attachments, Alexander Smith's _A Life Drama_ is a treasury of +suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at +sufficient distance to be useful. With the aid of intercalations Smith +exhibits the poet removed from his lady by scornful rejection, by +parental restraint, by an unhappy marriage, by self-reproach, and by +death. All these devices have been popular in our poetry. + +The lady's marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love, +though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for +idealization. The poet's worship is so supersensual as to be +inoffensive. To confine ourselves to poetic dramas treating historical +poets,--Beatrice,[Footnote: G. L. Raymond's and S. K. Wiley's dramas, +_Dante_, and _Dante and Beatrice_.] Laura, [Footnote: Cale Young Rice, +_A Night in Avignon_.] Vittoria Colonna, [Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael +Angelo_.] and Alison [Footnote: Peabody, _Marlowe_.] are all married to +one man while inspiring another. A characteristic autobiographical love +poem of this type, is that of Francis Thompson, who asserts the ideality +of the poet's affection in his reference to + + This soul which on thy soul is laid, + As maid's breast upon breast of maid. +[Footnote: See also _Ad Amicam_, _Her Portrait_, _Manus Animon Pinxit_.] + +There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death. +Translation of love into Platonic idealism is then almost inevitable. +Alexander Smith describes the change accomplished by the death of the +poet's sweetheart: + + Two passions dwelt at once within his soul, + Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky. + And as the sunset dies along the west, + Eve higher lifts her front of trembling stars + Till she is seated in the middle sky, + So gradual one passion slowly died + And from its death the other drew fresh life, + Until 'twas seated in the soul alone, + The dead was love, the living, poetry. + +The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, +mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, +perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: See _On the Vita Nuova of Dante_; +also _Dante at Verona_.] Much the same kind of translation is +described in _Vane's Story_, by James Thomson, B.V., which appears +to be a sort of mystic autobiography. + +The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote: +_Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase +of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense +to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this +increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last +step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's passion for +disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, +indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in +his sonnet sequence, _Ideal Passion_, thus exalts his mistress, the +abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets: + + Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go + From star to star, upward, all heavens above, + The grave forgot, forgot the human woe. + Though glorified, their love was human love, + One unto one; a greater love I know. + +But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its +brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love. + +Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love +as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, +who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar +very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to +vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole +way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to +supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and +twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of +their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic +character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most +idealistic verse. + +However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and +philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of +abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. +Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing +than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take +his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to +appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our +"muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies. + +Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of +widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical +love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it +seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See +Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.] + +Bulwer Lytton's _Milton_ was, if one may believe the press notices, +the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of +aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the +intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long +lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too +physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this +vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he +abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after +death. Bulwer Lytton cites the _Phaedrus_ of Plato as the basis of +his allegory, reminding us, + + The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend + From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be), + Dim broken memories of the state before, + Form what we call our reason... + ... Is not Love, + Of all those memories which to parent skies + Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above, + In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:) + Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest? + +Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George +Edward Woodberry. His poem, _Agathon_, dealing with the young poet of +Plato's _Symposium_, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism. +Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize +his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He +chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, +one of those + + Whose eyes were more divinely touched + In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth. + +As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of +nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the +beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the _Symposium_, +he expresses his unhappiness: + + Still must I mourn + That every lovely thing escapes the heart + Even in the moment of its cherishing. + +Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he +may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be +ennobled: + + Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts. + Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace; + So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb, + Their music linger here, the joy of men. + +Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros, +corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros +for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes +the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love: + + The waste desire be his, and sightless fate, + Him light shall not revisit; late he knows + The love that mates the heaven weds the grave. + +Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable +decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying, + + In its fiery womb I saw + The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene, + And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell. + +In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to +him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality: + + Let not dejection on thy heart take hold + That nature hath in thee her sure effects, + And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes, + Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress, + The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain? + +But, he continues, + + In fair things + There is another vigor, flowing forth + From heavenly fountains, the glad energy + That broke on chaos, and the outward rush + Of the eternal mind;... + ... Hence the poet's eye + That mortal sees, creates immortally + The hero more than men, not more than man, + The type prophetic. + +Agathon, in an ecstasy of comprehension, chants the praises of love +which Plato puts into his mouth in the _Symposium_. In conclusion, +Urania sums up the mystery of love and genius: + + For truth divine is life, not love, + Creative truth, and evermore + Fashions the object of desire + Through love that breathes the spirit's fire. + +We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with +the _Epipsychidion_, not merely because it is the most idealistic of +the interpretations of Platonic love given by nineteenth century poets, +but because by virtue of the fact that it describes Shelley's personal +experience, it should be most valuable in revealing the attitude toward +love of one possessing the purest of poetic gifts. [Footnote: Treatment +of this theme is foreshadowed in _Alastor_.] + +The prominence given to Shelley's earthly loves in this poem has led J. +A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks, + +While Shelley's doctrine in _Epipsychidion_ seems Platonic, it will +not square with the _Symposium_.... When a man has formed a just +conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who +find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested +by this standard, Shelley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with +so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is +spurious Platonism.[Footnote: _Shelley_, p. 142.] + +Perhaps this failure to break altogether with the physical is precisely +the distinction between the love of the poet and the love of the +philosopher with whom Plato is concerned. I do not believe that the +Platonism of this poem is intrinsically spurious; the conception of +Emilia seems to be intended simply as a poetic personification of +abstract beauty, but it is undeniable that at times this vision does not +mean abstract beauty to Shelley at all, but the actual Emilia Viviani. +He has protested against this judgment, "The _Epipsychidion_ is a +mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal with +those articles." The revulsion of feeling that turned him away from +Emilia, however, taught him how much of his feeling for her had entered +into the poem, so that, in June, 1822, Shelley wrote, + + The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot bear to look at. I think + one is always in love with something or other; the + error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in + flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a + mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal. + +Shelley begins his spiritual autobiography with his early mystical +intuition of the existence of spiritual beauty, which is to be the real +object of his love throughout life. By Plato, of course, this love is +made prenatal. Shelley says, + + She met me, robed in such exceeding glory + That I beheld her not. + +As this vision was totally disjoined from earthly objects, it won the +soul away from all interest in life. Therefore Shelley says, + + She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way + And lured me towards sweet death. + +This early vision passed away, however, + + Into the dreary cone of our life's shade. + +This line is evidently Shelley's Platonic fashion of referring to the +obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision +has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its +concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is +regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, +but an abiding presence in the soul. + +The first step toward this goal was a mistaken one. Shelley describes +his marriage with Harriet as a yielding to the senses merely, in other +words, as slavery to the Venus Pandemos. He describes this false vision, + + Whose voice was venomed melody. + * * * * * + The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers, + Her touch was as electric poison. + +Shelley was more successful in his second love, for Mary, whom he calls +the "cold, chaste moon." The danger of this stage in the ascent toward +beauty is that one is likely to be content with the fragmentary glimpse +of beauty gained through the loved one, and by losing sight of its other +embodiments fail to aspire to more complete vision. So Shelley says of +this period, "I was laid asleep, spirit and limb." By a great effort, +however, the next step was taken,--the agonizing one of breaking away +from the bondage of this individual, in order that beauty in all its +forms may appeal to one. Shelley writes, + + What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, + Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lips + Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse. + +Finally, the dross of its earthly embodiments being burned away by this +renunciation, ideal beauty is revealed to the poet, not merely in a +flash of inspiration, as at the beginning of his quest, but as an +abiding presence in the soul. At least this is the ideal, but, being a +poet, Shelley cannot claim the complete merging with the ideal that the +philosopher possesses. At the supersensual consummation of his love, +Shelley sinks back, only half conceiving of it, and cries, + + Woe is me! + The winged words on which my soul would pierce + Into the height of Love's rare universe + Are chains of lead around its flight of fire; + I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + + +Dare we venture into the holy of holies, where the gods are said to come +upon the poet? Is there not danger that the divine spark which kindles +his song may prove a bolt to annihilate us, because of our presumptuous +intrusion? What voice is this, which meets us at the threshold? + + Beware! Beware! + His flashing eyes, his floating hair! + Weave a circle round him thrice, + And close your eyes in holy dread-- + +It is Coleridge, warning us of our peril, if we remain open-eyed and +curious, trying to surprise the secret of the poet's visitation. + +Yet are we not tolerably safe? We are under the guidance of an initiate; +the poet himself promises to unveil the mystery of his inspiration for +us. As Vergil kept Dante unscathed by the flames of the divine vision, +will not our poet protect us? Let us enter. + +But another doubt, a less thrilling one, bids us pause. Is it indeed the +heavenly mystery that we are bid gaze upon, or are we to be the dupe of +self-deceived impostors? Our intimacy is with poets of the last two +centuries,--not the most inspired period in the history of poetry. And +in the ranks of our multitudinous verse-writers, it is not the most +prepossessing who are loudest in promising us a fair spectacle. How +harsh-voiced and stammering are some of these obscure apostles who are +offering to exhibit the entire mystery of their gift of tongues! We see +more impressive figures, to be sure. Here is the saturnine Poe, who with +contemptuous smile assures us that we are welcome to all the secrets of +his creative frenzies. Here is our exuberant Walt Whitman, crying, "Stop +this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all +poems." [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] But though we scan every face +twice, we find here no Shakespeare promising us the key to creation of a +_Hamlet_. + +Still, is it not well to follow a forlorn hope? Among the less +vociferous, here are singers whose faces are alight with a mysterious +radiance. Though they promise us little, saying that they themselves are +blinded by the transcendent vision, so that they appear as men groping +in darkness, yet may they not unawares afford us some glimpse of their +transfiguration? + +If we refuse the poet's revelation, we have no better way of arriving at +the truth. The scientist offers us little in this field; and his account +of inspiration is as cold and comfortless as a chemical formula. Of +course the scientist is amused by this objection to him, and asks, "What +more do you expect from the effusions of poets? Will not whatever secret +they reveal prove an open one? What will it profit you to learn that the +milk of Paradise nourishes the poetic gift, since it is not handled by +an earthly dairy?" But when he speaks thus, our scientific friend is +merely betraying his ignorance regarding the nature of poetry. Longinus, +[Footnote: _On the Sublime,_ I.] and after him, Sidney, [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry._] long ago pointed out its peculiar action, +telling us that it is the poet's privilege to make us partakers of his +ecstasy. So, if the poet describes his creative impulses, why should he +not make us sharers of them? + +This is not an idle question, for surely Plato, that involuntary poet, +has had just this effect upon his readers. Have not his pictures, in the +_Phaedrus_ and the _Ion_, of the artist's ecstasy touched Shelley and +the lesser Platonic poets of our time with the enthusiasm he depicts? +Incidentally, the figure of the magnet which Plato uses in the +Ion may arouse hope in the breasts of us, the humblest readers of +Shelley and Woodberry. For as one link gives power of suspension to +another, so that a ring which is not touched by the magnet is yet +thrilled with its force, so one who is out of touch with Plato's +supernal melodies, may be sensitized by the virtue imparted to his +nineteenth century disciples, who are able to "temper this planetary +music for mortal ears." + +Let us not lose heart, at the beginning of our investigation, though our +greatest poets admit that they themselves have not been able to keep +this creative ecstasy for long. To be sure this is disillusioning. We +should prefer to think of their silent intervals as times of insight too +deep for expression; as Anna Branch phrases it, + + When they went + Unto the fullness of their great content + Like moths into the grass with folded wings. +[Footnote: _The Silence of the Poets._] + +This pleasing idea has been fostered in us by poems of appeal to silent +singers. [Footnote: See Swinburne, _A Ballad of Appeal to Christina +Rossetti_; and Francis Thompson, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] +But we have manifold confessions that it is not commonly thus with the +non-productive poet. Not merely do we possess many requiems sung by +erst-while makers over their departed gift, [Footnote: See especially +Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Kirke White, _Hushed is the Lyre_; +Landor, _Dull is My Verse_, and _To Wordsworth_; James Thomson, B. V., +_The Fire that Filled My Heart of Old_, and _The Poet and the Muse_; +Joaquin Miller, _Vale_; Andrew Lang, _The Poet's Apology_; Francis +Thompson, _The Cloud's Swan Song_.] but there is much verse indicating +that, even in the poet's prime, his genius is subject to a mysterious +ebb and flow. [Footnote: See Burns, _Second Epistle to Lapraik_; Keats, +_To My Brother George_; Winthrop Mackworth Praed, _Letter from Eaton_; +William Cullen Bryant, _The Poet_; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _Invita +Minerva_; Emerson, _The Poet, Merlin_; James Gates Percival, _Awake My +Lyre_, _Invocation_; J. H. West, _To the Muse_, _After Silence_; Robert +Louis Stevenson, _The Laureate to an Academy Class Dinner_; Alice +Meynell, _To one Poem in Silent Time_; Austin Dobson, _A Garden Idyl_; +James Stevens, _A Reply_; Richard Middleton, _The Artist_; Franklin +Henry Giddings, _Song_; Benjamin R. C. Low, _Inspiration_; Robert +Haven Schauffler, _The Wonderful Hour_; Henry A. Beers, _The Thankless +Muse_; Karl Wilson Baker, _Days_.] Though he has faith that he is not +"widowed of his muse," [Footnote: See Francis Thompson, _The Cloud's +Swan Song_.] she yet torments him with all the ways of a coquette, so +that he sadly assures us his mistress "is sweet to win, but bitter to +keep." [Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ballade of the Poet's Thought_.] The +times when she solaces him may be pitifully infrequent. Rossetti, musing +over Coleridge, says that his inspired moments were + + Like desert pools that show the stars + Once in long leagues. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Coleridge_.] + +Yet, even so, upon such moments of insight rest all the poet's claims +for his superior personality. It is the potential greatness enabling him +at times to have speech with the gods that makes the rest of his life +sacred. Emerson is more outspoken than most poets; he is not perhaps at +variance with their secret convictions, when he describes himself: + + I, who cower mean and small + In the frequent interval + When wisdom not with me resides. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +However divine the singer considers himself in comparison with ordinary +humanity, he must admit that at times + + Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn, + The child of genius sits forlorn, + * * * * * + A cripple of God, half-true, half-formed. +[Footnote: Emerson, _The Poet_. See also George Meredith, _Pegasus_.] + +Like Dante, we seem disposed to faint at every step in our revelation. +Now a doubt crosses our minds whether the child of genius in his +crippled moments is better fitted than the rest of us to point out the +pathway to sacred enthusiasm. It appears that little verse describing +the poet's afflatus is written when the gods are actually with him. In +this field, the sower sows by night. Verse on inspiration is almost +always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the +intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful +curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual +introspection he is seeking the charm, so to speak, that will render his +afflatus permanent. The rigidity in much of such verse surely betrays, +not the white heat of genius, but a self-conscious attitude of readiness +for the falling of the divine spark. + +One wonders whether such preparation has been of much value in hastening +the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the +loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged +that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive +divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a +number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange +hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge +liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through +straggling branches.] This, however, is Emerson in a singularly +flat-footed moment. The real poet scoffs at such suggestions. Instead, +he feels that it is not for him to know the times and seasons of his +powers. Indeed, it seems to him, sometimes, that pure contrariety marks +the god's refusal to come when entreated. Thus we are told of the god of +song, + + Vainly, O burning poets! + Ye wait for his inspiration. + * * * * * + Hasten back, he will say, hasten back + To your provinces far away! There, at my own good time + Will I send my answer to you. +[Footnote: E. C. Stedman, _Apollo_. _The Hillside Door_ by the same +author also expresses this idea. See also Browning, _Old Pictures +in Florence_, in which he speaks "of a gift God gives me now and then." +See also Longfellow, _L'Envoi_; Keats, _On Receiving a Laurel Crown_; +Cale Young Rice, _New Dreams for Old_; Fiona Macleod, _The Founts of +Song_.] + +Then, at the least expected moment, the fire may fall, so that the poet +is often filled with naive wonder at his own ability. Thus Alice Meynell +greets one of her poems, + + Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine? + This winter of a silent poet's heart + Is suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art, + Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine. + +But if the poet cannot predict the time of his afflatus, he indicates +that he does know the attitude of mind which will induce it. In certain +quarters there is a truly Biblical reliance upon faith as bringer of the +gift. A minor writer assures us, "Ah, if we trust, comes the song!" +[Footnote: Richard Burton, _Singing Faith_.] Emerson says, + + The muses' hill by fear is guarded; + A bolder foot is still rewarded. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +And more extreme is the counsel of Owen Meredith to the aspiring artist: + + The genius on thy daily walks + Shall meet, and take thee by the hand; + But serve him not as who obeys; + He is thy slave if thou command. +[Footnote: _The Artist_.] + +The average artist is probably inclined to quarrel with this last +high-handed treatment of the muse. Reverent humility rather than +arrogance characterizes the most effectual appeals for inspiration. The +faith of the typical poet is not the result of boldness, but of an +aspiration so intense that it entails forgetfulness of self. Thus one +poet accounts for his inspired hour: + + Purged with high thoughts and infinite desire + I entered fearless the most holy place; + Received between my lips the sacred fire, + The breath of inspiration on my face. +[Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ave_.] + +Another writer stresses the efficacy of longing no less strongly; +speaking of + + The unsatiated, insatiable desire + Which at once mocks and makes all poesy. +[Footnote: William Alexander, _The Finding of the Book_. See also Edward +Dowden, _The Artist's Waiting_.] + +There is nothing new in this. It is only what the poet has implied in +all his confessions. Was he inspired by love? It was because thwarted +love filled him with intensest longing. So with his thirst for purity, +for religion, for worldly vanities. Any desire, be it fierce enough, and +hindered from immediate satisfaction, may engender poetry. As Joyce +Kilmer phrases it, + + Nothing keeps a poet + In his high singing mood, + Like unappeasable hunger + For unattainable food. +[Footnote: _Apology_.] + +But the poet would not have us imagine that we have here sounded the +depths of the mystery. Aspiration may call down inspiration, but it is +not synonymous with it. Mrs. Browning is fond of pointing out this +distinction. In _Aurora Leigh_ she reminds us, "Many a fervid man +writes books as cold and flat as gravestones." In the same poem she +indicates that desire is merely preliminary to inspiration. There are, +she says, + + Two states of the recipient artist-soul; + One forward, personal, wanting reverence, + Because aspiring only. We'll be calm, + And know that when indeed our Joves come down, + We all turn stiller than we have ever been. + +What is this mysterious increment, that must be added to aspiration +before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can +understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the +poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and +leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the contrary, seems +to give him a fictitious satisfaction; it is an arrest of his desire +that affords him a delicate poise and repose, on tiptoe, so to speak. +[Footnote: Compare Coleridge's statement that poetry is "a more than +usual state of emotion with more than usual order." _Biographia +Literaria_, Vol. II, Chap. I, p. 14, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge.] + +Does not the fact that inspiration works in this manner account for the +immemorial connection of poetic creativeness with Bacchic frenzy? To the +aspiring poet wine does not bring his mistress, nor virtue, nor +communion with God, nor any object of his longing. Yet it does bring a +sudden ease to his craving. So, wherever there is a romantic conception +of poetry, one is apt to find inspiration compared to intoxication. + +Such an idea did not, of course, find favor among typical eighteenth +century writers. Indeed, they would have seen more reason in ascribing +their clear-witted verse to an ice-pack, than to the bibulous hours +preceding its application to the fevered brow. We must wait for William +Blake before we can expect Bacchus to be reinstated among the gods of +song. Blake does not disappoint us, for we find his point of view +expressed, elegantly enough, in his comment on artists, "And when they +are drunk, they always paint best." [Footnote: _Artist Madmen: On the +Great Encouragement Given by the English Nobility and Gentry to +Correggio, etc_.] + +As the romantic movement progresses, one meets with more lyrical +expositions of the power in strong drink. Burns, especially, is never +tired of sounding its praise. He exclaims, + + There's naething like the honest nappy. + * * * * * + I've seen me daist upon a time + I scarce could wink or see a styme; + Just ae half mutchkin does me prime; + Aught less is little, + Then back I rattle with the rhyme + As gleg's a whittle. +[Footnote: _The First Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Again he assures us, + + But browster wives and whiskey stills, + They are my muses. +[Footnote: _The Third Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Then, in more exalted mood: + + O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink! + Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink, + Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink + In glorious faem, + Inspire me, till I lisp and wink + To sing thy name. +[Footnote: _Scotch Drink_.] + +Keats enthusiastically concurs in Burns' statements. [Footnote: See the +_Sonnet on the Cottage Where Burns Was Born_, and _Lines on the Mermaid +Tavern_.] + +Landor, also, tells us meaningly, + + Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingales + Sing cheerily but when the throat is moist. +[Footnote: _Homer_; _Laertes_; _Agatha_.] + +James Russell Lowell, in _The Temptation of Hassan Khaled_, +presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy: + + The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom + The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume, + And when the sun is warm within his blood + It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood, + Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they find + Interpretation in the poet's mind. + If wine be evil, song is evil too. + +His _Bacchic Ode_ is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received +his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in +England. Swinburne, [Footnote: See _Burns_.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote: +See _Vinum Daemonum_.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: See _A Villanelle of +the Poet's Road_.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: See _A Sequence to +Wine_.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent. +Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: See _A Toast to Omar Khayyam_.] +was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme. + +Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats +[Footnote: See _Lines on the Mermaid Inn_.] to Josephine Preston +Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan +dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially +stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the +centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group +keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson: + + And Ben was there, + Humming a song upon the old black settle, + "Or leave a kiss within the cup + And I'll not ask for wine," + But meanwhile, he drank malmsey. + [Footnote: _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +Fortunately for the future of American verse, there is another side to +the picture. The teetotaler poet is by no means non-existent in the last +century. Wordsworth takes pains to refer to himself as "a simple, +water-drinking bard," [Footnote: See _The Waggoner_.] and in lines +_To the Sons of Burns_ he delivers a very fine prohibition lecture. +Tennyson offers us _Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue, a reductio ad +absurdum_ of the claims of the bibulous bard. Then, lest the +temperance cause lack the support of great names, Longfellow causes the +title character of _Michael Angelo_ to inform us that he "loves not +wine," while, more recently, E. A. Robinson pictures Shakespeare's +inability to effervesce with his comrades, because, Ben Jonson confides +to us, + + Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, + He's wondering what's to pay on his insides. +[Footnote: _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_. See also +Poe's letter, April 1, 1841, to Snodgrass, on the unfortunate results of +his intemperance.] + +No, the poet will not allow us to take his words too seriously, lest we +drag down Apollo to the level of Bacchus. In spite of the convincing +realism in certain eulogies, it is clear that to the poet, as to the +convert at the eucharist, wine is only a symbol of a purely spiritual +ecstasy. But if intoxication is only a figure of speech, it is a +significant one, and perhaps some of the other myths describing the +poet's sensations during inspiration may put us on the trail of its +meaning. Of course, in making such an assumption, we are precisely like +the expounder of Plato's myths, who is likely to say, "Here Plato was +attempting to shadow forth the inexpressible. Now listen, and I will +explain exactly what he meant." Notwithstanding, we must proceed. + +The device of Chaucer's _House of Fame_, wherein the poet is carried to +celestial realms by an eagle, occasionally occurs to the modern poet as +an account of his _Aufschwung_. Thus Keats, in _Lines to Apollo_, avers, + + Aye, when the soul is fled + Too high above our head, + Affrighted do we gaze + After its airy maze + As doth a mother wild + When her young infant child + Is in an eagle's claws. + +"Poetry, my life, my eagle!" [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] cries Mrs. +Browning, likening herself to Ganymede, ravished from his sheep to the +summit of Olympus. The same attitude is apparent in most of her poems, +for Mrs. Browning, in singing mood, is precisely like a child in a +swing, shouting with delight at every fresh sensation of soaring. +[Footnote: See J. G. Percival, _Genius Awaking_, for the same +figure.] + +Again, the crash of the poet's inspiration upon his ordinary modes of +thought is compared to "fearful claps of thunder," by Keats [Footnote: +See _Sleep and Poetry_.] and others. [Footnote: See _The Master_, A. E. +Cheney.] Or, more often, his moment of sudden insight seems a lightning +flash upon the dark ways in which he is ordinarily groping. Keats says +that his early visions were seen as through a rift of sheet lightning. +[Footnote: See _The Epistle to George Keats_.] Emerson's impression is +the same; visions come "as if life were a thunderstorm wherein you can +see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand." [Footnote: +_Essay on Inspiration_.] Likewise Alexander Smith declares, + + Across the midnight sea of mind + A thought comes streaming like a blazing ship + Upon a mighty wind, + A terror and a glory! Shocked with light, + His boundless being glares aghast. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Perhaps this is a true expression of the poet's feelings during the +deepest inspiration, yet we are minded of Elijah's experience with the +wind and the fire and the still small voice. So we cannot help +sympathizing with Browning's protest against "friend Naddo's" view that +genius is a matter of bizarre and grandiose sensations. [Footnote: +_Sordello_.] At least it is pleasant to find verse, by minor +writers though it be, describing the quietude and naturalness of the +poet's best moments. Thus Holmes tells us of his inspiration: + + Soft as the moonbeams when they sought + Endymion's fragrant bower, + She parts the whispering leaves of thought + To show her full-leaved flower. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +Edwin Markham says, + + She comes like the hush and beauty of the night. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same: + + How to the singer comes his song? + How to the summer fields + Come flowers? How yields + Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night + Bring stars? +[Footnote: _How to the Singer Comes His Song?_] + +Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired +moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such +moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to +him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet, _Wise Passiveness_, says this +plainly: + + Think you I choose or that or this to sing? + I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream + Dreaming among green fields its summer dream, + Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring + Into its quiet bosom. + +To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, _Accident in Art_, +by Richard Hovey. He inquires, + + What poet has not found his spirit kneeling + A sudden at the sound of such or such + Strange verses staring from his manuscript, + Written, he knows not how, but which will sound + Like trumpets down the years. + +Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this +creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his +afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and +Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a +ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse +describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare +Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor in _Sordello_, +Book II.] In _The Song-Tree_ Alfred Noyes describes his first sensation +as a conscious poet: + + The first note that I heard, + A magical undertone, + Was sweeter than any bird + --Or so it seemed to me-- + And my tears ran wild. + This tale, this tale is true. + The light was growing gray, + And the rhymes ran so sweet + (For I was only a child) + That I knelt down to pray. + +But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense +were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess, + + She almost shrank + To feel the secret and expanding might + Of her own mind, +[Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.] + +the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. +Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple +Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of +her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, +when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent +reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is +"all me." + +However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good +his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged +divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack +of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal +to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his +verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of +his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, +some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent +scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on +Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And +in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of +thought: + + The everlasting universe of things + Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, + Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom-- + Now lending splendor, where from secret springs + The source of human thought its tribute brings + Of waters. + +Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says, + + The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible + influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory + brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a + flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the + conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its + approach or departure. + +Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his +mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us, + + A plastic power + Abode with me, a forming hand, at times + Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, + A local spirit of its own, at war + With general tendency, but for the most + Subservient strictly to external things + With which it communed. An auxiliary light + Came from my mind which on the setting sun + Bestowed new splendor-- +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] + +Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness +is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon +her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken, + + As the earth + Plunges in fury, when the internal fires + Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat + The marts and temples, the triumphal gates + And towers of observation, clears herself + To elemental freedom. + +We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who +relates how the vision of _Sordello_ arises to consciousness: + + Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, + Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears + Its outline, kindles at the core--. + +Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have +really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it +is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a +mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the +poet. + +"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The +Poet's Sleep_.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. +There was surely no reason why Keats' title, _Sleep and Poetry_, +should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of +Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. +The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in +the middle ages,--and even the prominence of _Night Thoughts_ in +eighteenth century verse--testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep +has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his +account of the composition of _Kubla Khan_.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: +See _Alastor_, and _Prince Athanase_. See also Edmund Gosse, +_Swinburne_, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three +stanzas of _A Vision of Spring_ in his sleep.]--it is the romanticists +who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And +once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, +asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. +Thus he tells us of the singer in _Prince Athanase:_ + + And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour + Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes, + Were driven within him by some secret power + Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar, + Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower. + +Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, +even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, +Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as +something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of +modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of +myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to +account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to +be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually +swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in +any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things +to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world. + + Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold, +[Footnote: _A Life Drama._] + +says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the +line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the +poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair. + +Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure +than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain +artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory +of one's past youth, or--to stay closer home--Wordsworth, with his +theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,--such artists +have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably +representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory +to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers +are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation, + + Live in the past; await no more + The rush of heaven-sent wings; + Earth still has music left in store + While memory sighs and sings. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, +like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to +admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her +title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we +have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their +existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, +reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the +body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a +vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries ... beholding +apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; +shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the +living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the +body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.] + +For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to +himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is +always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in +recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which +He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.] + +If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he +is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the +visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of +memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious +of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the +soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince +Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.] +Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on +Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in +verse of other poets. One writer inquires, + + Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes, + Indeed the product of my heart and brain? +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.] + +and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of +insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. +Another maintains of poetry, + + Her touch is a vibration and a light + From worlds before and after. +[Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal +inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by +Dorothea Laurence Mann.] + +Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural +and unforced of these verses. She muses: + + ... Mixed with memories not my own + The sweet streams throng into my breast. + Before this life began to be + The happy songs that wake in me + Woke long ago, and far apart. + Heavily on this little heart + Presses this immortality. + +This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic +theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather +than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. +She continues, + + I come from nothing, but from where + Come the undying thoughts I bear? + Down through long links of death and birth, + From the past poets of the earth, + My immortality is there. + +Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical +argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last +statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing +itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding +expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this +attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he +attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells +his brother poets: + + I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried + To work his will, the hand that moved my pen + Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask + Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps + With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, + Oracular glories, visionary gleams, + And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's +appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead +wife shall inspire his poetry. + +One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have +nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as +this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their +special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works +which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what +is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in +some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to +Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good +genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often +called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests +such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to +be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into +his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes: + + I do but rave, for it is better thus; + Were once thy starry nature given to mine, + In the one life which would encircle us + My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine; + Better to bear the far sublimer pain + Of thought that has not ripened into speech. + To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing + Divinely to the brain; + For thus the poet at the last shall reach + His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string. +[Footnote: _Ode to Shelly._] + +In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there +is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It +tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright +plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret +Steele Anderson, _Other People's Wreaths,_ and John Drinkwater, +_My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power +outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly +his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the +suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She +wistfully inquires: + + My own best poets, am I one with you? + . . . When my joy and pain, + My thought and aspiration, like the stops + Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb + Unless melodious, do you play on me, + My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play, + Would no sound come? Or is the music mine; + As a man's voice or breath is called his own, + Inbreathed by the life-breather? + +Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his +own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as +compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naive dependence +upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as +a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses +her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the +Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, +to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of +the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not +be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante +impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call +upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is +conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth +century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any +Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of +invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory +flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the +century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept +up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of +the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the +Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See _On +Lucinda's Tea-table_.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It +is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses _On the Death of His +Mother_, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that +his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement +progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth +century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the +goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen +from the sty." [Footnote: See _On a Report of a Monument to a Late +Author_.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled +hizzie," [Footnote: See the _Epistle to Lapraik_.] and sets the +fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that +each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom +he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer +nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than +apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he +confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift: + + 'Twas not much at any time + She could hitch into a rhyme, + Never was the muse sublime + Who has fled. +[Footnote: _A Poet's Apology_.] + +Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day +feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's +earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as +always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as +little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse +that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who +inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she +is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One +doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with +Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner +nature through our own." [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry_.] + +What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. +There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of +genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is +a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that +the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the +power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up +with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, +namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the +poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of +God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the +world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, +in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last +century, his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. All poets are +idealists. + +There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may +seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It +is expressed in the opening of Shelley's _Alastor_, and informs the +whole of the _Ode to the West Wind_. It pervades Wordsworth, for if +he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet +profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of +nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers +that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. +There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern +poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, +going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth +century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song +into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than +most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the +intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern +conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing +himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise +chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute +poetry. + +Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or +to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming +"into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his +communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that +it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the +revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe +the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel +that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be +deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the +singer, + + One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; + The next he writes his soul's memorial. +[Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.] + +So Shelley describes the experience: + + Meaning on his vacant mind + Flashed like strong inspiration. +[Footnote: _Alastor_.] + +The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He +becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the +flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, +enabling them, like Lucy, to be + + Rolled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees. + +Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer +cannot escape Plato's conclusion, + + There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been + inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer + in him: when he has not attained to this state he is + powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: + _Ion_, Sec.534.] + +And again, + + There is a ... kind of madness which is a possession of the + Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and + there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other + numbers.... But he who, not being inspired, and having no + touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks + he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, + and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at + all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote: + _Phaedrus_, Sec. 245.] + +Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as +to say, + + Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of + madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any + character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. + [Footnote: _Poetics_, XVII.] + +One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier +ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no +longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation +of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally +he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a +hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot +was + + Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting + Of all too greatly giving + The kingdom of his mind to those + Who for it deemed him mad. +[Footnote: Cale Young Rice, _Meredith_.] + +In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to +which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of +madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See _Gladys +and Her Island_.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See _Tasso to +Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's +Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward +Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur +in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply +because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the +cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he +prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than +the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the +writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, +are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he +leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered +in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal +realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is +not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The +tone of his poem, _Tasso and Leonora_, is very gloomy. The Italian +poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms +where eternal beauty dwells. He muses, + + Yes--as Love is truer far + Than all other things; so are + Life and Death, the World and Time + Mere false shows in some great Mime + By dreadful mystery sublime. + +But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders, + + For were life no flitting dream, + Were things truly what they seem, + Were not all this world-scene vast + But a shade in Time's stream glassed; + Were the moods we now display + Less phantasmal than the clay + In which our poor spirits clad + Act this vision, wild and sad, + I must be mad, mad,--how mad! + +However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly +convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the +manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not +merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come +upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not +understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal +inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been +applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: See _Kathrina_, by J. +G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern +poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares, + + As for the old seers + Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life + Of the unfolding ages, I must doubt + Whether they comprehended what they saw.] + +Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare +commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way +granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting +Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the +poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are +typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she +makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects, + + And ah, we poets, I misdoubt + Are little more than thou. + We speak a lesson taught, we know not how, + And what it is that from us flows + The hearer better than the utterer knows. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs._] + +One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this +inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as +a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much +attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the +romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John +Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the +mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: See _Song for Tasso_, +Shelley; _Tasso to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_, +E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles, _The Harp and Despair +of Cowper_; Mrs. Browning, _Cowper's Grave_; Lord Houghton, _On Cowper's +Cottage at Olney_.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last +century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during +periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is +not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing +the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional +poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed +madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_; +Shelley, _Rosalind and Helen_.] while the American, J. G. Holland, +represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a +hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland, +_Kathrina_. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benet, +_Mad Blake_; Amy Lowell, _Clear, With Light Variable Winds_; Cale Young +Rice, _The Mad Philosopher_; Edmund Blunden, _Clare's Ghost_.] + +It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly +incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced +by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad +poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries, + + All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought + Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat. +[Footnote: See fragment CI.] + +What chance did he have of recognition? + +This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired +poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic +madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines, + + Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense) + And once betrayed me into common sense. +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon +dry reason alone: + + A set o' dull, conceited hashes + Confuse their brains in college classes! + They gang in sticks and come out asses, + Plain truth to speak, + And syne they think to climb Parnassus + By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century +classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the _Prelude_.] +and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: +See _The Scholar_.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See _The Master of the +Dance_. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the +persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants +varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful +or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies +the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns +the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the +poet's mind. [Footnote: See _The Poet's Mind_.] So Richard Gilder +maintains of the singer, + + He was too wise + Either to fear, or follow, or despise + Whom men call science--for he knew full well + All she had told, or still might live to tell + Was known to him before her very birth. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J. +E. Flecker.] + +The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that +his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the +scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes +Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus: + + Yours is the living pall, + The aloof and frozen place of listeners + And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine + The fount of life itself, the burning fount + Pierian. I pity you. +[Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.] + +Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the +average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are +infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of +reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many +cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young: + + How proud the poet's billow swells! + The God! the God! his boast: + A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! + Dead bards stench every coast. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of +inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning +is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She +muses over the title of poet: + + The name + Is royal, and to sign it like a queen + Is what I dare not--though some royal blood + Would seem to tingle in me now and then + With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes + And manias usual to the race. Howbeit + I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad + And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; + The thing's too common. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, + For me, I wrote + False poems, like the rest, and thought them true + Because myself was true in writing them.] + +Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? +Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of +posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. +Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether +they be of God. What is his proof? + +Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers, + + I hung my verses in the wind. + Time and tide their faults may find. + All were winnowed through and through: + Five lines lasted sound and true; + Five were smelted in a pot + Than the south more fierce and hot. +[Footnote: _The Test_.] + +The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's +passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by +time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once +troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a +certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he +inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which +Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it +does." [Footnote: _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, "A Memorable +Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is +doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious +enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence. + +The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of +the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse +by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender +to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with +the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season +of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, +and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, +though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay on +_Imagination_.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief +in his visions by Tertullian's motto, _Credo quod absurdum_. + +If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence +arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning +matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred +pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer +seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he +ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his +moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete. + +The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the +poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain +men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of +Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of _Kubla Khan_, +are notorious. Tennyson, in _The Poet's Mind_, warns all intruders +away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them, + + In your eye there is death; + There is frost in your breath + Which would blight the plants. + * * * * * + In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; + It would fall to the ground if you came in. + +But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to +an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so +delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says, + + There are open hours + When the God's will sallies free, + And the dull idiot might see + The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;-- + Sudden, at unawares, + Self-moved, fly to the doors, + Nor sword of angels could reveal + What they conceal. +[Footnote: _Merlin_.] + +What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a +frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded +from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was +finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he +declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But +the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of +casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is +never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is +already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been +communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original +conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem +is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly +sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as +Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to +be dead. + +There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is +most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' +composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem +Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, +_How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the +Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert +Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the +other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter: + + Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke. + Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed, + Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke + Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed + Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul! + Indeed? + Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare: + Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage + Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: + Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age + Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in +the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James +Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.] + +Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be +as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden +gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a +poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and +phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we +misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets +bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not +because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but +because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words +was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says +William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable +and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the +poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage." + +Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression +of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he +works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to +Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any +other artist possesses, [Footnote: See _The Republic_, IX, 588 D.] +yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis +Thompson, + + Our untempered speech descends--poor heirs! + Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers; + Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, + Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit! +[Footnote: _Her Portrait_.] + +Walt Whitman voices the same complaint: + + Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself; + It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically, + "Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?" +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] + +Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the +singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, +"For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my +Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily +and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and +the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, +_Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; +Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The +Sculptor_; William Rose Benet, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman +Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and +Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, +_Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing +the Song of Her_.] + +Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are +coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which +refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly +unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep +for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is +likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his +hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an +impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is +significant that the singers who are most aware of their +inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no +thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are +obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, +herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the +problem for us. She avers, + + I found the phrase to every thought + I ever had, but one; + And that defies me,--as a hand + Did try to chalk the sun. + + To races nurtured in the dark;-- + How would your own begin? + Can blaze be done in cochineal, + Or noon in mazarin? + +"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the +poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of +his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their +darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of +Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the +apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.] + +Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most +often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the +question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a +divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth +century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of +adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too +frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He +may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not +attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his +thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his +public. + +Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less +aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, +throughout, the tenor of the first stanza: + + My counsel to the budding bard + Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard." + Your "gentle public," my good friend, + Won't read what they can't comprehend. + +This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and +one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's +audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. +Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is +enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to +face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall +the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own +delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse? + +There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the +intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been +reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments +that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to +make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his +materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for +his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And +he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries, + + O for ten years, that I may overwhelm + Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed + My soul has to herself decreed. +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother +George, April, 1817.] + +Bryant warns the poet, + + Deem not the framing of a deathless lay + The pastime of a drowsy summer day; + But gather all thy powers + And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of +avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet, + + Touch the crude line with fear + But in the moments of impassioned thought. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so +deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of +it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the +poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to +beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of +artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to +wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his +hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered +robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form +which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, +not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it. +Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson +delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger +of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than +these others, no doubt, even though he did not illustrate the efficacy +of his search, when he described his interest in reading old manuscripts +with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and +anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing +one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these. +The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped +off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with +more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the +beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the +conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an +accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they +are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn +his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the +cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades +and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is +proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of +most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning +advises them, + + Keep up the fire + And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or +whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation +of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he +realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than +this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of +revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers +of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does +not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over +the poet, + + When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, + Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead, + And though he cherisheth + The babe most strangely born from out her death, + Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, + It is not she. + [Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the +blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of +contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his +arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes +into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks +the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's +attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. Alice Gary +pleads, + + Hear me tell + How much my will transcends my feeble powers, + As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowers + Their tender hues. +[Footnote: _To the Spirit of Song_.] + +And there is not a poet in the last century of such prominence that he +does not reverence such a confession, [Footnote: Some poems showing the +similarity in such an attitude of great and small alike, follow: +_Epistle to Charles C. Clarke_, Keats; _The Soul's Expression_, Mrs. +Browning; _Memorial Verses to Wm. B. Scott_, Swinburne; _Sister Songs_, +_Proemion to Love in Dian's Lap_, _A Judgment in Heaven_, Francis +Thompson; _Urania_, Matthew Arnold; _There Have Been Vast Displays of +Critic Wit_, Alexander Smith; _Invita Minerva_ and _L'Envoi to the +Muse_, J. R. Lowell; _The Voiceless_, O. W. Holmes; _Fata Morgana_, and +_Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought_, Longfellow; _L'Envoi_, +Kipling; _The Apology_, and _Gleam on Me, Fair Ideal_, Lewis Morris; +_Dedication to Austin Dobson_, E. Gosse; _A Country Nosegay_, and +_Gleaners of Fame_, Alfred Austin; _Another Tattered Rhymster in the +Ring_, G. K. Chesterton; _To Any Poet_, Alice Meynell; _The Singer_, and +_To a Lady on Chiding Me For Not Writing_, Richard Realf; _The Will and +the Wing_ and _Though Dowered with Instincts Keen and High_, P. H. +Haynes; _Dull Words_, Trumbull Stickney; _The Inner Passion_, Alfred +Noyes; _The Veiled Muse_, William Winter; _Sonnet_, William Bennett; +_Tell Me_, Max Ehrmann; _The Singer's Plea_, Edward Dowden; _Genius_, R. +H. Home; _My Country_, George Woodberry; _Uncalled_, Madison Cawein; +Thomas Bailey Aldrich, _At the Funeral of a Minor Poet_; Robert Haven +Schauffler, _Overtones, The Silent Singers_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _A +Minor Poet_; Alec de Candole, _The Poets_.] and aver that he too is an +earnest and humble suppliant in the temple of beauty. For the clearer +his glimpse of the transcendent vision has been, the more conscious he +is of his blindness after the glory has passed, and the more +unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE POET'S MORALITY + + +If English poets of the last century are more inclined to parade their +moral virtue than are poets of other countries, this may be the result +of a singular persistency on the part of England in searching out and +punishing sins ascribed to poetic temperament. Byron was banished; +Shelley was judged unfit to rear his own children; Keats was advertised +as an example of "extreme moral depravity"; [Footnote: By _Blackwoods_.] +Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; Swinburne was castigated as "an unclean +fiery imp from the pit." [Footnote: By _The Saturday Review_.] These are +some of the most conspicuous examples of a refusal by the British public +to countenance what it considers a code of morals peculiar to poets. It +is hardly to be wondered at that verse-writers of the nineteenth and +twentieth centuries have not been inclined to quarrel with Sir Philip +Sidney's statement that "England is the stepmother of poets," [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry_.] and that through their writings should run a vein +of aggrieved protest against an unfair discrimination in dragging their +failings ruthlessly out to the light. + +It cannot, however, be maintained that England is unique in her +prejudice against poetic morals. The charges against the artist have +been long in existence, and have been formulated and reformulated in +many countries. In fact Greece, rather than England, might with some +justice be regarded as the parent of the poet's maligners, for Plato has +been largely responsible for the hue and cry against the poet throughout +the last two millennia. Various as are the counts against the poet's +conduct, they may all be included under the declaration in the +_Republic_, "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of +withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." +[Footnote: Book X, 606, Jowett translation.] + +Though the accusers of the poet are agreed that the predominance of +passion in his nature is the cause of his depravity, still they are a +heterogeneous company, suffering the most violent disagreement among +themselves as to a valid reason for pronouncing his passionate impulses +criminal. Their unfortunate victim is beset from so many directions that +he is sorely put to it to defend himself against one band of assailants +without exposing himself to attack from another quarter. + +This hostile public may be roughly divided into three camps, made up, +respectively, of philistines, philosophers, and puritans. Within recent +years the distinct grievance of each group has been made articulate in a +formal denunciation of the artist's morals. + +There is, first, that notorious indictment, _Degeneration_, by Max +Nordau. Nordau speaks eloquently for all who claim the name "average +plain citizen," all who would hustle off to the gallows anyone found +guilty of breaking the lockstep imposed upon men by convention. +Secondly, there is a severe criticism of the poet from an ostensibly +unbiased point of view, _The Man of Genius_, by Cesare Lombroso. +Herein are presented the arguments of the thinkers, who probe the poet's +foibles with an impersonal and scientific curiosity. Last, there is the +severe arraignment, _What Is Art?_ by Tolstoi. In this book are +crystallized the convictions of the ascetics, who recognize in beauty a +false goddess, luring men from the stern pursuit of holiness. + +How does it come about that, in affirming the perniciousness of the +poet's passionate temperament, the man of the street, the philosopher, +and the puritan are for the nonce in agreement? The man of the street is +not averse to feeling, as a rule, even when it is carried to egregious +lengths of sentimentality. A stroll through a village when all the +victrolas are in operation would settle this point unequivocally for any +doubter. It seems that the philistine's quarrel with the poet arises +from the fact that, unlike the makers of phonograph records, the poet +dares to follow feeling in defiance of public sentiment. Like the +conservative that he is, the philistine gloats over the poet's lapses +from virtue because, in setting aside mass-feeling as a gauge of right +and wrong, and in setting up, instead, his own individual feelings as a +rule of conduct, the poet displays an arrogance that deserves a fall. +The philosopher, like the philistine, may tolerate feeling within +limits. His sole objection to the poet lies in the fact that, far from +making emotion the handmaiden of the reason, as the philosopher would +do, the poet exalts emotion to a seat above the reason, thus making +feeling the supreme arbiter of conduct. The puritan, of course, gives +vent to the most bitter hostility of all, for, unlike the philistine and +the philosopher, he regards natural feeling as wholly corrupt. Therefore +he condemns the poet's indulgence of his passionate nature with equal +severity whether he is within or without the popular confines of proper +conduct, or whether or not his conduct may be proved reasonable. + +Much of the inconsistency in the poet's exhibitions of his moral +character may be traced to the fact that he is addressing now one, now +another, of his accusers. The sobriety of his arguments with the +philosopher has sometimes been interpreted by the man of the street as +cowardly side-stepping. On the other hand, the poet's bravado in defying +the man of the street might be interpreted by the philosopher as an +acknowledgment of imperviousness to reason. + +It seems as though the first impulse of the poet were to set his back +against the wall and deal with all his antagonists at once, by +challenging their right to pry into his private conduct. It is true that +certain poets of the last century have believed it beneath their dignity +to pay any attention to the insults and persecution of the public. But +though a number have maintained an air of stolid indifference so long as +the attacks have remained personal, few or none have been content to +disregard defamation of a departed singer. + +The public cannot maintain, in many instances, that this vicarious +indignation arises from a sense of sharing the frailties of the dead +poet who is the direct object of attack. Not thus may one account for +the generous heat of Whittier, of Richard Watson Gilder, of Robert +Browning, of Tennyson, in rebuking the public which itches to make a +posthumous investigation of a singer's character. [Footnote: See +Whittier, _My Namesake_; Richard W. Gilder, _A Poet's Protest_, and +_Desecration_; Robert Browning, _House_; Tennyson, _In Memoriam_.] +Tennyson affords a most interesting example of sensitiveness with +nothing, apparently, to conceal. There are many anecdotes of his morbid +shrinking from public curiosity, wholly in key with his cry of +abhorrence, + + Now the poet cannot die + Nor leave his music as of old, + But round him ere he scarce be cold + Begins the scandal and the cry: + Proclaim the faults he would not show, + Break lock and seal; betray the trust; + Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but just + The many-headed beast should know. + +In protesting against the right of the public to judge their conduct, +true poets refuse to bring themselves to a level with their accusers by +making the easiest retort, that they are made of exactly the same clay +as is the _hoi polloi_ that assails them. This sort of recrimination is +characteristic of a certain blustering type of claimant for the title of +poet, such as Joaquin Miller, a rather disorderly American of the last +generation, who dismissed attacks upon the singer with the words, + + Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealed + That he was more than man or less? +[Footnote: _Burns_ and _Byron_.] + +The attitude is also characteristic of another anomalous type which +flourished in America fifty years ago, whose verse represents an +attempted fusion of emasculated poetry and philistine piety. A writer of +this type moralizes impartially over the erring bard and his accusers, + + Sin met thy brother everywhere, + And is thy brother blamed? + From passion, danger, doubt and care + He no exemption claimed. +[Footnote: Ebenezer Eliot, _Burns_.] + +But genuine poets refuse to compromise themselves by admitting that they +are no better than other men. + +They are not averse, however, to pointing out the unfitness of the +public to cast the first stone. So unimpeachable a citizen as Longfellow +finds even in the notoriously spotted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, an +advantage over his maligners because + + He is not + That despicable thing, a hypocrite. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Most of the faults charged to them, poets aver, exist solely in the evil +minds of their critics. Coleridge goes so far as to expurgate the poetry +of William Blake, "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from +the too probable want of it in the readers." [Footnote: Letter to Charles +Augustus Tulk, Highgate, Thursday Evening, 1818, p. 684, Vol. II, +_Letters_, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge.] + +The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the +more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak +of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for +autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in +which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says +of Burns, "We can see horribly clear in the work of such a man his whole +life, as if we were God's spies." [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, +p. 285.] The Rousseau-like nudity of the poet's soul is sometimes put +forward as a plea that the public should close its eyes to possible +shortcomings. Yet, as a matter of fact, it is precisely in the lack of +privacy characterizing the poet's life that his enemies find their +justification for concerning themselves with his morality. Since by +flaunting his personality in his verse he propagates his faults among +his admirers, the public is surely justified in pointing out and +denouncing his failings. + +Poets cannot logically deny this. To do so, they would have to confess +that their inspirations are wholly unaffected by their personalities. +But this is, naturally, a very unpopular line of defense. That unhappy +worshiper of puritan morals and of the muses, J. G. Holland, does make +such a contention, averring, + + God finds his mighty way + Into his verse. The dimmest window panes + Let in the morning light, and in that light + Our faces shine with kindled sense of God + And his unwearied goodness, but the glass + Gets little good of it; nay, it retains + Its chill and grime beyond the power of light + To warm or whiten ... + ... The psalmist's soul + Was not a fitting place for psalms like his + To dwell in overlong, while wanting words. +[Footnote: _Kathrina._] + +But the egotism of the average poet precludes this explanation. No more +deadly insult could be offered him than forgiveness of his sins on the +ground of their unimportance. Far from holding that his personality does +not affect his verse, he would have us believe that the sole worth of +his poetry lies in its reflection of his unique qualities of soul. +Elizabeth Barrett, not Holland, exhibits the typical poetic attitude +when she asks Robert Browning, "Is it true, as others say, that the +productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature,--that in the +minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is _not_ true, +to my mind." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 3, 1845.] + +The glass houses in which the poet's accusers may reside really have +nothing to do with the question. The immorality of these men is of +comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's +personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his +works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn +have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne +muses happily over the sins of Villon, + + But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire, +[Footnote: _A Ballad of Francois Villon._] +it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a +claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without +recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral +history from his writings. + +Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the +ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them +that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead +him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and +philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of +virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by +making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous +charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition. + +There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the +obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness +of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their +voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which +finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly +ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege. + +So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its +members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to +present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are +heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose +only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days +when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting +their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is +untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to +dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say +when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing +at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to +choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and +the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. +Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period +wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted +morality, towers above most of his contemporaries? + +Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an +addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine +element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes +too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling +conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under +the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the +sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among +men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law. + +Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking +back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to + + Come down and redeem us from virtue, + +upon his youthful zest in leaving + + The lilies and languors of virtue + For the roses and raptures of vice, + +he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic +ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous +life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, +there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish +and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse, +_Life of Swinburne,_ p. 309.] + +So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, +however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the +contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression +must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most +conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the +time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration +of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes +did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore: + + If on his cheek unholy blood + Burned for one youthful hour, + 'Twas but the flushing of the bud + That bloomed a milk-white flower. +[Footnote: _After a Lecture on Moore_.] + +One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures +must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's +moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is +unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, +"I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to +the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have +recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent +to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to +feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of +Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his +obligatory feelings did not flower in a _Christabel_ or a _Kubla Khan_. + +The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of +poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from +conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what +even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if +unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness +added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of +virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its +aesthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains +unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been +on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose +aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic +expression. + +The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect +life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it. +He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to +tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to +indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until +he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, +Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, +A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No Lust Like to +Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth +century. A characteristic renaissance attitude toward life and art was +caught by Browning in a passage of _Sordello_. The hero, in a momentary +reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from +vice and exclaims, + + Leave untried + Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze + Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees + Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust, + All tyrannies in every shape be thrust + Upon this now. + +Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a +passing impulse in Sordello's life. + +The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in +the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If +the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a +very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's +autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don +Juan_--as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably +in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's +_Villanelle of the Poet's Road_ is a typical expression of the +mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines, + + Wine and women and song, + Three things garnish our way: + Yet is day overlong. + Three things render us strong, + Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. + Yet is day overlong. +Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, +rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices +is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an +inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover +it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic +feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. +This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian +period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to +it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the +most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the +_Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and +Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these +youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so +innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance +for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of +Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but +inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss +Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that +everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly +by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; +May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and +Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which +would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor, +cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into +their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." +[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.] + +Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as +yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him +into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a +yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take +an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the +_Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, +as in the lines, + + There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me, + I like the lassies--Gude forgie me. + +But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his +artist's temperament. The muse tells him, + + I saw thy pulses' maddening play, + Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way, + And yet the light that led astray + Was light from Heaven. + +And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided +poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time. + +Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height +about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor +over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_; +Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of Francois Villon_.] At the same time +Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, +_Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis +Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared +to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this +time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving +cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded + + What expiating agony + May for him damned to poesy + Shut in that little sentence be,-- + What deep austerities of strife,-- + He lived his life. He lived his life. +[Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.] + +Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case +more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, +puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as +the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their +charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to +temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper +course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but +to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a +disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. +[Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease +is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the +overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his +nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand +temptation. + +Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders +to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in +sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that +this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major +conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting +every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a +sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds +only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the +perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each +expression of his theories. + +In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, +[Footnote: See _Edmund Shore_, _Villars_.] Praed [Footnote: See _The +Talented Man_, _To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry_.] and Landor. [Footnote: +See _Few Poets Beckon_, _Apology for Gebir_.] Later, when the wave of +Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the +cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, +in _Michael Angelo_.] Protest against the group of decadents who +flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, +though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as +seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to +dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the +laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet +reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus: + + There will be fools that in the name of art + Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, + I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard + From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves + Far, far above them. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. See also +Richard Le Gallienne, _The Decadent to his Soul_, _Proem to the +Reader in English Poems_; Joyce Kilmer, _A Ballad of New Sins_.] + +Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral +natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. +In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is +ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of +wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if +a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all +scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth +century this mode of passing judgment was most naively manifest in +verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal +lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, +without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In +the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to +prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same +simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral +reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, +Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective +attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.] + +It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that +considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The +highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though +poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his +critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his +protege, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, +Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been +represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of +their poetical wares. + +Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead +one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain +quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate +connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously +moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that +the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing +the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in _In Memoriam_: + + Loveliness of perfect deeds, + More strong than all poetic thought, + +and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the +tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's _Letters of Life and Morning_, in +which she exhorts the young poet, + + Learn to sing, + But first in all thy learning, learn to be. + +The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the +conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, +not poetry, holds his first allegiance. + + He held his manly name + Far dearer than the muse, +[Footnote: J. G. Saxe, _A Poet's Elegy_.] + +we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan +carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' +talent and their respectability, averring, + + They are like angels, but some angels fell. +[Footnote: _Poets_.] + +Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be +mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes, + + Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these + The poet seems beside the man; + His life is now his noblest strain. +[Footnote: _To Bryant on His Birthday_.] + +When the poet of more firmly grounded conviction attempts to show reason +for his confidence in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument +for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by +Carlyle in his essay, _The Hero as Poet_. This is the theory that, far +from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, +the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as +preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry +is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from +certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have +been unlimited. Longfellow has seized upon this conception of the poet +in his drama, _Michael Angelo_, as has G. L. Raymond in his drama, +_Dante_. In the latter poem the argument for the poet's moral supremacy +is baldly set forth. + +Artistic sensibility, Dante says, far from excusing moral laxity, binds +one to stricter standards of right living. So when Cavalcanti argues in +favor of free love, + + Your humming birds may sip the sweet they need + From every flower, and why not humming poets? + +Raymond makes Dante reply, + + The poets are not lesser men, but greater, + And so should find unworthy of themselves + A word, a deed, that makes them seem less worthy. + +Owing to the growth of specialization in modern life, this argument, +despite Carlyle, has not attained much popularity. Even in idealized +fictions of the poet, it is not often maintained that he is equally +proficient in every line of activity. Only one actual poet within our +period, William Morris, can be taken as representative of such a type, +and he does not afford a strong argument for the poet's distinctive +virtue, inasmuch as tradition does not represent him as numbering +remarkable saintliness among his numerous gifts. + +There is a decided inconsistency, moreover, in claiming unusual strength +of will as one of the poet's attributes. The muscular morality resulting +from training one's will develops in proportion to one's ability to +overthrow one's own unruly impulses. It is almost universally maintained +by poets, on the contrary, that their gift depends upon their yielding +themselves utterly to every fugitive impulse and emotion. Little modern +verse vaunts the poet's stern self-control. George Meredith may cry, + + I take the hap + Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails + Propels, but I am helmsman. +[Footnote: _Modern Love_.] + +Henley may thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, +however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry +than is this one. + +Hardly more popular than the superman theory is another argument for the +poet's virtue that appears sporadically in verse. It has occurred to a +few poets that their virtue is accounted for by the high subject-matter +of their work, which exercises an unconscious influence upon their +lives. Thus in the eighteenth century Young finds it natural that in +Addison, the author of _Cato_, + + Virtues by departed heroes taught + Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame, + Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame. +[Footnote: _Lines to Mr. Addison_.] + +Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same +view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live + + With pureness in youth and religion in age. +[Footnote: _What Is a Poet_.] + +since he conceives as the function of poetry + + To raise and purify the grovelling soul, + * * * * * + And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a +Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of +the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming +his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more +efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps. + +These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real +ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his +subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,--the +fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful. + +There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility +with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves +his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: See the +_Republic_, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher +are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is +riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the +confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that +the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are +unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its +most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an +irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher. + +Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged +throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain +of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the +erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one +phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England, +where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again +in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading +across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The +only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the +Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to +English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his +Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian aesthetics, +he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his +creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to +make of his own life a true poem. + +"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the +beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the +shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain +assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] +The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of +beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and +repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering +sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry, + + Tis not in + The harmony of things--this hard decree, + This ineradicable taint of sin, + This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree + Whose root is earth. +[Footnote: _Childe Harold_.] + +If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it +is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been +undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems +wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and +the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, _Ode on the Poetical Character_; +John Hughes, _Ode on Divine Poetry_.] Among the romantic poets, the +Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he +says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the +opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad +feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this +particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's +allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in +the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the +poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. +One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor +poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet, + + O singing heart, think not of aught save song, + Beauty can do no wrong. +[Footnote: _Song_.] + +Again one hears of the singer, + + Pure must he be; + Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear + Where others hear not; see where others see + With a dazed vision, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_.] + +and again, + + To write a poem, a man should be as pure + As frost-flowers. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_.] + +Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who + + Lived beyond men, and so stood + Admitted to the brotherhood + Of beauty. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _The Dreamer of Dreams_.] + +It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all +of them look to a single standard to govern them aesthetically and +morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises, + +Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread +save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of +sin. [Footnote: _The Silent Voices_.] + +Such is the poet's case for himself. But no matter how eloquently he +presents his case, his quarrel with his three enemies remains almost as +bitter as before, and he is obliged to pay some attention to their +individual charges. + +The poet's quarrel with the philistine, in particular, is far from +settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the +good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What +is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the +plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any +charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which +reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? +Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary +folk are. If the poet professes to be able to achieve righteousness +without effort, the only way to prove it is to conform his conduct to +that of men who achieve righteousness with groaning of spirit. It is too +easy for the poet to justify any and every aberration with the +announcement, "My sixth sense for virtue, which you do not possess, has +revealed to me the propriety of such conduct." Thus reasons the +philistine. + +The beauty-blind philistine doubtless has some cause for bewilderment, +but the poet takes no pains to placate him. The more genuine is one's +impulse toward goodness, the more inevitably, the poet says, will it +bring one into conflict with an artificial code of morals. Shelley +indicated this at length in _The Defense of Poetry_, and in both +_Rosalind and Helen_ and _The Revolt of Islam_ he showed his bards +offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of +the poet-hero in _Prince Athanase_ Shelley tells us, + + Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise. + What he dared do or think, though men might start + He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes. + +It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative +verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a +typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora +Leigh_, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid, +and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and +chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage +with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical +resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too +respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath +with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry +Patmore. In Patmore's poem, _Olympus_, the bard decides to spend an +evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the +coarse jests, and flees home to + + The milk-soup men call domestic bliss. + +Likewise, in _The Angel in the House_, the poet follows a most +domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he +fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself. This sin +consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after +shamefacedly confessing it, he adds, + + And ere I slept, on bended knee + I owned myself, with many a tear + Unseasonable, disorderly. + +But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience +to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other +extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands +of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from +conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being + + Tall galleons, + Out of their very beauty driven to dare + The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_, Alfred Noyes.] + +He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such +courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine +Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public, + + My sins they learn by rote, + And never miss one; no, no miser of them, + * * * * * + Avid of foulness, so they hound me out + Away from blessing that they prate about, + But never saw, and never dreamed upon, + And know not how to long for with desire. +[Footnote: _Marlowe_.] + +In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in lines _On the Morals of +Poets_, warns their detractor, + + Bigot, one folly of the man you flout + Is more to God than thy lean life is whole. + +If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out +that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He +acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps, +but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a +childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the +world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The +innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and +purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical +pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's _The Minstrel_, +suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the +world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The +innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by +like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating +him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the +shock of awakening to conditions as they are. But environment alone does +not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of +whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize +evil motives when they are face to face with them. + +Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic +nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. +Browning, [Footnote: See _A Vision of Poets_.] Swinburne [Footnote: +See _A New Year's Ode_.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See _Sister +Songs_.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it +has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an +ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so +noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the +poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in +literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley, + + The curse of Cain + Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast + And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest. + +Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the +poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes of _Rosalind and Helen, +The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion_ and _Prince Athanase_, +share the disposition of the last-named one: + + Naught of ill his heart could understand, + But pity and wild sorrow for the same. + +It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of +Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic +readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is +reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many +respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's +character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting +glimpses of Shelley in _Sordello_, and to have acknowledged them in +his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's +revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of +Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley +as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of +later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven. +Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the +earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the +saint's white purity," being + + A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong, + * * * * * + With heavenly inspiration, too divine + For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine. +[Footnote: _Shelley_.] + +Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven +heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission. + +Aside from Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently +chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the +poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, _The +Death of Marlowe_, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's +depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it +moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted +Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye. In the drama by +Josephine Preston Peabody, the persecutions of hypocritical puritans +hound Marlowe to his death. [Footnote: _Marlowe._] + +The most representative view of Marlowe as an innocent, deceived youth +is that presented by Alfred Noyes, in _At the Sign of the Golden +Shoe_. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group +thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies + + Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl, + Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown. + +While there float in from the street, at intervals, the cries of the +ballad-mongers hawking their latest doggerel, + + Blaspheming Tamborlin must die, + And Faustus meet his end; + Repent, repent, or presently + To hell you must descend, + +Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringing +his possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also, + All unshielded, all unarmed, + A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams. + +His manner, + + Untamed, adventurous, but still innocent, + +exposed him to the clutches of the underworld. One woman, in particular, + + Used all her London tricks + To coney-catch the country greenhorn. + +Won by her pathetic account of her virtues and trials Marlowe tried to +help her to escape from London-then, because he was utterly unused to +the wiles of women, and was + + Simple as all great, elemental things, + +when she expressed an infatuation for him, then + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + * * * * * + And all that God had meant to wake one day + Under the Sun of Love, suddenly woke + By candle-light, and cried, "The Sun, the Sun." + +At last, holding him wrapped in her hair, the woman attempted to +tantalize him by revealing her promiscuous amours. In a horror of agony +and loathing, Marlowe broke away from her. The next day, as Nash was +loitering in a group including this woman and her lover, Archer, someone +ran in to warn Archer that a man was on his way to kill him. As Marlowe +strode into the place, Nash was struck afresh by his beauty: + + I saw his face, + Pale, innocent, just the clear face of that boy + Who walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick, + The little cobbler's son. Yet--there I caught + My only glimpse of how the sun-god looked-- + +Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that + + His were, perchance, the noblest steeds of all, + And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawn + Above the world.... Before his hand + Had learned to quell them, he was dashed to earth. + +Minor writers are most impartial in clearing the names of any and all +historical artists by such reasoning as this. By negligible American +versifiers one too often finds Burns lauded as one whom "such purity +inspires," [Footnote: A. S. G., _Burns_.] and, more astonishingly, +Byron conceived of as a misjudged innocent. If one is surprised to hear, +in verse on Byron's death, + + His cherub soul has passed to its eclipse, +[Footnote: T. H. Chivers, _On the Death of Byron_.] + +this fades into insignificance beside the consolation offered Byron by +another writer for his trials in this world, + + Peace awaits thee with caressings, + Sitting at the feet of Jesus. + +Better known poets are likely to admit a streak of imperfection in a few +of their number, while maintaining their essential goodness. It is +refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find +James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of +philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines +Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first +of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that +ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly +toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the +end, Burns' great charity is felt to offset all his failings, and Lowell +adds, of poets in general, + + These larger hearts must feel the rolls + Of stormier-waved temptation; + These star-wide souls beneath their poles + Bear zones of tropic passion. +[Footnote: _At the Burns Centennial_.] + +Browning is willing to allow even fictitious artists to be driven into +imperfect conduct by the failure of those about them to live up to their +standards. For example, Fra Lippo Lippi, disgusted with the barren +virtue of the monks, confesses, + + I do these wild things in sheer despite + And play the fooleries you catch me at + In sheer rage. + +But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author +assures the philistine public that it is entirely to blame. + +If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which +he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with +the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain +man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be +satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and +systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to +him. + +The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in +the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. +Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and +consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that +time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. +Robert Browning devoted a poem, _With Francis Furini_, to exposing the +incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in _The +Poet's Vow_, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken +determination to retire from the world, + + That so my purged, once human heart, + From all the human rent, + May gather strength to pledge and drink + Your wine of wonderment, + While you pardon me all blessingly + The woe mine Adam sent. + +In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the +best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts. + +No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a +flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in +their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's +mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a +failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is +truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives +in _Sordello_. + +One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument +again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than +Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and +sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing +himself into all phases of life. + +It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop +from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to +develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in +_Pauline_, + + I had resolved + No age should come on me ere youth was spent, + For I would wear myself out, + +Omar Khayyam's + + While you live + Drink!--for once dead you never shall return, + +Swinburne's cry of despair, + + Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has + grown gray with thy breath; + We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the + fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.] + +show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less +than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become +easy for the poet to carry his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His +talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to +guide aright his + + principle of restlessness + That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all +[Footnote: _Pauline_.] + +The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses +that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times. +Emerson admits this, telling us, in _The Poet_, that although the +singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which + + Turn his heart from lovely maids, + And make the darlings of the earth + Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth, + +these moments of exaltation pass, and the singer finds himself a mere +man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature, + + Eager for good, not hating ill; + On his tense chords all strokes are felt, + The good, the bad, with equal zeal. + +It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions +of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage +at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is +quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's +_Ode to Duty_ does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception +of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the +grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for +poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic +principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of +Arthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the +disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She +reflected grimly, + + Does the road wind uphill all the way? + Yes, to the very end! + Will the day's journey take the whole long day? + From morn till night, my friend. +[Footnote: _Uphill._] + +It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern +conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty +is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough +and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas +in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness +is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then +so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights. +Thus in the _Prelude_ he described an unconscious purification of +his life by his worship of physical beauty, saying of nature, + + If in my youth I have been pure in heart, + If, mingling with the world, I am content + With my own modest pleasures, and have lived + With God and Nature communing, removed + From little enmities and low desires, + The gift is yours. + +Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature +in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical +aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to +Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem +to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as +possible--as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The +Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing +incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for +they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to +Duty,_ + + When love is an unerring light, + And joy its own felicity. + +For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has +capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's +life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such +misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_ +wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, +because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted. +He resolves, + + The world shall bow to me conceiving all + Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small + Afar--not tasting any; no machine + To exercise my utmost will is mine, + Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive + What I could do, a mastery believe + Asserted and established to the throng + By their selected evidence of song, + Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek + To be, I am. + +The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet +the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser +whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the +philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the +good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion? +What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the +essential nature of the highest good as is the reason? + +There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on +this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and +the poet who + + dares to take + Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake, +[Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._] + +there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the +rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic +of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but +not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the +world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, +not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of +the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically asserting, "I hold +virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the +disposition, each a _feeling,_ not a principle." [Footnote: _Letter to +Charles Dallas,_ January 21, 1808.] + +On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as +that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher, +is governed by reason solely,--that the poetic imagination is a purely +intellectual function. [Footnote: See the _Southern Literary +Messenger,_ II, 328, April, 1836.] + +The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes +are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,--Browning, Tennyson, +Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual +pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral +conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their +natures. + +The most profound utterances of poets on this subject, however, show +them to be, not rationalists, but thoroughgoing Platonists. The feeling +in which they trust is a Platonic intuition which includes the reason, +but exists above it. At least this is the view of Shelley, and Shelley +has, more largely than any other man, moulded the beliefs of later +English poets. It is because he judges imaginative feeling to be always +in harmony with the deepest truths perceived by the reason that he +advertises his intention to purify men by awakening their feelings. +Therefore, in his preface to _The Revolt of Islam_ he says "I would +only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of +true virtue." in the preface to the _Cenci,_ again, he declares, +"Imagination is as the immortal God which should take flesh for the +redemption of human passion." + +The poet, while thus expressing absolute faith in the power of beauty to +redeem the world, yet is obliged to take into account the Platonic +distinction between the beautiful and the lover of the beautiful. +[Footnote: _Symposium,_ Sec. 204.] + +No man is pure poet, he admits, but in proportion as he approaches +perfect artistry, his life is purified. Shelley is expressing the +beliefs of practically all artists when he says, "The greatest poets +have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate +prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the +most fortunate of men; and the exceptions, as they regard those who +possess the poetical faculty in a high, yet an inferior degree, will be +found upon consideration to confirm, rather than to destroy, the rule." +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry._] + +Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Shelley precisely. In +_The Crystal,_ Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been +embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts +their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And in _Life +and Song_ he repeats the same idea: + + None of the singers ever yet + Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, + Or truly sung his true, true thought. + +Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life +arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and +the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the +poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with +the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges, +instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote: +Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the +senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal. + +Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic +expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence +to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in +the nature of a farewell to verse writing. In _The Symbol Seduces,_ +"A. E." exclaims, + + I leave + For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower, + For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive; + For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower. + +But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as +Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging +to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does +not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him, +and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the +imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to +him "a dome of many colored glass" that reveals, yet stains, "the white +radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty +apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her +ravishing. + +This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic +problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the +revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a +great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of +his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in +contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands +that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly +passions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to +separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may, +according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of +Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this +time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the +preeminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the +disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was +compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel +that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede +to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature +of the artist is manifest. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE POET'S RELIGION + + +There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the +priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not +tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed +of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing +no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest +critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, assert +with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with +their interpretation of that word. + +As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the +refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are +in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as +incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is +unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic +philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is, +as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the +poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The +poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society. + +The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in +evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry +is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn +pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions +of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the +period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for +art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers +could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had +said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we +must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This +narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within +the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be +characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in +what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their +philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds +and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send +their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue +philosophers. + +Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a +sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his +thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not +unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. +But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because +he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot +conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting +philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world +of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of +philosophy to which he objected, as follows: + + To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant + to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first + sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome + hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and + _species_ and _differentia_, into formal classes, + under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels + fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or + physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our + flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: _Plato and + Platonism._] + +But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which +is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet +demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we +may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most +purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, +"The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. +Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other +the image." [Footnote: _The Romantic Movement,_ p. 129.] That is, +to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual. + +Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true +that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of +subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Shelley is +the classic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's +theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of +his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, in _Queen Mab_. +But Shelley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the +incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that +Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under +the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely +able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the +course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more +truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with +spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, +were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who +declared, "After I had read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary,_ +I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart." +[Footnote: James Gillman, _Life of Coleridge_, p. 23.] + +A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at +the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing +materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their +admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in +his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that +materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the +curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the +reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If +idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which +poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the +_fin de siecle_ school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, +already drooping. + +It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, +Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these +men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, +the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible +explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for +poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic +views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To +Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that +one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. +"I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about +which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life." +[Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.] + +It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the +poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only +where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the +horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the +most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from +obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which +expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank +paper. + +One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the +notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose +atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of _The City of Dreadful +Night_. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, +with the words, + + And now at last authentic word I bring + Witnessed by every dead and living thing; + Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: + There is no God; no fiend with name divine + Made us and tortures us; if we must pine + It is to satiate no Being's gall. + +But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of +James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically +speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of +his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world +in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of +him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It +would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. +Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City +of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William +Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful +envy, + + He came to the desert of London town, + Mirk miles broad; + He wandered up and he wandered down, + Ever alone with God. +[Footnote: _William Blake._] + +Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner +world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be +distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his +impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of +his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it +is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the +"aesthetic repose." + +Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third +element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim +sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the +eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning, + + Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells + Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine. +[Footnote: _Poets._] + +Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every +verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of +the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, +John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benet, +_The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged +persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the +present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his +birds are + + Summer-saulting for God's sake. + +Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and +spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at +best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas +Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought +"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously +excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause +of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas +which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, +however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost +reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the +flower itself. He muses, + + Flower in the crannied wall, + I pluck you out of the crannies;-- + I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, + Little flower--but if I could understand + What you are, root and all and all in all, + I should know what God and man is. + +By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets +designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning +of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the +instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All +poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the +sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one. + +A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's +unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as +Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to +do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If +he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina +Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by + + The foolishest fond folly of a heart + Divided, neither here nor there at rest, + That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth. +[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.] + +On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely +physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his +nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. +Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both +elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him. + +Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a +conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the +unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Shelley devoted +a large part of _Prometheus Unbound_ and the conclusion of _Adonais_ to +his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the +sense world which was yet spiritual, + + The Being that is in the clouds and air, + That is in the green leaves among the groves, +[Footnote: _Hart Leap Well._] + +and was led to the conclusion, + + It is my faith that every flower + Enjoys the air it breathes. +[Footnote: _Lines Written in Early Spring._] + +Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever +returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. +Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now +rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in _Empedocles on +AEtna,_ in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and +out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is +most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's +pantheistic faith. Swinburne's _Hertha_ is one of the most thorough +going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much +of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit. +One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne's +_Natural Religion,_ wherein he explains the grounds of his faith, + + Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air + I cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?" + Sudden the answer like a flute I heard; + It was an angel, though it seemed a bird. + +On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's +charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the +realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to +establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe +with him. + +The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of +the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, +that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly +incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards +himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a +religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. +Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated +"without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter +to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the +same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does +poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence +from this power of revelation. + +But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the +poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit +characteristic of religious reverence. + +It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is +one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings. + + There is no God, O son! + If thou be none, +[Footnote: _On the Downs._] + +Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet +exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry +the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter +of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any +qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the +ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, +any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I +wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but +assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, +p. 309.] + +Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by +Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the +other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the +third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's +divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification +of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own +image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet +God." [Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of +the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in +carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. +In the _Prophetic Books_, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all +that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not +humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it. + +Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, +in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not +flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the +puritan himself feels the power of Emily Bronte's _Last Lines,_ in which +she cries with proud and triumphant faith, + + Though earth and man were gone, + And suns and universes ceased to be, + And Thou wert left alone, + Every existence would exist in Thee. + + There is not room for Death, + Nor atom that his might could render void; + Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, + And what Thou art may never be destroyed. + +There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has +the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical +illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome +importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if +these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully +repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious +demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the +romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him. + +In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to +placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the +appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this +attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. +So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of +the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also +was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the +unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch +as Byron's _A Vision of Judgment,_ with its irresistible satire on +Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet. + +The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the +romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance +of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century +inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest +of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring +conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of +yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I _do_ believe," +said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but +the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the +orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of +religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the +Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See +also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] _Cain,_ +however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief +significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in +arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians. + +Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional +religion. In _Julian and Maddalo_, he causes Byron to say of him, + + You were ever still + Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel. + +Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was +persecuted by the church. In _Rosalind and Helen_, the hero was +hated by the clergy, + + For he made verses wild and queer + Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear, + +and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in +Lionel's death, for + + The ministers of misrule sent + Seized on Lionel and bore + His chained limbs to a dreary tower, + For he, they said, from his mind had bent + Against their gods keen blasphemy. + +The most notable illustration of this phase of Shelley's thought is +_The Revolt of Islam,_ wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put +to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies. + +Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets +have gloried in his attitude. + +Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he + + Smote the God of base men's choice + At God's own gate. +[Footnote: _Burns._] + +Young poets have not yet lost their taste for religious persecution. It +is a great disappointment to them to find it difficult to strike fire +from the faithful in these days. Swinburne in his early poetry denounced +the orthodox God with such vigor that he roused a momentary flutter of +horror in the church, but nowadays the young poet who craves to manifest +his spiritual daring is far more likely to find himself in the position +of Rupert Brooke, of whom someone has said, "He imagines the poet as +going on a magnificent quest to curse God on his throne of fire, and +finding--nothing." + +The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, +however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his +finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, +indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in +which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, +frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter +Day._] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See _In Memoriam._] of Arnold, [Footnote: +See _Dover Beach._] of Clough. [Footnote: See _The New Sinai, Qui +Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium._] So, too, James Thomson muses +with regret, + + How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray + With all the others whom we love so well! + All disbelief and doubt might pass away, + And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell. + Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, + Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast. +[Footnote: _The Reclusant._] + +In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet +sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious +questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick +to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, +rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his +contemporaries, + + There lives more faith in honest doubt, + Believe me, than in half the creeds. + +Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he +expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any +more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the +heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and +love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards +proved spurious).] + +The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who +prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a +shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very +satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in +that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the +quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question +that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious +doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has +been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious +poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is +good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will +seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the +last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in +purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold. + +Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet +can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is +strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a +thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a +recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest +doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry, + + Ah, but there should be one! + There should be one. And there's the bitterness + Of this unending torture-place for men, + For the proud soul that craves a perfectness + That might outwear the rotting of all things + Rooted in earth. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe._] + +The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his +quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free +himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures +purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward +religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of +Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to +the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than +Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious +satisfaction. Thus the hero of _Pauline_ comes to no triumphant +issue, though he maintains, + + I have always had one lode-star; now + As I look back, I see that I have halted + Or hastened as I looked towards that star, + A need, a trust, a yearning after God. + +The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses, + + Of a power above you still, + Which, utterly incomprehensible, + Is out of rivalry, which thus you can + Love, though unloving all conceived by man-- + What need! And of--none the minutest duct + To that out-nature, naught that would instruct + And so let rivalry begin to live-- + But of a Power its representative + Who, being for authority the same, + Communication different, should claim + A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed, + This human clear, as that Divine concealed-- + What utter need! + +There is, after all, small need that the public should charge the poet +with deliberate failure to gain a satisfactory view of the deity. The +quest of a God who satisfies the poet's demand that He shall include all +life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and +embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears +inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and +troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in + + The too-bold dying song of her whose soul + Knew no fellow for might, + Passion, vehemence, grief, + Daring, since Byron died. +[Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, _Haworth Churchyard._] + +A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous +as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him, + + Who dropped his plummet down the broad + Deep universe, and said, "No God," + Finding no bottom. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets._] + +If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful +issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the +conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel +with Tennyson, + + Our little systems have their day, + They have their day and cease to be; + They are but broken lights of thee, + And thou, O Lord, art more than they, +[Footnote: _In Memoriam._] + +yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to + + Let lore of all theology + Be to thy soul what it can be. +[Footnote: _Soothsay._] + +Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of +tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the +part of the church. + +In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with +thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of +the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the +frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as +akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who +causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, _A Life in Song,_ +and _The Real and the Ideal,_ to begin by being poets, and end by +becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly +less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's _Bitter Sweet_ is a +thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman +who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and +hers likewise. In _Kathrina,_ though the hero, rebellious on account of +the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the +end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his +incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an +irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the +tradition of the poet-revivalist. + +Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina +Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean +Ingelow, in _Letters of Life and Morning_, offers most conventional +religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's _The +Angel in the House_, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the +eighteenth century could afford. + +The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother +of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson, +Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a +more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived, +perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in +evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded +in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute. +There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a +formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God +and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June +28, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert +Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the +suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically +advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline +Kilmer, April 21, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters_, +ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers +the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors. + +Perhaps a history of art would not square with the repugnance one feels +toward such censorship. Conformance to the religious beliefs of his time +certainly does not seem to have handicapped Homer or Dante, to say +nothing of the preeminent men in other fields of art, Phidias, Michael +Angelo, Raphael, etc. Yet in the modern consciousness, the theory of art +for art's sake has become so far established that we feel that any +compromise of the purely aesthetic standard is a loss to the artist. The +deity of the artist and the churchman may be in some measure the same, +since absolute beauty and absolute goodness are regarded both by poets +and theologians as identical, but there is reason to believe that the +poet may not go so far astray if he cleaves to his own immediate +apprehension of absolute beauty as he will if he fashions his beliefs +upon another man's stereotyped conception of the absolute good. + +Then, too, it is not unlikely that part of the poet's reluctance to +embrace the creed of his contemporaries arises from the fact that he, in +his secret heart, still hankers for his old title of priest. He knows +that it is the imaginative faculty of the poet that has been largely +instrumental in building up every religious system. The system that +holds sway in society is apt to be the one that he himself has just +outgrown; he has, accordingly, an artist's impatience for its +immaturity. There is much truth to the poet's nature in verses entitled +_The Idol Maker Prays_: + + Grant thou, that when my art hath made thee known + And others bow, I shall not worship thee, + But as I pray thee now, then let me pray + Some greater god,--like thee to be conceived + Within my soul. +[Footnote: By Arthur Guiterman.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + + +No matter how strong our affection for the ingratiating ne'er-do-well, +there are certain charges against the poet which we cannot ignore. It is +a serious thing to have an alleged madman, inebriate, and experimenter +in crime running loose in society. But there comes a time when our +patience with his indefatigable accusers is exhausted. Is not society +going a step too far if, after the poet's positive faults have been +exhausted, it institutes a trial for his sins of omission? Yet so it is. +If the poet succeeds in proving to the satisfaction of the jury that his +influence is innocuous, he must yet hear the gruff decision, "Perhaps, +as you say, you are doing no real harm. But of what possible use are +you? Either become an efficient member of society, or cease to exist." +Must we tamely look on, while the "light, winged, and holy creature," as +Plato called the poet, is harnessed to a truck wagon, and made to +deliver the world's bread and butter? Would that it were more common for +poets openly to defy society's demands for efficiency, as certain +children and malaperts of the poetic world have done! It is pleasant to +hear the naughty advice which that especially impractical poet, Emily +Dickinson, gave to a child: "Be sure to live in vain, dear. I wish I +had." [Footnote: Gamaliel Bradford, _Portraits of American Women_, +p. 248 (Mrs. Bianchi, p. 37).] And one is hardly less pleased to hear +the irrepressible Ezra Pound instruct his songs, + + But above all, go to practical people, go, jangle their door-bells. + Say that you do no work, and that you will live forever. +[Footnote: _Salutation the Second_.] + +Surely no one else has had so bad a time with efficiency experts as has +the poet, even though everyone whose occupation does not bring out sweat +on the brow is likely to fall under their displeasure. The scholar, for +instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he +has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have +dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even +bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to +maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is +often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging +aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to +loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him? + +The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be +confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of +his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James +Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_ (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. +Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, _The Poet and the Fisher_, +and _Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship_; +Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman, +_Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P. H. Hayne, +_An Idle Poet Dreaming_; Henry Timrod, _They Dub Thee Idler_; Washington +Allston, _Sylphs of the Seasons_; C. W. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Alan Seeger, +_Oneata_; J. G. Neihardt, _The Poet's Town_.] Sometimes he gives them +the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But +occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries +to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his +bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet. + +When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers +laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to +make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional +fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and +Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_, and _The Real +and the Ideal_.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few +scattered figures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.] +Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of +Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio, +Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See +_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must +admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the +poet-politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to +celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a +protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look +to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as +following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, +for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing +Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist +is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the +citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. +[Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama, +Richard Garnett.] + +If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he +may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will +vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He +is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer, + + When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's + work, + You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. + There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the + Turk, + And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword + in his hand. + It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, + And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was + strong, + And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, + Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song. +[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.] + +It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, +Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet +lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the +poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. +From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer +may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in +war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet +as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, +The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, +Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of +the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the +Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley, +_Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates, +Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David, +Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert +Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud +Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, +Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the +Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter +Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _Hell Gate of Soissons_; +Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace +Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the +Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_; +Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said, +"The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: +See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the +poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The +verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that +warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might +have done Byron's, + + When the true lightning of his soul was bared, + Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Bronte_.] + +But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his +character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does +not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be +pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him +that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of +strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he +has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too +likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet? +Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his +title as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some +merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims +for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at +fault when he excused his occupation: + + I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse, + And wrote verse. +[Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.] + +How can the poet satisfy the philistine world that his songs are worth +while? Need we ask? Business men will vouch for their utility, if he +will but conform to business men's ideas of art. Here is a typical +expression of their views, couched in verse for the singer's better +comprehension: + + The days of long-haired poets now are o'er, + The short-haired poet seems to have the floor; + For now the world no more attends to rhymes + That do not catch the spirit of the times. + The short-haired poet has no muse or chief, + He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef. +[Footnote: "The Short-haired Poet," in _Common-Sense_, by E. F. Ware.] + +But the poet utterly repudiates such a view of himself as this, for he +cannot draw his breath in the commercial world. [Footnote: Several poems +lately have voiced the poet's horror of materialism. See Josephine +Preston Peabody, _The Singing Man_; Richard Le Gallienne, _To R. W. +Emerson, Richard Watson Gilder_; Mary Robinson, _Art and Life_.] In vain +he assures his would-be friends that the intangibilities with which he +deals have a value of their own. Emerson says, + + One harvest from thy field + Homeward brought the oxen strong; + A second crop thine acres yield + Which I gather in a song. +[Footnote: _Apology_] + +But for this second crop the practical man says he can find absolutely +no market; hence overtures of friendliness between him and the poet end +with sneers and contempt on both sides. Doubtless the best way for the +poet to deal with the perennial complaints of the practical-minded, is +simply to state brazenly, as did Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite +useless." [Footnote: Preface to _Dorian Gray_.] + +Is the poet justified, then, in stopping his ears to all censure, and +living unto himself? Not so; when the hub-bub of his sordid accusers +dies away, he is conscious of another summons, before a tribunal which +he cannot despise or ignore. For once more the poet's equivocal position +exposes him to attacks from all quarters. He stands midway between the +spiritual and the physical worlds, he reveals the ideal in the sensual. +Therefore, while the practical man complains that the poet does not +handle the solid objects of the physical world, but transmutes them to +airy nothings, the philosopher, on the contrary, condemns the poet +because he does not wholly sever connections with this same physical +world, but is continually hovering about it, like a homesick ghost. + +Like the plain man, the philosopher gives the poet a chance to vindicate +his usefulness. Plato's challenge is not so age-worn that we may not +requote it. He makes Socrates say, in the _Republic_, + +Let us assure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation +that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered state, +we shall be delighted to receive her.... We are very conscious of her +charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth.... Shall I +propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this +condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some +other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are +lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on +her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful +to states and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. +[Footnote: _Republic_, Book X, 607.] + + * * * * * + +One wonders why the lovers of Poetry have been so much more solicitous +for her cause than Poetry herself has appeared to be. Aristotle, and +after him many others,--in the field of English literature, Sidney, +Shelley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,--have made most eloquent +defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been +forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to +attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the +last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the +impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them +to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but +here are some things I might say for myself, if I wished." + +Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal +conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give +the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy. +But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded +man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the +philosopher assures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than +is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at +least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the +philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet +distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet +pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, +but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious +system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of +himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is +really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body. + +Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical +man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of +the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and +one by the poet. [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, 596 B ff.] Now +the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well +known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the +room: + + "I know what is and what has been; + Not anything to me comes strange, + Who in so many years have seen + And lived through every kind of change. + I know when men are bad or good, + When well or ill," he slowly said, + "When sad or glad, when sane or mad + And when they sleep alive or dead." +[Footnote: _In the Room_] + +Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious +memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not +come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript +product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is +on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror +across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a +person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would +seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow +imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing +higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport." +[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.] + +It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake +their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd +enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of +dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel +the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow +assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude: + + Painting and sculpture are but images; + Are merely shadows cast by outward things + On stone or canvas, having in themselves + No separate existence. Architecture, + As something in itself, and not an image, + A something that is not, surpasses them + As substance shadow. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us +as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and +buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has +become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's +charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. +The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney +and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find +that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not +from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries +of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we +have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak +of commonness in the speaker's nature,--of a disposition to value the +clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined +to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, +"I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect. +It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an +earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of +the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than +one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A. +E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing, + + He who might have wrought in flame + Only traced upon the foam. +[Footnote: _Epilogue_] + +In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his +death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty +in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: +Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le +Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet +who died a soldier: + + A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, + Are greater than a poet's art, + And greater than a poet's fame + A little grave that has no name. +[Footnote: _Soliloquy_.] + +Is not our idealization of poets who died in war a confession that we +ourselves believe that they chose the better part,--that they did well +to discard imitation of life for life itself? + +It is not fair to force an answer to such a question till we have more +thoroughly canvassed poets' convictions on this matter. Do they all +admit the justice of Plato's characterization of poetry as a sport, +comparable to golf or tennis? In a few specific instances, poets have +taken this attitude toward their own verse, of course. There was the +"art for art's sake" cry, which at the end of the last century surely +degenerated into such a conception of poetry. There have been a number +of poets like Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang, who have frankly regarded +their verse as a pastime to while away an idle hour. There was +Swinburne, who characterized many of his poems as being idle and light +as white butterflies. [Footnote: See the _Dedication to Christina +Rossetti_, and _Envoi_.] But when we turn away from these +prestidigitators of rhymes and rhythms, we find that no view of poetry +is less acceptable than this one to poets in general. They are far more +likely to earn the world's ridicule by the deadly seriousness with which +they take verse writing. If the object of his pursuit is a sport, the +average poet is as little aware of it as is the athlete who suffers a +nervous collapse before the big game of the season. + +But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an +imitation of life? It depends, of course, upon how broadly we interpret +the phrase, "imitation of life." In one sense almost every poet would +say that Plato was right in characterizing poetry thus. The usual +account of inspiration points to passive mirroring of life. Someone has +said of the poet, + + As a lake + Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, + Shall he reflect our great humanity. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's +function, but they leave us leeway to quarrel over the nature of the +reflection mentioned, just as we quarrel over the exact connotations of +Plato's and Aristotle's word, imitation. Even if we hold to the narrower +meaning of imitation, there are a few poets who intimate that imitation +alone is their aim in writing poetry. Denying that life has an ideal +element, they take pains to mirror it, line for line, and blemish for +blemish. How can they meet Plato's question as to their usefulness? If +life is a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear +what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the +case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war +poetry. [Footnote: See _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_.] Perhaps his +defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication +contained in his two lines, + + If there's good in war and crime, + There may be in my bits of rhyme. +[Footnote: See _Ibid_.] + +Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least +James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most +thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in +English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_. +Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he +says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence +may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade +before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But +would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is +doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of +life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the +despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than +reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from +its realism, but from the idealism of the writer. + +We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection +of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. +Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its +misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let +the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and +dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple +haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, +for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is. + + And they shall be accounted poet-kings + Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose +inevitably calls up William Morris: + + Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, + Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? + Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme + Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, + Telling a tale, not too importunate + To those who in the sleepy region stay, + Lulled by the singer of an empty day. +[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.] + +Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He +would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's +minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about +ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead +for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, +_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other +justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of +man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea +that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought +of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the +breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to +suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says, + + 'Tis the privilege of art + Thus to play its cheerful part + Man on earth to acclimate + And bend the exile to his fate. +[Footnote: _Art_.] + +It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings +this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art +accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of +life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, +and is its essence. + +Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems +strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to +render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the +artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not +precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally +Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. +Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the +essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's +light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who +portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives +usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that +gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover +of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is +truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a +mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a +representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a +service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All +that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning +says, + + Paint a body well, + You paint a soul by implication. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual +accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is +useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward +a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and +that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he +tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye +and save the soul beside," [Footnote: _The Ring and the Book_.] as +Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things +under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest +insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, +without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers, + + If you get simple beauty and naught else, + You get about the best thing God invents. +[Footnote: _Fra, Lippo Lippi_.] + +Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of +the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be +expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy +Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist +simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword +Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. +Cook, June 28, 1918.] + +Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that +the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal +and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should +this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, +harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity. + +The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it +has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as + + A many-sided mirror, + Which could distort to many a shape of error + This true, fair world of things. +[Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the +artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of +things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him +irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in +this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described +the poet's achievement: + + With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, + The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes. +[Footnote: _Ode_.] + +"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is +truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different +mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the +artist's imitation of life, inquiring, + + What is art + But life upon the larger scale, the higher, + When, graduating up a spiral line + Of still expanding and ascending gyres + It pushes toward the intense significance + Of all things, hungry for the infinite. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, +then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their +objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely +superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things +than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work: + + He will watch from dawn to gloom + The lake-reflected sun illume + The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, + Nor heed nor see, what things they be; + But from these create he can + Forms more real than living man, + Nurslings of immortality. +[Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of +imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees +walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the +essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of +essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the +discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; +[Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only +teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are +some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: +Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a +Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_ +Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_ +Rossetti, _Sonnet, Shelley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_ +Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow, +_The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_; +Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_; +Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on +_Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the +Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren +Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_; +Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_; +Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of +the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The +Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.] + +Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher +and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook +human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same +pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one +another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to +the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth, +Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of +the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? +Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher +rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies +himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_; +Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the +quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows +trivial, but let us see how the case stands. + +From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of +methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being + + Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes. +[Footnote: _To William Wordsworth_.] + +Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts, + + Think you, mid all this mighty sum + Of things forever speaking, + That nothing of itself will come, + We must be ever seeking? +[Footnote: _Expostulation and Reply_.] + +But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate +intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he +asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can +only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the +breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression +which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the +poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, +"Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the +body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: _A +Defense of Poetry_.] + +To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making +discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a +sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends, + + True science investigates and brings to human perception such + truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and + society consider most important. Art transmits these truths + from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And + thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a + correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: _What is + Art?_] + +Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to +acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has +pronounced the philosopher's attitude of mind wholly antagonistic to +poetry. + + Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, + Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: +_A Poet's Epitaph_.] + +Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other +poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a +flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a +recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers, + + We are they who dream no dreams, + Singers of a rising day, + Who undaunted, + Where the sword of reason gleams, + Follow hard, to hew away + The woods enchanted. +[Footnote: E. Flecker, _Donde Estan_.] + +One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He +declares, + + Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art! + Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, + Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, + Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? + How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, + Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering + To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, + Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? + Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, + And driven the Hamadryad from the wood + To seek for shelter in some happier star? + Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, + The Elfin from the green grass, and from me + The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? +[Footnote: _To Science_.] + +If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the +philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's +hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which +must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the +poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed, + + Most true it is that I have looked on truth + Askance and strangely, + +and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, +the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." +[Footnote: Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_.] If poets complain that + all charms fly + At the mere touch of cold philosophy, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of +distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars? + +In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has +identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for +the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the +realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to +the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to +make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower +of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things. + +What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has +just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet +answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the +scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for +the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need +laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his +love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and +reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this +subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning, +_Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein, +_Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of + + The loftiest star of unascended heaven, + Pinnacled dim in the intense inane, + +in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense +against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his +non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his +sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to +sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the +philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they +represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly +medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's +thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a +somber tapestry. + +It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to +fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, +as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth +century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, +he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, +"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled +conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See +_The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both +warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry. +Even Landor reflected, + + A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, + And showing but the broken sky + Too surely is the sweetest lay + That wins the ear and wastes the day + Where youthful Fancy pouts alone + And lets not wisdom touch her zone. +[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.] + +But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such +distinctions. + +If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal +values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of +things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his +test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this +poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge +that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works. + +The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points +out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The +poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney +Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with +nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is +to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on +Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there +is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must +be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: +Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination +may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." +[Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] + +If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, +that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a +prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic +shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the +phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the +one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are +not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing +with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association +of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of +superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can +foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The +Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, +_Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many +poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. +[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_, +_Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_; +Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry +Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J. R. Lowell, _Massaccio_, Sonnet +XVIII; Owen Meredith, _The Prophet_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; O. W. +Holmes, _Shakespeare_; T. H. Olivers, _The Poet_, _Dante_; Alfred +Austin, _The Poet's Corner_; Swinburne, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_; +Herbert Trench, _Stanzas on Poetry_.] Holmes' view is typical: + + We call those poets who are first to mark + Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,-- + Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark + While others only note that day is gone; + For them the Lord of light the curtain rent + That veils the firmament. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Shelley +does; as a more recent poet has phrased it: + + Strange hints + Of things past, present and to come there lie + Sealed in the magic pages of that music, + Which, laying hold on universal laws, + Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +The poet's defense is not finished when he establishes the truth of his +vision. How shall the world be served, he is challenged, even though it +be true that the poet's dreams are of reality? Plato demanded of his +philosophers that they return to the cave of sense, after they had seen +the heavenly vision, and free the slaves there. Is the poet willing to +do this? It has been charged that he is not. Browning muses, + + Ah, but to find + A certain mood enervate such a mind, + Counsel it slumber in the solitude + Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good + Its nature just, as life and time accord. + --Too narrow an arena to reward + Emprize--the world's occasion worthless since + Not absolutely fitted to evince + Its mastery! +[Footnote: _Sordello_.] + +But one is inclined to question the justice of Browning's charge, at +least so far as it applies peculiarly to the poet. Logically, he should +devote himself to sense-blinded humanity, not reluctantly, like the +philosopher descending to a gloomy cave which is not his natural +habitat, but eagerly, since the poet is dependent upon sense as well as +spirit for his vision. "This is the privilege of beauty," says Plato, +"that, being the loveliest of the ideas, she is also the most palpable +to sight." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_.] Accordingly the poet has no +horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an +enthusiasm to make the world of sense a more transparent medium of +beauty. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet's humanitarian +aspect, see Bowles, _The Visionary Boy_, _On the Death of the +Rev. Benwell_; Wordsworth, _The Poet and the Caged Turtle Dove_; +Arnold, _Heine's Grave_; George Eliot, _O May I Join the Choir +Invisible_; Lewis Morris, _Food Of Song_; George Meredith, _Milton_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Swinburne, +_Centenary of Landor_, _Victor Hugo_, _Victor Hugo in 1877_, _Ben +Jonson_, _Thomas Decker_; Whittier, _To J. P._, and _The Tent on the +Beach_; J. R. Lowell, _To The Memory of Hood_; O. W. Holmes, _At a +Meeting of the Burns Club_; Emerson, _Solution_; R. Realf, _Of Liberty +and Charity_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the +Golden Age_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_; C. W. Hubner, _The Poet_; J. +H. West, _O Story Teller Poet_; Gerald Massey, _To Hood Who Sang the +Song of the Shirt_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; +Sidney Lanier, _Wagner_, _Clover_; C. A. Pierce, _The Poet's Ideal_; E. +Markham, _The Bard_, _A Comrade Calling Back_, _An April Greeting_; G. +L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_; Richard Gilder, _The City_, _The Dead +Poet_; E. L. Cox, _The Master_, _Overture_; R. C. Robbins, _Wordsworth_; +Carl McDonald, _A Poet's Epitaph_.] It is inevitable that every poet's +feeling for the world should be that of Shelley, who says to the spirit +of beauty, + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. +[Footnote: _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_.] +For, unlike the philosopher, the poet has never departed from the world +of sense, and it is hallowed to him as the incarnation of beauty. +Therefore he is eager to make other men ever more and more transparent +embodiments of their true selves, in order that, gazing upon them, the +poet may have ever deeper inspiration. This is the central allegory in +_Enydmion_, that the poet must learn to help humanity before the mystery +of poetship shall be unlocked to him. Browning comments to this effect +upon Bordello's unwillingness to meet the world: + + But all is changed the moment you descry + Mankind as half yourself. + +Matthew Arnold is the sternest of modern poets, perhaps, in pointing out +the poet's responsibility to humanity: + + The poet, to whose mighty heart + Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, + Subdues that energy to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. + Though he move mountains, though his day + Be passed on the proud heights of sway, + Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, + Though he hath borne immortal pains, + Action and suffering though he know, + He hath not lived, if he lives so. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by +which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their +essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is +peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the +moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must +be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something +beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to +the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. If beauty is the +heart of the universe (and it must be, the poet argues, since it abides +in sense as well as spirit), there is no place for the corrupt will. If +men are free, they are expressing their real natures; they are +beautiful. + +Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise +men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do +not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of +tyranny." [Footnote: _Republic._] Few enemies of poets nowadays +would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas +Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry, +asserted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's +potentates. [Footnote: See _The Four Ages of Poetry._] Once, it must +be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into +disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his +friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim, + + If thou hast ever done amiss + It was, O Southey, but in this, + That, to redeem the lost estate + Of the poor Muse, a man so great + Abased his laurels where some Georges stood + Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood. + Was ever genius but thyself + Friend or befriended of a Guelf? + +But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization +of the modern poet as liberty-lover. + +Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented +to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's +allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like +the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French +revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against +oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the +loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward +monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of +poet-laureate. + +The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of +history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry +during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our +history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles +II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be +expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and +virtue." Gray, in _The Progress of Poesy_, draws the same +conclusion as Shelley: + + Her track, where'er the goddess roves, + Glory pursue, and generous shame, + The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame. + +Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert +no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. +[Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's +Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The +Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, +_Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here +Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The +Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To +Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, +_Miriam_; Shelley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, +_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, +_Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, +_To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, +_The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in +a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, +Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; +Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Shore_, _For You_, +_O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; +Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of +Liberty and Charity_; Henry van Dyke, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; +Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles +Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit +of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, +_MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce +Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert +Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden +Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that +in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, +though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose +themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming, + + Where's the poet? Show him, show him, + Muses mine, that I may know him! + 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king + Or poorest of the beggar clan. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, +but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be +false to poetry, and he answers his detractors, + + Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise, + That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope + Of his pure song. + +In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent +champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for +ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom: + + Poets (hear the word) + Half-poets even, are still whole democrats. + Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high, + But loyal to the low, and cognizant + Of the less scrutable majesties. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote: +_See The Poet_.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the +liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See _Mater Triumphilis_, _Prelude_, +_Epilogue_, _Litany of Nations_, and _Hertha_.] till our new group of +singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident. + +It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always +synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to +distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise +Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs. +Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate +socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as +is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is +simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his +truest self. + +If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager +to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains +against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings +in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall +become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society +is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" +[Footnote: See _Sordello_.] of the world, here amending a law, here +building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the +poet. Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, makes much of the issue, +and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's +inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world + + Forgets + To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back + Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down + To the empty grave of Christ ... + ... Who has time, + An hour's time--think!--to sit upon a bank + And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +February 17, 1845.] + +The poet has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and +proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas +Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the +Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization in +reform the gauge of a poet's merit. Where, in that case, would Keats be +beside Hood? In our day, where would Sara Teasdale be beside Edwin +Markham? Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as +an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his +claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See +_Aurora Leigh_.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely +unsettling society,--for what end? He himself will soon have +forgotten--will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is +more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other +men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the +beauty of holiness. Let reformers beware how they assert the poet's +uselessness, our singers say, for it is an indication that they +themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be +leading men. The work of the reformer inevitably degenerates into the +mere strenuosity of the campaign, + + Unless the artist keep up open roads + Betwixt the seen and unseen, bursting through + The best of our conventions with his best, + The speakable, imaginable best + God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond + Both speech and imagination. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Thus speaks Mrs. Browning. + +The reforms that make a stir in the world, being merely external, mean +little or nothing apart from the impulse that started them, and the poet +alone is powerful to stir the impulse of reform in humanity. "To be +persuaded rests usually with ourselves," said Longinus, "but genius +brings force sovereign and irresistible to bear upon every hearer." +[Footnote: _On the Sublime_.] The poet, in ideal mood, is as +innocent of specific designs upon current morality as was Pippa, when +she wandered about the streets of Asolo, but the power of his songs is +ever as insuperable as was that of hers. It is for this reason that +Emerson advises the poet to leave hospital building and statute revision +for men of duller sight than he: + + Oft shall war end and peace return + And cities rise where cities burn + Ere one man my hill shall climb + Who can turn the golden rhyme. + Let them manage how they may, + Heed thou only Saadi's lay. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Here the philosopher may demur. If the poet were truly an idealist,--if +he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, +which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he +might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's +failing that he gives men no vision of abstract beauty. He represents +his visions in the contemporary dress of his times. Thus he idealizes +the past and the present, showing beauty shining through the dullness +and error of human history. Is he not, then, the enemy of progress, +since he will lead his readers to imagine that things are ideal as they +are? + +Rather, men will be filled with reverence for the idealized portrait of +themselves that the poet has drawn, and the intervention of the reformer +will be unnecessary, since they will voluntarily tear off the shackles +that disfigure them. The poet, said Shelley, "redeems from decay the +visitations of the divinity in man." Emerson said of Wordsworth, "He +more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." Mrs. +Browning said (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet--by analyzing +humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions +of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] +This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of +life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines +through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty +incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through which +beauty does not shine. + +Therefore, the poet repeats, he is the true author of reform. Tennyson +says of freedom, + + No sword + Of wrath her right arm whirled, + But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word + She shook the world. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +This brings us back to our war poets who have so recently died. Did they +indeed disparage the Muse whom they deserted? Did they not rather die to +fulfill a poet's prophesy of freedom? A poet who did not carry in his +heart the courage of his song--what could be more discreditable to +poetry than that? The soldier-poets were like a general who rushes into +the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a +man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the +engagement, that saved the day. + +If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his +reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says, + + The gods talk in the breath of the woods, + They talk in the shaken pine, + And fill the long reach of the old seashore + With dialogue divine. + And the poet who overhears + Some random word they say + Is the fated man of men + Whom the nations must obey. +[Footnote: Fragment on _The Poet_.] + +What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his +vision is true he shall join + + The choir invisible + Of those immortal dead who live again + In minds made better by their presence: live + In pulses stirred to generosity, + In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, + And with their mild persistence urge man's search + To vaster issues. +[Footnote: George Eliot, _The Choir Invisible_.] + +Does this mean simply the immortality of fame? It is a higher thing than +that. The beauty which the poet creates is itself creative, and having +the principle of life in it, can never perish. Whitman cries, + + Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! + Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for, + But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, + greater than before known, + Arouse! for you must justify me! +[Footnote: _Poets to Come_.] + +Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the +snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his +name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the +_Symposium_, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of +beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he +is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself. +So, though he be as fragile as a windflower, he may assure himself, + + I shall not die; I shall not utterly die, + For beauty born of beauty--that remains. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _To a Windflower_.] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + + +Not even a paper shortage has been potent to give the lie to the author +of _Ecclesiastes_, but it has fanned into flame the long smouldering +resentment of those who are wearily conscious that of making many books +there is no end. No longer is any but the most confirmed writer suffered +to spin out volume after volume in complacent ignorance of his readers' +state of mind, for these victims of eye-strain and nerves turn upon the +newest book, the metaphorical last straw on the camel's load, with the +exasperated cry, Why? Why? and again Why? + +Fortunately for themselves, most of the poets who have taken the poet's +character as their theme, indulged their weakness for words before that +long-suffering bookworm, the reader, had turned, but one who at the +present day drags from cobwebby corners the accusive mass of material on +the subject, must seek to justify, not merely the loquacity of its +authors, but one's own temerity as well, in forcing it a second time +upon the jaded attention of the public. + +If one had been content merely to make an anthology of poems dealing +with the poet, one's deed would perhaps have been easier to excuse, for +the public has been so often assured that anthologies are an economical +form of publication, and a time-saving form of predigested food, that it +usually does not stop to consider whether the material was worth +collecting in the first place. Gleaner after gleaner has worked in the +field of English literature, sorting and sifting, until almost the last +grain, husk, straw and thistle have been gathered and stored with their +kind. But instead of making an anthology, we have gone on the assumption +that something more than accidental identity of subject-matter holds +together the apparently desultory remarks of poets on the subject of the +poet's eyebrows, his taste in liquors, his addiction to midnight +rambles, and whatnot. We have followed a labyrinthine path through the +subject with faith that, if we were but patient in observing the clues, +we should finally emerge at a point of vantage on the other side of the +woods. + +The primary grounds of this faith may have appeared to the skeptic +ridiculously inadequate. Our faith was based upon the fact that, more +than two thousand years ago, a serious accusation had been made against +poets, against which they had been challenged to defend themselves. This +led us to conclude that there must be unity of intention in poetry +dealing with the poet, for we believed that when English poets talked of +themselves and their craft, they were attempting to remove the stigma +placed upon the name of poet by Plato's charge. + +Now it is easy for a doubter to object that many of the poems on the +subject show the poet, not arraying evidence for a trial, but leaning +over the brink of introspection in the attitude of Narcissus. One need +seek no farther than self-love, it may be suggested, to find the motive +for the poet's absorption in his reflection. Yet it is incontrovertible +that the self-infatuation of our Narcissus has its origin in the +conviction that no one else understands him, and that this conviction is +founded upon a very real attitude of hostility on the part of his +companions. The lack of sympathy between the English poet and the public +is so notorious that Edmund Gosse is able to state as a truism: + While in France poetry has been accustomed to reflect the + general tongue of the people, the great poets of England have + almost always had to struggle against a complete dissonance + between their own aims and interests and those of the nation. + The result has been that England, the most inartistic of the + modern races, has produced the largest number of exquisite + literary artists. [Footnote: _French Profiles_, p. 344.] + +Furthermore, even though everyone may agree that a lurking sense of +hostile criticism is back of the poet's self-absorption, another ground +for skepticism may lie in our assumption that Plato is the central +figure in the opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy +of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the +student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt +their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal +and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in +classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher +North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces +of cipher foolishness, abstractions which we named the puritan, the +philosopher, the philistine. Possibly by so doing we have given the +impression that poets are beating the air against an abstraction when +they are in reality delivering thumping blows upon the body of a +personal enemy. And if these generalizations appear indefensible, still +more misleading, it may be urged, is an attempt to represent that the +poet, when he takes issue with this and that opponent, is answering a +challenge hidden away from the unstudious in the tenth book of Plato's +_Republic_. It is doubtful even whether a number of our poets are +aware of the existence of Plato's challenge, and much more doubtful +whether they have it in mind as they write. + +Second thought must make it clear, however, that to prove ignorance of +Plato's accusation on the part of one poet and another does not at all +impair the possibility that it is his accusation which they are +answering. So multiple are the threads of influence leading from the +_Republic_ through succeeding literatures and civilizations that it +is unsafe to assert, offhand, that any modern expression of hostility to +poetry may not be traced, by a patient untangler of evidence, to a +source in the _Republic_. But even this is aside from the point. +One might concede that the wide-spread modern antagonism to poetry would +have been the same if Plato had never lived, and still maintain that in +the _Republic_ is expressed for all time whatever in anti-aesthetic +criticism is worthy of a serious answer. Whether poets themselves are +aware of it or not, we have a right to assert that in concerning +themselves with the character of the ideal poet, they are responding to +Plato's challenge. + +This may not be enough to justify our faith that these defensive +expositions lead us anywhere. Let us agree that certain poets of the +nineteenth and twentieth centuries have answered Plato's challenge. But +has the Poet likewise answered it? If from their independent efforts to +paint the ideal poet there has emerged a portrait as sculpturally clear +in outline as is Plato's portrait of the ideal philosopher, we shall +perhaps be justified in saying, Yes, the Poet, through a hundred mouths, +has spoken. + +Frankly, the composite picture which we have been considering has not +sculptural clarity. To the casual observer it bears less resemblance to +an alto-relief than to a mosaic; no sooner do distinct patterns spring +out of myriad details than they shift under the onlooker's eyes to a +totally different form. All that we can claim for the picture is +excellence as a piece of impressionism, which one must scan with +half-closed eyes at a calculated distance, if one would appreciate its +central conception. + +Apparently readers of English poetry have not taken the trouble to scan +it with such care. They may excuse their indifference by declaring that +an attempt to discover a common aesthetic principle in a collection of +views as catholic as those with which we have dealt is as absurd as an +attempt to discover philosophical truth by taking a census of general +opinion. Still, obvious as are the limitations of a popular vote in +determining an issue, it has a certain place in the discovery of truth. +One would not entirely despise the benefit derived from a general survey +of philosophers' convictions, for instance. Into the conclusions of each +philosopher, even of the greatest, there are bound to enter certain +personal whimsicalities of thought, which it is profitable to eliminate, +by finding the common elements in the thought of several men. If the +quest of a universal least common denominator forces one to give up +everything that is of significance in the views of philosophers, there +is profit, at least, in learning that the title of philosopher does not +carry with it a guarantee of truth-telling. On the other hand if we find +universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common _cogito ergo +sum_, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a +discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex +system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no +real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar +census of the views of poets. + +After hearkening to the general suffrage of poets on the question of the +poet's character, we must bring a serious charge against them if a +deafening clamor of contradiction reverberates in our ears. In such a +case their claim that they are seers, or masters of harmony, can be +worth little. The unbiased listener is likely to assure us that +clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets' +speaking amounts to, but we shall be slow to acknowledge as much. Have +we been merely the dupe of pretty phrasing when we felt ourselves +insured against discord by the testimony of Keats? Hear him: + + How many bards gild the lapses of time! + * * * * * + ... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme, + These will in throngs before my mind intrude, + But no confusion, no disturbance rude + Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. + +However incompatible the characteristics of the poets celebrated by +Wordsworth and by Swinburne, by Christina Rossetti and by Walt Whitman +may have seemed in immediate juxtaposition, we have trusted that we need +only retire to a position where "distance of recognizance bereaves" +their individual voices, in order to detect in their mingled notes +"pleasing music, and not wild uproar." + +The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our +multitudinous verse-writers may point out that we should have had more +right to expect concord if we had shown some discernment in sifting true +poets from false. Those who have least claim to the title of poet have +frequently been most garrulous in voicing their convictions. Moreover, +these pseudo-poets outnumber genuine poets one hundred to one, yet no +one in his right mind would contend that their expressions of opinion +represent more than a straw vote, if they conflict with the judgment of +a single true poet. + +Still, our propensity for listening to the rank breath of the multitude +is not wholly indefensible. In the first place pseudo-poets have not +created so much discord as one might suppose. A lurking sense of their +own worthlessness has made them timid of utterance except as they echo +and prolong a note that has been struck repeatedly by singers of +reputation. This echoing, it may be added, has sometimes been effective +in bringing the traditions of his craft to the attention of a young +singer as yet unaware of them. Thus Bowles and Chivers, neither of whom +has very strong claim to the title of bard, yet were in a measure +responsible for the minor note in Coleridge's and Poe's description of +the typical poet. + +Even when the voices of spurious bards have failed to chime with the +others, the resulting discord has not been of serious moment. A +counterfeit coin may be as good a touchstone for the detection of pure +silver, as is pure silver for the detection of counterfeit. Not only are +a reader's views frequently clarified by setting a poetaster beside a +poet as a foil, but poets themselves have clarified their views because +they have been incited by declarations in false verse to express their +convictions more unreservedly than they should otherwise have done. +Pseudo-poets have sometimes been of genuine benefit by their +exaggeration of some false note which they have adopted from poetry of +the past. No sooner do they exaggerate such a note, than a concerted +shout of protest from true poets drowns the erroneous statement, and +corrects the misleading impression which careless statements in earlier +verse might have left with us. Thus the morbid singer exhibited in minor +American verse of the last century, and the vicious singer lauded in one +strain of English verse, performed a genuine service by calling forth +repudiation, by major poets, of traits which might easily lead a singer +in the direction of morbidity and vice. + +The confusion of sound which our critic complains of is not to be +remedied merely by silencing the chorus of echoic voices. If we dropped +from consideration all but poets of unquestionable merit, we should not +be more successful in detecting a single clear note, binding all their +voices together. When the ideal poet of Shelley is set against that of +Byron, or that of Matthew Arnold against that of Browning, there is no +more unison than when great and small in the poetic world are allowed to +speak indiscriminately. + +Does this prove that only the supreme poet speaks truly, and that we +must hush all voices but his if we would learn what is the essential +element in the poetic character? Then we are indeed in a hard case. +There is no unanimity of opinion among us regarding the supreme English +poet of the last century, and if we dared follow personal taste in +declaring one of higher altitude than all the others only a small +percentage of readers would be satisfied when we set up the _Prelude_ or +_Adonais_ or _Childe Harold_ or _Sordello_ beside the _Republic_ as +containing the one portrait of the ideal singer worthy to stand beside +the portrait of the ideal philosopher. And this is not the worst of the +difficulty. Even if we turn from Shelley to Byron, from Wordsworth to +Browning, in quest of the one satisfactory conception of the poet, we +shall not hear in anyone of their poems the single clear ringing note +for which we are listening. When anyone of these men is considering the +poetic character, his thought behaves like a pendulum, swinging back and +forth between two poles. + +Thus we ourselves have admitted the futility of our quest of truth, the +critic may conclude. But no, before we admit as much, let us see exactly +what constitutes the lack of unity which troubles us. After its +persistence in verse of the same country, the same period, the same +tradition, the same poet, even, has led us to the brink of despair, its +further persistence rouses in us fresh hope, or at least intense +curiosity, for what impresses us as the swinging of a pendulum keeps up +its rhythmical beat, not merely in the mind of each poet, but in each +phase of his thought. We find the same measured antithesis of thought, +whether he is considering the singer's environment or his health, his +inspiration or his mission. + +In treatment even of the most superficial matters related to the poet's +character, this vibration forces itself upon our attention. Poets are +sofar from subscribing to Taine's belief in the supreme importance of +environment as molder of genius that the question of the singer's proper +habitat is of comparative indifference to them, yet the dualism that we +have noted runs as true to form here as in more fundamental issues. When +one takes the suffrage of poets in general on the question of +environment, two voices are equally strong. Genius is fostered by +solitude, we hear; but again, genius is fostered by human companionship. +At first we may assume that this divergence of view characterizes +separate periods. Writers in the romantic period, we say, praised the +poet whose thought was turned inward by solitude; while writers in the +Victorian period praised the poet whose thought was turned upon the +spectacle of human passions. But on finding that this classification is +true only in the most general way, we go farther. Within the Victorian +period Browning, we say, is the advocate of the social poet, as Arnold +is the advocate of the solitary one. But still our classification is +inadequate. Is Browning the expositor of the gregarious poet? It is true +that he feels it necessary for the singer to "look upon men and their +cares and hopes and fears and joys." [Footnote: _Pauline_.] But he +makes Sordello flee like a hunted creature back to Goito and solitude in +quest of renewed inspiration. Is Arnold the expositor of the solitary +poet? True, he urges him to fly from "the strange disease of modern +life". [Footnote: _The Scholar Gypsy_.] Yet he preaches that the +duty of the poet is + + to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +Within the romantic period the same phenomenon is evident. Does +Wordsworth paint the ideal poet dwelling apart from human distractions? +Yet he declares that his deepest insight is gained by listening to "the +still sad music of humanity". In Keats, Shelley, Byron, the same +antithesis of thought is not less evident. + +We cannot justly conclude that a compromise between contradictions, an +avoidance of extremes, is what anyone of these poets stands for. It is +complete absorption in the drame of human life that makes one a poet, +they aver; but again, it is complete isolation that allows the inmost +poetry of one's nature to rise to consciousness. At the same time they +make it clear that the supreme poet needs the gifts of both +environments. To quote Walt Whitman, + + What the full-grown poet came, + Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe + with all its shows of day and night) saying, He + is mine; + But out spake too the Soul of men, proud, jealous + and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone; + --Then the full-grown poet stood between the two and + took each by the hand; + And today and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly + holding hands, + Which he will never release till he reconciles the two, + And wholly and joyously blends them. + +The paradox in poets' views was equally perplexing, no matter what phase +of the poetic character was considered. A mere resume of the topics +discussed in these essays is enough to make the two horns of the dilemma +obtrude themselves. Did we consider the financial status of the poet? We +heard that he should experience all the luxurious sensations that wealth +can bring; on the other hand we heard that his poverty should shield him +from distractions that might call him away from accumulation of +spiritual treasure. Did we consider the poet's age? We heard that the +freshness of sensation possessed only by youth carries the secret of +poetry; on the other hand we heard that the secret lies in depth of +spiritual insight possible only to old age. So in the allied question of +the poet's body. He should have + + The dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear, + +that no beauty in the physical world may escape him. Yet he should be +absorbed in the other world to such a degree that blindness, even, is a +blessing to him, enabling him to "see, no longer blinded by his eyes." +The question of the poet's health arose. He should have the exuberance +and aplomb of the young animal; no, he should have a body frail enough +to enable him, like the mediaeval mystic, to escape from its +importunatedemands upon the spirit. + +In the more fundamental questions that poets considered, relating to the +poet's temperament, his loves, his inspiration, his morality, his +religion, his mission, the same cleavage invariably appeared. What +constitutes the poetic temperament? It is a fickle interchange of joy +and grief, for the poet is lifted on the wave of each new sensation; it +is an imperturbable serenity, for the poet dwells apart with the eternal +verities. What is the distinguishing characteristic of his love? The +object of his worship must be embodied, passionate, yet his desire is +for purely spiritual union with her. What is the nature of his +inspiration? It fills him with trancelike impassivity to sensation; it +comes upon him with such overwhelming sensation that he must touch the +walls to see whether they or his visions are the reality. [Footnote: See +Christopher Wordsworth, _Memoirs of Wordsworth_, Vol. II, p. 480.] +How is his moral life different from that of other men? He is more +fiercely tempted, because he is more sensitive to human passions; he is +shut away from all temptations because his interest is solely in the +principle of beauty. What is the nature of his religious instinct? He is +mad with thirst for God; he will have no God but his own humanity. What +is his mission? He must awaken men to the wonder of the physical world +and fit them to abide therein; he must redeem them from physical +bondage, and open their eyes to the spiritual world. + +The impatient listener to this lengthy catalogue of the poet's views may +assert that it has no significance. It merely shows that there are many +kinds of poets, who attempt to imitate many aspects of human life. But +surely our catalogue does not show just this. There is no multiform +picture of the poet here. The pendulum of his desire vibrates +undeviatingly between two points only. Sense and spirit, spirit and +sense, the pulse of his nature seems to reiterate incessantly. There is +no poet so absorbed in sensation that physical objects do not +occasionally fade into unreality when he compares them with the spirit +of life. Even Walt Whitman, most sensuous of all our poets, exclaims, + + Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul + That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, + concepts, non-realities. +[Footnote: _Apparitions_.] + +On the other hand there is no poet whose taste is so purely spiritual +that he is indifferent to sensation. The idealism of Wordsworth, even, +did not preclude his finding in sensation + + An appetite, a feeling and a love + That had no need of a remoter charm + By thought supplied. + +Is this systole and diastole of the affection from sense to spirit, from +spirit to sense, peculiarly characteristic of English poets? There may +be some reason for assuming that it is. Historians have repeatedly +pointed out that there are two strains in the English blood, the one +northern and ascetic, the other southern and epicurean. In the modern +English poet the austere prophetic character of the Norse scald is +wedded to the impressionability of the troubadour. No wonder there is a +battle in his breast when he tries to single out one element or the +other as his most distinctive quality of soul. Yet, were it not unsafe +to generalize when our data apply to only one country, we should venture +the assertion that the dualism of the poet's desires is not an insular +characteristic, but is typical of his race in every country. + +Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world, +shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an +irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves +singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over +and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is +harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says +Eurymachus in the _Symposium_. It is union of the finite and the +infinite, says Socrates in the _Philebus_. Do the poet's desires +point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that +stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole +secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. +His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in +two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the +spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot +tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity +in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and +barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination +which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of +sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a +little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this +power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is +called _Voyage a L'Infine_: + + The swan existing + Is like a song with an accompaniment + Imaginary. + + Across the grassy lake, + Across the lake to the shadow of the willows + It is accompanied by an image, + --as by Debussy's + "Reflets dans l'eau." + + The swan that is + Reflects + Upon the solitary water--breast to breast + With the duplicity: + "The other one!" + + And breast to breast it is confused. + O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession! + It is accompanied by the image of itself + Alone. + + At night + The lake is a wide silence, + Without imagination. + +But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic +answering of sense to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered +by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and +spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the +spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense; +yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is +clearly either physical or spiritual; therefore they do not stand poised +between the two worlds with the perfect balance of interests which marks +the poet. The philosopher and the man of religion recognize their goal +as a spiritual and ascetic one. If they concern themselves more than is +needful with the temporal and sensual, they feel that they are false to +their ideal. The scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand, +are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss +consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of +course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius +of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But +if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph +just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the +invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is +not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us +conscious of the two worlds of sense and spirit, reflecting one another. + +Supposing that all this is true, what is gained by discovering, from a +consensus of poets' views, that the distinctive characteristic of the +poet is harmony of sense and spirit? Is not this so obvious as to be a +truism? It is perhaps so obvious that like all the truest things in the +world it is likely to be ignored unless insisted upon occasionally. +Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English +criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written +criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually +ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own +goal. + +It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of +English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of +the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's _School of +Abuse_, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who +had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry +were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan +criticism, that of Lodge, [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry, Musick and +Stage Plays._] Harrington, [Footnote: _Apology for Poetry._] Meres, +[Footnote: _Palladis Tamia._] Campion, [Footnote: _Observations in the +Art of English Poetry._] Daniel, [Footnote: _Defense of Rhyme._] and +even in lesser degree of Sidney, obscures the aesthetic problem by +turning it into an ethical one. + +In the criticism of Sidney, himself a poet, one does find implied a +recognition of the twofold significance of the poet's powers. He asserts +his spiritual pre-eminence strongly, declaring that the poet, unlike the +scientist, is not bound to the physical world.[Footnote: "He is not +bound to any such subjection, as scientists, to nature." _Defense of +Poetry._] On the other hand he is clearly aware of the need for a +sensuous element in poetry, since by it, Sidney declares, the poet may +lead men by "delight" to follow the forms of virtue. + +The next critic of note, Dryden, in his revulsion from the ascetic +character which the puritans would develop in the poet, swung too far to +the other extreme, and threw the poetic character out of balance by +belittling its spiritual insight. He did justice to the physical element +in poetry, defining poetic drama, the type of his immediate concern, as +"a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions, and +traverses of fortune," [Footnote: _English Garner,_ III, 513.] but +he appears to have felt the ideal aspect of the poet's nature as merely +a negation of the sensual, so that he was driven to the absurdity of +recommending a purely mechanical device, rhyme, as a means of elevating +poetry above the sordid plane of "a bare imitation." In the eighteenth +century, Edmund Burke likewise laid too much stress upon the physical +aspect of the poet's nature, in accounting for the sublime in poetry as +originating in the sense of pain, and the beautiful as originating in +pleasure. Yet he comes closer than most critics to laying his finger +onthe particular point which distinguishes poets from philosophers, +namely, their dependence upon sensation. + +With the single exception of Burke, however, the critics of the +eighteenth century labored under a misapprehension no less blind than +the moral obsession which twisted Elizabethan criticism. In the +eighteenth century critics were prone to confuse the spiritual element +in the poet's nature with intellectualism, and the sensuous element with +emotionalism. Such criticism tended to drive the poet either into an +arid display of wit, on the one hand, or into sentimental excess, on the +other, and the native English distrust of emotion led eighteenth century +critics to praise the poet when the intellect had the upper hand. But +surely poets have made it clear enough that the intellect is not the +distinctive characteristic of the poet. To be intelligent is merely to +be human. Intelligence is only a tool, poets have repeatedly insisted, +in their quarrel with philosophers. In proportion as one is intelligent +within one's own field, one excels, poets would admit. If one is +intelligent with respect to fisticuffs one is likely to become a good +prize-fighter, but no matter how far refinement of intelligence goes in +this direction, it will not make a pugilist into a poet. Intelligence +must belong likewise, in signal degree, to the great poet, but it is +neither one of the two essential elements in his nature. Augustan +critics starved the spiritual element in poetry, even while they +imagined that they were feeding it, for in sharpening his wit the poet +came no nearer expressing the "poor soul, the center of his sinful +earth" than when he reveled in emotion. We no longer believe that in the +most truly poetic nature the intelligence of a Pope is joined with the +emotionalism of a Rousseau. We believe that the spirituality of a +Crashaw is blent with the sensuousness of a Swinburne. + +Nineteenth century criticism, since it is almost entirely the work of +poets, should not be thus at odds with the conception of the poet +expressed in poetry. But although nineteenth century prose criticism +moves in the right direction, it is not entirely adequate. The poet is +not at his best when he is working in a prose medium. He works too +consciously in prose, hence his intuitive flashes are not likely to find +expression. After he has tried to express his buried life there, he +himself is likely to warn us that what he has said "is well, is +eloquent, but 'tis not true." Even Shelley, the most successful of +poet-critics, gives us a more vivid comprehension of the poetical +balance of sense and spirit through his poet-heroes than through _The +Defense of Poetry_, for he is almost exclusively concerned, in that +essay, with the spiritual aspect of poetry. He expresses, in fact, the +converse of Dryden's view in that he regards the sensuous as negation or +dross merely. He asserts: + + Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the + beauty of their conception in naked truth and splendor, and it + is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not + necessary to temper this planetary music to mortal ears. + +The harmony in Shelley's nature which made it possible for his +contemporaries to believe him a gross sensualist, and succeeding +generations to believe him an angel, is better expressed by Browning, +who says: + + His noblest characteristic I call his simultaneous perception + of Power and Love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in + the concrete, while he throws, from his poet-station between + them both, swifter, subtler and more numerous films for the + connection of each with each than have been thrown by any + modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.[Footnote: Preface + to the letters of Shelley (afterward found spurious).] + +Yet Browning, likewise, gives a more illuminating picture of the poetic +nature in his poetry than in his prose. + +The peculiar merit of poetry about the poet is that it makes a valuable +supplement to prose criticism. We have been tempted to deny that such +poetry is the highest type of art. It has seemed that poets, when they +are introspective and analytical of their gift, are not in the highest +poetic mood. But when we are on the quest of criticism, instead of +poetry, we are frankly grateful for such verse. It is analytical enough +to be intelligible to us, and still intuitive enough to convince us of +its truthfulness. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ has been condemned in +certain quarters as "a talking about poetry, not poetry itself," but in +part, at least, the _Prelude_ is truly poetry. For this reason it +gives us more valuable ideas about the nature of poetry than does the +_Preface to the Lyrical Ballads_. If it is worth while to analyze +the poetic character at all, then poetry on the poet is invaluable to +us. + +Perhaps it is too much for us to decide whether the picture of the poet +at which we have been gazing is worthy to be placed above Plato's +picture of the philosopher. The poet does not contradict Plato's charge +against him. His self-portrait bears out the accusation that he is +unable to see "the divine beauty--pure and clear and unalloyed, not +clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and +varieties of human life." [Footnote: _Symposium_, 212.] Plato would +agree with the analysis of the poetic character that Keats once +struggled with, when he exclaimed, + +What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in +literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean +_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in +uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after +fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine +isolated verisimilitude caught from the Pentralium of mystery, from +being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge--With a great +poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather +obliterates all consideration. + +Plato would agree with this,--all but the last sentence. Only, in place +of the phrase "negative capability," he would substitute "incapability," +and reflect that the poet fails to see absolute beauty because he is not +content to leave the sensual behind and press on to absolute reality. + +It may be that Plato is right, yet one cannot help wishing that sometime +a poet may arise of greater power of persuasion than any with whom we +have dealt, who will prove to Plato what he appears ever longing to be +convinced of, that absolute ideality is not a negation of the sensual, +and that poetry, in revealing the union of sense and spirit, is the +strongest proof of idealism that we possess. A poet may yet arise who +will prove that he is right in refusing to acknowledge that this world +is merely a surface upon which is reflected the ideals which constitute +reality and which abide in a different realm. The assumption in that +conception is that, if men have spiritual vision, they may apprehend +ideals directly, altogether apart from sense. On the contrary, the +impression given by the poet is that ideality constitutes the very +essence of the so-called physical world, and that this essence is +continually striving to express itself through refinement and remolding +of the outer crust of things. So, when the world of sense comes to +express perfectly the ideal, it will not be a mere representation of +reality. It will be reality. If he can prove this, we must acknowledge +that, not the rationalistic philosopher, but the poet, grasps reality +_in toto_. + +However inconclusive his proof, the claims of the poet must fascinate +one with their implications. The two aspects of human life, the physical +and the ideal, focus in the poet, and the result is the harmony which is +art. The fact is of profound philosophical significance, surely, for +union of the apparent contradictions of the sensual and the spiritual +can only mean that idealism is of the essence of the universe. What is +the poetic metaphor but the revelation of an identical meaning in the +physical and spiritual world? The sympathetic reader of poetry cannot +but see the reflection of the spiritual in the sensual, and the sensual +in the spiritual, even as does the poet, and one, as the other, must be +by temperament an idealist. + + + + +INDEX + + + Addison, Joseph, + "A.E." (see George William Russell), + Aeschylus, + Agathon, + Akins, Zoe, + Alcaeus, + Aldrich, Anne Reeve, + Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, + Alexander, Hartley Burr, + Alexander, William, + Allston, Washington, + Ambercrombe, Lascelles, + Anderson, Margaret Steele, + Angelo, Michael, + Arensberg, Walter Conrad, + Aristotle, + Arnold, Edwin, + Arnold, Matthew, + his discontent; + on the poet's death; + inspiration; + loneliness; morality; + religion; + usefulness; + youth; + his sense of superiority. + Arnold, Thomas, + Asquith, Herbert, + Austin, Alfred, + + Bacon, Josephine Dodge Daskam, + Baker, Karle Wilson, + Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, + Beatrice, + Beattie, James, + Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, + Beers, Henry A., + Benet, Stephen Vincent, + Benet, William Rose, + Bennet, William, + Binyon, Robert Lawrence, + Blake, William, + later poets on; + on inspiration; + on the poet as truthteller; + on the poet's religion. + Blunden, Edmund, + Boccaccio, + Boker, George Henry, + Borrow, George, + Bowles, William Lisle, + Branch, Anna Hempstead, + Brawne, Fanny H., + Bridges, Robert, + Bronte, Emily, + Brooke, Rupert, + Browne, T. E., + Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, + appearance; + _Aurora Leigh_; + on Keats; + on the poet's age; + content with his own time; + democracy; + eyes; + habitat; + health, + humanitarianism, + inferiority to his creations, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + pain, + personality, + religion, + resentment at patronage, + self-consciousness, + self-expression, + sex, + usefulness, + other poets on, + + Browning, Robert, + on fame, + on inspiration, + on the poet's beauty, + loneliness, + love, + morals, + persecutions, + pride, + religion, + self-expression, + sex, + superiority, + usefulness, + on Shakespeare, + on Shelley, + _Sordello_, + other poets on + Bryant, William Cullen + Buchanan, Robert + Bunker, John Joseph + Burke, Edmund + Burleigh, William Henry + Burnet, Dana + Burns, Robert, + his self-depreciation, + on the poet's caste, + habitat, + inspiration, + love of liberty, + morals, persecutions, + poverty, + superiority, + other poets on + Burton, Richard + Butler, Samuel + Byron, Lord, + his body, + escape from himself in poetry, + friendship with Shelley, + indifference to fame, + later poets on, + his morals, + his mother, + his religion, + self-portraits in verse, + superiority, + on Tasso + + Camoeens + Campbell, Thomas + Campion, Thomas + Candole, Alec de + Carlin, Francis + Carlyle, Thomas + Carman, Bliss + Carpenter, Rhys + Cary, Alice + Cary, Elisabeth Luther + Cassells, S. J. + Cavalcanti, Guido + Cawein, Madison + Cellini, Benvenuto + Cervantes + Chapman, George + Chatterton, Thomas + Chaucer, Geoffrey + Cheney, Annie Elizabeth + Chenier, Andre + Chesterton, Gilbert Keith + Chivers, Thomas Holley + Clare, John + Clough, Arthur Hugh + Coleridge, Hartley + Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, + appearance; + on Blake; + on Chatterton; + friendship with Wordsworth; + on the poet's habitat; + health; + love; + morals; + reflection in nature; + religion; + youth; + usefulness; + later poets on + Collins, William, + Colonna, Vittoria, + Colvin, Sidney, + Conkling, Grace Hazard, + Cornwall, Barry (see Procter, Bryan Waller), + Cowper, William, + Cox, Ethel Louise, + Crabbe, George, + Crashaw, Richard, + Cratylus, + + Dana, Richard Henry, + Daniel, Samuel, + D'Annunzio, Gabriele, + Dante, + G.L. Raymond on; + Oscar Wilde on; + Sara King Wiley on; + Dargan, Olive, + David, + Davidson, John, + Davies, William Henry, + Dermody, Thomas, + Descartes, + Dickinson, Emily, + Dionysodorus, + Dobell, Sidney, + Dobson, Austin, + Dommett, Alfred, + Donne, John, + Dowden, Edward, + Dowson, Ernest, + Drake, Joseph Rodman, + Drinkwater, John, + Druce, C.J., + Dryden, John, + Dunbar, Paul Laurence, + Dunroy, William Reed, + Dunsany, Lord Edward, + Dyer, Sidney, + Ehrman, Max, + Elijah, + Eliot, Ebenezer, + Eliot, George, + Emerson, Ralph Waldo, + his contempt for the public; + his democracy; + his humility; + on inspiration; + on love of fame; + on the poet's divinity; + love; + morals; + poverty; + solitude; + usefulness + Euripedes, + Euthydemus, + Evans, Mrs. E.H., + + Fainier, C.H., + Fairfield, S. L., + Field, Eugene., + Flecker, James Elroy, + Flint, F.S., + French, Daniel Chester, + Freneau, Philip Morin, + Fuller, Frances, + Fuller, Metta, + + Gage, Mrs. Frances, + Garnett, Richard, + Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, + Giddings, Franklin Henry, + Gilbert, Sir William Schwenek + Gilder, Richard Watson; + on Helen Hunt Jackson; + on Emma Lazarus; + on the poet's age; + blindness; + inspiration; + morality; + normality; + poverty + Gillman, James + Giltinan, Caroline + Goethe + Gosse, Edmund + Gosson, Stephen + Graves, Robert + Gray, Thomas + Grenfil, Julian + Griffith, William + Guiterman, Arthur + + Hake, Thomas Gordon + Halleck, Shelley + Halpine, Charles Graham + Hardy, Thomas + Harris, Thomas Lake + Harrison, Birge + Hayne, Paul Hamilton + Hazlitt, William + Hemans, Felicia + Henderson, Daniel + Henley, William Ernest + Herbert, George + Herrick, Robert + Hewlett, Maurice + Hildreth, Charles Latin + Hill, H., + Hilliard, George Stillman + Hillyer, Robert Silliman + Hoffman, C. F. + Hogg, Thomas Jefferson + Holland, Josiah Gilbert + Holmes, Oliver Wendell + Homer + Hood, Thomas + Hooper, Lucy + "Hope, Lawrence" (see Violet + Nicolson) + Horne, Richard Hengest + Houghton, Lord + Houseman, Laurence + Hovey, Richard + Hubbard, Harvey + Hubner, Charles William + Hughes, John + Hugo, Victor + Hunt, Leigh + + Ingelow, Jean + + Jackson, Helen Hunt + Jameson, Mrs. Anna Brownell + Johnson, Donald F. Goold + Johnson, Lionel + Johnson, Robert Underwood, + Johnson, Rossiter + Johnson, Dr. Samuel + Jonson, Ben + + Kaufman, Herbert + Keats, John; + his body; + on Burns; + Christopher North on; + on his desire for fame; + his egotism; + on Elizabethan poets; + on expression; + on the harmony of poets + Homer's blindness; + on his indifference to the public; + on inspiration; + later poets on Keats; + on love; + quarrel with philosophy; + on the poet's democracy, + gift of prophecy, + habitat, + morals, + persecutions, + unpoetical character, + unobtrusiveness, + usefulness + Keble, John + Kemble, Frances Anne + Kent, Charles + Kenyon, James Benjamin + Kerl, Simon + Khayyam, Omar + Kilmer, Joyce + Kingsley, Charles + Kipling, Rudyard + Knibbs, Harry Herbert + + Lamb, Charles + Landor, Walter Savage; + on Byron; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + on Homer; + on intoxication and inspiration; + on the poet's age, + morals, + pride; + on poetry and reason; + on Shakespeare; + on Southey + Lang, Andrew + Lanier, Sidney + Larcom, Lucy + Laura + Lazarus, Emma + Ledwidge, Francis + Le Gallienne, Richard + Leonard, William Ellery + Lindsay, Vachel + Lockhart, John Gibson + Lodge, Thomas + Lombroso, Cesare + Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; + his democracy; + on grief and poetry; + _Michael Angelo_; + on the poet's morals, + solitude; + on the savage poet; + on inspiration + Longinus + Lord, William W. + Low, Benjamin R. C. + Lowell, Amy + Lowell, James Russell; + on Burns; + on the poet's age, + divinity, + habitat, + inspiration, + usefulness + Lucan + Lucretius + Lytton, Bulwer, on Andre Chenier; + on the female poet; + on Milton; + on the poet's appearance, + fame, + persecution, + usefulness + + McDonald, Carl + Mackaye, Percy + Maclean, L. E. + "Macleod, Fiona" (see William Sharp) + MacNiel, J. C. + Mann, Dorothea Lawrence + Mansfield, Richard + Map, Walter + Markham, Edwin + Marlowe, Christopher, + Alfred Noyes on, + Josephine Preston Peabody on, + Marquis, Don, + Masefield, John, + Massey, Gerald, + Masters, Edgar Lee, + Meres, Francis, + Meredith, George, + Meredith, Owen, + Meynell, Alice, + Meynell, Viola, + Middleton, Richard, + Millay, Edna St. Vincent, + Miller, Joaquin, + Milton, John, + Miriam, + Mitchell, L. E., + Mitchell, Stewart + Mitford, Mary Russell, + Montgomery, James, + Moody, William Vaughan, + Moore, Thomas, + Morley, Christopher, + Morris, Lewis, + Morris, William, + Myers, Frederick W. H. + + Naden, Constance, Nash, Thomas, + Neihardt, John Gneisenau, + Nero, + Nerval, Gerard de, + Newbolt, Henry, + Newman, Henry, + Newton, Sir Isaac, + Nicolson, Violet, + Nordau, Max Simon, + North, Christopher, + Noyes, Alfred, + + O'Connor, Norreys Jephson, + Osborne, James Insley, + O'Sheel, Shaemus, + Otway, Thomas, + + Pater, Walter, + Patmore, Coventry, on the + poet's expression, + indifference to fame, + love, + morals, + religion, + usefulness + Payne, John, + Peabody, Josephine Preston, + Percival, James Gates, + Percy, William Alexander, + Petrarch, + Phidias, + Phillips, Stephen, + Phillpotts, Eden, + Pierce, C. A., + Plato, + _Ion_, + _Phaedo_ + _Philebus_, + _Phaedrus_, + _Republic_, + _Symposium_, + Poe, Edgar Allan, + Pollock, Robert, + Pope, Alexander, + Pound, Ezra, + Praed, Winthrop Mackworth + Price, C. Augustus + Procter, Adelaide Anne + Procter, Bryan Cornwall + + Rand, Theodore Harding + Raphael + Raymond, George Lansing + Reade, Thomas Buchanan + Realf, Richard + Reno, Lydia M. + Rice, Cale Young + Rice, Harvey + Riley, James Whitcomb + Rittenhouse, Jessie + Rives, Hallie Erven + Robbins, Reginald Chauncey + Roberts, Cecil + Roberts, Charles George Douglas + Robinson, Edwin Arlington + Robinson, Mary + Rossetti, Christina + Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, + on Chatterton, + on Dante, + on Marston, + on the poet's age, + expression, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + usefulness + Rousseau, Jean Jacques + Ruskin, John + Russell, George William + Ryan, Abram J. + + Sampson, Henry Aylett + Sandburg, Carl + Sappho; + Alcaeus on, + modern poets on her genius, + on her passion + Savage, John + Saxe, John Godfrey + Scala, George Augustus + Schauffler, Robert Haven + Schiller, Johann Christoff Friedrich + Scott, Sir Walter + Seeger, Alan + Service, Robert + Shairp, Principal + Shakespeare, William + Sharp, William + Shelley, Percy Bysshe, + and Byron, + on female poets, + his hostility to the public, + his indifference to his body, + on Keats, + on the poet's early death, + habitat, + inspiration, + love, + madness, + loneliness, + morals, + persecutions, + poverty, + religion, + seership, + usefulness, + on prenatal life, + on Tasso + Shenstone, William + Sidney, Sir Philip + Sinclair, May + Smart, Christopher + Smith, Alexander, + Smith, J. Thorne, jr., + Socrates, + Solomon, + Soran, Charles, + Southey, Robert, + Spenser, Edmund, + Sprague, E.L., + Stedman, Edmund Clarence, + Stephens, James, + Stickney, Trumbull, + Stoddard, Charles Warren, + Sullivan, Sir Arthur, + Swinburne, Algernon, + chafing against moral restraints; + on Victor Hugo; + on Marston; + on his mother; + on the poet's age; + love of liberty; + morals; + parentage; + religion; + usefulness; + on Christina Rossetti; + on Sappho; + on Shelley + Symons, Arthur, + + Taine, Hippolyte Adolph, + Tannahill, John, + Tasso, Torquato, + Taylor, Bayard, + Teasdale, Sara, + Tennyson, Alfred, + burlesque on inspiration in wine; + his contempt for the public; + on the poet's death; + expression; + inspiration; + intuitions; + love of liberty; + lovelessness; + morality; + pantheism; + persecution; + rank; + religion; + superiority to art; + usefulness + Tertullian, Thomas, Edith, + Thompson, Francis, + confidence in immortality; + humility; + on inspiration; + on love and poetry; + on Alice Meynell; + on Viola Meynell; + on the poet's body; + expression; + grief; + habitat; + loneliness; + morals; + youth + Thomson, James, + Thomson, James (B.V.), + his atheism; + on Mrs. Browning; + on inspiration; + on pessimistic poetry; + on Platonic love; + on Shelley; + on Tasso; + on Weltschmerz + Timrod, Henry, + Tolstoi, Count Leo, + Towne, Charles Hanson, + Trench, Herbert, + Tupper, Martin Farquhar, + + Van Dyke, Henry, + Vergil, + Verlaine, Paul Marie, + Villon, Francois, + Viviani, Emilia, + + Waddington, Samuel + Ware, Eugene + Watts-Dunton, Theodore + Wesley, Charles + West, James Harcourt + Wheelock, John Hall + White, Kirke + Whitman, Walt; + confidence in immortality; + democracy; + on expression; + on the poet's idleness, + inspiration, + morals, + normality, + protean nature, + love, + reconciling of man and nature; + on the poet-warrior; + his zest + Whittier, John Greenleaf + Wilde, Oscar, on Byron; + on Dante; + on Keats; + on love and art; + his morals; + on the poet's prophecy; + on the uselessness of art + Wiley, Sara King + Winter, William + Woodberry, George Edward; + apology; + on friendship; on the poet's love; + on inspiration; + on Shelley + Wordsworth, William; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + his friendship with Coleridge; + on James Hogg; + on inspiration; + Keats' annoyance with Wordsworth; + on love poetry; + on the peasant poet; + on the poet's democracy, + habitat, + morals, + religion, + solitude; + the _Prelude_; + on prenatal life; + quarrel with philosophy; + repudiation of inspiration through wine + Wright, Harold Bell + + Yeats, William Butler + Young, Edmund + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet's Poet, by Elizabeth Atkins + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POET'S POET *** + +***** This file should be named 7928.txt or 7928.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/7/9/2/7928/ + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: The Poet's Poet + +Author: Elizabeth Atkins + +Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7928] +[This file was first posted on June 1, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: US-ASCII + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE POET'S POET *** + + + + +Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + + +THE POET'S POET + +Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in +English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years + +By + +ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D. + +Instructor in English, University of Minnesota + + + + +TO + +HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER + + + + +PREFACE + + +Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps +received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the +majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the +last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no +means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the +part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of +aesthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer +of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the +poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic +philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only +incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, +whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider. + +The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of +individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_ +Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a +re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and +essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the +main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. +We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic +conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing +theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an +essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission. + +It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is +not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt +has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each +question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is +inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the +lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the +spiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that +practically every utterance which we may consider,--even such as deal +with the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or +his health,--falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as +the poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be +the more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been +the most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose +nature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly +harmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are +attempting to present. + +Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. In +the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesque +in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since it +is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influenced +Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that +in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where +the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a +large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to +the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small +in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It +is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the +subject of their nature than have greater ones, but some attempt is here +made to hold them within bounds, so that they may not drown out the more +meaningful utterances of the master singers. + +The last one hundred and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, +since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a +peculiarly self-conscious attitude in the poet, and brought his +personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within +the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as +enthusiasts like to term the new stirring of interest in verse) is +revealing young poets of the present day even more frank in +self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago. + +The excursion through modern English poetry involved in these studies +has been a pleasant one. The value and interest of such an investigation +was first pointed out to me by Professor Louise Pound of the University +of Nebraska. It is with sincere appreciation that I here express my +indebtedness to her, both for the initial suggestion, and for the +invaluable advice which I have received from her during my procedure. I +owe much gratitude also to President Wimam Allan Neilson of Smith +College, who was formerly my teacher in Radcliffe College, and to +Professor Hartley Burr Alexander, of the department of Philosophy at the +University of Nebraska, who has given me unstinted help and generous +encouragement. + +ELIZABETH ATKINS. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + +PREFACE + +I. THE EGO-CENTRIC CIRCLE + +Apparent futility of verse dealing with the poet.--Its +justification.--The poet's personality the hidden theme of all +verse,--The poet's egotism.--Belief that his inspirations are +divine.--Belief in the immortality of his poems.--The romantic view that +the creator is greater than his creations.--The poet's contempt for +uninspired men.--Reaction of the public to the poet's contempt.--Its +retaliation in jeers.--The poet's wounded vanity.--His morbid +self-consciousness.--His self-imposed solitude.--Enhancement of his +egotism by solitude. + +II. THE MORTAL COIL + +View that genius results from a happy combination of physical +conditions.--The poet's reluctance to embrace such a theory.--His +heredity.--Rank.--Patricians vs. children of the soil.--His +body.--Poetic beauty.--Features expressing alert and delicate +senses.--Contrary conception of poet rapt away from sense.-- +Blindness.--Physique.--Health.--Hypersensibility of invalids.-- +Escape from fleshly bondage afforded by perfect health.--The poet's +sex.--Limitations of the woman poet.--Her claims.--The poet's +habitat.--Vogue of romantic solitude.--Savage environment.--Its +advantages.--Growing popularity of the city poet.--The wanderer.-- +The financial status of the poet.--Poverty as sharpener of +sensibility.--The poet's age.--Vogue of the young poet.--Purity of +youthful emotions.--Early death.--Claims of the aged poet.-- +Contemplation after active life. + +III. THE POET AS LOVER + +The classic conception.--Love as a disturbing factor in +composition.--The romantic conception.--Love the source of +inspiration.--Fusion of intense passion with repose essential to +poetry.--Poetic love and Platonic love synonymous.--Sensual love not +suggestive.--The poet's ascent to ideal love.--Analogy with ascent +described in Plato's _Symposium_.--Discontent with ephemeralness of +passion.--Poetry a means of rendering passion eternal.--Insatiability of +the poet's affections.--Idealization of his mistress.--Ideal beauty the +real object of his love.--Fickleness.--Its justification.--Advantage in +seeing varied aspects of ideal beauty.--Remoteness as an essential +factor in ideal love.--Sluggishness resulting from complete +content.--Aspiration the poetic attitude.--Abstract love-poetry, +consciously addressed to ideal beauty.--Its merits and defects.--The +sensuous as well as the ideal indispensable to poetry. + +IV. THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + +Reticence of great geniuses regarding inspiration.--Mystery of +inspiration.--The poet's curiosity as to his inspired moments.--Wild +desire preceding inspiration.--Sudden arrest rather than satisfaction of +desire.--Ecstasy.--Analogy with intoxication.--Attitude of reverence +during inspired moments.--Feeling that an outside power is +responsible.--Attempts to give a rational account of inspiration.--The +theory of the sub-conscious.--Prenatal memory.--Reincarnation of dead +geniuses.--Varied conceptions of the spirit inspiring song as the Muse, +nature, the spirit of the universe.--The poet's absolute surrender to +this power.--Madness.--Contempt for the limitations of the human +reason.--Belief in infallibility of inspirations.--Limitations of +inspiration.--Transience.--Expression not given from without.--The work +of the poet's conscious intelligence.--Need for making the vision +intelligible.--Quarrel over the value of hard work. + +V. THE POET'S MORALITY + +The poet's reliance upon feeling as sole moral guide.--Attack upon his +morals made by philosophers, puritans, philistines.--Professedly wicked +poets.--Their rarity.--Revolt against mass-feeling.--The aesthetic +appeal of sin.--The morally frail poet, handicapped by susceptibility to +passion.--The typical poet's repudiation of immorality.--Feeling that +virtue and poetry are inseparable.--Minor explanations for this +conviction.--The "poet a poem" theory.--Identity of the good and the +beautiful.--The poet's quarrel with the philistine.--The poet's horror +of restraint.--The philistine's unfairness to the poet's innocence.--The +poet's quarrel with the puritan.--The poet's horror of asceticism.--The +poet's quarrel with the philosopher.--Feeling upon which the poet relies +allied to Platonic intuition. + +VI. THE POET'S RELIGION + +Threefold attack upon the poet's religion.--His lack of theological +temper.--His lack of reverence.--His lack of conformance.--The poet's +defense.--Materialistic belief deadening to poetry.--His idealistic +temper.--His pantheistic leanings.--His reverence for beauty.--His +repudiation of a religion that humbles him.--Compatibility of pride and +pantheism.--The poet's nonconformance.--His occasional perverseness.-- +Inspiring nature of doubt.--The poet's thirst for God.--The occasional +orthodox poet. + +VII. THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + +The poet's alleged uselessness,--His effeminacy.--His virility.--The +poet warrior.--Incompatibility of poets and materialists.--Plato'scharge +that poetry is inferior to actual life.--The concurrence of +certain soldier poets in Plato's charge.--Poetry as an amusement +only.--The value of faithful imitation.--The realists.--Poetry as a +solace.--Poetry a reflection of the ideal essence of things.--Love of +beauty the poet's guide in disentangling ideality from the accidents of +things.--Beauty as truth.--The poet as seer.--The quarrel with the +philosopher.--The truth of beauty vs. cold facts.--Proof of validity of +the poet's truth.--His skill as prophet.--The poet's mission as +reformer.--His impatience with practical reforms.--Belief in essential +goodness of men, since beauty is the essence of things.--Reform a matter +of allowing all things to express their essence.--Enthusiasm for +liberty.--Denial of the war-poet's charge.--Poets the authors of +liberty.--Poets the real rulers of mankind.--The world's appreciation of +their importance.--Their immortality. + +VIII. A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + +Denial that the views of poets on the poet are heterogeneous.--Poets' +identity of purpose in discussing poets.--Apparent contradictions in +views.-Apparent inconsistency in the thought of each poet.--The two-fold +interests of poets.--The poet as harmonizer of sensual and spiritual.-- +Balance of sense and spirit in the poetic temperament.--Injustice to +one element or the other in most literary criticism.--Limitations of +the poet's prose criticism.--Superiority of his critical expressions +in verse.--The poet's importance.--Poetry as a proof of the idealistic +philosophy. + +INDEX + + + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE + + +Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some +entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon +the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection +which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much +more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give +it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of +thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has +blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the +"egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are +but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it +"discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all +kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their +own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the +Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with +thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which +is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again +our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it +is the mortal coil. + +In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of +the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to +the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to +carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless +round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by +simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the +squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, +never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our +dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the +quietude of transcendent beauty. + +But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively +recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an +ineffable vision, but advertisement of the author's importance? His +argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you +because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my +superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the +rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered +consciousness? + +Indeed the poet's circle is likely to appear to us even more viciousthan +that of other men. To be sure, we remember Sir Philip Sidney's +contention, supported by his anecdote of the loquacious horseman, that +men of all callings are equally disposed to vaunt themselves. If the +poet seems especially voluble about his merits, this may be owing to the +fact that, words being the tools of his trade, he is more apt than other +men in giving expression to his self-importance. But our specific +objection to the poet is not met by this explanation. Even the horseman +does not expect panegyrics of his profession to take the place of +horseshoes. The inventor does not issue an autobiography in lieu of a +new invention. The public would seem justified in reminding the poet +that, having a reasonable amount of curiosity about human nature, it +will eagerly devour the poet's biography, properly labeled, but only +after he has forgotten himself long enough to write a poem that will +prove his genius, and so lend worth to the perusal of his idiosyncratic +records, and his judgments on poetic composition. + +The first impulse of our revulsion from the self-infatuated poet is to +confute him with the potent name of Aristotle, and show him his doom +foreordained in the book of poetic Revelations. "The poet should speak +as little as possible in his own person," we read, "for it is not this +that makes him an imitator." [Footnote: _Poetics_, 1460 a.] One cannot +too much admire Aristotle's canniness in thus nipping the poet's egotism +in the bud, for he must have seen clearly that if the poet began to talk +in his own person, he would soon lead the conversation around to +himself, and that, once launched on that inexhaustible subject, he would +never be ready to return to his original theme. + +We may regret that we have not Aristotle's sanction for condemning also +extra-poetical advertisements of the poet's personality, as a hindrance +to our seeing the ideal world through his poetry. In certain moods one +feels it a blessing that we possess no romantic traditions of Homer, to +get in the way of our passing impartial judgment upon his works. Our +intimate knowledge of nineteenth century poets has been of doubtful +benefit to us. Wordsworth has shaken into what promises to be his +permanent place among the English poets much more expeditiously than has +Byron. Is this not because in Wordsworth's case the reader is not +conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from +purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us +the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we +to determine whether his sonnet, _When I Have Fears,_ is great poetry or +not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love +for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard? + +Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping +generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his +contention: + +Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and +we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make +his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of +their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether +these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating +their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney +Colvin, _John Keats,_ p. 478.] + +If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in _Blackwoods,_ we may be +more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by +Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and +Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows: + +Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters into one's +soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its +subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose +their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire +me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!".... I will cut all +this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.... I +don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to +say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have +them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. [Footnote: _Ibid.,_ p. 253.] + +If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing +their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much +better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into +the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's +sonnets, + + With this key + Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more + _Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he. +[Footnote: _House._] + +Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less +the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this +our contention? + +It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are +practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of +themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron, +concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself--oh, that accursed +selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in +scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E. +Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather +hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself +at the reader's head. + +It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration +that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself +be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to +confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the +most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he +is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, +the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical +and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no +identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.] +The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a +luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself, +to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as +compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the +self-obliterating splendor of his genius: + + In poetry there is but one supreme, + Though there are many angels round his throne, + Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid. +[Footnote: _On Shakespeare_.] + +But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, +the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What +right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper +to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the +legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that +we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure +obscure our view? + +Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon +one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old +dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic +mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of +immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet +should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, +which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in +this world. + +Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way +through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the +opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and +Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying +their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet +should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, +he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we +maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone +of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have +no competitors to dispute his place as chief character. + +At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic +poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental +entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality +cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual +world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by +his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet +cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals +nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable +from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the +other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be +embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_, +"This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the +ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: sec. 251.] Now, +whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, +one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, +personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures +of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization +of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered +to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the +habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge: + + In our life alone does nature live, + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd. +[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._] + +The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; +his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the +philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own +toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret +of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's +personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his +conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us, + + There was a child went forth every day, + And the first object he looked upon, that object he became. + +Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet +called _The Love of Narcissus:_ + + Like him who met his own eyes in the river, + The poet trembles at his own long gaze + That meets him through the changing nights and days + From out great Nature; all her waters quiver + With his fair image facing him forever: + The music that he listens to betrays + His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways + His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor. + His dreams are far among the silent hills; + His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain; + With winds at night vague recognition thrills + His lonely heart with piercing love and pain; + He knows again his mirth in mountain rills, + His weary tears that touch him in the rain. + +Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the +poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in +poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into +realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent +mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when +we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold +representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses +his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist +gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against +"your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a +theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great +feat." [Footnote: _Poem Outlines._] + +In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse +may point to the _Canterbury Tales,_ and show us Chaucer ambling +along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of +distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our +view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet +is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern +poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all +the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the +destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached. + +We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of +Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that +criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the +personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines, + + Great poet, 'twas thy art, + To know thyself, and in thyself to be + Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, + Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart + Can make of man. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent +objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own +personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one +character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his +presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his +representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent +criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of +his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. +"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January +13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into +prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never +have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a +poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And +Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet +than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to +show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is +the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert +Browning, September 9, 1845.] + +"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes +enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of +Verlaine, "_c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme_." Of course if one +concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, +the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the +poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that +civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure +to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler +way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's +word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is +nature seen through a temperament." + +Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, _Mimeseis_, did mean "seeing +through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would +have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament." +Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind were +like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things. Modern +poets, on the other hand, are inclined to grant that a person has poetic +temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window, transforming +all that is seen through it, if by any chance something _is_ seen +through it. + +If the modern poet sees the world colored red or green or violet by his +personality, it is well for the interests of truth, we must admit, that +he make it clear to us that his nature is the transforming medium, but +how comes it that he fixes his attention so exclusively upon the colors +of things, for which his own nature is responsible, and ignores the +forms of things, which are not affected by him? How comes it that the +colored lights thrown on nature by the stained windows of his soul are +so important to him that he feels justified in painting for us, +notnature, but stained-glass windows? + +In part this is, as has often been said, a result of the individualizing +trend of modern art. The broad general outlines of things have been +"done" by earlier artists, and there is no chance for later artists to +vary them, but the play of light and shade offers infinite possibilities +of variation. If one poet shows us the world highly colored by his +personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their +attention caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw +upon it. The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will +be interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious," +Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet +otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.] + +This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of +course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more +plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One +wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his +inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of +creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration +is surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that +this accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in +his work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the +lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I +know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the +musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an +assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure. +Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend +of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme, +chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group, +Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently +portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that +the mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be +paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to +ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all +other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is +mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to +forget that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, +language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, +accordingly, to be dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" +for his inspiration. + +At least this mystery surrounding his creations has much to do with +removing the artist from the comparative freedom from self-consciousness +that we ascribe to the general run of men. In addition it removes him +from the comparative humility of other thinkers, who are wont to think +of their discoveries as following inevitably upon their data, so that +they themselves deserve credit only as they are persistent and +painstaking in following the clues. The genesis of Sir Isaac Newton's +discovery has been compared to poetical inspiration; yet even in this +case the difference is apparent, and Newton did not identify himself +with the universe he conceived, as the poet is in the habit of doing. + +Not being able to account for his inspirations, the poet seems to be +driven inevitably either into excessive humility, since he feels that +his words are not his own, or into inordinate pride, since he feels that +he is able to see and express without volition truths that other men +cannot glimpse with the utmost effort. He may disclaim all credit for +his performance, in the words of a nineteenth-century verse-writer: + + This is the end of the book + Written by God. + I am the earth he took, + I am the rod, + The iron and wood which he struck + With his sounding rod. +[Footnote: L. E. Mitchell, _Written at the End of a Book._] + +a statement that provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such +amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is +really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious +states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist +"experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is +considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, +not to one's self, but to the Almighty. + +The minor American poets in the middle of the last century are often +found exhorting one another to humility, quite after the prayer-meeting +tradition. Bitter is their denunciation of the poet's arrogance: + + A man that's proud--vile groveller in the dust, + Dependent on the mercy of his God + For every breath. +[Footnote: B. Saunders, _To Chatterton._] + +Again they declare that the poet should be + + Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy._] + +telling him, + + Think not of thine own self, +[Footnote: Richard Gilder, _To the Poet._] + +adding, + + Always, O bard, humility is power. +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Poet If on a Lasting Fame._] + +One is reminded of Mrs. Heep's repeated adjuration, "Be 'umble, Ury," +and the likeness is not lessened when we find them ingratiatingly +sidling themselves into public favor. We hear them timidly inquiring of +their inspiration, + + Shall not the violet bloom? +[Footnote: Mrs. Evans, _Apologetic._] + +and pleading with their critics, + + Lightly, kindly deal, + My buds were culled amid bright dews + In morn of earliest youth. +[Footnote: Lydia M. Reno, _Preface to Early Buds._] + +At times they resort to the mixed metaphor to express their innocuous +unimportance, declaring, + + A feeble hand essays + To swell the tide of song, +[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, _Invocation._] + +and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness: + + Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts, + Win in each heart and memory a home. +[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, _Dedication._] + +But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a +librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be +absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere +expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have +taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the +genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, _In a Dull Uncertain +Brain_; Whittier, _To my Namesake_; Sidney Lanier, _Ark of the Future_; +Oliver Wendell Holmes, _The Last Reader_; Bayard Taylor, _L'Envoi_; +Robert Louis Stevenson, _To Dr. Hake_; Francis Thompson, _To My +Godchild_.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong +in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the +habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so +sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of +himself: + + I am nae poet, in a sense, + But just a rhymer like, by chance, + And hae to learning nae pretense, + Yet what the matter? + Whene'er my muse does on me glance, + I jingle at her. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik._] + +Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the +title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about +the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the +minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the +average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who +casually disposes of the poet's immortality: + + Let but the verse befit a hero's fame; + Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name. +[Footnote: _Introduction to Don Roderick._] + +Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's +conceit, assuring him: + + Ye are not great because creation drew + Large revelations round your earliest sense, + Nor bright because God's glory shines for you. +[Footnote: _Mountaineer and Poet_.] + +But in her other poetry, notably in _Aurora Leigh_ and _A Vision of +Poets,_ she amply avows her sense of the preeminence of the singer, as +well as of his song. + +While it is easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the +nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical +spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it +is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. +Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are +likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a +friend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life +engenders pride and egotism!' True--I know it does: but this pride and +egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could, +so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23, +1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is +completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of +composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and +preserving it. + +Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his +verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic +type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long +tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it +appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a +beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor, + + Well I remember how you smiled + To see me write your name upon + The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child, + You think you're writing upon stone!" + I have since written what no tide + Shall ever wash away, what men + Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide, + And find Ianthe's name again, + +or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, _Ad Amicam_, which expresses +the author's purpose to + + Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time, + Telling him that he is too insolent + Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme, + Whereof to one because thou life hast given, + The other yet shall give a life to thee, + Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven, + And compassed weaker immortality, + +or Yeats' lines _Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved_, +wherein he takes pride in the reflection: + + Weigh this song with the great and their pride; + I made it out of a mouthful of air; + Their children's children shall say they have lied. + +But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the +most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony, + + Yet to me I feel + That an internal brightness is vouchsafed + That must not die, +[Footnote: _Home at Grasmere_.] + +or in Walt Whitman's injunction: + + Recorders ages hence, + Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive + Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me. +[Footnote: See also, _Long Long Hence_.] + +Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the +importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the +clutches of the old-fashioned habit of apology, to be sure, [Footnote: +See _My Country_.]--perhaps this is one reason the radicals are so +opposed to him; but in the ranks of the radicals themselves we find very +few retaining any doubt of themselves. [Footnote: Exceptions are Jessie +Rittenhouse, _Patrius_; Lawrence Houseman, _Mendicant Rhymes_; +Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Poor Faltering Rhymes_.] Self-assertion +is especially characteristic of their self-appointed leader, Ezra Pound, +in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom +he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote: +_Lustra_.] A typical assertion is that in _Salutation the Second_, + + How many will come after me, + Singing as well as I sing, none better. + +There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the +present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile +immortality" [Footnote: _Refuge._] or James Stephens' exultation in +_A Tune Upon a Reed,_ + + Not a piper can succeed + When I lean against a tree, + Blowing gently on a reed, + +and in _The Rivals,_ where he boasts over a bird, + + I was singing all the time, + Just as prettily as he, + About the dew upon the lawn, + And the wind upon the lea; + So I didn't listen to him + As he sang upon a tree. + +If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded +monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the +nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further +than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have +needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German +idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of +the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its +rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another +century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the +fashion of _A Song of Myself:_ + + I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin, + Hoping to cease not till death. + +Whitman is conscious of--perhaps even exaggerates--the novelty of his +task, + + Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited + itself (the great pride of man in himself) + Chanter of personality. + +While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of +their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not +have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older +singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted +in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The +favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, +Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as +proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by +following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's +characterization of Byron in _Julian and Maddalo_, + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light, + +has been followed by many expressions of the same thought, at first +wholly sympathetic, lately, it must be confessed, somewhat ironical. + +Consciousness of partnership with God in composition naturally lifts the +poet, in his own estimation, at least, to a super-human level. The myth +of Apollo disguised as a shepherd strikes him as being a happy +expression of his divinity. [Footnote: See James Russell Lowell, _The +Shepherd of King Admetus._] Thus Emerson calls singers + + Blessed gods in servile masks. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +The hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a +Poet_ soars to a monotheistic conception of his powers, asserting + + Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness + Is God. I suffer. I am God. + +Another poet-hero is characterized: + + He would reach the source of light, + And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might. +[Footnote: Harvey Rice, _The Visionary_ (1864). + +In recent years a few poets have modestly disclaimed equality with God. +See William Rose Benet, _Imagination,_ and Joyce Kilmer, _Trees._ The +kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of _The Lonely Poet_ +(1919), by John Hall Wheelock.] + +On the other hand, recent poets' hatred of orthodox religion has led +them to idealize the Evil One, and regard him as no unworthy rival as +regards pride. One of Browning's poets is "prouder than the devil." +[Footnote: _Waring._] Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin +to Milton through his Satan's pride." [Footnote: Sonnet, _To +Chatterton._] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares, + + You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell, + And keep the lowest circle to yourself. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_ (1911).] + +There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over +the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer +takes the trouble to declare, + + Artists truly great + Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange + Their fate for that of any potentate. +[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.] + +Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an +attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to +say, + + Think not, although my aim is art, + I cannot toy with empire easily. +[Footnote: _Nero_.] + +Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: +See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A +Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a +disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example +and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt +Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the +street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to +earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems +absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity +in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The +Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment, + + No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I + Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die. + +It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, +singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that +he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude +harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare +endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young +friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man +from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame +seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. +The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their +art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for +Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of +Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in +_Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives +indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet: + + He, from above descending, stooped to touch + The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though + It scarce deserved his verse. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of +late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young +Rice: + + I have felt the ineffable sting + Of life, though I be art's valet. + I have painted the cloud and the clod, + Who should have possessed the earth. +[Footnote: _Limitations_.] + +It depressed Alan Seeger: + + I, who, conceived beneath another star, + Had been a prince and played with life, + Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far + From the fair things my faith has merited. +[Footnote: _Liebestod_.] + +It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive: + + Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams, + Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at, + And know we be its rulers, though but dreams. +[Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] + +Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is +made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide. + +The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere +in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it +seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate +him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that +his genius is judged by a public that is vastly inferior to him. This +galling thought usually drives him into an attitude of indifference or +of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at +the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is +to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his +brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his +worth.[Footnote: See _To Darwin_.] But the average poet of the last +century and a half goes a step beyond this attitude, and appears to feel +that there is something contemptible about popularity. Literary +arrogance seems far from characteristic of Burns, yet he tells us how, +in a mood of discouragement, + + I backward mused on wasted time, + How I had spent my youthful prime, + And done naething + But stringin' blithers up in rhyme + For fools to sing. +[Footnote: _The Vision._] + +Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most +thoroughgoing expression of this contempt for the public. The sentiment +in _Childe Harold_ is one that Byron never tires of harping on: + I have not loved the world, nor the world me; + I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed + To its idolatries a patient knee. + +And this attitude of Byron's has been adopted by all his disciples, who +delight in picturing his scorn: + + With terror now he froze the cowering blood, + And now dissolved the heart in tenderness, + Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself, + But back into his soul retired alone, + Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously + On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +Of the other romantic poets, Sir Walter Scott alone remains on good +terms with the public, expressing a child's surprise and delight over +the substantial checks he is given in exchange for his imaginings. But +Shelley starts out with a chip on his shoulder, in the very +advertisements of his poems expressing his unflattering opinion of +The public's judgment, and Keats makes it plain that his own criticisms +concern him far more than those of other men. + +The consciously aristocratic, sniffing attitude toward the public, which +ran its course during Victoria's reign, is ushered in by Landor, who +confesses, + + I know not whether I am proud, + But this I know, I hate the crowd, + Therefore pray let me disengage + My verses from the motley page, + Where others, far more sure to please + Pour forth their choral song with ease. + +The same gentlemanly indifference to his plebeian readers is diffused +all through Matthew Arnold's writing, of course. He casually disposes of +popularity: + + Some secrets may the poet tell + For the world loves new ways; + To tell too deep ones is not well,-- + It knows not what he says. +[Footnote: See _In Memory of Obermann._] + +Mrs. Browning probably has her own success in mind when she makes the +young poetess, Aurora Leigh, recoil from the fulsome praise of her +readers. Browning takes the same attitude in _Sordello,_ contrasting +Eglamor, the versifier who servilely conformed to the taste of the mob, +with Sordello, the true poet, who despised it. In _Popularity_, Browning +returns to the same theme, of the public's misplaced praises, and in +_Pacchiarotto_ he outdoes himself in heaping ridicule upon his readers. +Naturally the coterie of later poets who have prided themselves on their +unique skill in interpreting Browning have been impressed by his +contempt for his readers. Perhaps they have even exaggerated it. No less +contemptuous of his readers than Browning was that other Victorian, so +like him in many respects, George Meredith. + +It would be interesting to make a list of the zoological metaphors by +which the Victorians expressed their contempt for the public. Landor +characterized their criticisms as "asses' kicks aimed at his head." +[Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Life of Swinburne_, p. 103.] Browning +alternately represented his public cackling and barking at him. +[Footnote: See Thomas J. Wise, Letters, Second Series, Vol. 2, p. 52.] +George Meredith made a dichotomy of his readers into "summer flies" and +"swinish grunters." [Footnote: _My Theme_.] Tennyson, being no +naturalist, simply named the public the "many-headed beast." [Footnote: +_In Memoriam_.] + +In America there has been less of this sort of thing openly expressed by +genuine poets. Emerson is fairly outspoken, telling us, in _The +Poet_, how the public gapes and jeers at a new vision. But one must +go to our border-line poets to find the feeling most candidly put into +words. Most of them spurn popularity, asserting that they are too +worthwhile to be appreciated. They may be even nauseated by the slight +success they manage to achieve, and exclaim, + + Yet to know + That we create an Eden for base worms! + +If the consciousness of recent writers is dominated by contempt for +mankind at large, such a mood is expressed with more caution than +formerly. Kipling takes men's stupidity philosophically. [Footnote: See +_The Story of Ung._] Edgar Lee Masters uses a fictional character +as a mask for his remarks on the subject. [Footnote: See _Having His +Way._] Other poets have expressed themselves with a degree of mildness. +[Footnote: See Watts-Dunton, _Apollo in Paris;_ James Stephens, _The +Market;_ Henry Newbolt, _An Essay in Criticism;_ William Rose Benet, +_People._] But of course Ezra Pound is not to be suppressed. He +inquires, + + Will people accept them? + (i.e., these songs) + As a timorous wench from a centaur + (or a centurion) + Already they flee, howling in terror + * * * * * + Will they be touched with the verisimilitude? + Their virgin stupidity is untemptable. + +He adds, + + I beg you, my friendly critics, + Do not set about to procure me an audience. + +Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public, + + Salute them with your thumbs to your noses. + +It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in +another poem, + + May my poems be printed this week? + +The naivete of this last question brings up insistently a perplexing +problem. If the poet despises his readers, why does he write? He may +perhaps evade this question by protesting, with Tennyson, + + I pipe but as the linnets do, + And sing because I must. + +But why does he publish? If he were strictly logical, surely he would do +as the artist in Browning's _Pictor Ignotus,_ who so shrank from +having his pictures come into contact with fools, that he painted upon +hidden, moldering walls, thus renouncing all possibility of fame. But +one doubts whether such renunciation has been made often, especially in +the field of poetry. Rossetti buried his poems, of course, but their +resurrection was not postponed till the Last Judgment. Other writers +have coyly waved fame away, but have gracefully yielded to their +friends' importunities, and have given their works to the world. When +one reads such expressions as Byron's; + + Fame is the thirst of youth,--but I am not + So young as to regard men's frown or smile + As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot, +[Footnote: _Childe Harold._] + +one wonders. Perhaps the highest genius takes absolutely no account of +fame, as the sun-god asserts in Watts-Dunton's poem, _Apollo in Paris:_ + + I love the song-born poet, for that he + Loves only song--seeks for love's sake alone + Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown + To feudaries of fame, are known to thee. +[Footnote: See also Coventry Patmore, from _The Angel in the House,_ "I +will not Hearken Blame or Praise"; Francis Carlin, _The Home Song_ +(1918).] + +But other poets, with the utmost inconsistency, have admitted that they +find the thought of fame very sweet. [Footnote: See Edward Young, _Love +of Fame;_ John Clare, _Song's Eternity, Idle Fame, To John Milton;_ +Bulwer Lytton, _The Desire of Fame;_ James Gates Percival, _Sonnet 379;_ +Josephine Peston Peabody, _Marlowe._] Keats dwells upon the thought of +it. [Footnote: See the _Epistle to My Brother George._] Browning shows +both of his poet heroes concerned over the question. In _Pauline_ the +speaker confesses, + + I ne'er sing + But as one entering bright halls, where all + Will rise and shout for him. + +In _Sordello,_ again, Browning analyzes the desire for fame: + + Souls like Sordello, on the contrary, + Coerced and put to shame, retaining will, + Care little, take mysterious comfort still, + But look forth tremblingly to ascertain + If others judge their claims not urged in vain, + And say for them their stifled thoughts aloud. + So they must ever live before a crowd: + --"Vanity," Naddo tells you. + +Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame, + Nor can dispense + With Persia for an audience. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +Can it be that when the poet renounces fame, we must concur with Austin +Dobson's paraphrase of his meaning, + + But most, because the grapes are sour, + Farewell, renown? +[Footnote: _Farewell Renown._] + +Perhaps the poet is saved from inconsistency by his touching confidence +that in other times and places human nature is less stupid and +unappreciative than it proves itself in his immediate audience. He +reasons that in times past the public has shown sufficient insight to +establish the reputation of the master poets, and that history will +repeat itself. Several writers have stated explicitly that their quarrel +with humanity is not to be carried beyond the present generation. Thus +Arnold objects to his time because it is aesthetically dead. [Footnote: +See _Persistency of Poetry._] But elsewhere he objects because it shows +signs of coming to life, [Footnote: See _Bacchanalia._] so it is hard to +determine how our grandfathers could have pleased him. Similarly +unreasonable discontent has been expressed by later poets with our own +time. [Footnote: See William Ernest Henley, _The Gods are Dead;_ Edmund +Gosse, _On Certain Critics;_ Samuel Waddington, _The Death of Song;_ +John Payne, _Double Ballad of the Singers of the Time_(1906).] Only +occasionally a poet rebukes his brethren for this carping attitude. Mrs. +Browning protests, in _Aurora Leigh,_ + + 'Tis ever thus + With times we live in,--evermore too great + To be apprehended near.... + I do distrust the poet who discerns + No character or glory in his times, + And trundles back his soul five hundred years. +[Footnote: See Robert Browning, Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12, +1845.] + +And Kipling is a notorious defender of the present generation, but these +two stand almost alone. [Footnote: See also James Elroy Flecker, _Oak +and Olive;_ Max Ehrmann, _Give Me Today._] + +Several mythical explanations for the stupidity of the poet's own times +have been offered in verse. Browning says that poetry is like wine; it +must age before it grows sweet. [Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto +Volume._] Emerson says the poet's generation is deafened by the thunder +of his voice. [Footnote: _Solution._] A minor writer says that poetry +must be written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one +before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, _The Way of +the World_ (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is +worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, _A Poet's +Question._] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the +poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by +Shelley, in the _Defense of Poetry:_ + + No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the + jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to + all time, must be composed of his peers. + +Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not +the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost +forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition +to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much +farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most +nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words, +as + + Antidotes + Of medicated music, answering for + Mankind's forlornest uses. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese._] + +And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose. +Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as +Browning did, + + My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste + On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste! + A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick-- + I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath, + Henceforward with nettle-broth. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume._] + +Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are +hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly +to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry +hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a +stick. + +The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating. +They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does +not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, +and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his +fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious +circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the +belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result +his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public +more deliberately expressed. + +At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to +have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival +from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the _Castle +of Indolence,_ Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also _To Mr. Thomson, +Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem,_ by H. Hill.] and Thomas +Hood [Footnote: See _To the Late Lord Mayor._] both concerned +themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that +patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the _Ode +Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle._] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, +offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because +of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son. +[Footnote: _The Patron._] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for +the poet, in _Lady Geraldine's Courtship,_ and upheld the nobility of +the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him +appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified +contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose +manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People +are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to +cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there +have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who +have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of +circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in +thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See _Common Sense and +Genius,_ and _Rhymes by the Road._] Later libelers have been, usually, +writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the +course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, _The Green +Carnation,_ which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets. +[Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's _Patience_ made an even greater +sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English +ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim, + + I say an artist + Who does not wholly give himself to art, + Who has about him nothing marked or strange, + But tries to suit himself to all the world + Will ne'er attain to greatness. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo._] + +Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his +conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder +insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on +thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss +him. He repeats the world's query: + + How shall we know him? + Ye shall know him not, + Till, ended hate and scorn, + To the grave he's borne. +[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._] + +Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original +attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring + + Of these states the poet is the equable man, + Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, + fail of their full returns. +[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] + +As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the +poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet +resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the +wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth +telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the +tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's +delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys +and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G. +Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._] + +To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded +his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in +on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, +_More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an +ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new +singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for +his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is +doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who +does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of +beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: +Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ +Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The +Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, +_Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ +George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); +S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New +Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An +Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts- +Dunton, _The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming +Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The +Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous +designs of the public. + +A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who +exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the +Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently +believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the +maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are +described: + + Where the heart of each should beat, + There seemed a wound instead of it, + From whence the blood dropped to their feet. + +The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally +shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit +leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter +waters, + + And toads seen crawling on his hand, + And clinging bats, but dimly scanned, + Full in his face their wings expand. + A paleness took the poet's cheek; + "Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek + The lady's will with utterance meek: + "Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:" + (And this time she spoke cheerfully) + Behooves thee know world's cruelty. + +The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which +to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. +From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems +of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides. +[Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's +Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our +poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." +[Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great +renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt +from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously +represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging, +imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, +aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare, +Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante +[Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and +Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_.] and +Tasso [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Tasso_; Shelley, _Song for +Tasso_; James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_.] have received most +attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of +several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's +poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred +Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.] + +Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those +of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement +who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme +youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that +caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody +on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James +Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_; +Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's +Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by +Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an +indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's +faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all +geniuses: + + Alas! what snows are shed + Upon thy laurelled head, + Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs! + Malignity lets none + Approach the Delphic throne; + A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's + hundred tongues. +[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.] + +The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The +centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse. + +Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, +remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the +more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, +[Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and +_Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_ +(1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by +him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought, + + The Pythian of the age one arrow drew + And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow, + They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low. +[Footnote: _Adonais._] + +The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as +formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his +critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far toward +giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the +youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._] +brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but +for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One +is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile +criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile +self-characterization into his mouth: + + I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse + They hounded on to death's untimely doom. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).] + +In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is +expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his +enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized +as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... never content till +they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they +worship her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, +1845.] + +With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have +raised the most indignant storm of protest is Shelley. Several poets, as +the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr. +Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Shelley almost part of +their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Shelley's life warrant +such sympathy. Then too, Shelley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, +is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in +his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for +Shelley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his +scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human +race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches +for the sincerity of his statement, in the _Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty_: + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. + +Accordingly Shelley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden +hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets +have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: +See E. C. Stedman, _Ariel_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Alfred +Austin, _Shelley's Death_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _The General Public_.] + +The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts +of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the +mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one + + Who in another's fate now wept his own. + +Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor +in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate +of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of +popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne +springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that +the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these +defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the +persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent +crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet +is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, +it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century +wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a +personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the +romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, +Joaquin Miller, _I Shall Remember_, and _Vale_; Francis Ledwidge, _The +Visitation of Peace_.] + +Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose +of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the _Canterbury +Tales_, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in +keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in +the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction +so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the +plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole +social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this +friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his +ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American +public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed +it." [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] Emerson tries to get on +common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to +some extent,[Footnote: See _The Enchanter_.] and it is consistent +with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as +Emerson: + + There cannot be confusion of sound forgot, + A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry. +[Footnote: _Pandeen._] + +But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, +"Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley +have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. +W. Holmes, _To Longfellow_; P. H. Hayne, _To Henry W. Longfellow_; T. B. +Read, _A Leaf from the Past_; E. C. Stedman, _J. G. H._; P. L. Dunbar, +_James Whitcombe Riley_; J. W. Riley, _Rhymes of Ironquill_.] for their +promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the +part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who +commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the +public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages +of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the +level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches. + +There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the +hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples +of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, +because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone +is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is +essential to the poet. In the _Prelude_ he relates how, from early +childhood, + + I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, + The self-sufficing power of solitude. + +Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse: + + These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk + Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night. +[Footnote: _Personal Talk_.] + +So he describes the poet's character: + + He is retired as noontide dew + Or fountain in a noonday grove. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Epitaph_.] + +In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, +and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries. +Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed +none." [Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] Emerson expressed the same mood +frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind: + + Think me not unkind and rude + That I walk alone in grove and glen; + I go to the god of the wood, + To fetch his word to men. +[Footnote: _The Apology_.] + +He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet: + + Men consort in camp and town, + But the poet dwells alone. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of +the poet's personality: + + I have no brothers and no peers + And the dearest interferes; + When I would spend a lonely day, + Sun and moon are in my way. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find +his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this +picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, +usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is +characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the +stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, +even while his heart thirsts for companionship.[Footnote: See John +Clare, _The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am_; James Gates Percival, +_The Bard_; Joseph Rodman Drake, _Brorix_ (1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade, +_My Heritage_; Whittier, _The Tent on the Beach_; Mrs. Frances Gage, +_The Song of the Dreamer_ (1867); R. H. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Abram J. +Ryan, _Poets_; Richard H. Dana, _The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet_; +Frances Anne Kemble, _The Fellowship of Genius_ (1889); F. S. Flint, +_Loneliness_(1909); Lawrence Hope, _My Paramour was Loneliness_ (1905); +Sara Teasdale, _Alone_.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last +century, asserting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet +declares: + + For me, I'd rather live + With this weak human heart and yearning blood, + Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls. + More brave, more beautiful than myself must be + The man whom I can truly call my friend. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +So the poet is limited to the companionship of rare souls, who make up +to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this +compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, +because the affections that most people expend on many human +relationships are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the +world's indifference to him, Shelley takes comfort in the assurance of +such communion, saying to Mary, + + If men must rise and stamp with fury blind + On his pure name who loves them--thou and I, + Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity + Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,-- + Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by, + That burn from year to year with inextinguished light. +[Footnote: Introduction to _The Revolt of Islam_.] + +But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's +love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his +loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and +discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most +nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as +Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: +The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, +however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth +century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal +comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the +Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas +at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from +Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes' +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the +gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in +acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his +epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal +conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish +among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no +glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The +closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary +verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an +extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for +Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in +Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the +philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is +the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists +are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from +unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and +Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on +some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the +Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_. +For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, +_To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding +Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).] + +Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships +in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so +notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were +the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his +sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines: + + Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, + And cast them into shape some other day; + Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, + And shattered with the fall, I stand alone. + +The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was +of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is +a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel +it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. +(Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and +more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate +that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which +understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the +premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for +their celebration in verse, from classic times onward. + +Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and +transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest +of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been +written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, +in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost +obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a +Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." +Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says, +"The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his +own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told, + + He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. + +Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas +Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem +he says of himself, + + He came the last, neglected and apart, + +and describes himself as + + companionless + As the last cloud of an expiring storm, + Whose thunder is its knell. + +Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's +lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in +_The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all +human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in +isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without +friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A +Renegade Poet on the Poet:_ + + He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no + company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, + and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority + of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument + I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should + ever do as other men. + +One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his +isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something +beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, +however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, +indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and +characterizes himself, + + I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, + Love their love or mine own love to them teach, + A bastard barred from their inheritance, + * * * * * + In antre of this lowly body set, + Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he +finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually +draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable +consequence of his genius,--that he + + Spares but the cloudy border of his base + To the foiled searching of mortality. +[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, _Shakespeare_.] + +The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, +when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet +he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must +exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, +for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy, +_To Shakespeare_.] + +Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure +perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds +introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride +breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility +and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation +breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second +revolution of the egocentric circle. + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE MORTAL COIL + + If I might dwell where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + +sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There +is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude,--the same inconsistency that +lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees +this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,--and yet it is to +him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it +as from a prison house. + +One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the +flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler +spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a +derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all--a woman Sappho, +suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of +us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can +consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material +endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that +there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the +mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him +an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal +on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine +his spirit. + +Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to +attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his +grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in +poems even of such bulk as the _Prelude_ one does not find a complete +analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into +a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story +told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the +only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the +restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement +and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, +but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In _Aurora +Leigh_ one might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism +of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her +English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in +giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, +if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of +qualities derived from more remote ancestors. + +The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical +poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, +[Footnote: See _Thalassius_.] since it typifies the union in the +poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is +lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the +poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful +strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In +the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption +in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete +otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness. + +There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; +this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. +Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything +patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben +Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of +the woman who was "no churl" as + + A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes, + And white hair blown back softly from a face + Etherially fierce, as might have looked + Cassandra in old age. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. +Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. +[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; +Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; +J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; +Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, +_The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of +woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is +hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while +she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's +adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D. +Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might +almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage +indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as +making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A +Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.] + +The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted +upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her +Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley +Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert +and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a +double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of +versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in +heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's +career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject +of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was +Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said +to the little Viola, + + If angels have hereditary wings, + If not by Salic law is handed down + The poet's laurel crown, + To thee, born in the purple of the throne, + The laurel must belong. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in +which they grow. + +What have poets to say on the larger question of their social +inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the +nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the +varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. +The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than +to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the +genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the +beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new +exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that +the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage. + +Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of +opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, +confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd +guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble +of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns +his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of +"Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. +[Footnote: See _Lord Burleigh_, Eleanore in _A Becket_, and the Count in +_The Falcon_.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the +two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, +yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In +Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political +leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his +hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are _The +Troubadour_, Praed; _The King's Tragedy_, Rossetti; _David, Charles di +Trocca_, Cale Young Rice.] + +None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, +and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a +tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer +who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin +was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century +poet as John Hughes, in lines _On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal +Man_, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the +breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See _The +Patron_.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] also, seem +not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes +of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes +into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is +merely personal: + + Gie me ae spark of nature's fire! + That's a' the learning I desire. + Then, though I drudge through dub and mire + At plough or cart, + My muse, though homely in attire, + May touch the heart. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given +sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with +"nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns +see Thomas Campbell, _Ode to Burns_; Whittier, _Burns_; Joaquim Miller, +_Burns and Byron_; William Bennett, _To the Memory of Burns_; A. B. +Street, _Robbie Burns_ (1867); O. W. Holmes, _The Burns Centennial_; +Richard Realf, _Burns_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_ (1868); Shelley Halleck, +_Burns_.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few +of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his +belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found +in the character of the old pedlar, in the _Excursion_. The origin of +Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on +caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his +Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is presumably modeled after +Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching +realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry +with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even +while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: +Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is +Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the +Golden Shoe_; Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_.] Here and there, the +poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last +century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare, _The +Peasant Poet_; Mrs. Browning, _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_; Robert +Buchanan, _Poet Andrew_; T. E. Browne, _Tommy Big Eyes_; Whittier, +_Eliot_; J. G. Saxe, _Murillo and his Slave_.] And at present, with the +penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight +revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are +popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness +than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John +Davidson, _A Ballad in Blank Verse_; Vachel Lindsay, _The North Star +Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son_; John Masefield, _Dauber_; Francis +Carlin, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_ (1918).] Still, for the most part, the +present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of +indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than +caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would +probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning, + + What if men have found + Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll + Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul? +[Footnote: Henry van Dyke, _Sonnet_.] + +If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict +the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most +minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the +poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? +since singers tell + + us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth, + Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar. +[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.] + +as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to +frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses +it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look +for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not +troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the +phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their +father Spenser, who argues, + + So every spirit, as it is most pure, + And hath in it the more of heavenly light, + So it the fairer body doth procure + To habit in, and it more fairly dight + With cheerful grace, and amiable sight; + For of the soul the body form doth take, + For soul is form, and doth the body make. +[Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.] + +What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy +Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed +Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable +geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like +the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which + + Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive +Plant_.] + +Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his +pronouncement, admitting-- + + Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind + Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd, + Either by chance, against the course of kind, + Or through unaptness of the substance found, + Which it assumed of some stubborn ground + That will not yield unto her form's direction, + But is preformed with some foul imperfection. + +But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does +Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and +insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on +Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that +she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from +Alcaeus' line, + + Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho. + +As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of +his extant portrait: + + A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of + Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright, + Low-lidded now, and luminous as love, + Anon soul-searching, ominous as night, + Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps + Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps. +[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth, _At the Mermaid_ (1889).] + +The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their +brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for +geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of +his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti, _Sonnet on Chatterton_.] +has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. +Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies +of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their +imaginations inevitably turn to + + The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair, + The lean, athletic body, deftly planned + To carry that swift soul of fire and air; + The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand + Heroic shoulders! +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a +belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face +of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire +of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have +encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes +Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever +saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the +invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in +all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident +that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into +existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the +frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made +beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert +Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, _Rupert +Brooke_.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate +days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. +Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be +led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of +the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer +to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage. + +We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the +romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made +with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a +conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of +allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication +that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary +sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic +might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by +no means universal;--that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly +bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's +_Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the +latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy, + + He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love, + Is all that these eyes can adore. + He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love, + And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore. + +Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line +with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, +likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the +brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River, + + Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street + For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk, +[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.] + +for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" +of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable. + +Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and +assures us, + + Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped, +[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.] + +but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic +topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing +features? + +Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably +wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, +there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture +of Keats, + + The real Adonis, with the hymeneal + Fresh vernal buds half sunk between + His youthful curls. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero, + + A lovely youth, + With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_ (1898); Frances Fuller, _To Edith May_ (1851); +Metta Fuller, _Lines to a Poetess_ (1851).] Someone has pointed out +that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the +heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the +same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the +poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it. + +"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, _On the Death of +James Hogg_; Browning, _Sordello_, _By the Fireside_; Mrs. Browning, +_Aurora Leigh_; Principal Shairp, _Balliol Scholars_; Alfred Noyes, +_Tales of the Mermeid Inn_.] poets invariably possess, but the less +phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The +differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, +as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of +Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its +ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas, +_The Life of Charles Lamb_, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was +especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines _To a Poet Breaking +Silence_, he asserts, + + Yes, in this silent interspace + God sets his poems in thy face, + +and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses, + + How should I gage what beauty is her dole, + Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, + As birds see not the casement for the sky. + +It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most +radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical +nature,--through his + + Dream dazzled gaze + Aflame and burning like a god in song. +[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.] + +Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he +surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there +probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward +look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." +[Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John +Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the +heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_] +Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser, + + With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But +Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a +fictitious poet that + + His steadfast eye burnt inwardly + As burning out his soul, +[Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.] + +we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before +serious damage is done. + +The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in +varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half +closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet +it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his + + Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined + Before the sovran-thought of his own mind. +[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.] + +Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and +his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. +I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.] + +But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to + + See, no longer blinded with his eyes, +[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.] + +and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's +noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, +undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is +seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse +having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial +explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton, + + The living throne, the sapphire blaze + Where angels tremble while they gaze + He saw, but blasted with excess of light, + Closed his eyes in endless night, +[Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.] + +and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John +Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in +Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C. +Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, +also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may + + By the darkness of thine eyes discern + How piercing was the light within thy soul. +[Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne, +_Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the +Sea_.] + +Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an +assertion as that of Keats, + + There is a triple sight in blindness keen. +[Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes, +Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.] + +Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, +one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth, + + Thou that, when first my quickened ear + Thy deeper harmonies might hear, + I imaged to myself as old and blind, + For so were Milton and Maeonides, +[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).] + +and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to +his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See +also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)] + +But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up +here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, +for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture +of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite +picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very +beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally +distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more +spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural +tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely +aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The +brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly +school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's +_Dispute of the Poets_. The spiritual one + + Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes, + +but his brother, + + The one with brighter hues and darker curls + Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine, + Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life + Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight + From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought. + +The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, +seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of +John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ is + + A youth whose sultry eyes + Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust. + +But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous +features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello, + + Yourselves shall trace + (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, + A sharp and restless lip, so well combine + With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive + Delight at every sense; you can believe + Sordello foremost in the regal class + Nature has broadly severed from her mass + Of men, and framed for pleasure... + * * * * * + You recognize at once the finer dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear. + +Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more +easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," +as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. +Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never +seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a +celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne +undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is +so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no +further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be +deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of +English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the +burly host, + + He in the waast is shape as wel as I; + This were a popet in an arm tenbrace + For any woman, smal and fair of face? +[Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.] + +Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. +Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from +the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the +handsome young squire, who + + Coude songes make, and wel endyte. +[Footnote: _Prologue_.] + +Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, +_The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from +Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine +unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid +flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it +philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, +interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to +remain, though it begins with the line, + + A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems. + +And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's +callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly +decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." +[Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.] + +Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as +another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent +realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could _not_ be a glorious +eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other +men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne, +_Joyce Kilmer_.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike +shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce +Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a +delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." +[Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday, _Memoir of Joyce Kilmer_, p. 62.] Of +course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic +distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the +idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's +proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and +drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut +him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a +poet. + +It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands +of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the +stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. +Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length +in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation +of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds +them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from +tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, +excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been +alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last +century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the +melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman +does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive +disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.] +and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that +it was + + Projected from the bilious Childe. +[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.] + +But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with +emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid. + +To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ +describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position +we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, +assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was +the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. +[Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his +favorite poet as + + A man who measured six feet four: + Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest, + Compact his frame, his muscles of the best. +[Footnote: _A Portrait_.] + +With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has +again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been +noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly +verse-writers, + + A heavy handed blow, I think, + Would make your veins drip scented ink. +[Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.] + +But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share +of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the +Poet_, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers +resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began +his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt +against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself +unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint, + + We are compared to that sort of person, + Who wanders about announcing his sex + As if he had just discovered it. +[Footnote: _The Condolence_.] + +The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in +poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora +Leigh's cousin Romney to argue, + + Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life, + You need the lower life to stand upon + In order to reach up unto that higher; + And none can stand a tip-toe in that place + He cannot stand in with two stable feet. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +May 6, 1845.] + +Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific +account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the +result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael +Angelo_ (1904).] + +Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is +illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, +outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of +essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention: + + In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These + semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration, + for in reality the beggars have the advantage + of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed + to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to + the point. We must dig painfully through the outer + layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the + invalids are all spirit. +[Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.] + +That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last +century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their +ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if +anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello +turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So +nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max +Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art, _Degeneration_, was +able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a +disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.] + +Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as +Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be +significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a +sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil +from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let +us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our +earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of +whom we learn, + + Too long had sickness left her pining trace + With slow still touch on each decaying grace; + Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien; + Despair upon his languid smile was seen. +[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley_.] + +We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that +tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that +he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that +Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. +Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out +of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_ +Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction, + + Death and love are yet contending for their prey, + +and in _Adonais_ he appears as + + A power + Girt round with weakness. + * * * * * + A light spear ... + Vibrated, as the everbearing heart + Shook the weak hand that grasped it. + +Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as +consumption saps his strength: + + You might see his colour come and go, + And the softest strain of music made + Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade + Amid the dew of his tender eyes; + And the breath with intermitting flow + Made his pale lips quiver and part. +[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.] + +The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, +_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so +affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough +became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the +last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to +Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame +of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the +anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. + +Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the +poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus +Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: + + More tremulous + Than the soft star that in the azure East + Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day + Was his frail soul. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in +thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: his heroes harried by their +genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the +mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the +realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,--in fact, +it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows +struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry +them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned +with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, +or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_.] and +Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; +Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Sapphics_, _Anactoria_; +Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy +Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in Lenkos_.] to the +long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: +Browning, _One Word More_, _Preface to The Ring and the Book_; James +Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the Death of Mrs. +Browning_.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, _Ballad of +Appeal to Christina Rossetti_, _New Year's Eve_, _Dedication to +Christina Rossetti_.] Emily Bronte, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, +_Emily Bronte_.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister +Songs_, _On her Photograph_, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] Felicia +Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans_.] Adelaide Proctor, +[Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor_.] Helen Hunt, +[Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H_. _H_.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote: +_Ibid_., _To E. Lazarus_.]--one finds woman the subject of complimentary +verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we +should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their +greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it +plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her +style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her +"manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_.] So the +feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise. + +As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing +thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, +woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were +sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of +their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal +Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe_.] both +deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could +not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The +Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed +to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations +when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: +See _The Catalogue_. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The +Squinting Poetess_.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall +took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love +rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess_. More +seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend +with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother +Does_.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the +nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a +literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical his heroes +harried by their genius into ill health, prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the +mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, + + Some life of men unblest + He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. + He went, his piping took a troubled sound + Of storms that rage outside our happy ground. + He could not wait their passing; he is dead. + +In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark +upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by +Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse: + + The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn, + The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn, + The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell, + The almond face that Giotto drew so well, + The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._] + +Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the +_Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that +he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another, + + Behold him, how Hell's reek + Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek. +[Footnote: _Dante at Verona._] + +A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore: + + And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell. +[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._] + +In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying +hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius +into ill health, Prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book 1.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to +themutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, of their complaint must be significant. A +jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a sufferer in turning +his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil from the suggestion +that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let us ask them to +explain its real character to us. To take one of our earliest examples, +what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of whom we learn, + Too long had sickness left her pining trace + With slow still touch on each decaying grace; + Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien; + Despair upon his languid smile was seen. +[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley._] + +We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that +tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that +he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that +Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. +Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out +of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam_, +Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction, + + Death and love are yet contending for their prey, + +and in _Adonais_ he appears as + + A power + Girt round with weakness. + * * * * * + A light spear ... + Vibrated, as the everbeating heart + Shook the weak hand that grasped it. + +Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as +consumption saps his strength: + + You might see his colour come and go, + And the softest strain of music made + Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade + Amid the dew of his tender eyes; + And the breath with intermitting flow + Made his pale lips quiver and part. +[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen._] + + +The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, +_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, +so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the +cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for +the last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to +Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame +of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the +anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. + +Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the +poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus +Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: + + More tremulous + Than the soft star that in the azure East + Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day + Was his frail soul. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in +thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: it of course has left its +traces in the realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be +light,--in fact, it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most +of the blows struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few +efforts to parry them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, +in verse concerned with specific woman poets, men have not failed to +give them their due, or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, +_Miriam_.] and Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument +of Phaon_; Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs, Sapphics, +Anactoria;_ Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song;_ J. G. Percival, +_Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in +Lenkos._] to the long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. +Browning, [Footnote: Browning, _One Word More, Preface to The Ring and +the Book;_ James Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the +Death of Mrs. Browning._] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, +_Ballad of Appeal to Christina. Rossetti, New Year's Eve, Dedication to +Christina Rossetti._] Emily Bronte, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily +Bronte._] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister Songs, +on her Photograph, To a Poet Breaking Silence._] Felicia Hemans, +[Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans._] Adelaide Proctor, +[Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor._] Helen Hunt, +[Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H. H._] Emma Lazarus +[Footnote: _Ibid., To E. Lazarus._]--one finds woman the subject of +complimentary verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of +here, we should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to +their greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made +it plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of +her style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail +her "manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs._] So the +feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise. +As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing the +courage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, +woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were +sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of +their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal +Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe._] both +deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could +not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The +Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed +to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations +when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: +See _The Catalogue._ Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The +Squinting Poetess._] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall +took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love +rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess._] More +seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend +with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother +Does._] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the +nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a +literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer +Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and +heroine, + + In each lay poesy--for woman's heart + Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen; + And if it flow not through the tide of art, + Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween + It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked + The egress of rich words, it flows in thought, + And in its silent mirror doth reflect + Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought. +[Footnote: Milton.] + +Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on +her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, +appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an +anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written +by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober +judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of +Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, +Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but +who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,--Cythna, in +_The Revolt of Islam_. + +It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of +sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to +the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his + + Lyric love, half angel and half bird, + +reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position +on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In +_The Two Poets of Croisic_ he deals with the eighteenth century in +France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. +Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning +the admiration of the celebrities of the day--only to have his verse +tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by +her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact +that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine +_nom de plume_, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. +[Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod."] If indifference is the +attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that +her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her +entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we +must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to +approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted +to Robert Browning, "is--that there is a natural inferiority of mind in +women--of the intellect--not by any means of the moral nature--and that +the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." +[Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this +private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well. + +In a short narrative poem, _Mother and Poet_, Mrs. Browning claims +for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the +average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper +sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be +found in _Aurora Leigh_. She feels that making her imaginary poet a +woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much +of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must +have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring +insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the +charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. +Romney declares, + + Women as you are, + Mere women, personal and passionate, + You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, + Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints! + We get no Christ from you,--and verily + We shall not get a poet, in my mind. + +Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in +charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. +She confesses, + + We women are too apt to look to one, + Which proves a certain impotence in art. + +But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry +even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to +be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an +advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, +because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails +verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question +of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, +_Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.] + +Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's +physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the +chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit? + +In answer, one is haunted by the line, + + I too was born in Arcadia. + +Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In +the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of +the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: +See _Corydon_.] Collins, [Footnote: See _Selim, or the Shepherd's +Moral_.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See _Pastoral on the Death of +Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal +sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly +necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving +a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. +[Footnote: See _Huggins and Duggins_, and _The Forlorn Shepherd's +Complaint_.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes' +_Letter to a Friend in the Country_, and Sidney Dyer's _A Country +Walk_, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He +is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday. + +With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the +poet to nature becomes, of course, more intimate. But Cowper and Thomson +keep themselves out of their nature poetry to such an extent that it is +hard to tell what their ideal position would be, and not till the +publication of Beattie's _The Minstrel_ do we find a poem in which +the poet is nurtured under the influence of a natural scenery. At the +very climax of the romantic period the poet is not always bred in the +country. We find Byron revealing himself as one who seeks nature only +occasionally, as a mistress in whose novelty resides a good deal of her +charm. Shelley, too, portrays a poet reared in civilization, but +escaping to nature. [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_, and _Alastor_.] +Still, it is obvious that ever since the time of Burns and Wordsworth, +the idea of a poet nurtured from infancy in nature's bosom has been +extremely popular. + +There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the +hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth +were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were +not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too +tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. +[Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so +far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the +Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. +[Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society +every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of +Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs, + + So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth, + That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran + (And song is but the eloquence of truth). + +The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, +declaring of poetry, + + Its seat is deeper in the savage breast + Than in the man of cities. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of +acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all +singers," in Longfellow's _Hiawatha_. + +But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian +reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from +nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that +response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical +experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of +imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to +add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come +to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. +Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of +nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says + + If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach + My heart their beautiful parts of speech, + And the natural art they say these with, + My soul would sing of beauty and myth + In a rhyme and a meter none before + Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore. +[Footnote: _Preludes_.] + +The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, +was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not +intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature + + More like a man + Flying from something that he dreads, than one + Who sought the thing he loved. + +What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. +Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: +See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too, +were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting +nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's +life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See +_Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The +Prelude_.] + +Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him +to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to +the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic +solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run +its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges +the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar +Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and +preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from +civilization: + + For early didst thou leave the world, with powers + Fresh, undiverted to the world without, + Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; + Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt + Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings. + +No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality. +Stephen Phillips says of Emily Bronte's poetic gift, + + Only barren hills + Could wring the woman riches out of thee, +[Footnote: _Emily Bronte_.] + +and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. +But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was +developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See _The Palace of Art_.] and +Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See _The Poet's Vow_; Letters to Robert +Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning +as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the +eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe, +_An Escape_; J. E. Flecker, _Dirge_; Madison Cawein, _Comrading_; Yeats, +_The Lake Isle of Innisfree_.] he does not have everything his own way. + +For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely +anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared +in +London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter +of course, + + The coy muse, with me she would not live + In this dark city, +[Footnote: _Epistle to George Felton Mathew_. Wordsworth's sonnet, +"Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at +this time.] + +and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet, + + In cities he was low and mean; + The mountain waters washed him clean. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse, + + She can find a nobler theme for song + In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight + Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore. +[Footnote: _L'Envoi_.] + +A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in +London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to +the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of +the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, +_The Rossettis_, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral +verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. +Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they +were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this +regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the +city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See _The +City of Dreadful Night_.] this is not the same thing as the romantic +poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment. + +Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an +anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: +See _On London Stones_.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious +about his city poets. [Footnote: See _Fleet Street Eclogues_.] But as +landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the +most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more +and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to +take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. +Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. +[Footnote: See _Paris_.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl +Sandburg, _Chicago Poems_; Edgar Lee Masters, _The Loop_; William +Griffith, _City Pastorals_; Charles H. Towne, _The City_.] are beginning +to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called _A Winter +Night_ reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the +most bucolic shepherd among his flocks. + +To poets' minds the only unaesthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the +country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry +inspired by it, the reader of the _Spoon River Anthology_ is still +disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist +whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment. + +So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern +poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of +course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, +but usually, as in the Old English poem, _The Wanderer_, he has been +unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the +habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See +_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] But Byron set the fashion among poets +of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] +and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since +Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] +The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's +autobiographical novels, _Rest Harrow_ and _Open Country_, and William +H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. +[Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, _Denby the Rhymer_ (1918); Henry +Herbert Knibbs, _Songs of the Trail_ (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, +concurred in the view, declaring, + + Down the free roads of human happiness + I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Sidney_.] + +"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels +with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as +has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? +What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's +_Complaint to His Empty Purse_, onward, English poetry has borne +the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled +with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for +their destitution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camoeens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, +Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want +exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse. + +The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well +inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of +course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time +on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, +also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from +illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there +are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's _Bohemia_ reveals the +fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of +his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller +the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, +the cost _per caput_ will be _nil_. Not only so, but the poet is likely +to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready +cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of +contemptuous amusement from a poet's statement, + + Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay! + One would I sell and daffodils buy + To feed my soul. +[Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.] + +What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually +asking. + +What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking +of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but +only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines +_Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_ + + Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased + And yet can starve the author of the pleasure. + +Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as +bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in +poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public, + + You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me + After you've starved me and driven me dead. + Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread. +[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.] + +Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's +_Ina_, the author himself appears, raving, + + A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool! + Would you know what it means to be a poet? + It is to want a friend, to want a home, + A country, money,--aye, to want a meal. +[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.] + +But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to +pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious +horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. +Browning boasts, + + The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented + Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, + But culls his Faustus from philosophers + And not from poets. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true +artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his +mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington +Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a +Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to +remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the +couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See +_Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, +Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been +held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry +Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see +Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are +comparatively safe from a poet's strike. + +Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his +financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A +Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their +terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this +subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy, + + Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes + Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers; + What is a world of vanities + To a world as fair as ours? + +In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle +to Davie, Fellow Poet_: + + To lie in kilns and barns at e'en + When bones are crazed, and blind is thin + Is doubtless great distress, + Yet then content would make us blest. + +Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_, + + Our simple life wants little, and true taste + Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste + The scene it would adorn. + +Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward +poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston +Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G. +Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G. +Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf +of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet, +_In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The +poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish +it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take +away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only +the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. +With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries, + + Starving, still I smile, + Laugh at want and wrong, + He is fed and clothed + To whom God giveth song. +[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, _A Crowned Poet_.] + +It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's +satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect, + + One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye, + The cave of Poverty and Poetry. + Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, + Emblem of music caused by emptiness, +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of +compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates +on the poet, + + The Muse gave special charge + His learning should be deep and large,-- + * * * * * + His flesh should feel, his eyes should read + Every maxim of dreadful need. + * * * * * + By want and pain God screeneth him + Till his appointed hour. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal +conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's +physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as +the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is +appalling. What can account for it? + +In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of +constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another +popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes +it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him, + + For I had the share of life that might have filled a century, + Before its fourth in time had passed me by. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] + +A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects, + + ... For my thirty years, + Dashed with sun and splashed with tears, + Wan with revel, red with wine, + Other wiser happier men + Take the full three score and ten. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with +recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily +Bronte, of whom it is written: + + They live not long of thy pure fire composed; + Earth asks but mud of those that will endure. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Bronte_.] + +Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness. +Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death + + Far from the trembling throng + Whose souls are never to the tempest given. +[Footnote: _Adonais_.] + +With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis +Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home +to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong +for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are +screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream +about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his +article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne +speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has +written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is +nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense +must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less +wild-winged." + +It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or +to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to +mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with +regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not +wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a +departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to +overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to +retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise. + +More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In +Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic +muses, + + He died--'twas shrewd: + And came with all his youth and unblown hopes + On the world's heart, and touched it into tears. + +In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses +this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been +expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_: + + I have seen more glory in sunrise + Than in the deepening of azure noon, + +or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_: + + I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, + In predecease of his just-sickening song, + Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme, + Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long. + +Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in +English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east +must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a +poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth +and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot +Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the +Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_; +George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a +Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson, +_From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis +Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_; +Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The +Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919); +Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The +Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died +Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes +through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_: + + Youth rambles on life's arid mount, + And strikes the rock and finds the vein, + And brings the water from the fount. + The fount which shall not flow again. + + The man mature with labor chops + For the bright stream a channel grand, + And sees not that the sacred drops + Ran off and vanished out of hand. + + And then the old man totters nigh + And feebly rakes among the stones; + The mount is mute, the channel dry, + And down he lays his weary bones. + +But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if +nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. +For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by +prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might +bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them +to do so [Footnote: See Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Landor, _Dull is +my Verse_; J. G. Percival, _Invocation_; Matthew Arnold, _Growing Old_; +Longfellow, _My Books_; O. W. Holmes, _The Silent Melody_; C. W. +Stoddard, _The Minstrel's Harp_; P. H. Hayne, _The Broken Chords_; J. C. +MacNiel, _A Prayer_; Harvey Hubbard, _The Old Minstrel_.]--but it would +never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we +have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their +unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, _Age and Song, The Centenary +of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo_; O. W. Holmes, _Whittier's Eightieth +Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday_; E. E. Stedman, _Ad Vatem_; P. +H. Hayne, _To Longfellow_; Richard Gilder, _Jocoseria_; M. F. Tupper, +_To the Poet of Memory_; Edmund Gosse, _To Lord Tennyson on his +Eightieth Birthday_; Alfred Noyes, _Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of +Swinburne_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Eightieth Birthday_; Lucy Larcom, +_J. G. Whittier_; Mary Clemmer, _To Whittier_; Percy Mackaye, _Browning +to Ben Ezra_.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating +the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still +singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, +Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman +continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may +have had a genuine influence on younger writers. + +Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the +self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is +equivocal, as Landor's + + Dull is my verse: not even thou + Who movest many cares away + From this lone breast and weary brow + Canst make, as once, its fountains play; + No, nor those gentle words that now + Support my heart to hear thee say, + The bird upon the lonely bough + Sings sweetest at the close of day. + +It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding +convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. +Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_ +and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for +his belief in + + The last of life for which the first was made, + +as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found +its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get +the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself +at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and +Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by +their longevity. + +But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and +in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the +youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems +indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the +Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's +minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. +[Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of +these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. +The poet in Campbell's poem explains, + + 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore. + +Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the +old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can +express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares, + + I count it strange and hard to understand + That nearly all young poets should write old. + ... It may be perhaps + Such have not settled long and deep enough + In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still + The memory mixes with the vision, spoils + And works it turbid. Or perhaps again + In order to discover the Muse Sphinx + The melancholy desert must sweep around + Behind you as before. + +Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She +sighs, remembering her own youth, + + Alas, near all the birds + Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take + The chaffering swallow for the holy lark. + +Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment: + ... Many men are poets in their youth, + But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong + Even through all age the indomitable song. + [Footnote: _Genius in Beauty_.] + +Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See _To any Poet_.] too, and Richard Watson +Gilder [Footnote: See _Life is a Bell_.] feel that increasing power of +song comes with age. + +It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon +the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas +old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them +to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required +before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not +surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at +thirty, asserting, + + In me thou seest the glowing of such fire + As on the ashes of his youth doth lie, + +and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come +from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own +day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See +_There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, +[Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of +Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his +inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their +future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling +and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, +Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his +juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later +poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, +into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, +once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and +passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection, + + White-bearded and with eyes that look afar + From their still region of perpetual snow, + Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men. +[Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.] + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +THE POET AS LOVER + + +Do the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ leave anything to be said on the +relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The +poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new +philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the +power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his +gratitude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that +love has received many encomiums before. + +It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the +part of the uninitiated. + + Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle, + +Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been +no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the +fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which associates +all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion, +which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the +contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the +singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like +the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by +the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of classic +Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly +escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of +the present time says much for himself. + +In the first place, our non-lover may assure us, the nature of love is +such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard. For love is a mad +pursuit of life at first hand, in its most engrossing aspect, and it +renders one deaf and blind to all but the object of the chase; while +poetry is, as Plato points out, [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, sec. +599-601; and _Phaedrus_, sec. 248.] only a pale and lifeless imitation +of the ardors and delights which the lover enjoys at first hand. +Moreover, one who attempts to divide his attention between the muse and +an earthly mistress, is likely not only to lose the favor of the former, +but, as the ubiquity of the rejected poet in verse indicates, to lose +the latter as well, because his temperament will incline him to go into +retirement and meditate upon his lady's charms, when he should be +flaunting his own in her presence. It will not be long, indeed, before +he has so covered the object of his affection with the leafage of his +fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all. The +non-lover may remind us that even so ardent an advocate of love as Mrs. +Browning voices this danger, confessing, in _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, +[Footnote: Sonnet XXIX.] + + My thoughts do twine and bud + About thee, as wild vines about a tree + Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see + Except the straggling green that hides the wood. + +The non-lover may also recall to our minds the notorious egotism and +self-sufficiency of the poet, which seem incompatible with the humility +and insatiable yearning of the lover. He exults in the declaration of +Keats, + + My solitude is sublime,--for, instead of what I have + described (_i.e._, domestic bliss) there is sublimity + to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and + the stars through the windowpanes are my children; the + mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have, + stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. + [Footnote: Letter to George Keats, October 31, 1818.] + +Borne aloft by his admiration for this passage, the non-lover may +himself essay to be sublime. He may picture to us the frozen heights on +which genius resides, where the air is too rare for earthly affection. +He may declare that Keats' Grecian Urn is a symbol of all art, which +must be + + All breathing human passion far above. + +He will assert that the mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and +see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure +out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw +his view out of perspective. + +Finally, the enemy of love may call as witnesses poets whom he fancies +he has led astray. Strangely enough, considering the dedication of the +_Ring and the Book_, he is likely to give most conspicuous place among +these witnesses to Browning. Like passages of Holy Writ, lines from +Browning have been used as the text for whatever harangue a new +theorist sees fit to give us. In _Youth and Art_, the non-lover +will point out the characteristic attitude of young people who are +"married to their art," and consequently have no capacity for other +affection. In _Pauline_, he will gloat over the hero's confession +that he is inept in love because he is concerned with his perceptions +rather than with their objects, and his explanation, + + I am made up of an intensest life; + Of a most clear idea of consciousness + Of self ... + And I can love nothing,--and this dull truth + Has come at last: but sense supplies a love + Encircling me and mingling with my life. + +He will point out that Sordello is another example of the same type, for +though Sordello is ostensibly the lover of Palma, he really finds +nothing outside himself worthy of his unbounded adoration. [Footnote: +Compare Browning's treatment of Sordello with the conventional treatment +of him as lover, in _Sordello_, by Mrs. W. Buck (1837).] Turning to +Tennyson, in _Lucretius_ the non-lover will note the tragic death +of the hero that grows out of the asceticism in love engendered by his +absorption in composition. With the greatest pride the enemy of love +will point to his popularity in the 1890's, when the artificial and +heartless artist enjoyed his greatest vogue. As his most scintillating +advocate he will choose Oscar Wilde. Assuring us of many prose passages +in his favor, he will read to us the expression of conflict between love +and art in _Flower of Love_, where Wilde exclaims, + + I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and though my youth is + gone in wasted days, + I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's + crown of bays, + +and he will read the record of the same sense of conflict, in different +mood, expressed in the sonnet _Helas_: + + To drift with every passion till my soul + Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, + Is it for this that I have given away + Mine ancient wisdom and austere control? + Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll + Scrawled over on some boyish holiday + With idle songs for pipe and virelai, + Which do but mar the secret of the whole. + Surely there was a time I might have trod + The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance + Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God. + Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod + I did but touch the honey of romance, + And must I lose a soul's inheritance? + +And yet, when the non-lover has finally arrived at the peroration of his +defense, we may remain unshaken in our conviction that from the _Song +of Solomon_ to the _Love Songs of Sara Teasdale_, the history of poetry +constitutes an almost unbroken hymn to the power of love, "the poet, and +the source of poetry in others," [Footnote: _The Symposium_ of Plato, sec. +196.] as Agathon characterized him at the banquet in Love's honour. +Within the field of our especial inquiry, the last century, we may rest +assured that there is no true poet whose work, rightly interpreted, is +out of tune with this general acclaim. Even Browning and Oscar Wilde are +to be saved, although, it may be, only as by fire. + +The influence of love upon poetry, which we are assuming with such _a +priori_ certainty, is effected in various ways. The most obvious, of +course, is by affording new subject matter. The confidence of +Shakespeare, + + How can my muse want subject to invent + While thou dost breathe, that pourest into my verse + Thine own sweet argument? + +is at least as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth +century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to +the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to +contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon +poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, with any +number of other personal experiences that have thrilled the poet to +composition. + +The scope of love's influence is widened when one reflects upon its +efficacy as a prize held up before the poet, spurring him on to express +himself. In this aspect poetry is often a form of spiritual display +comparable to the gay plumage upon the birds at mating season. In the +case of women poets, verse often affords an essentially refined and +lady-like manner of expressing one's sentiments toward a possible +suitor. The convention so charmingly expressed in William Morris' lines, +_Rhyme Slayeth Shame_, seems to be especially grateful to them. At +times the ruse fails, as a writer has recently admitted: + + All sing it now, all praise its artless art, + But ne'er the one for whom the song was made, +[Footnote: Edith Thomas, _Vos non Nobis_.] + +but perhaps the worth of the poetry is not affected by the stubbornness +of its recipient. Sara Teasdale very delicately names her anthology of +love poems by women, _The Answering Voice_, but half the poems reveal +the singer speaking first, while a number of them show her expressing an +open-minded attitude toward any possible applicant for her hand among +her readers. But it is not merely for its efficacy as a matrimonial +agency that poets are indebted to love. + +Since the nineteenth century is primarily the age of the love story, +personal experience of love has been invaluable to the poet in a third +way. The taste of the time has demanded that the poet sing of the tender +theme almost exclusively, whether in dramatic, lyric or narrative, +whether in historical or fictional verse. This is, of course, one reason +that, wherever the figure of a bard appears in verse, he is almost +always portrayed as a lover. Not to illustrate exhaustively, three of +the most widely read poems with poet heroes, of the beginning, middle +and end of the century respectively, _i. e._, Moore's _Lalla +Rookh_, Mrs. Browning's _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, and +Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, all depend for plot +interest upon their hero's implication in a love affair. The authors' +love affairs were invaluable, no doubt, since a poet is not be expected +to treat adequately a passion which he has not experienced himself. It +is true that one hears from time to time, notably in the 1890's, that +the artist should remain apart from, and coldly critical of the emotions +he portrays. But this is not the typical attitude of our period. When +one speaks thus, he is usually thought to be confusing the poet with the +literary man, who writes from calculation rather than from inspiration. +The dictum of Aristotle, "Those who feel emotion are most convincing +through a natural sympathy with the characters they represent," +[Footnote: _Poetics_ XVII, Butcher's translation.] has appeared +self-evident to most critics of our time. + +But the real question of inspiration by love goes deeper and is +connected with Aristotle's further suggestion that poetry involves "a +strain of madness," a statement which we are wont to interpret as +meaning that the poet is led by his passions rather than by his reason. +This constitutes the gist of the whole dispute between the romanticist +and the classicist, and our poets are such ardent devotees of love as +their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the +temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is +obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the +offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then +equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is +doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not +as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel +filled from without. His afflatus comes upon him and departs, without +his control or understanding. Poetical inspiration, to such a +temperament, naturally assumes the shape of passion. Bryant's expression +of this point of view is so typical of the general attitude as to seem +merely commonplace. He tells us, in _The Poet_, + + No smooth array of phrase, + Artfully sought and ordered though it be, + Which the cold rhymer lays + Upon his page languid industry + Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed. + * * * * * + The secret wouldst thou know + To touch the heart or fire the blood at will? + Let thine own eyes o'erflow; + Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill. + Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past, + And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast. + +Coleridge's comprehension of this fact led him to cry, "Love is the +vital air of my genius." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1799.] + +All this, considering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps +only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most +sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal +of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to +understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of +emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar +Lee Masters' _Monsieur D---- and the Psycho-Analyst_.] + +Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their +passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his +biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably +passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet +being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life +afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly +assures us, + +Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to +write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by +my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. +[Footnote: See Arthur Symons, _The Romantic Movement_, p. 92 (from +Myers, _Life of Wordsworth_).] + +Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who +shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of +temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in +_My Namesake_, says of himself, + + Few guessed beneath his aspect grave + What passions strove in chains. + +Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion, + + But you are blind, and to the blind + The touch of ice and fire is one. + +The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled _Our +Elder Poets_.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an +expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet +somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from +the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion. + +Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine +of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity +for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned +themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life +writing them up. Childe Harold is + + Grown aged in this world of woe, + In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, + So that no wonder waits him, nor below + Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife, + Cut to his heart again with the keen knife + Of silent, sharp endurance. + +The very imitative hero of Praed's _The Troubadour_, after +disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six +dismisses passion forever. We are assured that + + The joys that wound, the pains that bless, + Were all, were all departed, + And he was wise and passionless + And happy and cold-hearted. + +The popularity of this sort of poet was, however, ephemeral. Of late +years poets have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who +attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely, +beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted +poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy +of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he +had not wantonly wasted his emotions. + +One is justified in asking why, on the other hand, the poet should not +be one who, instead of spending his love on a finite mistress, should +devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry +is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are +portrayed in Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, where the hero agonizes for +relief from his too ardent love: + + O that my heart was quiet as a grave + Asleep in moonlight! + For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold + Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul + A passion burns from basement to the cope. + Poesy, poesy! +But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly +unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly +with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to +the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher +described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, +is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to +be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without +doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. +One of our minor American poets declares, + + The bard who yields to flesh his emotion + Knows naught of the frenzy divine. +[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest +against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.] + +But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a +Platonist--and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B. +Alexander, _Poetry and the Individual_, p. 46.]--the poet is led upward +to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of +sense. Thus in one of the most Platonic of our poems, G. E. Woodberry's +_Agathon_, Eros says of the hero, who is the young poet of the +_Symposium_, + + A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed, + Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense + In him is amorous and passionate. + Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out + So with pure thought and care of things divine + To touch his soul that it partake the gods. + +This does not imply that romantic love is the only avenue to ideal +beauty. Rupert Brooke's _The Great Lover_ might dissipate such an +idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for +sensuousbeauty. + + These I have loved, + +Brooke begins, + + White plates and cups, clean gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood. + +And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of +his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than +such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to +result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design, +unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great passion, +which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously, +affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other +impressions. Of course the exceptionally idealistic poet, who is +conscious of a religious ideal, can say with Milton, "I am wont day and +night to seek the _idea_ of beauty through all the forms and faces +of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it +leading me on with certain assured traces." [Footnote: _Prose +Works_, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symmons ed.] To him there is no need of +the unifying influence of romantic love. In his case the mission of a +strong passion is rather to humanize the ideal, lest it become purely +philosophical (as that of G. E. Woodberry is in danger of doing) or +purely ethical, as is the case of our New England poets. On the other +hand, to the poet who denies the ideal element in life altogether, the +unifying influence of love is indispensable. Such deeply tragic poetry +as that of James Thomson, B. V., for instance, which asserts Macbeth's +conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter +chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the +memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and +beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair. + +In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that +the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as +the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual +beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's +perturbation. He inquires: + + Can proportion of the outward part + Move such affection in the inward mind + That it can rob both sense and reason blind? + Why do not then the blossoms of the field, + Which are arrayed with much more orient hue + And to the sense most daintie odors yield, + Work like impression in the looker's view? +[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.] + +Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic +mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in +asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the +senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all +creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they +declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love +poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such +heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most +beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's. + +It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its +most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit +kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an +instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the +analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames +that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of +Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the +title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he +learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court. + + Thou art a glorious madman, + +Lodge exclaims, + + Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, + And rise again to immortality. + +Marlowe replies, + + Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, + What if? I shall have drained my splendor down + To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness, + And mirk and mire and black oblivion, + Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, + Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest + To be so damned. + +Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for +the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her +living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See +Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip +Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_; +Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_; +Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice, +_Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho +and Phaon_; Zoe Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander +Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims +this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for +sympathy, + + For all my days as all thy days from birth + My heart as thy heart was in me as thee + Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea + Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth + Is fuel enough to feed, + While day sows night, and night sows day for seed. + +This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the +poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. +The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical +quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is +needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, +in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal +love and beauty, declaring, + + Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; + Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; + Love has no habitation but the heart: + Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, + Cling, and are borne into the night apart, + The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover. + +Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love. +Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct, +Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, +arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, + + What had all we done + That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, + And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, + And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins? + +Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal +the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, +[Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire." +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to +immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea: + + Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, + But mine are beauty and immortal love. + Therefore I will be tyrant of myself-- + Mine own law will I be! And I will make + Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms + Are wrought of loveliness without decay, + And wild desire without satiety, + And joy and aspiration without death. + And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho! + Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, + Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens + Are fallen and withered. + +To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to +note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho. +[Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in +Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our +enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope +to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have +been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable +matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as +mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her +love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her +temperament, + + Night and day + A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, + And all her veins ran fever, +[Footnote: _Sappho_.] + +conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her, + + Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, + Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love. +[Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.] + +It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her +genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing +her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert, + + But having made me, me he shall not slay: + Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his, + Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss + Contents them. + +It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in +the body as in an oyster shell," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, sec. 250.] +while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the +senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara +Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself, + + Who would run at dusk + Along the surges creeping up the shore + When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, + And running, running till the night was black, + Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand, + And quiver with the winds from off the sea. + Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides + Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me + Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest. +[Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, +in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this +destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite, + + If I sing no more + To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, + It is that thou hast made my life too sweet + To hold the added sweetness of a song. + * * * * * + I taught the world thy music; now alone + I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.] + +Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in +her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In _Anactoria_ +she tells the object of her infatuation: + + I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated + With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead. + * * * * * + I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, + Intense device and superflux of pain. + +And after detailing with gusto the bloody ingenuities of her plan of +torture, she states that her motive is, + + To wring thy very spirit through the flesh. + +The myth that Sappho's agony resulted from an offense done to Aphrodite, +is several times alluded to. In _Sappho and Phaon_ she asserts her +independence of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the goddess turns +Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thalassa, the mother of his +children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest +of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning +passion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is +mentioned. This is the sole theme of _Sapphics_, in which poem the +goddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual +delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her: + + Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho," + Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not + Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids.... + Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, + Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, + Full of music; only beheld among them + Soar as a bird soars + Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel + Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, + Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, + Clothed with the wind's wings. + +It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory +indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while +incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits +of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's +drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who +conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in +her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a +meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in +the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is +more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus +Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely +spiritual conception. + +Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having +no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual +beauty which is shining through the flesh, and which is the real object +of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it +seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is +some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual +loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking +the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as +the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of +his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for +the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would +be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess. +Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no +impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is +the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith +and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes +under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the +meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, _Helas_, quoted above. + +While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must +remember that Burns, in some of his accounts of inspiration, ascribes +quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the +barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as +much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one. +The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the +"swinish trough," which Alfred Austin asserts them to be. [Footnote: In +_Off Mesolonghi_.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it constitutes the +strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote: +In _Lines To a Lady_.] + + Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke + Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak, + Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near, + Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere. + The puny heart within him swells to view, + The man grows loftier and the poet too. + +Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence. +The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance +sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the +finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his +beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's + + Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts + Which I by lacking have supposed dead, + +is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compass_, + + Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone, + But as the meaning of all things that are; + A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar + Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon, + Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; + Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar, + Being of its furthest fires oracular, + The evident heart of all life sown and mown. + +Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves, + + Their shining fronts, + Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same, + As river water hallowed into founts) + Met in thee. +[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.] + +Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the +conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of +Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_: + + Lady, I fain would tell how evermore + Thy soul I know not from thy body nor + Thee from myself, neither our love from God. + +The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here +implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti +identifies her lover with her Christian faith: + + Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such + I cannot love you if I love not Him, + I cannot love Him if I love not you. +[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of +Love_ (a sonnet sequence).] + +It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there +is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of +the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a +matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has +affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture +their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent +of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form +is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general +is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty +in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: _Symposium_, Jowett +translation, sec.210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting +enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In _Epipsychidion_ +Shelley declares, + + I never was attached to that great sect + Whose doctrine is that each one should select + Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, + And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend + To cold oblivion.... + + True love in this differs from gold and clay, + That to divide is not to take away. + Love is like understanding, that grows bright + Gazing on many truths.... + + Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, + The life that wears, the spirit that creates + One object and one form, and builds thereby + A sepulchre for its eternity. + +These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the +goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to +another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has +departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See +Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke +is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which +begins, + + There was a damned successful poet, + There was a woman like the Sun. + And they were dead. They did not know it. + They did not know his hymns + Were silence; and her limbs + That had served love so well, + Dust, and a filthy smell. + +The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through +manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at +least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses +his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration: + + As a bathtub lined with white porcelain + When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,-- + So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, + My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady. + +As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal +beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting +affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible +vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through +first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of +the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This +is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our +writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and +blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the +ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or +belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho +compares her sensations + + Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year + When I love thee. + +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love +of the poetess, she asserts of herself, + + I doubt if ever she saw form of man + Or maiden either whom, being beautiful, + She hath not loved. + +When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins, + + All + That breathes to her is passion, love itself + All passionate. + +The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills +her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the +nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines +wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her: + + How should they know that Sappho lived and died + Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, + Never transfused and lost in what she loved, + Never so wholly loving nor at peace. + I asked for something greater than I found, + And every time that love has made me weep + I have rejoiced that love could be so strong; + For I have stood apart and watched my soul + Caught in a gust of passion as a bird + With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind + Struggles and frees itself to find the sky. + +She continues, apostrophizing beauty, + + In many guises didst thou come to me; + I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, + Phaon allured me with a look of thine, + In Anactoria I knew thy grace. + I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, + But never wholly, soul and body mine + Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. + +The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as +for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists +of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the +rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the +half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her +passion: + + I love thee to the depth and breadth and height + My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight + For the ends of Being and ideal grace. + +It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate +response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences +that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of +philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude +with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. +[Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's +passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On +the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne +Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_ +(1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and Fanny Brawne_ (1919); James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).] + +Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it +follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the +fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the +transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy +object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted +for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is +beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, +255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an +unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara +Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool, + + O wondrous deep, + I love you, I give you my light to keep. + Oh, more profound than the moving sea, + That never has shown myself to me. + * * * * * + But out of the woods as night grew cool + A brown pig came to the little pool; + It grunted and splashed and waded in + And the deepest place but reached its chin. + +The tragedy in such love is the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe, +_At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. The dramatist comes to London as +a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His +innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman: + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + +But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her +revelation of her character: + + Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay, + Wedded and one with it, he moaned. + * * * * * + Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace + Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew, + Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face. + +It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that +he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen +woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into +forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan +only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller's _The Ideal and the +Real_ is an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into +this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet +idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's +_Jenny_, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem, +_A Vision of Woman_. [Footnote: See also Kirke White, _The Prostitute_; +Whitman, _To a Common Prostitute_; Joaquin Miller, _A Dove of St. Mark_; +and Olive Dargan, _A Magdalen to Her Poet_.] + +To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious +denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is +purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes +with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's _Non Sum +Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae_: + + Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine + There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed + Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; + And I was desolate and sick of an old passion; + Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: + I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. + +The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of +his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is irresistibly impelled +to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her +touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a _reductio +ad absurdum_ of a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort +can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in the +_Vita Nuova_. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, +by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote: _Dante_] and by Sara King Wiley. +[Footnote: _Dante and Beatrice_] Both these writers, however, show +a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents +their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by +apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting +Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, +stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his gratitude +for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists +are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their +plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's +double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another +famous Renaissance lover for the hero of _A Night in Avignon_, a +play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his +long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for +consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate +Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this +inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's +devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering +the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the +subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of +contrition. + +Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his +admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the +dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the +other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When +he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the +object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, +comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his +burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of +good and evil. He explains, + + I serve a lady so imperial fair, + June paled when she was born. Indeed no star, + No dream, no distance, but a very woman, + Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake; + Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit + That thou hast heard of ... + ... I would eat, and have all human joy, + And know,--and know. + +He continues, + + But, for the Evening Star, I have it there. + I would not have it nearer. Is that love + As thou dost understand? Yet is it mine + As I would have it: to look down on me, + Not loving and not cruel; to be bright, + Out of my reach; to lighten me the dark + When I lift eyes to it, and in the day + To be forgotten. But of all things, far, + Far off beyond me, otherwise no star. + +Marlowe's closing words bring us to another important question, _i. e._, +the stage of love at which it is most inspiring. This is the subject of +much difference of opinion. Mrs. Browning might well inquire, in one of +her love sonnets, + + How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use? + A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine + Sad memory with thy songs to interfuse? + A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine? + A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, XVII.] +Each of these situations has been celebrated as begetting the poet's +inspiration. + +To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the +married state as least likely to be spiritually creative. It is true +that we find a number of poems addressed by poets to their wives. But +these are more likely to be the contented purring of one who writes by a +cozy fireside, than the passionate cadence of one whose genius has been +fanned to flame. One finds but a single champion of the married state +considered abstractly. This is Alfred Austin, in whose poem, _The Poet +and the Muse_, his genius explains to the newly betrothed poet: + + How should you, poet, hope to sing? + The lute of love hath a single string. + Its note is sweet as the coo of the dove, + But 'tis only one note, and the note is love. + + But when once you have paired and built your nest, + And can brood thereon with a settled breast, + You will sing once more, and your voice will stir + All hearts with the sweetness gained from her. + +And perhaps even Alfred Austin's vote is canceled by his inconsistent +statement in his poem on Petrarch, _At Vaucluse_, + + Let this to lowlier bards atone, + Whose unknown Laura is their own, + Possessing and possessed: + + Of whom if sooth they do not sing, + 'Tis that near her they fold their wing + To drop into her nest. + +Let us not forget Shelley's expression of his need for his wife: + + Ah, Mary dear, come to me soon; + I am not well when thou art far; + As twilight to the sphered moon, + As sunset to the evening star, + Thou, beloved, art to me. +[Footnote: _To Mary_.] + +Perhaps it is unworthy quibbling to object that the figure here suggests +too strongly Shelley's consciousness of the merely atmospheric function +of Mary, in enhancing his own personality, as contrasted with the +radiant divinity of Emilia Viviani, to whom he ascribes his +creativeness. [Footnote: Compare Wordsworth, _She Was a Phantom of +Delight_, _Dearer Far than Life_; Tennyson, _Dedication of +Enoch Arden_.] + +It is customary for our bards gallantly to explain that the completeness +of their domestic happiness leaves them no lurking discontent to spur +them onto verse writing. This is the conclusion of the happily wedded +heroes of Bayard Taylor's _A Poet's Journal_, and of Coventry +Patmore's _The Angel in the House_; likewise of the poet in J. G. +Holland's _Kathrina_, who excuses his waning inspiration after his +marriage: + + She, being all my world, had left no room + For other occupation than my love. + ... I had grown enervate + In the warm atmosphere which I had breathed. + +Taken as a whole, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the remote love, +prevented in some way from reaching its culmination. To requote Alfred +Noyes, the poet knows that ideal love must be + + Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star. +[Footnote: Marlowe.] + +In _Sister Songs_ Francis Thompson asserts that such remoteness is +essential to his genius: + + I deem well why life unshared + Was ordained me of yore. + In pairing time, we know, the bird + Kindles to its deepmost splendour, + And the tender + Voice is tenderest in its throat. + Were its love, forever by it, + Never nigh it, + It might keep a vernal note, + The crocean and amethystine + In their pristine + Lustre linger on its coat. +[Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. +Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in _Monna Innominata_ +XIV, mourning for + + The silence of a heart that sang its songs + When youth and beauty made a summer morn, + Silence of love that cannot sing again.] + +Byron, in the _Lament of Tasso_, causes that famous lover likewise +to maintain that distance is necessary to idealization. He sighs, + + Successful love may sate itself away. + The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate + To have all feeling save the one decay, + And every passion into one dilate, + As rapid rivers into ocean pour. + But ours is bottomless and hath no shore. + +The manner of achieving this necessary remoteness is a nice problem. Of +course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss +Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt's _Cormac, +Son of Ogmond_. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are +often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is +something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not +till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in +poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. +Browning, Sonnet VII. + + And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday, + Are only dear, the singing angels know + Because thy name moves right in what they say.] + +The minor poet, to be sure, is often discovered solicitously feeling his +pulse to gauge the effect of love on his rhymes, but one does not feel +that his verse gains by it. Therefore, an external obstacle is usually +made to intervene. + +As often as not, this obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One +finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. +The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and +poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not +be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility +and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, +she being unaware that it is the reflection of his own soul that the +poet is worshipping in her. One can feel some sympathy with the lady in +Thomas Hardy's _I Rose Up as My Custom Is_, who, when her lover's +ghost discovers her beside a snoring spouse, confesses that she is +content with her lot: + + He makes no quest into my thoughts, + But a poet wants to know + What one has felt from earliest days, + Why one thought not in other ways, + And one's loves of long ago. + +It may be, too, that an instinct for protection has something to do with +the lady's rejection, for a recent poet has openly proclaimed the effect +of attaining, in successful love, one step toward absolute beauty: + + O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows + In tender yielding unto me, + A vast desire awakes and grows + Unto forgetfulness of thee. +[Footnote: "A. E.," _The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty_.] + +Rejection is apt to prove an obstacle of double worth to the poet, since +it not only removes him to a distance where his lady's human frailties +are less visible, so that the divine light shining through her seems +less impeded, but it also fires him with a very human ambition to prove +his transcendent worth and thus "get even" with his unappreciative +beloved. [Footnote: See Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; G. L. Raymond, +_"Loving,"_ from _A Life in Song_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_. + +Richard Realf in _Advice Gratis_ satirically depicts the lady's +altruism in rejecting her lover: + + It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verse + If you dropped some aloes into his wine, + They write supremely under a curse.] + +There is danger, of course, that the disillusionment produced by the +revelation of low ideals which the lady makes in her refusal will +counterbalance these good effects. Still, though the poet is so +egotistical toward all the world beside, in his attitude toward his lady +the humility which Emerson expresses in _The Sphinx_ is not without +parallel in verse. Many singers follow him in his belief that the only +worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is +impossible. [Footnote: See _The Sphinx_-- + + Have I a lover who is noble and free? + I would he were nobler than to love me. + +See also Walt Whitman, _Sometimes with One I Love_, and Mrs. Browning, +"I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to love +me--the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to Robert +Browning, December 24, 1845.] + +To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided +attachments, Alexander Smith's _A Life Drama_ is a treasury of +suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at +sufficient distance to be useful. With the aid of intercalations Smith +exhibits the poet removed from his lady by scornful rejection, by +parental restraint, by an unhappy marriage, by self-reproach, and by +death. All these devices have been popular in our poetry. + +The lady's marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love, +though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for +idealization. The poet's worship is so supersensual as to be +inoffensive. To confine ourselves to poetic dramas treating historical +poets,--Beatrice,[Footnote: G. L. Raymond's and S. K. Wiley's dramas, +_Dante_, and _Dante and Beatrice_.] Laura, [Footnote: Cale Young Rice, +_A Night in Avignon_.] Vittoria Colonna, [Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael +Angelo_.] and Alison [Footnote: Peabody, _Marlowe_.] are all married to +one man while inspiring another. A characteristic autobiographical love +poem of this type, is that of Francis Thompson, who asserts the ideality +of the poet's affection in his reference to + + This soul which on thy soul is laid, + As maid's breast upon breast of maid. +[Footnote: See also _Ad Amicam_, _Her Portrait_, _Manus Animon Pinxit_.] + +There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death. +Translation of love into Platonic idealism is then almost inevitable. +Alexander Smith describes the change accomplished by the death of the +poet's sweetheart: + + Two passions dwelt at once within his soul, + Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky. + And as the sunset dies along the west, + Eve higher lifts her front of trembling stars + Till she is seated in the middle sky, + So gradual one passion slowly died + And from its death the other drew fresh life, + Until 'twas seated in the soul alone, + The dead was love, the living, poetry. + +The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, +mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, +perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: See _On the Vita Nuova of Dante_; +also _Dante at Verona_.] Much the same kind of translation is +described in _Vane's Story_, by James Thomson, B.V., which appears +to be a sort of mystic autobiography. + +The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote: +_Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase +of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense +to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this +increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last +step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's passion for +disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, +indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in +his sonnet sequence, _Ideal Passion_, thus exalts his mistress, the +abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets: + + Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go + From star to star, upward, all heavens above, + The grave forgot, forgot the human woe. + Though glorified, their love was human love, + One unto one; a greater love I know. + +But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its +brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love. + +Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love +as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, +who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar +very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to +vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole +way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to +supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and +twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of +their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic +character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most +idealistic verse. + +However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and +philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of +abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. +Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing +than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take +his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to +appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our +"muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies. + +Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of +widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical +love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it +seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See +Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.] + +Bulwer Lytton's _Milton_ was, if one may believe the press notices, +the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of +aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the +intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long +lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too +physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this +vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he +abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after +death. Bulwer Lytton cites the _Phaedrus_ of Plato as the basis of +his allegory, reminding us, + + The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend + From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be), + Dim broken memories of the state before, + Form what we call our reason... + ... Is not Love, + Of all those memories which to parent skies + Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above, + In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:) + Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest? + +Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George +Edward Woodberry. His poem, _Agathon_, dealing with the young poet of +Plato's _Symposium_, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism. +Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize +his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He +chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, +one of those + + Whose eyes were more divinely touched + In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth. + +As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of +nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the +beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the _Symposium_, +he expresses his unhappiness: + + Still must I mourn + That every lovely thing escapes the heart + Even in the moment of its cherishing. + +Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he +may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be +ennobled: + + Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts. + Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace; + So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb, + Their music linger here, the joy of men. + +Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros, +corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros +for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes +the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love: + + The waste desire be his, and sightless fate, + Him light shall not revisit; late he knows + The love that mates the heaven weds the grave. + +Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable +decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying, + + In its fiery womb I saw + The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene, + And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell. + +In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to +him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality: + + Let not dejection on thy heart take hold + That nature hath in thee her sure effects, + And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes, + Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress, + The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain? + +But, he continues, + + In fair things + There is another vigor, flowing forth + From heavenly fountains, the glad energy + That broke on chaos, and the outward rush + Of the eternal mind;... + ... Hence the poet's eye + That mortal sees, creates immortally + The hero more than men, not more than man, + The type prophetic. + +Agathon, in an ecstasy of comprehension, chants the praises of love +which Plato puts into his mouth in the _Symposium_. In conclusion, +Urania sums up the mystery of love and genius: + + For truth divine is life, not love, + Creative truth, and evermore + Fashions the object of desire + Through love that breathes the spirit's fire. + +We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with +the _Epipsychidion_, not merely because it is the most idealistic of +the interpretations of Platonic love given by nineteenth century poets, +but because by virtue of the fact that it describes Shelley's personal +experience, it should be most valuable in revealing the attitude toward +love of one possessing the purest of poetic gifts. [Footnote: Treatment +of this theme is foreshadowed in _Alastor_.] + +The prominence given to Shelley's earthly loves in this poem has led J. +A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks, + +While Shelley's doctrine in _Epipsychidion_ seems Platonic, it will +not square with the _Symposium_.... When a man has formed a just +conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who +find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested +by this standard, Shelley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with +so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is +spurious Platonism.[Footnote: _Shelley_, p. 142.] + +Perhaps this failure to break altogether with the physical is precisely +the distinction between the love of the poet and the love of the +philosopher with whom Plato is concerned. I do not believe that the +Platonism of this poem is intrinsically spurious; the conception of +Emilia seems to be intended simply as a poetic personification of +abstract beauty, but it is undeniable that at times this vision does not +mean abstract beauty to Shelley at all, but the actual Emilia Viviani. +He has protested against this judgment, "The _Epipsychidion_ is a +mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal with +those articles." The revulsion of feeling that turned him away from +Emilia, however, taught him how much of his feeling for her had entered +into the poem, so that, in June, 1822, Shelley wrote, + + The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot bear to look at. I think + one is always in love with something or other; the + error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in + flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a + mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal. + +Shelley begins his spiritual autobiography with his early mystical +intuition of the existence of spiritual beauty, which is to be the real +object of his love throughout life. By Plato, of course, this love is +made prenatal. Shelley says, + + She met me, robed in such exceeding glory + That I beheld her not. + +As this vision was totally disjoined from earthly objects, it won the +soul away from all interest in life. Therefore Shelley says, + + She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way + And lured me towards sweet death. + +This early vision passed away, however, + + Into the dreary cone of our life's shade. + +This line is evidently Shelley's Platonic fashion of referring to the +obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision +has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its +concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is +regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, +but an abiding presence in the soul. + +The first step toward this goal was a mistaken one. Shelley describes +his marriage with Harriet as a yielding to the senses merely, in other +words, as slavery to the Venus Pandemos. He describes this false vision, + + Whose voice was venomed melody. + * * * * * + The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers, + Her touch was as electric poison. + +Shelley was more successful in his second love, for Mary, whom he calls +the "cold, chaste moon." The danger of this stage in the ascent toward +beauty is that one is likely to be content with the fragmentary glimpse +of beauty gained through the loved one, and by losing sight of its other +embodiments fail to aspire to more complete vision. So Shelley says of +this period, "I was laid asleep, spirit and limb." By a great effort, +however, the next step was taken,--the agonizing one of breaking away +from the bondage of this individual, in order that beauty in all its +forms may appeal to one. Shelley writes, + + What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, + Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lips + Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse. + +Finally, the dross of its earthly embodiments being burned away by this +renunciation, ideal beauty is revealed to the poet, not merely in a +flash of inspiration, as at the beginning of his quest, but as an +abiding presence in the soul. At least this is the ideal, but, being a +poet, Shelley cannot claim the complete merging with the ideal that the +philosopher possesses. At the supersensual consummation of his love, +Shelley sinks back, only half conceiving of it, and cries, + + Woe is me! + The winged words on which my soul would pierce + Into the height of Love's rare universe + Are chains of lead around its flight of fire; + I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + + +Dare we venture into the holy of holies, where the gods are said to come +upon the poet? Is there not danger that the divine spark which kindles +his song may prove a bolt to annihilate us, because of our presumptuous +intrusion? What voice is this, which meets us at the threshold? + + Beware! Beware! + His flashing eyes, his floating hair! + Weave a circle round him thrice, + And close your eyes in holy dread-- + +It is Coleridge, warning us of our peril, if we remain open-eyed and +curious, trying to surprise the secret of the poet's visitation. + +Yet are we not tolerably safe? We are under the guidance of an initiate; +the poet himself promises to unveil the mystery of his inspiration for +us. As Vergil kept Dante unscathed by the flames of the divine vision, +will not our poet protect us? Let us enter. + +But another doubt, a less thrilling one, bids us pause. Is it indeed the +heavenly mystery that we are bid gaze upon, or are we to be the dupe of +self-deceived impostors? Our intimacy is with poets of the last two +centuries,--not the most inspired period in the history of poetry. And +in the ranks of our multitudinous verse-writers, it is not the most +prepossessing who are loudest in promising us a fair spectacle. How +harsh-voiced and stammering are some of these obscure apostles who are +offering to exhibit the entire mystery of their gift of tongues! We see +more impressive figures, to be sure. Here is the saturnine Poe, who with +contemptuous smile assures us that we are welcome to all the secrets of +his creative frenzies. Here is our exuberant Walt Whitman, crying, "Stop +this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all +poems." [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] But though we scan every face +twice, we find here no Shakespeare promising us the key to creation of a +_Hamlet_. + +Still, is it not well to follow a forlorn hope? Among the less +vociferous, here are singers whose faces are alight with a mysterious +radiance. Though they promise us little, saying that they themselves are +blinded by the transcendent vision, so that they appear as men groping +in darkness, yet may they not unawares afford us some glimpse of their +transfiguration? + +If we refuse the poet's revelation, we have no better way of arriving at +the truth. The scientist offers us little in this field; and his account +of inspiration is as cold and comfortless as a chemical formula. Of +course the scientist is amused by this objection to him, and asks, "What +more do you expect from the effusions of poets? Will not whatever secret +they reveal prove an open one? What will it profit you to learn that the +milk of Paradise nourishes the poetic gift, since it is not handled by +an earthly dairy?" But when he speaks thus, our scientific friend is +merely betraying his ignorance regarding the nature of poetry. Longinus, +[Footnote: _On the Sublime,_ I.] and after him, Sidney, [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry._] long ago pointed out its peculiar action, +telling us that it is the poet's privilege to make us partakers of his +ecstasy. So, if the poet describes his creative impulses, why should he +not make us sharers of them? + +This is not an idle question, for surely Plato, that involuntary poet, +has had just this effect upon his readers. Have not his pictures, in the +_Phaedrus_ and the _Ion_, of the artist's ecstasy touched Shelley and +the lesser Platonic poets of our time with the enthusiasm he depicts? +Incidentally, the figure of the magnet which Plato uses in the +Ion may arouse hope in the breasts of us, the humblest readers of +Shelley and Woodberry. For as one link gives power of suspension to +another, so that a ring which is not touched by the magnet is yet +thrilled with its force, so one who is out of touch with Plato's +supernal melodies, may be sensitized by the virtue imparted to his +nineteenth century disciples, who are able to "temper this planetary +music for mortal ears." + +Let us not lose heart, at the beginning of our investigation, though our +greatest poets admit that they themselves have not been able to keep +this creative ecstasy for long. To be sure this is disillusioning. We +should prefer to think of their silent intervals as times of insight too +deep for expression; as Anna Branch phrases it, + + When they went + Unto the fullness of their great content + Like moths into the grass with folded wings. +[Footnote: _The Silence of the Poets._] + +This pleasing idea has been fostered in us by poems of appeal to silent +singers. [Footnote: See Swinburne, _A Ballad of Appeal to Christina +Rossetti_; and Francis Thompson, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] +But we have manifold confessions that it is not commonly thus with the +non-productive poet. Not merely do we possess many requiems sung by +erst-while makers over their departed gift, [Footnote: See especially +Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Kirke White, _Hushed is the Lyre_; +Landor, _Dull is My Verse_, and _To Wordsworth_; James Thomson, B. V., +_The Fire that Filled My Heart of Old_, and _The Poet and the Muse_; +Joaquin Miller, _Vale_; Andrew Lang, _The Poet's Apology_; Francis +Thompson, _The Cloud's Swan Song_.] but there is much verse indicating +that, even in the poet's prime, his genius is subject to a mysterious +ebb and flow. [Footnote: See Burns, _Second Epistle to Lapraik_; Keats, +_To My Brother George_; Winthrop Mackworth Praed, _Letter from Eaton_; +William Cullen Bryant, _The Poet_; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _Invita +Minerva_; Emerson, _The Poet, Merlin_; James Gates Percival, _Awake My +Lyre_, _Invocation_; J. H. West, _To the Muse_, _After Silence_; Robert +Louis Stevenson, _The Laureate to an Academy Class Dinner_; Alice +Meynell, _To one Poem in Silent Time_; Austin Dobson, _A Garden Idyl_; +James Stevens, _A Reply_; Richard Middleton, _The Artist_; Franklin +Henry Giddings, _Song_; Benjamin R. C. Low, _Inspiration_; Robert +Haven Schauffler, _The Wonderful Hour_; Henry A. Beers, _The Thankless +Muse_; Karl Wilson Baker, _Days_.] Though he has faith that he is not +"widowed of his muse," [Footnote: See Francis Thompson, _The Cloud's +Swan Song_.] she yet torments him with all the ways of a coquette, so +that he sadly assures us his mistress "is sweet to win, but bitter to +keep." [Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ballade of the Poet's Thought_.] The +times when she solaces him may be pitifully infrequent. Rossetti, musing +over Coleridge, says that his inspired moments were + + Like desert pools that show the stars + Once in long leagues. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Coleridge_.] + +Yet, even so, upon such moments of insight rest all the poet's claims +for his superior personality. It is the potential greatness enabling him +at times to have speech with the gods that makes the rest of his life +sacred. Emerson is more outspoken than most poets; he is not perhaps at +variance with their secret convictions, when he describes himself: + + I, who cower mean and small + In the frequent interval + When wisdom not with me resides. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +However divine the singer considers himself in comparison with ordinary +humanity, he must admit that at times + + Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn, + The child of genius sits forlorn, + * * * * * + A cripple of God, half-true, half-formed. +[Footnote: Emerson, _The Poet_. See also George Meredith, _Pegasus_.] + +Like Dante, we seem disposed to faint at every step in our revelation. +Now a doubt crosses our minds whether the child of genius in his +crippled moments is better fitted than the rest of us to point out the +pathway to sacred enthusiasm. It appears that little verse describing +the poet's afflatus is written when the gods are actually with him. In +this field, the sower sows by night. Verse on inspiration is almost +always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the +intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful +curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual +introspection he is seeking the charm, so to speak, that will render his +afflatus permanent. The rigidity in much of such verse surely betrays, +not the white heat of genius, but a self-conscious attitude of readiness +for the falling of the divine spark. + +One wonders whether such preparation has been of much value in hastening +the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the +loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged +that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive +divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a +number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange +hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge +liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through +straggling branches.] This, however, is Emerson in a singularly +flat-footed moment. The real poet scoffs at such suggestions. Instead, +he feels that it is not for him to know the times and seasons of his +powers. Indeed, it seems to him, sometimes, that pure contrariety marks +the god's refusal to come when entreated. Thus we are told of the god of +song, + + Vainly, O burning poets! + Ye wait for his inspiration. + * * * * * + Hasten back, he will say, hasten back + To your provinces far away! There, at my own good time + Will I send my answer to you. +[Footnote: E. C. Stedman, _Apollo_. _The Hillside Door_ by the same +author also expresses this idea. See also Browning, _Old Pictures +in Florence_, in which he speaks "of a gift God gives me now and then." +See also Longfellow, _L'Envoi_; Keats, _On Receiving a Laurel Crown_; +Cale Young Rice, _New Dreams for Old_; Fiona Macleod, _The Founts of +Song_.] + +Then, at the least expected moment, the fire may fall, so that the poet +is often filled with naive wonder at his own ability. Thus Alice Meynell +greets one of her poems, + + Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine? + This winter of a silent poet's heart + Is suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art, + Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine. + +But if the poet cannot predict the time of his afflatus, he indicates +that he does know the attitude of mind which will induce it. In certain +quarters there is a truly Biblical reliance upon faith as bringer of the +gift. A minor writer assures us, "Ah, if we trust, comes the song!" +[Footnote: Richard Burton, _Singing Faith_.] Emerson says, + + The muses' hill by fear is guarded; + A bolder foot is still rewarded. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +And more extreme is the counsel of Owen Meredith to the aspiring artist: + + The genius on thy daily walks + Shall meet, and take thee by the hand; + But serve him not as who obeys; + He is thy slave if thou command. +[Footnote: _The Artist_.] + +The average artist is probably inclined to quarrel with this last +high-handed treatment of the muse. Reverent humility rather than +arrogance characterizes the most effectual appeals for inspiration. The +faith of the typical poet is not the result of boldness, but of an +aspiration so intense that it entails forgetfulness of self. Thus one +poet accounts for his inspired hour: + + Purged with high thoughts and infinite desire + I entered fearless the most holy place; + Received between my lips the sacred fire, + The breath of inspiration on my face. +[Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ave_.] + +Another writer stresses the efficacy of longing no less strongly; +speaking of + + The unsatiated, insatiable desire + Which at once mocks and makes all poesy. +[Footnote: William Alexander, _The Finding of the Book_. See also Edward +Dowden, _The Artist's Waiting_.] + +There is nothing new in this. It is only what the poet has implied in +all his confessions. Was he inspired by love? It was because thwarted +love filled him with intensest longing. So with his thirst for purity, +for religion, for worldly vanities. Any desire, be it fierce enough, and +hindered from immediate satisfaction, may engender poetry. As Joyce +Kilmer phrases it, + + Nothing keeps a poet + In his high singing mood, + Like unappeasable hunger + For unattainable food. +[Footnote: _Apology_.] + +But the poet would not have us imagine that we have here sounded the +depths of the mystery. Aspiration may call down inspiration, but it is +not synonymous with it. Mrs. Browning is fond of pointing out this +distinction. In _Aurora Leigh_ she reminds us, "Many a fervid man +writes books as cold and flat as gravestones." In the same poem she +indicates that desire is merely preliminary to inspiration. There are, +she says, + + Two states of the recipient artist-soul; + One forward, personal, wanting reverence, + Because aspiring only. We'll be calm, + And know that when indeed our Joves come down, + We all turn stiller than we have ever been. + +What is this mysterious increment, that must be added to aspiration +before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can +understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the +poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and +leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the contrary, seems +to give him a fictitious satisfaction; it is an arrest of his desire +that affords him a delicate poise and repose, on tiptoe, so to speak. +[Footnote: Compare Coleridge's statement that poetry is "a more than +usual state of emotion with more than usual order." _Biographia +Literaria_, Vol. II, Chap. I, p. 14, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge.] + +Does not the fact that inspiration works in this manner account for the +immemorial connection of poetic creativeness with Bacchic frenzy? To the +aspiring poet wine does not bring his mistress, nor virtue, nor +communion with God, nor any object of his longing. Yet it does bring a +sudden ease to his craving. So, wherever there is a romantic conception +of poetry, one is apt to find inspiration compared to intoxication. + +Such an idea did not, of course, find favor among typical eighteenth +century writers. Indeed, they would have seen more reason in ascribing +their clear-witted verse to an ice-pack, than to the bibulous hours +preceding its application to the fevered brow. We must wait for William +Blake before we can expect Bacchus to be reinstated among the gods of +song. Blake does not disappoint us, for we find his point of view +expressed, elegantly enough, in his comment on artists, "And when they +are drunk, they always paint best." [Footnote: _Artist Madmen: On the +Great Encouragement Given by the English Nobility and Gentry to +Correggio, etc_.] + +As the romantic movement progresses, one meets with more lyrical +expositions of the power in strong drink. Burns, especially, is never +tired of sounding its praise. He exclaims, + + There's naething like the honest nappy. + * * * * * + I've seen me daist upon a time + I scarce could wink or see a styme; + Just ae half mutchkin does me prime; + Aught less is little, + Then back I rattle with the rhyme + As gleg's a whittle. +[Footnote: _The First Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Again he assures us, + + But browster wives and whiskey stills, + They are my muses. +[Footnote: _The Third Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Then, in more exalted mood: + + O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink! + Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink, + Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink + In glorious faem, + Inspire me, till I lisp and wink + To sing thy name. +[Footnote: _Scotch Drink_.] + +Keats enthusiastically concurs in Burns' statements. [Footnote: See the +_Sonnet on the Cottage Where Burns Was Born_, and _Lines on the Mermaid +Tavern_.] + +Landor, also, tells us meaningly, + + Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingales + Sing cheerily but when the throat is moist. +[Footnote: _Homer_; _Laertes_; _Agatha_.] + +James Russell Lowell, in _The Temptation of Hassan Khaled_, +presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy: + + The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom + The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume, + And when the sun is warm within his blood + It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood, + Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they find + Interpretation in the poet's mind. + If wine be evil, song is evil too. + +His _Bacchic Ode_ is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received +his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in +England. Swinburne, [Footnote: See _Burns_.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote: +See _Vinum Daemonum_.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: See _A Villanelle of +the Poet's Road_.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: See _A Sequence to +Wine_.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent. +Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: See _A Toast to Omar Khayyam_.] +was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme. + +Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats +[Footnote: See _Lines on the Mermaid Inn_.] to Josephine Preston +Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan +dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially +stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the +centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group +keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson: + + And Ben was there, + Humming a song upon the old black settle, + "Or leave a kiss within the cup + And I'll not ask for wine," + But meanwhile, he drank malmsey. + [Footnote: _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +Fortunately for the future of American verse, there is another side to +the picture. The teetotaler poet is by no means non-existent in the last +century. Wordsworth takes pains to refer to himself as "a simple, +water-drinking bard," [Footnote: See _The Waggoner_.] and in lines +_To the Sons of Burns_ he delivers a very fine prohibition lecture. +Tennyson offers us _Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue, a reductio ad +absurdum_ of the claims of the bibulous bard. Then, lest the +temperance cause lack the support of great names, Longfellow causes the +title character of _Michael Angelo_ to inform us that he "loves not +wine," while, more recently, E. A. Robinson pictures Shakespeare's +inability to effervesce with his comrades, because, Ben Jonson confides +to us, + + Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, + He's wondering what's to pay on his insides. +[Footnote: _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_. See also +Poe's letter, April 1, 1841, to Snodgrass, on the unfortunate results of +his intemperance.] + +No, the poet will not allow us to take his words too seriously, lest we +drag down Apollo to the level of Bacchus. In spite of the convincing +realism in certain eulogies, it is clear that to the poet, as to the +convert at the eucharist, wine is only a symbol of a purely spiritual +ecstasy. But if intoxication is only a figure of speech, it is a +significant one, and perhaps some of the other myths describing the +poet's sensations during inspiration may put us on the trail of its +meaning. Of course, in making such an assumption, we are precisely like +the expounder of Plato's myths, who is likely to say, "Here Plato was +attempting to shadow forth the inexpressible. Now listen, and I will +explain exactly what he meant." Notwithstanding, we must proceed. + +The device of Chaucer's _House of Fame_, wherein the poet is carried to +celestial realms by an eagle, occasionally occurs to the modern poet as +an account of his _Aufschwung_. Thus Keats, in _Lines to Apollo_, avers, + + Aye, when the soul is fled + Too high above our head, + Affrighted do we gaze + After its airy maze + As doth a mother wild + When her young infant child + Is in an eagle's claws. + +"Poetry, my life, my eagle!" [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] cries Mrs. +Browning, likening herself to Ganymede, ravished from his sheep to the +summit of Olympus. The same attitude is apparent in most of her poems, +for Mrs. Browning, in singing mood, is precisely like a child in a +swing, shouting with delight at every fresh sensation of soaring. +[Footnote: See J. G. Percival, _Genius Awaking_, for the same +figure.] + +Again, the crash of the poet's inspiration upon his ordinary modes of +thought is compared to "fearful claps of thunder," by Keats [Footnote: +See _Sleep and Poetry_.] and others. [Footnote: See _The Master_, A. E. +Cheney.] Or, more often, his moment of sudden insight seems a lightning +flash upon the dark ways in which he is ordinarily groping. Keats says +that his early visions were seen as through a rift of sheet lightning. +[Footnote: See _The Epistle to George Keats_.] Emerson's impression is +the same; visions come "as if life were a thunderstorm wherein you can +see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand." [Footnote: +_Essay on Inspiration_.] Likewise Alexander Smith declares, + + Across the midnight sea of mind + A thought comes streaming like a blazing ship + Upon a mighty wind, + A terror and a glory! Shocked with light, + His boundless being glares aghast. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Perhaps this is a true expression of the poet's feelings during the +deepest inspiration, yet we are minded of Elijah's experience with the +wind and the fire and the still small voice. So we cannot help +sympathizing with Browning's protest against "friend Naddo's" view that +genius is a matter of bizarre and grandiose sensations. [Footnote: +_Sordello_.] At least it is pleasant to find verse, by minor +writers though it be, describing the quietude and naturalness of the +poet's best moments. Thus Holmes tells us of his inspiration: + + Soft as the moonbeams when they sought + Endymion's fragrant bower, + She parts the whispering leaves of thought + To show her full-leaved flower. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +Edwin Markham says, + + She comes like the hush and beauty of the night. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same: + + How to the singer comes his song? + How to the summer fields + Come flowers? How yields + Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night + Bring stars? +[Footnote: _How to the Singer Comes His Song?_] + +Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired +moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such +moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to +him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet, _Wise Passiveness_, says this +plainly: + + Think you I choose or that or this to sing? + I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream + Dreaming among green fields its summer dream, + Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring + Into its quiet bosom. + +To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, _Accident in Art_, +by Richard Hovey. He inquires, + + What poet has not found his spirit kneeling + A sudden at the sound of such or such + Strange verses staring from his manuscript, + Written, he knows not how, but which will sound + Like trumpets down the years. + +Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this +creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his +afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and +Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a +ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse +describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare +Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor in _Sordello_, +Book II.] In _The Song-Tree_ Alfred Noyes describes his first sensation +as a conscious poet: + + The first note that I heard, + A magical undertone, + Was sweeter than any bird + --Or so it seemed to me-- + And my tears ran wild. + This tale, this tale is true. + The light was growing gray, + And the rhymes ran so sweet + (For I was only a child) + That I knelt down to pray. + +But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense +were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess, + + She almost shrank + To feel the secret and expanding might + Of her own mind, +[Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.] + +the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. +Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple +Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of +her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, +when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent +reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is +"all me." + +However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good +his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged +divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack +of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal +to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his +verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of +his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, +some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent +scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on +Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And +in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of +thought: + + The everlasting universe of things + Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, + Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom-- + Now lending splendor, where from secret springs + The source of human thought its tribute brings + Of waters. + +Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says, + + The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible + influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory + brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a + flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the + conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its + approach or departure. + +Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his +mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us, + + A plastic power + Abode with me, a forming hand, at times + Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, + A local spirit of its own, at war + With general tendency, but for the most + Subservient strictly to external things + With which it communed. An auxiliary light + Came from my mind which on the setting sun + Bestowed new splendor-- +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] + +Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness +is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon +her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken, + + As the earth + Plunges in fury, when the internal fires + Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat + The marts and temples, the triumphal gates + And towers of observation, clears herself + To elemental freedom. + +We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who +relates how the vision of _Sordello_ arises to consciousness: + + Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, + Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears + Its outline, kindles at the core--. + +Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have +really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it +is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a +mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the +poet. + +"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The +Poet's Sleep_.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. +There was surely no reason why Keats' title, _Sleep and Poetry_, +should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of +Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. +The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in +the middle ages,--and even the prominence of _Night Thoughts_ in +eighteenth century verse--testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep +has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his +account of the composition of _Kubla Khan_.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: +See _Alastor_, and _Prince Athanase_. See also Edmund Gosse, +_Swinburne_, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three +stanzas of _A Vision of Spring_ in his sleep.]--it is the romanticists +who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And +once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, +asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. +Thus he tells us of the singer in _Prince Athanase:_ + + And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour + Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes, + Were driven within him by some secret power + Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar, + Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower. + +Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, +even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, +Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as +something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of +modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of +myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to +account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to +be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually +swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in +any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things +to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world. + + Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold, +[Footnote: _A Life Drama._] + +says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the +line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the +poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair. + +Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure +than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain +artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory +of one's past youth, or--to stay closer home--Wordsworth, with his +theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,--such artists +have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably +representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory +to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers +are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation, + + Live in the past; await no more + The rush of heaven-sent wings; + Earth still has music left in store + While memory sighs and sings. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, +like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to +admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her +title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we +have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their +existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, +reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the +body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a +vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries ... beholding +apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; +shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the +living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the +body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.] + +For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to +himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is +always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in +recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which +He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.] + +If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he +is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the +visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of +memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious +of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the +soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince +Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.] +Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on +Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in +verse of other poets. One writer inquires, + + Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes, + Indeed the product of my heart and brain? +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.] + +and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of +insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. +Another maintains of poetry, + + Her touch is a vibration and a light + From worlds before and after. +[Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal +inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by +Dorothea Laurence Mann.] + +Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural +and unforced of these verses. She muses: + + ... Mixed with memories not my own + The sweet streams throng into my breast. + Before this life began to be + The happy songs that wake in me + Woke long ago, and far apart. + Heavily on this little heart + Presses this immortality. + +This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic +theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather +than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. +She continues, + + I come from nothing, but from where + Come the undying thoughts I bear? + Down through long links of death and birth, + From the past poets of the earth, + My immortality is there. + +Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical +argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last +statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing +itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding +expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this +attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he +attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells +his brother poets: + + I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried + To work his will, the hand that moved my pen + Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask + Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps + With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, + Oracular glories, visionary gleams, + And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's +appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead +wife shall inspire his poetry. + +One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have +nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as +this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their +special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works +which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what +is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in +some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to +Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good +genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often +called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests +such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to +be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into +his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes: + + I do but rave, for it is better thus; + Were once thy starry nature given to mine, + In the one life which would encircle us + My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine; + Better to bear the far sublimer pain + Of thought that has not ripened into speech. + To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing + Divinely to the brain; + For thus the poet at the last shall reach + His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string. +[Footnote: _Ode to Shelly._] + +In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there +is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It +tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright +plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret +Steele Anderson, _Other People's Wreaths,_ and John Drinkwater, +_My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power +outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly +his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the +suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She +wistfully inquires: + + My own best poets, am I one with you? + . . . When my joy and pain, + My thought and aspiration, like the stops + Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb + Unless melodious, do you play on me, + My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play, + Would no sound come? Or is the music mine; + As a man's voice or breath is called his own, + Inbreathed by the life-breather? + +Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his +own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as +compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naive dependence +upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as +a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses +her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the +Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, +to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of +the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not +be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante +impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call +upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is +conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth +century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any +Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of +invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory +flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the +century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept +up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of +the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the +Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See _On +Lucinda's Tea-table_.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It +is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses _On the Death of His +Mother_, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that +his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement +progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth +century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the +goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen +from the sty." [Footnote: See _On a Report of a Monument to a Late +Author_.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled +hizzie," [Footnote: See the _Epistle to Lapraik_.] and sets the +fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that +each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom +he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer +nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than +apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he +confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift: + + 'Twas not much at any time + She could hitch into a rhyme, + Never was the muse sublime + Who has fled. +[Footnote: _A Poet's Apology_.] + +Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day +feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's +earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as +always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as +little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse +that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who +inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she +is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One +doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with +Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner +nature through our own." [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry_.] + +What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. +There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of +genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is +a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that +the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the +power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up +with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, +namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the +poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of +God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the +world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, +in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last +century, his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. All poets are +idealists. + +There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may +seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It +is expressed in the opening of Shelley's _Alastor_, and informs the +whole of the _Ode to the West Wind_. It pervades Wordsworth, for if +he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet +profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of +nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers +that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. +There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern +poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, +going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth +century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song +into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than +most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the +intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern +conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing +himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise +chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute +poetry. + +Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or +to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming +"into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his +communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that +it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the +revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe +the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel +that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be +deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the +singer, + + One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; + The next he writes his soul's memorial. +[Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.] + +So Shelley describes the experience: + + Meaning on his vacant mind + Flashed like strong inspiration. +[Footnote: _Alastor_.] + +The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He +becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the +flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, +enabling them, like Lucy, to be + + Rolled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees. + +Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer +cannot escape Plato's conclusion, + + There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been + inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer + in him: when he has not attained to this state he is + powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: + _Ion_, sec.534.] + +And again, + + There is a ... kind of madness which is a possession of the + Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and + there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other + numbers.... But he who, not being inspired, and having no + touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks + he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, + and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at + all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote: + _Phaedrus_, sec. 245.] + +Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as +to say, + + Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of + madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any + character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. + [Footnote: _Poetics_, XVII.] + +One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier +ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no +longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation +of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally +he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a +hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot +was + + Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting + Of all too greatly giving + The kingdom of his mind to those + Who for it deemed him mad. +[Footnote: Cale Young Rice, _Meredith_.] + +In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to +which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of +madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See _Gladys +and Her Island_.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See _Tasso to +Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's +Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward +Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur +in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply +because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the +cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he +prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than +the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the +writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, +are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he +leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered +in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal +realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is +not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The +tone of his poem, _Tasso and Leonora_, is very gloomy. The Italian +poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms +where eternal beauty dwells. He muses, + + Yes--as Love is truer far + Than all other things; so are + Life and Death, the World and Time + Mere false shows in some great Mime + By dreadful mystery sublime. + +But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders, + + For were life no flitting dream, + Were things truly what they seem, + Were not all this world-scene vast + But a shade in Time's stream glassed; + Were the moods we now display + Less phantasmal than the clay + In which our poor spirits clad + Act this vision, wild and sad, + I must be mad, mad,--how mad! + +However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly +convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the +manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not +merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come +upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not +understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal +inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been +applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: See _Kathrina_, by J. +G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern +poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares, + + As for the old seers + Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life + Of the unfolding ages, I must doubt + Whether they comprehended what they saw.] + +Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare +commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way +granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting +Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the +poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are +typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she +makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects, + + And ah, we poets, I misdoubt + Are little more than thou. + We speak a lesson taught, we know not how, + And what it is that from us flows + The hearer better than the utterer knows. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs._] + +One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this +inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as +a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much +attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the +romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John +Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the +mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: See _Song for Tasso_, +Shelley; _Tasso to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_, +E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles, _The Harp and Despair +of Cowper_; Mrs. Browning, _Cowper's Grave_; Lord Houghton, _On Cowper's +Cottage at Olney_.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last +century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during +periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is +not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing +the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional +poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed +madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_; +Shelley, _Rosalind and Helen_.] while the American, J. G. Holland, +represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a +hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland, +_Kathrina_. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benet, +_Mad Blake_; Amy Lowell, _Clear, With Light Variable Winds_; Cale Young +Rice, _The Mad Philosopher_; Edmund Blunden, _Clare's Ghost_.] + +It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly +incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced +by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad +poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries, + + All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought + Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat. +[Footnote: See fragment CI.] + +What chance did he have of recognition? + +This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired +poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic +madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines, + + Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense) + And once betrayed me into common sense. +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon +dry reason alone: + + A set o' dull, conceited hashes + Confuse their brains in college classes! + They gang in sticks and come out asses, + Plain truth to speak, + And syne they think to climb Parnassus + By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century +classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the _Prelude_.] +and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: +See _The Scholar_.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See _The Master of the +Dance_. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the +persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants +varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful +or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies +the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns +the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the +poet's mind. [Footnote: See _The Poet's Mind_.] So Richard Gilder +maintains of the singer, + + He was too wise + Either to fear, or follow, or despise + Whom men call science--for he knew full well + All she had told, or still might live to tell + Was known to him before her very birth. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J. +E. Flecker.] + +The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that +his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the +scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes +Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus: + + Yours is the living pall, + The aloof and frozen place of listeners + And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine + The fount of life itself, the burning fount + Pierian. I pity you. +[Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.] + +Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the +average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are +infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of +reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many +cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young: + + How proud the poet's billow swells! + The God! the God! his boast: + A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! + Dead bards stench every coast. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of +inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning +is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She +muses over the title of poet: + + The name + Is royal, and to sign it like a queen + Is what I dare not--though some royal blood + Would seem to tingle in me now and then + With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes + And manias usual to the race. Howbeit + I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad + And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; + The thing's too common. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, + For me, I wrote + False poems, like the rest, and thought them true + Because myself was true in writing them.] + +Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? +Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of +posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. +Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether +they be of God. What is his proof? + +Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers, + + I hung my verses in the wind. + Time and tide their faults may find. + All were winnowed through and through: + Five lines lasted sound and true; + Five were smelted in a pot + Than the south more fierce and hot. +[Footnote: _The Test_.] + +The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's +passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by +time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once +troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a +certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he +inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which +Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it +does." [Footnote: _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, "A Memorable +Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is +doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious +enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence. + +The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of +the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse +by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender +to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with +the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season +of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, +and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, +though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay on +_Imagination_.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief +in his visions by Tertullian's motto, _Credo quod absurdum_. + +If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence +arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning +matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred +pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer +seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he +ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his +moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete. + +The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the +poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain +men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of +Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of _Kubla Khan_, +are notorious. Tennyson, in _The Poet's Mind_, warns all intruders +away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them, + + In your eye there is death; + There is frost in your breath + Which would blight the plants. + * * * * * + In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; + It would fall to the ground if you came in. + +But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to +an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so +delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says, + + There are open hours + When the God's will sallies free, + And the dull idiot might see + The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;-- + Sudden, at unawares, + Self-moved, fly to the doors, + Nor sword of angels could reveal + What they conceal. +[Footnote: _Merlin_.] + +What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a +frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded +from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was +finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he +declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But +the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of +casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is +never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is +already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been +communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original +conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem +is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly +sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as +Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to +be dead. + +There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is +most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' +composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem +Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, +_How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the +Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert +Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the +other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter: + + Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke. + Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed, + Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke + Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed + Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul! + Indeed? + Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare: + Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage + Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: + Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age + Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in +the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James +Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.] + +Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be +as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden +gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a +poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and +phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we +misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets +bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not +because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but +because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words +was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says +William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable +and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the +poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage." + +Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression +of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he +works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to +Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any +other artist possesses, [Footnote: See _The Republic_, IX, 588 D.] +yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis +Thompson, + + Our untempered speech descends--poor heirs! + Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers; + Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, + Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit! +[Footnote: _Her Portrait_.] + +Walt Whitman voices the same complaint: + + Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself; + It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically, + "Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?" +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] + +Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the +singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, +"For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my +Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily +and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and +the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, +_Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; +Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The +Sculptor_; William Rose Benet, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman +Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and +Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, +_Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing +the Song of Her_.] + +Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are +coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which +refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly +unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep +for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is +likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his +hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an +impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is +significant that the singers who are most aware of their +inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no +thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are +obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, +herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the +problem for us. She avers, + + I found the phrase to every thought + I ever had, but one; + And that defies me,--as a hand + Did try to chalk the sun. + + To races nurtured in the dark;-- + How would your own begin? + Can blaze be done in cochineal, + Or noon in mazarin? + +"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the +poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of +his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their +darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of +Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the +apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.] + +Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most +often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the +question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a +divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth +century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of +adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too +frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He +may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not +attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his +thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his +public. + +Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less +aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, +throughout, the tenor of the first stanza: + + My counsel to the budding bard + Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard." + Your "gentle public," my good friend, + Won't read what they can't comprehend. + +This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and +one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's +audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. +Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is +enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to +face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall +the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own +delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse? + +There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the +intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been +reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments +that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to +make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his +materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for +his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And +he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries, + + O for ten years, that I may overwhelm + Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed + My soul has to herself decreed. +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother +George, April, 1817.] + +Bryant warns the poet, + + Deem not the framing of a deathless lay + The pastime of a drowsy summer day; + But gather all thy powers + And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of +avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet, + + Touch the crude line with fear + But in the moments of impassioned thought. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so +deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of +it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the +poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to +beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of +artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to +wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his +hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered +robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form +which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, +not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it. +Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson +delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger +of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than +these others, no doubt, even though he did not illustrate the efficacy +of his search, when he described his interest in reading old manuscripts +with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and +anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing +one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these. +The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped +off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with +more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the +beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the +conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an +accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they +are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn +his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the +cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades +and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is +proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of +most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning +advises them, + + Keep up the fire + And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or +whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation +of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he +realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than +this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of +revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers +of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does +not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over +the poet, + + When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, + Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead, + And though he cherisheth + The babe most strangely born from out her death, + Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, + It is not she. + [Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the +blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of +contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his +arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes +into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks +the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's +attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. Alice Gary +pleads, + + Hear me tell + How much my will transcends my feeble powers, + As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowers + Their tender hues. +[Footnote: _To the Spirit of Song_.] + +And there is not a poet in the last century of such prominence that he +does not reverence such a confession, [Footnote: Some poems showing the +similarity in such an attitude of great and small alike, follow: +_Epistle to Charles C. Clarke_, Keats; _The Soul's Expression_, Mrs. +Browning; _Memorial Verses to Wm. B. Scott_, Swinburne; _Sister Songs_, +_Proemion to Love in Dian's Lap_, _A Judgment in Heaven_, Francis +Thompson; _Urania_, Matthew Arnold; _There Have Been Vast Displays of +Critic Wit_, Alexander Smith; _Invita Minerva_ and _L'Envoi to the +Muse_, J. R. Lowell; _The Voiceless_, O. W. Holmes; _Fata Morgana_, and +_Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought_, Longfellow; _L'Envoi_, +Kipling; _The Apology_, and _Gleam on Me, Fair Ideal_, Lewis Morris; +_Dedication to Austin Dobson_, E. Gosse; _A Country Nosegay_, and +_Gleaners of Fame_, Alfred Austin; _Another Tattered Rhymster in the +Ring_, G. K. Chesterton; _To Any Poet_, Alice Meynell; _The Singer_, and +_To a Lady on Chiding Me For Not Writing_, Richard Realf; _The Will and +the Wing_ and _Though Dowered with Instincts Keen and High_, P. H. +Haynes; _Dull Words_, Trumbull Stickney; _The Inner Passion_, Alfred +Noyes; _The Veiled Muse_, William Winter; _Sonnet_, William Bennett; +_Tell Me_, Max Ehrmann; _The Singer's Plea_, Edward Dowden; _Genius_, R. +H. Home; _My Country_, George Woodberry; _Uncalled_, Madison Cawein; +Thomas Bailey Aldrich, _At the Funeral of a Minor Poet_; Robert Haven +Schauffler, _Overtones, The Silent Singers_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _A +Minor Poet_; Alec de Candole, _The Poets_.] and aver that he too is an +earnest and humble suppliant in the temple of beauty. For the clearer +his glimpse of the transcendent vision has been, the more conscious he +is of his blindness after the glory has passed, and the more +unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE POET'S MORALITY + + +If English poets of the last century are more inclined to parade their +moral virtue than are poets of other countries, this may be the result +of a singular persistency on the part of England in searching out and +punishing sins ascribed to poetic temperament. Byron was banished; +Shelley was judged unfit to rear his own children; Keats was advertised +as an example of "extreme moral depravity"; [Footnote: By _Blackwoods_.] +Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; Swinburne was castigated as "an unclean +fiery imp from the pit." [Footnote: By _The Saturday Review_.] These are +some of the most conspicuous examples of a refusal by the British public +to countenance what it considers a code of morals peculiar to poets. It +is hardly to be wondered at that verse-writers of the nineteenth and +twentieth centuries have not been inclined to quarrel with Sir Philip +Sidney's statement that "England is the stepmother of poets," [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry_.] and that through their writings should run a vein +of aggrieved protest against an unfair discrimination in dragging their +failings ruthlessly out to the light. + +It cannot, however, be maintained that England is unique in her +prejudice against poetic morals. The charges against the artist have +been long in existence, and have been formulated and reformulated in +many countries. In fact Greece, rather than England, might with some +justice be regarded as the parent of the poet's maligners, for Plato has +been largely responsible for the hue and cry against the poet throughout +the last two millennia. Various as are the counts against the poet's +conduct, they may all be included under the declaration in the +_Republic_, "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of +withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." +[Footnote: Book X, 606, Jowett translation.] + +Though the accusers of the poet are agreed that the predominance of +passion in his nature is the cause of his depravity, still they are a +heterogeneous company, suffering the most violent disagreement among +themselves as to a valid reason for pronouncing his passionate impulses +criminal. Their unfortunate victim is beset from so many directions that +he is sorely put to it to defend himself against one band of assailants +without exposing himself to attack from another quarter. + +This hostile public may be roughly divided into three camps, made up, +respectively, of philistines, philosophers, and puritans. Within recent +years the distinct grievance of each group has been made articulate in a +formal denunciation of the artist's morals. + +There is, first, that notorious indictment, _Degeneration_, by Max +Nordau. Nordau speaks eloquently for all who claim the name "average +plain citizen," all who would hustle off to the gallows anyone found +guilty of breaking the lockstep imposed upon men by convention. +Secondly, there is a severe criticism of the poet from an ostensibly +unbiased point of view, _The Man of Genius_, by Cesare Lombroso. +Herein are presented the arguments of the thinkers, who probe the poet's +foibles with an impersonal and scientific curiosity. Last, there is the +severe arraignment, _What Is Art?_ by Tolstoi. In this book are +crystallized the convictions of the ascetics, who recognize in beauty a +false goddess, luring men from the stern pursuit of holiness. + +How does it come about that, in affirming the perniciousness of the +poet's passionate temperament, the man of the street, the philosopher, +and the puritan are for the nonce in agreement? The man of the street is +not averse to feeling, as a rule, even when it is carried to egregious +lengths of sentimentality. A stroll through a village when all the +victrolas are in operation would settle this point unequivocally for any +doubter. It seems that the philistine's quarrel with the poet arises +from the fact that, unlike the makers of phonograph records, the poet +dares to follow feeling in defiance of public sentiment. Like the +conservative that he is, the philistine gloats over the poet's lapses +from virtue because, in setting aside mass-feeling as a gauge of right +and wrong, and in setting up, instead, his own individual feelings as a +rule of conduct, the poet displays an arrogance that deserves a fall. +The philosopher, like the philistine, may tolerate feeling within +limits. His sole objection to the poet lies in the fact that, far from +making emotion the handmaiden of the reason, as the philosopher would +do, the poet exalts emotion to a seat above the reason, thus making +feeling the supreme arbiter of conduct. The puritan, of course, gives +vent to the most bitter hostility of all, for, unlike the philistine and +the philosopher, he regards natural feeling as wholly corrupt. Therefore +he condemns the poet's indulgence of his passionate nature with equal +severity whether he is within or without the popular confines of proper +conduct, or whether or not his conduct may be proved reasonable. + +Much of the inconsistency in the poet's exhibitions of his moral +character may be traced to the fact that he is addressing now one, now +another, of his accusers. The sobriety of his arguments with the +philosopher has sometimes been interpreted by the man of the street as +cowardly side-stepping. On the other hand, the poet's bravado in defying +the man of the street might be interpreted by the philosopher as an +acknowledgment of imperviousness to reason. + +It seems as though the first impulse of the poet were to set his back +against the wall and deal with all his antagonists at once, by +challenging their right to pry into his private conduct. It is true that +certain poets of the last century have believed it beneath their dignity +to pay any attention to the insults and persecution of the public. But +though a number have maintained an air of stolid indifference so long as +the attacks have remained personal, few or none have been content to +disregard defamation of a departed singer. + +The public cannot maintain, in many instances, that this vicarious +indignation arises from a sense of sharing the frailties of the dead +poet who is the direct object of attack. Not thus may one account for +the generous heat of Whittier, of Richard Watson Gilder, of Robert +Browning, of Tennyson, in rebuking the public which itches to make a +posthumous investigation of a singer's character. [Footnote: See +Whittier, _My Namesake_; Richard W. Gilder, _A Poet's Protest_, and +_Desecration_; Robert Browning, _House_; Tennyson, _In Memoriam_.] +Tennyson affords a most interesting example of sensitiveness with +nothing, apparently, to conceal. There are many anecdotes of his morbid +shrinking from public curiosity, wholly in key with his cry of +abhorrence, + + Now the poet cannot die + Nor leave his music as of old, + But round him ere he scarce be cold + Begins the scandal and the cry: + Proclaim the faults he would not show, + Break lock and seal; betray the trust; + Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but just + The many-headed beast should know. + +In protesting against the right of the public to judge their conduct, +true poets refuse to bring themselves to a level with their accusers by +making the easiest retort, that they are made of exactly the same clay +as is the _hoi polloi_ that assails them. This sort of recrimination is +characteristic of a certain blustering type of claimant for the title of +poet, such as Joaquin Miller, a rather disorderly American of the last +generation, who dismissed attacks upon the singer with the words, + + Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealed + That he was more than man or less? +[Footnote: _Burns_ and _Byron_.] + +The attitude is also characteristic of another anomalous type which +flourished in America fifty years ago, whose verse represents an +attempted fusion of emasculated poetry and philistine piety. A writer of +this type moralizes impartially over the erring bard and his accusers, + + Sin met thy brother everywhere, + And is thy brother blamed? + From passion, danger, doubt and care + He no exemption claimed. +[Footnote: Ebenezer Eliot, _Burns_.] + +But genuine poets refuse to compromise themselves by admitting that they +are no better than other men. + +They are not averse, however, to pointing out the unfitness of the +public to cast the first stone. So unimpeachable a citizen as Longfellow +finds even in the notoriously spotted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, an +advantage over his maligners because + + He is not + That despicable thing, a hypocrite. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Most of the faults charged to them, poets aver, exist solely in the evil +minds of their critics. Coleridge goes so far as to expurgate the poetry +of William Blake, "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from +the too probable want of it in the readers." [Footnote: Letter to Charles +Augustus Tulk, Highgate, Thursday Evening, 1818, p. 684, Vol. II, +_Letters_, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge.] + +The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the +more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak +of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for +autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in +which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says +of Burns, "We can see horribly clear in the work of such a man his whole +life, as if we were God's spies." [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, +p. 285.] The Rousseau-like nudity of the poet's soul is sometimes put +forward as a plea that the public should close its eyes to possible +shortcomings. Yet, as a matter of fact, it is precisely in the lack of +privacy characterizing the poet's life that his enemies find their +justification for concerning themselves with his morality. Since by +flaunting his personality in his verse he propagates his faults among +his admirers, the public is surely justified in pointing out and +denouncing his failings. + +Poets cannot logically deny this. To do so, they would have to confess +that their inspirations are wholly unaffected by their personalities. +But this is, naturally, a very unpopular line of defense. That unhappy +worshiper of puritan morals and of the muses, J. G. Holland, does make +such a contention, averring, + + God finds his mighty way + Into his verse. The dimmest window panes + Let in the morning light, and in that light + Our faces shine with kindled sense of God + And his unwearied goodness, but the glass + Gets little good of it; nay, it retains + Its chill and grime beyond the power of light + To warm or whiten ... + ... The psalmist's soul + Was not a fitting place for psalms like his + To dwell in overlong, while wanting words. +[Footnote: _Kathrina._] + +But the egotism of the average poet precludes this explanation. No more +deadly insult could be offered him than forgiveness of his sins on the +ground of their unimportance. Far from holding that his personality does +not affect his verse, he would have us believe that the sole worth of +his poetry lies in its reflection of his unique qualities of soul. +Elizabeth Barrett, not Holland, exhibits the typical poetic attitude +when she asks Robert Browning, "Is it true, as others say, that the +productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature,--that in the +minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is _not_ true, +to my mind." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 3, 1845.] + +The glass houses in which the poet's accusers may reside really have +nothing to do with the question. The immorality of these men is of +comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's +personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his +works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn +have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne +muses happily over the sins of Villon, + + But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire, +[Footnote: _A Ballad of Francois Villon._] +it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a +claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without +recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral +history from his writings. + +Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the +ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them +that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead +him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and +philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of +virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by +making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous +charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition. + +There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the +obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness +of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their +voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which +finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly +ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege. + +So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its +members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to +present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are +heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose +only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days +when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting +their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is +untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to +dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say +when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing +at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to +choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and +the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. +Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period +wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted +morality, towers above most of his contemporaries? + +Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an +addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine +element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes +too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling +conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under +the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the +sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among +men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law. + +Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking +back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to + + Come down and redeem us from virtue, + +upon his youthful zest in leaving + + The lilies and languors of virtue + For the roses and raptures of vice, + +he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic +ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous +life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, +there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish +and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse, +_Life of Swinburne,_ p. 309.] + +So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, +however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the +contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression +must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most +conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the +time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration +of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes +did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore: + + If on his cheek unholy blood + Burned for one youthful hour, + 'Twas but the flushing of the bud + That bloomed a milk-white flower. +[Footnote: _After a Lecture on Moore_.] + +One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures +must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's +moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is +unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, +"I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to +the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have +recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent +to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to +feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of +Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his +obligatory feelings did not flower in a _Christabel_ or a _Kubla Khan_. + +The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of +poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from +conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what +even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if +unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness +added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of +virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its +aesthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains +unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been +on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose +aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic +expression. + +The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect +life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it. +He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to +tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to +indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until +he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, +Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, +A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No Lust Like to +Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth +century. A characteristic renaissance attitude toward life and art was +caught by Browning in a passage of _Sordello_. The hero, in a momentary +reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from +vice and exclaims, + + Leave untried + Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze + Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees + Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust, + All tyrannies in every shape be thrust + Upon this now. + +Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a +passing impulse in Sordello's life. + +The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in +the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If +the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a +very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's +autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don +Juan_--as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably +in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's +_Villanelle of the Poet's Road_ is a typical expression of the +mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines, + + Wine and women and song, + Three things garnish our way: + Yet is day overlong. + Three things render us strong, + Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. + Yet is day overlong. +Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, +rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices +is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an +inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover +it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic +feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. +This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian +period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to +it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the +most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the +_Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and +Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these +youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so +innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance +for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of +Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but +inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss +Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that +everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly +by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; +May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and +Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which +would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor, +cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into +their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." +[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.] + +Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as +yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him +into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a +yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take +an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the +_Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, +as in the lines, + + There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me, + I like the lassies--Gude forgie me. + +But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his +artist's temperament. The muse tells him, + + I saw thy pulses' maddening play, + Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way, + And yet the light that led astray + Was light from Heaven. + +And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided +poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time. + +Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height +about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor +over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_; +Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of Francois Villon_.] At the same time +Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, +_Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis +Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared +to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this +time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving +cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded + + What expiating agony + May for him damned to poesy + Shut in that little sentence be,-- + What deep austerities of strife,-- + He lived his life. He lived his life. +[Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.] + +Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case +more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, +puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as +the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their +charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to +temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper +course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but +to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a +disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. +[Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease +is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the +overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his +nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand +temptation. + +Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders +to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in +sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that +this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major +conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting +every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a +sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds +only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the +perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each +expression of his theories. + +In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, +[Footnote: See _Edmund Shore_, _Villars_.] Praed [Footnote: See _The +Talented Man_, _To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry_.] and Landor. [Footnote: +See _Few Poets Beckon_, _Apology for Gebir_.] Later, when the wave of +Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the +cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, +in _Michael Angelo_.] Protest against the group of decadents who +flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, +though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as +seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to +dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the +laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet +reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus: + + There will be fools that in the name of art + Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, + I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard + From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves + Far, far above them. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. See also +Richard Le Gallienne, _The Decadent to his Soul_, _Proem to the +Reader in English Poems_; Joyce Kilmer, _A Ballad of New Sins_.] + +Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral +natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. +In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is +ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of +wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if +a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all +scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth +century this mode of passing judgment was most naively manifest in +verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal +lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, +without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In +the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to +prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same +simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral +reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, +Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective +attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.] + +It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that +considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The +highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though +poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his +critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his +protege, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, +Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been +represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of +their poetical wares. + +Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead +one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain +quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate +connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously +moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that +the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing +the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in _In Memoriam_: + + Loveliness of perfect deeds, + More strong than all poetic thought, + +and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the +tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's _Letters of Life and Morning_, in +which she exhorts the young poet, + + Learn to sing, + But first in all thy learning, learn to be. + +The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the +conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, +not poetry, holds his first allegiance. + + He held his manly name + Far dearer than the muse, +[Footnote: J. G. Saxe, _A Poet's Elegy_.] + +we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan +carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' +talent and their respectability, averring, + + They are like angels, but some angels fell. +[Footnote: _Poets_.] + +Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be +mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes, + + Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these + The poet seems beside the man; + His life is now his noblest strain. +[Footnote: _To Bryant on His Birthday_.] + +When the poet of more firmly grounded conviction attempts to show reason +for his confidence in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument +for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by +Carlyle in his essay, _The Hero as Poet_. This is the theory that, far +from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, +the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as +preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry +is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from +certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have +been unlimited. Longfellow has seized upon this conception of the poet +in his drama, _Michael Angelo_, as has G. L. Raymond in his drama, +_Dante_. In the latter poem the argument for the poet's moral supremacy +is baldly set forth. + +Artistic sensibility, Dante says, far from excusing moral laxity, binds +one to stricter standards of right living. So when Cavalcanti argues in +favor of free love, + + Your humming birds may sip the sweet they need + From every flower, and why not humming poets? + +Raymond makes Dante reply, + + The poets are not lesser men, but greater, + And so should find unworthy of themselves + A word, a deed, that makes them seem less worthy. + +Owing to the growth of specialization in modern life, this argument, +despite Carlyle, has not attained much popularity. Even in idealized +fictions of the poet, it is not often maintained that he is equally +proficient in every line of activity. Only one actual poet within our +period, William Morris, can be taken as representative of such a type, +and he does not afford a strong argument for the poet's distinctive +virtue, inasmuch as tradition does not represent him as numbering +remarkable saintliness among his numerous gifts. + +There is a decided inconsistency, moreover, in claiming unusual strength +of will as one of the poet's attributes. The muscular morality resulting +from training one's will develops in proportion to one's ability to +overthrow one's own unruly impulses. It is almost universally maintained +by poets, on the contrary, that their gift depends upon their yielding +themselves utterly to every fugitive impulse and emotion. Little modern +verse vaunts the poet's stern self-control. George Meredith may cry, + + I take the hap + Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails + Propels, but I am helmsman. +[Footnote: _Modern Love_.] + +Henley may thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, +however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry +than is this one. + +Hardly more popular than the superman theory is another argument for the +poet's virtue that appears sporadically in verse. It has occurred to a +few poets that their virtue is accounted for by the high subject-matter +of their work, which exercises an unconscious influence upon their +lives. Thus in the eighteenth century Young finds it natural that in +Addison, the author of _Cato_, + + Virtues by departed heroes taught + Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame, + Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame. +[Footnote: _Lines to Mr. Addison_.] + +Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same +view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live + + With pureness in youth and religion in age. +[Footnote: _What Is a Poet_.] + +since he conceives as the function of poetry + + To raise and purify the grovelling soul, + * * * * * + And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a +Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of +the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming +his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more +efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps. + +These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real +ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his +subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,--the +fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful. + +There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility +with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves +his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: See the +_Republic_, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher +are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is +riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the +confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that +the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are +unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its +most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an +irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher. + +Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged +throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain +of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the +erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one +phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England, +where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again +in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading +across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The +only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the +Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to +English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his +Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian aesthetics, +he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his +creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to +make of his own life a true poem. + +"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the +beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the +shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain +assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] +The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of +beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and +repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering +sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry, + + Tis not in + The harmony of things--this hard decree, + This ineradicable taint of sin, + This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree + Whose root is earth. +[Footnote: _Childe Harold_.] + +If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it +is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been +undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems +wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and +the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, _Ode on the Poetical Character_; +John Hughes, _Ode on Divine Poetry_.] Among the romantic poets, the +Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he +says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the +opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad +feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this +particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's +allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in +the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the +poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. +One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor +poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet, + + O singing heart, think not of aught save song, + Beauty can do no wrong. +[Footnote: _Song_.] + +Again one hears of the singer, + + Pure must he be; + Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear + Where others hear not; see where others see + With a dazed vision, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_.] + +and again, + + To write a poem, a man should be as pure + As frost-flowers. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_.] + +Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who + + Lived beyond men, and so stood + Admitted to the brotherhood + Of beauty. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _The Dreamer of Dreams_.] + +It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all +of them look to a single standard to govern them aesthetically and +morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises, + +Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread +save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of +sin. [Footnote: _The Silent Voices_.] + +Such is the poet's case for himself. But no matter how eloquently he +presents his case, his quarrel with his three enemies remains almost as +bitter as before, and he is obliged to pay some attention to their +individual charges. + +The poet's quarrel with the philistine, in particular, is far from +settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the +good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What +is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the +plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any +charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which +reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? +Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary +folk are. If the poet professes to be able to achieve righteousness +without effort, the only way to prove it is to conform his conduct to +that of men who achieve righteousness with groaning of spirit. It is too +easy for the poet to justify any and every aberration with the +announcement, "My sixth sense for virtue, which you do not possess, has +revealed to me the propriety of such conduct." Thus reasons the +philistine. + +The beauty-blind philistine doubtless has some cause for bewilderment, +but the poet takes no pains to placate him. The more genuine is one's +impulse toward goodness, the more inevitably, the poet says, will it +bring one into conflict with an artificial code of morals. Shelley +indicated this at length in _The Defense of Poetry_, and in both +_Rosalind and Helen_ and _The Revolt of Islam_ he showed his bards +offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of +the poet-hero in _Prince Athanase_ Shelley tells us, + + Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise. + What he dared do or think, though men might start + He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes. + +It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative +verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a +typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora +Leigh_, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid, +and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and +chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage +with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical +resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too +respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath +with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry +Patmore. In Patmore's poem, _Olympus_, the bard decides to spend an +evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the +coarse jests, and flees home to + + The milk-soup men call domestic bliss. + +Likewise, in _The Angel in the House_, the poet follows a most +domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he +fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself. This sin +consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after +shamefacedly confessing it, he adds, + + And ere I slept, on bended knee + I owned myself, with many a tear + Unseasonable, disorderly. + +But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience +to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other +extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands +of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from +conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being + + Tall galleons, + Out of their very beauty driven to dare + The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_, Alfred Noyes.] + +He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such +courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine +Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public, + + My sins they learn by rote, + And never miss one; no, no miser of them, + * * * * * + Avid of foulness, so they hound me out + Away from blessing that they prate about, + But never saw, and never dreamed upon, + And know not how to long for with desire. +[Footnote: _Marlowe_.] + +In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in lines _On the Morals of +Poets_, warns their detractor, + + Bigot, one folly of the man you flout + Is more to God than thy lean life is whole. + +If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out +that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He +acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps, +but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a +childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the +world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The +innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and +purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical +pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's _The Minstrel_, +suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the +world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The +innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by +like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating +him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the +shock of awakening to conditions as they are. But environment alone does +not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of +whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize +evil motives when they are face to face with them. + +Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic +nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. +Browning, [Footnote: See _A Vision of Poets_.] Swinburne [Footnote: +See _A New Year's Ode_.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See _Sister +Songs_.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it +has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an +ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so +noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the +poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in +literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley, + + The curse of Cain + Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast + And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest. + +Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the +poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes of _Rosalind and Helen, +The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion_ and _Prince Athanase_, +share the disposition of the last-named one: + + Naught of ill his heart could understand, + But pity and wild sorrow for the same. + +It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of +Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic +readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is +reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many +respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's +character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting +glimpses of Shelley in _Sordello_, and to have acknowledged them in +his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's +revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of +Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley +as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of +later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven. +Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the +earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the +saint's white purity," being + + A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong, + * * * * * + With heavenly inspiration, too divine + For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine. +[Footnote: _Shelley_.] + +Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven +heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission. + +Aside from Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently +chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the +poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, _The +Death of Marlowe_, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's +depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it +moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted +Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye. In the drama by +Josephine Preston Peabody, the persecutions of hypocritical puritans +hound Marlowe to his death. [Footnote: _Marlowe._] + +The most representative view of Marlowe as an innocent, deceived youth +is that presented by Alfred Noyes, in _At the Sign of the Golden +Shoe_. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group +thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies + + Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl, + Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown. + +While there float in from the street, at intervals, the cries of the +ballad-mongers hawking their latest doggerel, + + Blaspheming Tamborlin must die, + And Faustus meet his end; + Repent, repent, or presently + To hell you must descend, + +Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringing +his possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also, + All unshielded, all unarmed, + A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams. + +His manner, + + Untamed, adventurous, but still innocent, + +exposed him to the clutches of the underworld. One woman, in particular, + + Used all her London tricks + To coney-catch the country greenhorn. + +Won by her pathetic account of her virtues and trials Marlowe tried to +help her to escape from London-then, because he was utterly unused to +the wiles of women, and was + + Simple as all great, elemental things, + +when she expressed an infatuation for him, then + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + * * * * * + And all that God had meant to wake one day + Under the Sun of Love, suddenly woke + By candle-light, and cried, "The Sun, the Sun." + +At last, holding him wrapped in her hair, the woman attempted to +tantalize him by revealing her promiscuous amours. In a horror of agony +and loathing, Marlowe broke away from her. The next day, as Nash was +loitering in a group including this woman and her lover, Archer, someone +ran in to warn Archer that a man was on his way to kill him. As Marlowe +strode into the place, Nash was struck afresh by his beauty: + + I saw his face, + Pale, innocent, just the clear face of that boy + Who walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick, + The little cobbler's son. Yet--there I caught + My only glimpse of how the sun-god looked-- + +Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that + + His were, perchance, the noblest steeds of all, + And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawn + Above the world.... Before his hand + Had learned to quell them, he was dashed to earth. + +Minor writers are most impartial in clearing the names of any and all +historical artists by such reasoning as this. By negligible American +versifiers one too often finds Burns lauded as one whom "such purity +inspires," [Footnote: A. S. G., _Burns_.] and, more astonishingly, +Byron conceived of as a misjudged innocent. If one is surprised to hear, +in verse on Byron's death, + + His cherub soul has passed to its eclipse, +[Footnote: T. H. Chivers, _On the Death of Byron_.] + +this fades into insignificance beside the consolation offered Byron by +another writer for his trials in this world, + + Peace awaits thee with caressings, + Sitting at the feet of Jesus. + +Better known poets are likely to admit a streak of imperfection in a few +of their number, while maintaining their essential goodness. It is +refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find +James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of +philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines +Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first +of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that +ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly +toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the +end, Burns' great charity is felt to offset all his failings, and Lowell +adds, of poets in general, + + These larger hearts must feel the rolls + Of stormier-waved temptation; + These star-wide souls beneath their poles + Bear zones of tropic passion. +[Footnote: _At the Burns Centennial_.] + +Browning is willing to allow even fictitious artists to be driven into +imperfect conduct by the failure of those about them to live up to their +standards. For example, Fra Lippo Lippi, disgusted with the barren +virtue of the monks, confesses, + + I do these wild things in sheer despite + And play the fooleries you catch me at + In sheer rage. + +But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author +assures the philistine public that it is entirely to blame. + +If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which +he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with +the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain +man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be +satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and +systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to +him. + +The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in +the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. +Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and +consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that +time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. +Robert Browning devoted a poem, _With Francis Furini_, to exposing the +incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in _The +Poet's Vow_, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken +determination to retire from the world, + + That so my purged, once human heart, + From all the human rent, + May gather strength to pledge and drink + Your wine of wonderment, + While you pardon me all blessingly + The woe mine Adam sent. + +In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the +best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts. + +No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a +flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in +their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's +mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a +failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is +truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives +in _Sordello_. + +One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument +again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than +Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and +sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing +himself into all phases of life. + +It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop +from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to +develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in +_Pauline_, + + I had resolved + No age should come on me ere youth was spent, + For I would wear myself out, + +Omar Khayyam's + + While you live + Drink!--for once dead you never shall return, + +Swinburne's cry of despair, + + Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has + grown gray with thy breath; + We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the + fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.] + +show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less +than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become +easy for the poet to carry his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His +talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to +guide aright his + + principle of restlessness + That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all +[Footnote: _Pauline_.] + +The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses +that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times. +Emerson admits this, telling us, in _The Poet_, that although the +singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which + + Turn his heart from lovely maids, + And make the darlings of the earth + Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth, + +these moments of exaltation pass, and the singer finds himself a mere +man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature, + + Eager for good, not hating ill; + On his tense chords all strokes are felt, + The good, the bad, with equal zeal. + +It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions +of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage +at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is +quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's +_Ode to Duty_ does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception +of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the +grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for +poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic +principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of +Arthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the +disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She +reflected grimly, + + Does the road wind uphill all the way? + Yes, to the very end! + Will the day's journey take the whole long day? + From morn till night, my friend. +[Footnote: _Uphill._] + +It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern +conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty +is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough +and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas +in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness +is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then +so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights. +Thus in the _Prelude_ he described an unconscious purification of +his life by his worship of physical beauty, saying of nature, + + If in my youth I have been pure in heart, + If, mingling with the world, I am content + With my own modest pleasures, and have lived + With God and Nature communing, removed + From little enmities and low desires, + The gift is yours. + +Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature +in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical +aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to +Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem +to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as +possible--as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The +Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing +incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for +they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to +Duty,_ + + When love is an unerring light, + And joy its own felicity. + +For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has +capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's +life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such +misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_ +wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, +because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted. +He resolves, + + The world shall bow to me conceiving all + Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small + Afar--not tasting any; no machine + To exercise my utmost will is mine, + Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive + What I could do, a mastery believe + Asserted and established to the throng + By their selected evidence of song, + Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek + To be, I am. + +The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet +the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser +whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the +philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the +good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion? +What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the +essential nature of the highest good as is the reason? + +There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on +this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and +the poet who + + dares to take + Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake, +[Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._] + +there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the +rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic +of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but +not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the +world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, +not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of +the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically asserting, "I hold +virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the +disposition, each a _feeling,_ not a principle." [Footnote: _Letter to +Charles Dallas,_ January 21, 1808.] + +On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as +that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher, +is governed by reason solely,--that the poetic imagination is a purely +intellectual function. [Footnote: See the _Southern Literary +Messenger,_ II, 328, April, 1836.] + +The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes +are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,--Browning, Tennyson, +Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual +pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral +conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their +natures. + +The most profound utterances of poets on this subject, however, show +them to be, not rationalists, but thoroughgoing Platonists. The feeling +in which they trust is a Platonic intuition which includes the reason, +but exists above it. At least this is the view of Shelley, and Shelley +has, more largely than any other man, moulded the beliefs of later +English poets. It is because he judges imaginative feeling to be always +in harmony with the deepest truths perceived by the reason that he +advertises his intention to purify men by awakening their feelings. +Therefore, in his preface to _The Revolt of Islam_ he says "I would +only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of +true virtue." in the preface to the _Cenci,_ again, he declares, +"Imagination is as the immortal God which should take flesh for the +redemption of human passion." + +The poet, while thus expressing absolute faith in the power of beauty to +redeem the world, yet is obliged to take into account the Platonic +distinction between the beautiful and the lover of the beautiful. +[Footnote: _Symposium,_ sec. 204.] + +No man is pure poet, he admits, but in proportion as he approaches +perfect artistry, his life is purified. Shelley is expressing the +beliefs of practically all artists when he says, "The greatest poets +have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate +prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the +most fortunate of men; and the exceptions, as they regard those who +possess the poetical faculty in a high, yet an inferior degree, will be +found upon consideration to confirm, rather than to destroy, the rule." +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry._] + +Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Shelley precisely. In +_The Crystal,_ Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been +embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts +their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And in _Life +and Song_ he repeats the same idea: + + None of the singers ever yet + Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, + Or truly sung his true, true thought. + +Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life +arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and +the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the +poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with +the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges, +instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote: +Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the +senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal. + +Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic +expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence +to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in +the nature of a farewell to verse writing. In _The Symbol Seduces,_ +"A. E." exclaims, + + I leave + For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower, + For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive; + For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower. + +But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as +Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging +to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does +not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him, +and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the +imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to +him "a dome of many colored glass" that reveals, yet stains, "the white +radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty +apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her +ravishing. + +This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic +problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the +revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a +great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of +his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in +contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands +that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly +passions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to +separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may, +according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of +Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this +time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the +preeminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the +disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was +compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel +that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede +to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature +of the artist is manifest. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE POET'S RELIGION + + +There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the +priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not +tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed +of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing +no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest +critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, assert +with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with +their interpretation of that word. + +As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the +refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are +in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as +incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is +unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic +philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is, +as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the +poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The +poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society. + +The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in +evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry +is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn +pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions +of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the +period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for +art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers +could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had +said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we +must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This +narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within +the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be +characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in +what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their +philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds +and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send +their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue +philosophers. + +Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a +sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his +thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not +unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. +But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because +he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot +conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting +philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world +of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of +philosophy to which he objected, as follows: + + To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant + to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first + sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome + hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and + _species_ and _differentia_, into formal classes, + under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels + fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or + physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our + flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: _Plato and + Platonism._] + +But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which +is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet +demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we +may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most +purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, +"The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. +Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other +the image." [Footnote: _The Romantic Movement,_ p. 129.] That is, +to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual. + +Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true +that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of +subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Shelley is +the classic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's +theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of +his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, in _Queen Mab_. +But Shelley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the +incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that +Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under +the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely +able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the +course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more +truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with +spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, +were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who +declared, "After I had read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary,_ +I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart." +[Footnote: James Gillman, _Life of Coleridge_, p. 23.] + +A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at +the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing +materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their +admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in +his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that +materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the +curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the +reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If +idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which +poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the +_fin de siecle_ school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, +already drooping. + +It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, +Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these +men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, +the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible +explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for +poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic +views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To +Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that +one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. +"I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about +which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life." +[Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.] + +It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the +poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only +where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the +horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the +most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from +obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which +expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank +paper. + +One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the +notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose +atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of _The City of Dreadful +Night_. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, +with the words, + + And now at last authentic word I bring + Witnessed by every dead and living thing; + Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: + There is no God; no fiend with name divine + Made us and tortures us; if we must pine + It is to satiate no Being's gall. + +But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of +James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically +speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of +his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world +in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of +him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It +would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. +Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City +of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William +Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful +envy, + + He came to the desert of London town, + Mirk miles broad; + He wandered up and he wandered down, + Ever alone with God. +[Footnote: _William Blake._] + +Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner +world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be +distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his +impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of +his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it +is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the +"aesthetic repose." + +Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third +element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim +sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the +eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning, + + Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells + Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine. +[Footnote: _Poets._] + +Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every +verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of +the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, +John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benet, +_The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged +persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the +present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his +birds are + + Summer-saulting for God's sake. + +Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and +spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at +best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas +Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought +"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously +excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause +of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas +which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, +however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost +reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the +flower itself. He muses, + + Flower in the crannied wall, + I pluck you out of the crannies;-- + I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, + Little flower--but if I could understand + What you are, root and all and all in all, + I should know what God and man is. + +By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets +designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning +of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the +instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All +poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the +sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one. + +A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's +unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as +Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to +do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If +he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina +Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by + + The foolishest fond folly of a heart + Divided, neither here nor there at rest, + That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth. +[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.] + +On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely +physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his +nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. +Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both +elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him. + +Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a +conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the +unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Shelley devoted +a large part of _Prometheus Unbound_ and the conclusion of _Adonais_ to +his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the +sense world which was yet spiritual, + + The Being that is in the clouds and air, + That is in the green leaves among the groves, +[Footnote: _Hart Leap Well._] + +and was led to the conclusion, + + It is my faith that every flower + Enjoys the air it breathes. +[Footnote: _Lines Written in Early Spring._] + +Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever +returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. +Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now +rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in _Empedocles on +AEtna,_ in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and +out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is +most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's +pantheistic faith. Swinburne's _Hertha_ is one of the most thorough +going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much +of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit. +One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne's +_Natural Religion,_ wherein he explains the grounds of his faith, + + Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air + I cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?" + Sudden the answer like a flute I heard; + It was an angel, though it seemed a bird. + +On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's +charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the +realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to +establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe +with him. + +The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of +the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, +that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly +incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards +himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a +religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. +Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated +"without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter +to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the +same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does +poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence +from this power of revelation. + +But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the +poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit +characteristic of religious reverence. + +It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is +one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings. + + There is no God, O son! + If thou be none, +[Footnote: _On the Downs._] + +Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet +exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry +the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter +of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any +qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the +ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, +any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I +wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but +assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, +p. 309.] + +Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by +Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the +other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the +third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's +divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification +of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own +image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet +God." [Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of +the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in +carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. +In the _Prophetic Books_, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all +that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not +humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it. + +Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, +in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not +flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the +puritan himself feels the power of Emily Bronte's _Last Lines,_ in which +she cries with proud and triumphant faith, + + Though earth and man were gone, + And suns and universes ceased to be, + And Thou wert left alone, + Every existence would exist in Thee. + + There is not room for Death, + Nor atom that his might could render void; + Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, + And what Thou art may never be destroyed. + +There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has +the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical +illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome +importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if +these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully +repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious +demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the +romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him. + +In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to +placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the +appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this +attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. +So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of +the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also +was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the +unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch +as Byron's _A Vision of Judgment,_ with its irresistible satire on +Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet. + +The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the +romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance +of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century +inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest +of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring +conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of +yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I _do_ believe," +said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but +the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the +orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of +religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the +Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See +also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] _Cain,_ +however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief +significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in +arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians. + +Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional +religion. In _Julian and Maddalo_, he causes Byron to say of him, + + You were ever still + Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel. + +Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was +persecuted by the church. In _Rosalind and Helen_, the hero was +hated by the clergy, + + For he made verses wild and queer + Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear, + +and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in +Lionel's death, for + + The ministers of misrule sent + Seized on Lionel and bore + His chained limbs to a dreary tower, + For he, they said, from his mind had bent + Against their gods keen blasphemy. + +The most notable illustration of this phase of Shelley's thought is +_The Revolt of Islam,_ wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put +to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies. + +Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets +have gloried in his attitude. + +Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he + + Smote the God of base men's choice + At God's own gate. +[Footnote: _Burns._] + +Young poets have not yet lost their taste for religious persecution. It +is a great disappointment to them to find it difficult to strike fire +from the faithful in these days. Swinburne in his early poetry denounced +the orthodox God with such vigor that he roused a momentary flutter of +horror in the church, but nowadays the young poet who craves to manifest +his spiritual daring is far more likely to find himself in the position +of Rupert Brooke, of whom someone has said, "He imagines the poet as +going on a magnificent quest to curse God on his throne of fire, and +finding--nothing." + +The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, +however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his +finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, +indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in +which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, +frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter +Day._] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See _In Memoriam._] of Arnold, [Footnote: +See _Dover Beach._] of Clough. [Footnote: See _The New Sinai, Qui +Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium._] So, too, James Thomson muses +with regret, + + How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray + With all the others whom we love so well! + All disbelief and doubt might pass away, + And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell. + Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, + Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast. +[Footnote: _The Reclusant._] + +In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet +sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious +questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick +to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, +rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his +contemporaries, + + There lives more faith in honest doubt, + Believe me, than in half the creeds. + +Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he +expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any +more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the +heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and +love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards +proved spurious).] + +The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who +prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a +shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very +satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in +that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the +quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question +that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious +doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has +been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious +poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is +good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will +seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the +last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in +purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold. + +Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet +can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is +strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a +thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a +recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest +doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry, + + Ah, but there should be one! + There should be one. And there's the bitterness + Of this unending torture-place for men, + For the proud soul that craves a perfectness + That might outwear the rotting of all things + Rooted in earth. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe._] + +The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his +quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free +himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures +purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward +religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of +Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to +the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than +Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious +satisfaction. Thus the hero of _Pauline_ comes to no triumphant +issue, though he maintains, + + I have always had one lode-star; now + As I look back, I see that I have halted + Or hastened as I looked towards that star, + A need, a trust, a yearning after God. + +The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses, + + Of a power above you still, + Which, utterly incomprehensible, + Is out of rivalry, which thus you can + Love, though unloving all conceived by man-- + What need! And of--none the minutest duct + To that out-nature, naught that would instruct + And so let rivalry begin to live-- + But of a Power its representative + Who, being for authority the same, + Communication different, should claim + A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed, + This human clear, as that Divine concealed-- + What utter need! + +There is, after all, small need that the public should charge the poet +with deliberate failure to gain a satisfactory view of the deity. The +quest of a God who satisfies the poet's demand that He shall include all +life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and +embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears +inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and +troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in + + The too-bold dying song of her whose soul + Knew no fellow for might, + Passion, vehemence, grief, + Daring, since Byron died. +[Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, _Haworth Churchyard._] + +A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous +as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him, + + Who dropped his plummet down the broad + Deep universe, and said, "No God," + Finding no bottom. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets._] + +If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful +issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the +conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel +with Tennyson, + + Our little systems have their day, + They have their day and cease to be; + They are but broken lights of thee, + And thou, O Lord, art more than they, +[Footnote: _In Memoriam._] + +yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to + + Let lore of all theology + Be to thy soul what it can be. +[Footnote: _Soothsay._] + +Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of +tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the +part of the church. + +In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with +thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of +the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the +frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as +akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who +causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, _A Life in Song,_ +and _The Real and the Ideal,_ to begin by being poets, and end by +becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly +less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's _Bitter Sweet_ is a +thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman +who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and +hers likewise. In _Kathrina,_ though the hero, rebellious on account of +the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the +end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his +incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an +irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the +tradition of the poet-revivalist. + +Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina +Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean +Ingelow, in _Letters of Life and Morning_, offers most conventional +religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's _The +Angel in the House_, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the +eighteenth century could afford. + +The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother +of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson, +Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a +more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived, +perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in +evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded +in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute. +There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a +formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God +and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June +28, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert +Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the +suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically +advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline +Kilmer, April 21, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters_, +ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers +the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors. + +Perhaps a history of art would not square with the repugnance one feels +toward such censorship. Conformance to the religious beliefs of his time +certainly does not seem to have handicapped Homer or Dante, to say +nothing of the preeminent men in other fields of art, Phidias, Michael +Angelo, Raphael, etc. Yet in the modern consciousness, the theory of art +for art's sake has become so far established that we feel that any +compromise of the purely aesthetic standard is a loss to the artist. The +deity of the artist and the churchman may be in some measure the same, +since absolute beauty and absolute goodness are regarded both by poets +and theologians as identical, but there is reason to believe that the +poet may not go so far astray if he cleaves to his own immediate +apprehension of absolute beauty as he will if he fashions his beliefs +upon another man's stereotyped conception of the absolute good. + +Then, too, it is not unlikely that part of the poet's reluctance to +embrace the creed of his contemporaries arises from the fact that he, in +his secret heart, still hankers for his old title of priest. He knows +that it is the imaginative faculty of the poet that has been largely +instrumental in building up every religious system. The system that +holds sway in society is apt to be the one that he himself has just +outgrown; he has, accordingly, an artist's impatience for its +immaturity. There is much truth to the poet's nature in verses entitled +_The Idol Maker Prays_: + + Grant thou, that when my art hath made thee known + And others bow, I shall not worship thee, + But as I pray thee now, then let me pray + Some greater god,--like thee to be conceived + Within my soul. +[Footnote: By Arthur Guiterman.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + + +No matter how strong our affection for the ingratiating ne'er-do-well, +there are certain charges against the poet which we cannot ignore. It is +a serious thing to have an alleged madman, inebriate, and experimenter +in crime running loose in society. But there comes a time when our +patience with his indefatigable accusers is exhausted. Is not society +going a step too far if, after the poet's positive faults have been +exhausted, it institutes a trial for his sins of omission? Yet so it is. +If the poet succeeds in proving to the satisfaction of the jury that his +influence is innocuous, he must yet hear the gruff decision, "Perhaps, +as you say, you are doing no real harm. But of what possible use are +you? Either become an efficient member of society, or cease to exist." +Must we tamely look on, while the "light, winged, and holy creature," as +Plato called the poet, is harnessed to a truck wagon, and made to +deliver the world's bread and butter? Would that it were more common for +poets openly to defy society's demands for efficiency, as certain +children and malaperts of the poetic world have done! It is pleasant to +hear the naughty advice which that especially impractical poet, Emily +Dickinson, gave to a child: "Be sure to live in vain, dear. I wish I +had." [Footnote: Gamaliel Bradford, _Portraits of American Women_, +p. 248 (Mrs. Bianchi, p. 37).] And one is hardly less pleased to hear +the irrepressible Ezra Pound instruct his songs, + + But above all, go to practical people, go, jangle their door-bells. + Say that you do no work, and that you will live forever. +[Footnote: _Salutation the Second_.] + +Surely no one else has had so bad a time with efficiency experts as has +the poet, even though everyone whose occupation does not bring out sweat +on the brow is likely to fall under their displeasure. The scholar, for +instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he +has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have +dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even +bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to +maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is +often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging +aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to +loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him? + +The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be +confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of +his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James +Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_ (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. +Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, _The Poet and the Fisher_, +and _Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship_; +Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman, +_Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P. H. Hayne, +_An Idle Poet Dreaming_; Henry Timrod, _They Dub Thee Idler_; Washington +Allston, _Sylphs of the Seasons_; C. W. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Alan Seeger, +_Oneata_; J. G. Neihardt, _The Poet's Town_.] Sometimes he gives them +the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But +occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries +to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his +bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet. + +When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers +laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to +make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional +fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and +Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_, and _The Real +and the Ideal_.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few +scattered figures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.] +Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of +Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio, +Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See +_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must +admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet- +politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to +celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a +protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look +to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as +following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, +for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing +Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist +is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the +citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. +[Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama, +Richard Garnett.] + +If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he +may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will +vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He +is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer, + + When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's + work, + You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. + There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the + Turk, + And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword + in his hand. + It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, + And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was + strong, + And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, + Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song. +[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.] + +It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, +Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet +lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the +poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. +From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer +may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in +war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet +as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, +The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, +Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of +the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the +Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley, +_Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates, +Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David, +Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert +Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud +Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, +Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the +Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter +Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _Hell Gate of Soissons_; +Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace +Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the +Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_; +Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said, +"The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: +See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the +poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The +verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that +warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might +have done Byron's, + + When the true lightning of his soul was bared, + Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Bronte_.] + +But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his +character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does +not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be +pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him +that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of +strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he +has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too +likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet? +Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his +title as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some +merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims +for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at +fault when he excused his occupation: + + I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse, + And wrote verse. +[Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.] + +How can the poet satisfy the philistine world that his songs are worth +while? Need we ask? Business men will vouch for their utility, if he +will but conform to business men's ideas of art. Here is a typical +expression of their views, couched in verse for the singer's better +comprehension: + + The days of long-haired poets now are o'er, + The short-haired poet seems to have the floor; + For now the world no more attends to rhymes + That do not catch the spirit of the times. + The short-haired poet has no muse or chief, + He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef. +[Footnote: "The Short-haired Poet," in _Common-Sense_, by E. F. Ware.] + +But the poet utterly repudiates such a view of himself as this, for he +cannot draw his breath in the commercial world. [Footnote: Several poems +lately have voiced the poet's horror of materialism. See Josephine +Preston Peabody, _The Singing Man_; Richard Le Gallienne, _To R. W. +Emerson, Richard Watson Gilder_; Mary Robinson, _Art and Life_.] In vain +he assures his would-be friends that the intangibilities with which he +deals have a value of their own. Emerson says, + + One harvest from thy field + Homeward brought the oxen strong; + A second crop thine acres yield + Which I gather in a song. +[Footnote: _Apology_] + +But for this second crop the practical man says he can find absolutely +no market; hence overtures of friendliness between him and the poet end +with sneers and contempt on both sides. Doubtless the best way for the +poet to deal with the perennial complaints of the practical-minded, is +simply to state brazenly, as did Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite +useless." [Footnote: Preface to _Dorian Gray_.] + +Is the poet justified, then, in stopping his ears to all censure, and +living unto himself? Not so; when the hub-bub of his sordid accusers +dies away, he is conscious of another summons, before a tribunal which +he cannot despise or ignore. For once more the poet's equivocal position +exposes him to attacks from all quarters. He stands midway between the +spiritual and the physical worlds, he reveals the ideal in the sensual. +Therefore, while the practical man complains that the poet does not +handle the solid objects of the physical world, but transmutes them to +airy nothings, the philosopher, on the contrary, condemns the poet +because he does not wholly sever connections with this same physical +world, but is continually hovering about it, like a homesick ghost. + +Like the plain man, the philosopher gives the poet a chance to vindicate +his usefulness. Plato's challenge is not so age-worn that we may not +requote it. He makes Socrates say, in the _Republic_, + +Let us assure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation +that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered state, +we shall be delighted to receive her.... We are very conscious of her +charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth.... Shall I +propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this +condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some +other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are +lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on +her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful +to states and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. +[Footnote: _Republic_, Book X, 607.] + + * * * * * + +One wonders why the lovers of Poetry have been so much more solicitous +for her cause than Poetry herself has appeared to be. Aristotle, and +after him many others,--in the field of English literature, Sidney, +Shelley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,--have made most eloquent +defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been +forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to +attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the +last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the +impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them +to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but +here are some things I might say for myself, if I wished." + +Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal +conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give +the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy. +But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded +man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the +philosopher assures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than +is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at +least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the +philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet +distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet +pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, +but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious +system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of +himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is +really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body. + +Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical +man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of +the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and +one by the poet. [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, 596 B ff.] Now +the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well +known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the +room: + + "I know what is and what has been; + Not anything to me comes strange, + Who in so many years have seen + And lived through every kind of change. + I know when men are bad or good, + When well or ill," he slowly said, + "When sad or glad, when sane or mad + And when they sleep alive or dead." +[Footnote: _In the Room_] + +Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious +memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not +come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript +product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is +on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror +across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a +person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would +seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow +imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing +higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport." +[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.] + +It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake +their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd +enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of +dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel +the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow +assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude: + + Painting and sculpture are but images; + Are merely shadows cast by outward things + On stone or canvas, having in themselves + No separate existence. Architecture, + As something in itself, and not an image, + A something that is not, surpasses them + As substance shadow. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us +as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and +buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has +become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's +charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. +The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney +and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find +that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not +from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries +of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we +have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak +of commonness in the speaker's nature,--of a disposition to value the +clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined +to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, +"I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect. +It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an +earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of +the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than +one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A. +E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing, + + He who might have wrought in flame + Only traced upon the foam. +[Footnote: _Epilogue_] + +In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his +death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty +in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: +Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le +Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet +who died a soldier: + + A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, + Are greater than a poet's art, + And greater than a poet's fame + A little grave that has no name. +[Footnote: _Soliloquy_.] + +Is not our idealization of poets who died in war a confession that we +ourselves believe that they chose the better part,--that they did well +to discard imitation of life for life itself? + +It is not fair to force an answer to such a question till we have more +thoroughly canvassed poets' convictions on this matter. Do they all +admit the justice of Plato's characterization of poetry as a sport, +comparable to golf or tennis? In a few specific instances, poets have +taken this attitude toward their own verse, of course. There was the +"art for art's sake" cry, which at the end of the last century surely +degenerated into such a conception of poetry. There have been a number +of poets like Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang, who have frankly regarded +their verse as a pastime to while away an idle hour. There was +Swinburne, who characterized many of his poems as being idle and light +as white butterflies. [Footnote: See the _Dedication to Christina +Rossetti_, and _Envoi_.] But when we turn away from these +prestidigitators of rhymes and rhythms, we find that no view of poetry +is less acceptable than this one to poets in general. They are far more +likely to earn the world's ridicule by the deadly seriousness with which +they take verse writing. If the object of his pursuit is a sport, the +average poet is as little aware of it as is the athlete who suffers a +nervous collapse before the big game of the season. + +But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an +imitation of life? It depends, of course, upon how broadly we interpret +the phrase, "imitation of life." In one sense almost every poet would +say that Plato was right in characterizing poetry thus. The usual +account of inspiration points to passive mirroring of life. Someone has +said of the poet, + + As a lake + Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, + Shall he reflect our great humanity. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's +function, but they leave us leeway to quarrel over the nature of the +reflection mentioned, just as we quarrel over the exact connotations of +Plato's and Aristotle's word, imitation. Even if we hold to the narrower +meaning of imitation, there are a few poets who intimate that imitation +alone is their aim in writing poetry. Denying that life has an ideal +element, they take pains to mirror it, line for line, and blemish for +blemish. How can they meet Plato's question as to their usefulness? If +life is a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear +what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the +case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war +poetry. [Footnote: See _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_.] Perhaps his +defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication +contained in his two lines, + + If there's good in war and crime, + There may be in my bits of rhyme. +[Footnote: See _Ibid_.] + +Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least +James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most +thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in +English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_. +Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he +says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence +may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade +before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But +would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is +doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of +life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the +despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than +reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from +its realism, but from the idealism of the writer. + +We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection +of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. +Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its +misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let +the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and +dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple +haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, +for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is. + + And they shall be accounted poet-kings + Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose +inevitably calls up William Morris: + + Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, + Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? + Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme + Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, + Telling a tale, not too importunate + To those who in the sleepy region stay, + Lulled by the singer of an empty day. +[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.] + +Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He +would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's +minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about +ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead +for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, +_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other +justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of +man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea +that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought +of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the +breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to +suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says, + + 'Tis the privilege of art + Thus to play its cheerful part + Man on earth to acclimate + And bend the exile to his fate. +[Footnote: _Art_.] + +It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings +this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art +accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of +life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, +and is its essence. + +Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems +strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to +render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the +artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not +precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally +Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. +Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the +essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's +light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who +portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives +usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that +gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover +of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is +truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a +mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a +representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a +service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All +that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning +says, + + Paint a body well, + You paint a soul by implication. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual +accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is +useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward +a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and +that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he +tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye +and save the soul beside," [Footnote: _The Ring and the Book_.] as +Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things +under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest +insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, +without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers, + + If you get simple beauty and naught else, + You get about the best thing God invents. +[Footnote: _Fra, Lippo Lippi_.] + +Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of +the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be +expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy +Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist +simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword +Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. +Cook, June 28, 1918.] + +Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that +the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal +and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should +this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, +harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity. + +The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it +has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as + + A many-sided mirror, + Which could distort to many a shape of error + This true, fair world of things. +[Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the +artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of +things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him +irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in +this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described +the poet's achievement: + + With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, + The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes. +[Footnote: _Ode_.] + +"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is +truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different +mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the +artist's imitation of life, inquiring, + + What is art + But life upon the larger scale, the higher, + When, graduating up a spiral line + Of still expanding and ascending gyres + It pushes toward the intense significance + Of all things, hungry for the infinite. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, +then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their +objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely +superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things +than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work: + + He will watch from dawn to gloom + The lake-reflected sun illume + The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, + Nor heed nor see, what things they be; + But from these create he can + Forms more real than living man, + Nurslings of immortality. +[Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of +imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees +walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the +essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of +essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the +discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; +[Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only +teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are +some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: +Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a +Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_ +Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_ +Rossetti, _Sonnet, Shelley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_ +Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow, +_The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_; +Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_; +Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on +_Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the +Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren +Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_; +Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_; +Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of +the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The +Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.] + +Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher +and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook +human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same +pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one +another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to +the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth, +Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of +the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? +Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher +rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies +himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_; +Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the +quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows +trivial, but let us see how the case stands. + +From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of +methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being + + Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes. +[Footnote: _To William Wordsworth_.] + +Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts, + + Think you, mid all this mighty sum + Of things forever speaking, + That nothing of itself will come, + We must be ever seeking? +[Footnote: _Expostulation and Reply_.] + +But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate +intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he +asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can +only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the +breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression +which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the +poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, +"Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the +body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: _A +Defense of Poetry_.] + +To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making +discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a +sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends, + + True science investigates and brings to human perception such + truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and + society consider most important. Art transmits these truths + from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And + thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a + correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: _What is + Art?_] + +Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to +acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has +pronounced the philosopher's attitude of mind wholly antagonistic to +poetry. + + Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, + Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: +_A Poet's Epitaph_.] + +Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other +poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a +flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a +recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers, + + We are they who dream no dreams, + Singers of a rising day, + Who undaunted, + Where the sword of reason gleams, + Follow hard, to hew away + The woods enchanted. +[Footnote: E. Flecker, _Donde Estan_.] + +One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He +declares, + + Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art! + Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, + Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, + Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? + How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, + Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering + To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, + Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? + Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, + And driven the Hamadryad from the wood + To seek for shelter in some happier star? + Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, + The Elfin from the green grass, and from me + The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? +[Footnote: _To Science_.] + +If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the +philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's +hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which +must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the +poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed, + + Most true it is that I have looked on truth + Askance and strangely, + +and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, +the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." +[Footnote: Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_.] If poets complain that + all charms fly + At the mere touch of cold philosophy, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of +distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars? + +In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has +identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for +the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the +realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to +the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to +make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower +of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things. + +What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has +just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet +answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the +scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for +the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need +laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his +love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and +reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this +subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning, +_Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein, +_Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of + + The loftiest star of unascended heaven, + Pinnacled dim in the intense inane, + +in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense +against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his +non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his +sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to +sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the +philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they +represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly +medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's +thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a +somber tapestry. + +It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to +fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, +as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth +century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, +he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, +"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled +conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See +_The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both +warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry. +Even Landor reflected, + + A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, + And showing but the broken sky + Too surely is the sweetest lay + That wins the ear and wastes the day + Where youthful Fancy pouts alone + And lets not wisdom touch her zone. +[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.] + +But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such +distinctions. + +If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal +values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of +things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his +test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this +poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge +that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works. + +The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points +out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The +poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney +Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with +nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is +to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on +Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there +is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must +be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: +Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination +may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." +[Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] + +If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, +that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a +prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic +shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the +phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the +one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are +not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing +with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association +of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of +superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can +foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The +Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, +_Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many +poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. +[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_, +_Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_; +Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry +Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J. R. Lowell, _Massaccio_, Sonnet +XVIII; Owen Meredith, _The Prophet_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; O. W. +Holmes, _Shakespeare_; T. H. Olivers, _The Poet_, _Dante_; Alfred +Austin, _The Poet's Corner_; Swinburne, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_; +Herbert Trench, _Stanzas on Poetry_.] Holmes' view is typical: + + We call those poets who are first to mark + Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,-- + Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark + While others only note that day is gone; + For them the Lord of light the curtain rent + That veils the firmament. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Shelley +does; as a more recent poet has phrased it: + + Strange hints + Of things past, present and to come there lie + Sealed in the magic pages of that music, + Which, laying hold on universal laws, + Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +The poet's defense is not finished when he establishes the truth of his +vision. How shall the world be served, he is challenged, even though it +be true that the poet's dreams are of reality? Plato demanded of his +philosophers that they return to the cave of sense, after they had seen +the heavenly vision, and free the slaves there. Is the poet willing to +do this? It has been charged that he is not. Browning muses, + + Ah, but to find + A certain mood enervate such a mind, + Counsel it slumber in the solitude + Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good + Its nature just, as life and time accord. + --Too narrow an arena to reward + Emprize--the world's occasion worthless since + Not absolutely fitted to evince + Its mastery! +[Footnote: _Sordello_.] + +But one is inclined to question the justice of Browning's charge, at +least so far as it applies peculiarly to the poet. Logically, he should +devote himself to sense-blinded humanity, not reluctantly, like the +philosopher descending to a gloomy cave which is not his natural +habitat, but eagerly, since the poet is dependent upon sense as well as +spirit for his vision. "This is the privilege of beauty," says Plato, +"that, being the loveliest of the ideas, she is also the most palpable +to sight." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_.] Accordingly the poet has no +horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an +enthusiasm to make the world of sense a more transparent medium of +beauty. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet's humanitarian +aspect, see Bowles, _The Visionary Boy_, _On the Death of the +Rev. Benwell_; Wordsworth, _The Poet and the Caged Turtle Dove_; +Arnold, _Heine's Grave_; George Eliot, _O May I Join the Choir +Invisible_; Lewis Morris, _Food Of Song_; George Meredith, _Milton_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Swinburne, +_Centenary of Landor_, _Victor Hugo_, _Victor Hugo in 1877_, _Ben +Jonson_, _Thomas Decker_; Whittier, _To J. P._, and _The Tent on the +Beach_; J. R. Lowell, _To The Memory of Hood_; O. W. Holmes, _At a +Meeting of the Burns Club_; Emerson, _Solution_; R. Realf, _Of Liberty +and Charity_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the +Golden Age_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_; C. W. Hubner, _The Poet_; J. +H. West, _O Story Teller Poet_; Gerald Massey, _To Hood Who Sang the +Song of the Shirt_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; +Sidney Lanier, _Wagner_, _Clover_; C. A. Pierce, _The Poet's Ideal_; E. +Markham, _The Bard_, _A Comrade Calling Back_, _An April Greeting_; G. +L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_; Richard Gilder, _The City_, _The Dead +Poet_; E. L. Cox, _The Master_, _Overture_; R. C. Robbins, _Wordsworth_; +Carl McDonald, _A Poet's Epitaph_.] It is inevitable that every poet's +feeling for the world should be that of Shelley, who says to the spirit +of beauty, + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. +[Footnote: _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_.] +For, unlike the philosopher, the poet has never departed from the world +of sense, and it is hallowed to him as the incarnation of beauty. +Therefore he is eager to make other men ever more and more transparent +embodiments of their true selves, in order that, gazing upon them, the +poet may have ever deeper inspiration. This is the central allegory in +_Enydmion_, that the poet must learn to help humanity before the mystery +of poetship shall be unlocked to him. Browning comments to this effect +upon Bordello's unwillingness to meet the world: + + But all is changed the moment you descry + Mankind as half yourself. + +Matthew Arnold is the sternest of modern poets, perhaps, in pointing out +the poet's responsibility to humanity: + + The poet, to whose mighty heart + Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, + Subdues that energy to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. + Though he move mountains, though his day + Be passed on the proud heights of sway, + Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, + Though he hath borne immortal pains, + Action and suffering though he know, + He hath not lived, if he lives so. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by +which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their +essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is +peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the +moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must +be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something +beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to +the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. If beauty is the +heart of the universe (and it must be, the poet argues, since it abides +in sense as well as spirit), there is no place for the corrupt will. If +men are free, they are expressing their real natures; they are +beautiful. + +Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise +men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do +not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of +tyranny." [Footnote: _Republic._] Few enemies of poets nowadays +would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas +Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry, +asserted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's +potentates. [Footnote: See _The Four Ages of Poetry._] Once, it must +be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into +disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his +friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim, + + If thou hast ever done amiss + It was, O Southey, but in this, + That, to redeem the lost estate + Of the poor Muse, a man so great + Abased his laurels where some Georges stood + Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood. + Was ever genius but thyself + Friend or befriended of a Guelf? + +But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization +of the modern poet as liberty-lover. + +Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented +to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's +allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like +the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French +revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against +oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the +loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward +monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of +poet-laureate. + +The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of +history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry +during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our +history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles +II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be +expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and +virtue." Gray, in _The Progress of Poesy_, draws the same +conclusion as Shelley: + + Her track, where'er the goddess roves, + Glory pursue, and generous shame, + The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame. + +Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert +no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. +[Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's +Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The +Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, +_Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here +Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The +Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To +Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, +_Miriam_; Shelley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, +_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, +_Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, +_To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, +_The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in +a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, +Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; +Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Shore_, _For You_, +_O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; +Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of +Liberty and Charity_; Henry van Dyke, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; +Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles +Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit +of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, +_MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce +Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert +Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden +Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that +in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, +though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose +themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming, + + Where's the poet? Show him, show him, + Muses mine, that I may know him! + 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king + Or poorest of the beggar clan. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, +but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be +false to poetry, and he answers his detractors, + + Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise, + That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope + Of his pure song. + +In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent +champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for +ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom: + + Poets (hear the word) + Half-poets even, are still whole democrats. + Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high, + But loyal to the low, and cognizant + Of the less scrutable majesties. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote: +_See The Poet_.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the +liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See _Mater Triumphilis_, _Prelude_, +_Epilogue_, _Litany of Nations_, and _Hertha_.] till our new group of +singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident. + +It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always +synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to +distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise +Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs. +Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate +socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as +is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is +simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his +truest self. + +If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager +to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains +against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings +in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall +become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society +is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" +[Footnote: See _Sordello_.] of the world, here amending a law, here +building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the +poet. Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, makes much of the issue, +and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's +inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world + + Forgets + To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back + Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down + To the empty grave of Christ ... + ... Who has time, + An hour's time--think!--to sit upon a bank + And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +February 17, 1845.] + +The poet has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and +proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas +Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the +Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization in +reform the gauge of a poet's merit. Where, in that case, would Keats be +beside Hood? In our day, where would Sara Teasdale be beside Edwin +Markham? Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as +an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his +claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See +_Aurora Leigh_.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely +unsettling society,--for what end? He himself will soon have +forgotten--will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is +more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other +men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the +beauty of holiness. Let reformers beware how they assert the poet's +uselessness, our singers say, for it is an indication that they +themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be +leading men. The work of the reformer inevitably degenerates into the +mere strenuosity of the campaign, + + Unless the artist keep up open roads + Betwixt the seen and unseen, bursting through + The best of our conventions with his best, + The speakable, imaginable best + God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond + Both speech and imagination. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Thus speaks Mrs. Browning. + +The reforms that make a stir in the world, being merely external, mean +little or nothing apart from the impulse that started them, and the poet +alone is powerful to stir the impulse of reform in humanity. "To be +persuaded rests usually with ourselves," said Longinus, "but genius +brings force sovereign and irresistible to bear upon every hearer." +[Footnote: _On the Sublime_.] The poet, in ideal mood, is as +innocent of specific designs upon current morality as was Pippa, when +she wandered about the streets of Asolo, but the power of his songs is +ever as insuperable as was that of hers. It is for this reason that +Emerson advises the poet to leave hospital building and statute revision +for men of duller sight than he: + + Oft shall war end and peace return + And cities rise where cities burn + Ere one man my hill shall climb + Who can turn the golden rhyme. + Let them manage how they may, + Heed thou only Saadi's lay. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Here the philosopher may demur. If the poet were truly an idealist,--if +he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, +which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he +might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's +failing that he gives men no vision of abstract beauty. He represents +his visions in the contemporary dress of his times. Thus he idealizes +the past and the present, showing beauty shining through the dullness +and error of human history. Is he not, then, the enemy of progress, +since he will lead his readers to imagine that things are ideal as they +are? + +Rather, men will be filled with reverence for the idealized portrait of +themselves that the poet has drawn, and the intervention of the reformer +will be unnecessary, since they will voluntarily tear off the shackles +that disfigure them. The poet, said Shelley, "redeems from decay the +visitations of the divinity in man." Emerson said of Wordsworth, "He +more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." Mrs. +Browning said (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet--by analyzing +humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions +of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] +This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of +life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines +through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty +incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through which +beauty does not shine. + +Therefore, the poet repeats, he is the true author of reform. Tennyson +says of freedom, + + No sword + Of wrath her right arm whirled, + But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word + She shook the world. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +This brings us back to our war poets who have so recently died. Did they +indeed disparage the Muse whom they deserted? Did they not rather die to +fulfill a poet's prophesy of freedom? A poet who did not carry in his +heart the courage of his song--what could be more discreditable to +poetry than that? The soldier-poets were like a general who rushes into +the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a +man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the +engagement, that saved the day. + +If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his +reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says, + + The gods talk in the breath of the woods, + They talk in the shaken pine, + And fill the long reach of the old seashore + With dialogue divine. + And the poet who overhears + Some random word they say + Is the fated man of men + Whom the nations must obey. +[Footnote: Fragment on _The Poet_.] + +What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his +vision is true he shall join + + The choir invisible + Of those immortal dead who live again + In minds made better by their presence: live + In pulses stirred to generosity, + In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, + And with their mild persistence urge man's search + To vaster issues. +[Footnote: George Eliot, _The Choir Invisible_.] + +Does this mean simply the immortality of fame? It is a higher thing than +that. The beauty which the poet creates is itself creative, and having +the principle of life in it, can never perish. Whitman cries, + + Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! + Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for, + But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, + greater than before known, + Arouse! for you must justify me! +[Footnote: _Poets to Come_.] + +Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the +snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his +name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the +_Symposium_, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of +beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he +is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself. +So, though he be as fragile as a windflower, he may assure himself, + + I shall not die; I shall not utterly die, + For beauty born of beauty--that remains. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _To a Windflower_.] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + + +Not even a paper shortage has been potent to give the lie to the author +of _Ecclesiastes_, but it has fanned into flame the long smouldering +resentment of those who are wearily conscious that of making many books +there is no end. No longer is any but the most confirmed writer suffered +to spin out volume after volume in complacent ignorance of his readers' +state of mind, for these victims of eye-strain and nerves turn upon the +newest book, the metaphorical last straw on the camel's load, with the +exasperated cry, Why? Why? and again Why? + +Fortunately for themselves, most of the poets who have taken the poet's +character as their theme, indulged their weakness for words before that +long-suffering bookworm, the reader, had turned, but one who at the +present day drags from cobwebby corners the accusive mass of material on +the subject, must seek to justify, not merely the loquacity of its +authors, but one's own temerity as well, in forcing it a second time +upon the jaded attention of the public. + +If one had been content merely to make an anthology of poems dealing +with the poet, one's deed would perhaps have been easier to excuse, for +the public has been so often assured that anthologies are an economical +form of publication, and a time-saving form of predigested food, that it +usually does not stop to consider whether the material was worth +collecting in the first place. Gleaner after gleaner has worked in the +field of English literature, sorting and sifting, until almost the last +grain, husk, straw and thistle have been gathered and stored with their +kind. But instead of making an anthology, we have gone on the assumption +that something more than accidental identity of subject-matter holds +together the apparently desultory remarks of poets on the subject of the +poet's eyebrows, his taste in liquors, his addiction to midnight +rambles, and whatnot. We have followed a labyrinthine path through the +subject with faith that, if we were but patient in observing the clues, +we should finally emerge at a point of vantage on the other side of the +woods. + +The primary grounds of this faith may have appeared to the skeptic +ridiculously inadequate. Our faith was based upon the fact that, more +than two thousand years ago, a serious accusation had been made against +poets, against which they had been challenged to defend themselves. This +led us to conclude that there must be unity of intention in poetry +dealing with the poet, for we believed that when English poets talked of +themselves and their craft, they were attempting to remove the stigma +placed upon the name of poet by Plato's charge. + +Now it is easy for a doubter to object that many of the poems on the +subject show the poet, not arraying evidence for a trial, but leaning +over the brink of introspection in the attitude of Narcissus. One need +seek no farther than self-love, it may be suggested, to find the motive +for the poet's absorption in his reflection. Yet it is incontrovertible +that the self-infatuation of our Narcissus has its origin in the +conviction that no one else understands him, and that this conviction is +founded upon a very real attitude of hostility on the part of his +companions. The lack of sympathy between the English poet and the public +is so notorious that Edmund Gosse is able to state as a truism: + While in France poetry has been accustomed to reflect the + general tongue of the people, the great poets of England have + almost always had to struggle against a complete dissonance + between their own aims and interests and those of the nation. + The result has been that England, the most inartistic of the + modern races, has produced the largest number of exquisite + literary artists. [Footnote: _French Profiles_, p. 344.] + +Furthermore, even though everyone may agree that a lurking sense of +hostile criticism is back of the poet's self-absorption, another ground +for skepticism may lie in our assumption that Plato is the central +figure in the opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy +of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the +student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt +their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal +and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in +classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher +North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces +of cipher foolishness, abstractions which we named the puritan, the +philosopher, the philistine. Possibly by so doing we have given the +impression that poets are beating the air against an abstraction when +they are in reality delivering thumping blows upon the body of a +personal enemy. And if these generalizations appear indefensible, still +more misleading, it may be urged, is an attempt to represent that the +poet, when he takes issue with this and that opponent, is answering a +challenge hidden away from the unstudious in the tenth book of Plato's +_Republic_. It is doubtful even whether a number of our poets are +aware of the existence of Plato's challenge, and much more doubtful +whether they have it in mind as they write. + +Second thought must make it clear, however, that to prove ignorance of +Plato's accusation on the part of one poet and another does not at all +impair the possibility that it is his accusation which they are +answering. So multiple are the threads of influence leading from the +_Republic_ through succeeding literatures and civilizations that it +is unsafe to assert, offhand, that any modern expression of hostility to +poetry may not be traced, by a patient untangler of evidence, to a +source in the _Republic_. But even this is aside from the point. +One might concede that the wide-spread modern antagonism to poetry would +have been the same if Plato had never lived, and still maintain that in +the _Republic_ is expressed for all time whatever in anti-aesthetic +criticism is worthy of a serious answer. Whether poets themselves are +aware of it or not, we have a right to assert that in concerning +themselves with the character of the ideal poet, they are responding to +Plato's challenge. + +This may not be enough to justify our faith that these defensive +expositions lead us anywhere. Let us agree that certain poets of the +nineteenth and twentieth centuries have answered Plato's challenge. But +has the Poet likewise answered it? If from their independent efforts to +paint the ideal poet there has emerged a portrait as sculpturally clear +in outline as is Plato's portrait of the ideal philosopher, we shall +perhaps be justified in saying, Yes, the Poet, through a hundred mouths, +has spoken. + +Frankly, the composite picture which we have been considering has not +sculptural clarity. To the casual observer it bears less resemblance to +an alto-relief than to a mosaic; no sooner do distinct patterns spring +out of myriad details than they shift under the onlooker's eyes to a +totally different form. All that we can claim for the picture is +excellence as a piece of impressionism, which one must scan with +half-closed eyes at a calculated distance, if one would appreciate its +central conception. + +Apparently readers of English poetry have not taken the trouble to scan +it with such care. They may excuse their indifference by declaring that +an attempt to discover a common aesthetic principle in a collection of +views as catholic as those with which we have dealt is as absurd as an +attempt to discover philosophical truth by taking a census of general +opinion. Still, obvious as are the limitations of a popular vote in +determining an issue, it has a certain place in the discovery of truth. +One would not entirely despise the benefit derived from a general survey +of philosophers' convictions, for instance. Into the conclusions of each +philosopher, even of the greatest, there are bound to enter certain +personal whimsicalities of thought, which it is profitable to eliminate, +by finding the common elements in the thought of several men. If the +quest of a universal least common denominator forces one to give up +everything that is of significance in the views of philosophers, there +is profit, at least, in learning that the title of philosopher does not +carry with it a guarantee of truth-telling. On the other hand if we find +universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common _cogito ergo +sum_, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a +discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex +system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no +real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar +census of the views of poets. + +After hearkening to the general suffrage of poets on the question of the +poet's character, we must bring a serious charge against them if a +deafening clamor of contradiction reverberates in our ears. In such a +case their claim that they are seers, or masters of harmony, can be +worth little. The unbiased listener is likely to assure us that +clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets' +speaking amounts to, but we shall be slow to acknowledge as much. Have +we been merely the dupe of pretty phrasing when we felt ourselves +insured against discord by the testimony of Keats? Hear him: + + How many bards gild the lapses of time! + * * * * * + ... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme, + These will in throngs before my mind intrude, + But no confusion, no disturbance rude + Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. + +However incompatible the characteristics of the poets celebrated by +Wordsworth and by Swinburne, by Christina Rossetti and by Walt Whitman +may have seemed in immediate juxtaposition, we have trusted that we need +only retire to a position where "distance of recognizance bereaves" +their individual voices, in order to detect in their mingled notes +"pleasing music, and not wild uproar." + +The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our +multitudinous verse-writers may point out that we should have had more +right to expect concord if we had shown some discernment in sifting true +poets from false. Those who have least claim to the title of poet have +frequently been most garrulous in voicing their convictions. Moreover, +these pseudo-poets outnumber genuine poets one hundred to one, yet no +one in his right mind would contend that their expressions of opinion +represent more than a straw vote, if they conflict with the judgment of +a single true poet. + +Still, our propensity for listening to the rank breath of the multitude +is not wholly indefensible. In the first place pseudo-poets have not +created so much discord as one might suppose. A lurking sense of their +own worthlessness has made them timid of utterance except as they echo +and prolong a note that has been struck repeatedly by singers of +reputation. This echoing, it may be added, has sometimes been effective +in bringing the traditions of his craft to the attention of a young +singer as yet unaware of them. Thus Bowles and Chivers, neither of whom +has very strong claim to the title of bard, yet were in a measure +responsible for the minor note in Coleridge's and Poe's description of +the typical poet. + +Even when the voices of spurious bards have failed to chime with the +others, the resulting discord has not been of serious moment. A +counterfeit coin may be as good a touchstone for the detection of pure +silver, as is pure silver for the detection of counterfeit. Not only are +a reader's views frequently clarified by setting a poetaster beside a +poet as a foil, but poets themselves have clarified their views because +they have been incited by declarations in false verse to express their +convictions more unreservedly than they should otherwise have done. +Pseudo-poets have sometimes been of genuine benefit by their +exaggeration of some false note which they have adopted from poetry of +the past. No sooner do they exaggerate such a note, than a concerted +shout of protest from true poets drowns the erroneous statement, and +corrects the misleading impression which careless statements in earlier +verse might have left with us. Thus the morbid singer exhibited in minor +American verse of the last century, and the vicious singer lauded in one +strain of English verse, performed a genuine service by calling forth +repudiation, by major poets, of traits which might easily lead a singer +in the direction of morbidity and vice. + +The confusion of sound which our critic complains of is not to be +remedied merely by silencing the chorus of echoic voices. If we dropped +from consideration all but poets of unquestionable merit, we should not +be more successful in detecting a single clear note, binding all their +voices together. When the ideal poet of Shelley is set against that of +Byron, or that of Matthew Arnold against that of Browning, there is no +more unison than when great and small in the poetic world are allowed to +speak indiscriminately. + +Does this prove that only the supreme poet speaks truly, and that we +must hush all voices but his if we would learn what is the essential +element in the poetic character? Then we are indeed in a hard case. +There is no unanimity of opinion among us regarding the supreme English +poet of the last century, and if we dared follow personal taste in +declaring one of higher altitude than all the others only a small +percentage of readers would be satisfied when we set up the _Prelude_ or +_Adonais_ or _Childe Harold_ or _Sordello_ beside the _Republic_ as +containing the one portrait of the ideal singer worthy to stand beside +the portrait of the ideal philosopher. And this is not the worst of the +difficulty. Even if we turn from Shelley to Byron, from Wordsworth to +Browning, in quest of the one satisfactory conception of the poet, we +shall not hear in anyone of their poems the single clear ringing note +for which we are listening. When anyone of these men is considering the +poetic character, his thought behaves like a pendulum, swinging back and +forth between two poles. + +Thus we ourselves have admitted the futility of our quest of truth, the +critic may conclude. But no, before we admit as much, let us see exactly +what constitutes the lack of unity which troubles us. After its +persistence in verse of the same country, the same period, the same +tradition, the same poet, even, has led us to the brink of despair, its +further persistence rouses in us fresh hope, or at least intense +curiosity, for what impresses us as the swinging of a pendulum keeps up +its rhythmical beat, not merely in the mind of each poet, but in each +phase of his thought. We find the same measured antithesis of thought, +whether he is considering the singer's environment or his health, his +inspiration or his mission. + +In treatment even of the most superficial matters related to the poet's +character, this vibration forces itself upon our attention. Poets are +sofar from subscribing to Taine's belief in the supreme importance of +environment as molder of genius that the question of the singer's proper +habitat is of comparative indifference to them, yet the dualism that we +have noted runs as true to form here as in more fundamental issues. When +one takes the suffrage of poets in general on the question of +environment, two voices are equally strong. Genius is fostered by +solitude, we hear; but again, genius is fostered by human companionship. +At first we may assume that this divergence of view characterizes +separate periods. Writers in the romantic period, we say, praised the +poet whose thought was turned inward by solitude; while writers in the +Victorian period praised the poet whose thought was turned upon the +spectacle of human passions. But on finding that this classification is +true only in the most general way, we go farther. Within the Victorian +period Browning, we say, is the advocate of the social poet, as Arnold +is the advocate of the solitary one. But still our classification is +inadequate. Is Browning the expositor of the gregarious poet? It is true +that he feels it necessary for the singer to "look upon men and their +cares and hopes and fears and joys." [Footnote: _Pauline_.] But he +makes Sordello flee like a hunted creature back to Goito and solitude in +quest of renewed inspiration. Is Arnold the expositor of the solitary +poet? True, he urges him to fly from "the strange disease of modern +life". [Footnote: _The Scholar Gypsy_.] Yet he preaches that the +duty of the poet is + + to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +Within the romantic period the same phenomenon is evident. Does +Wordsworth paint the ideal poet dwelling apart from human distractions? +Yet he declares that his deepest insight is gained by listening to "the +still sad music of humanity". In Keats, Shelley, Byron, the same +antithesis of thought is not less evident. + +We cannot justly conclude that a compromise between contradictions, an +avoidance of extremes, is what anyone of these poets stands for. It is +complete absorption in the drame of human life that makes one a poet, +they aver; but again, it is complete isolation that allows the inmost +poetry of one's nature to rise to consciousness. At the same time they +make it clear that the supreme poet needs the gifts of both +environments. To quote Walt Whitman, + + What the full-grown poet came, + Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe + with all its shows of day and night) saying, He + is mine; + But out spake too the Soul of men, proud, jealous + and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone; + --Then the full-grown poet stood between the two and + took each by the hand; + And today and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly + holding hands, + Which he will never release till he reconciles the two, + And wholly and joyously blends them. + +The paradox in poets' views was equally perplexing, no matter what phase +of the poetic character was considered. A mere resume of the topics +discussed in these essays is enough to make the two horns of the dilemma +obtrude themselves. Did we consider the financial status of the poet? We +heard that he should experience all the luxurious sensations that wealth +can bring; on the other hand we heard that his poverty should shield him +from distractions that might call him away from accumulation of +spiritual treasure. Did we consider the poet's age? We heard that the +freshness of sensation possessed only by youth carries the secret of +poetry; on the other hand we heard that the secret lies in depth of +spiritual insight possible only to old age. So in the allied question of +the poet's body. He should have + + The dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear, + +that no beauty in the physical world may escape him. Yet he should be +absorbed in the other world to such a degree that blindness, even, is a +blessing to him, enabling him to "see, no longer blinded by his eyes." +The question of the poet's health arose. He should have the exuberance +and aplomb of the young animal; no, he should have a body frail enough +to enable him, like the mediaeval mystic, to escape from its +importunatedemands upon the spirit. + +In the more fundamental questions that poets considered, relating to the +poet's temperament, his loves, his inspiration, his morality, his +religion, his mission, the same cleavage invariably appeared. What +constitutes the poetic temperament? It is a fickle interchange of joy +and grief, for the poet is lifted on the wave of each new sensation; it +is an imperturbable serenity, for the poet dwells apart with the eternal +verities. What is the distinguishing characteristic of his love? The +object of his worship must be embodied, passionate, yet his desire is +for purely spiritual union with her. What is the nature of his +inspiration? It fills him with trancelike impassivity to sensation; it +comes upon him with such overwhelming sensation that he must touch the +walls to see whether they or his visions are the reality. [Footnote: See +Christopher Wordsworth, _Memoirs of Wordsworth_, Vol. II, p. 480.] +How is his moral life different from that of other men? He is more +fiercely tempted, because he is more sensitive to human passions; he is +shut away from all temptations because his interest is solely in the +principle of beauty. What is the nature of his religious instinct? He is +mad with thirst for God; he will have no God but his own humanity. What +is his mission? He must awaken men to the wonder of the physical world +and fit them to abide therein; he must redeem them from physical +bondage, and open their eyes to the spiritual world. + +The impatient listener to this lengthy catalogue of the poet's views may +assert that it has no significance. It merely shows that there are many +kinds of poets, who attempt to imitate many aspects of human life. But +surely our catalogue does not show just this. There is no multiform +picture of the poet here. The pendulum of his desire vibrates +undeviatingly between two points only. Sense and spirit, spirit and +sense, the pulse of his nature seems to reiterate incessantly. There is +no poet so absorbed in sensation that physical objects do not +occasionally fade into unreality when he compares them with the spirit +of life. Even Walt Whitman, most sensuous of all our poets, exclaims, + + Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul + That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, + concepts, non-realities. +[Footnote: _Apparitions_.] + +On the other hand there is no poet whose taste is so purely spiritual +that he is indifferent to sensation. The idealism of Wordsworth, even, +did not preclude his finding in sensation + + An appetite, a feeling and a love + That had no need of a remoter charm + By thought supplied. + +Is this systole and diastole of the affection from sense to spirit, from +spirit to sense, peculiarly characteristic of English poets? There may +be some reason for assuming that it is. Historians have repeatedly +pointed out that there are two strains in the English blood, the one +northern and ascetic, the other southern and epicurean. In the modern +English poet the austere prophetic character of the Norse scald is +wedded to the impressionability of the troubadour. No wonder there is a +battle in his breast when he tries to single out one element or the +other as his most distinctive quality of soul. Yet, were it not unsafe +to generalize when our data apply to only one country, we should venture +the assertion that the dualism of the poet's desires is not an insular +characteristic, but is typical of his race in every country. + +Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world, +shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an +irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves +singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over +and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is +harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says +Eurymachus in the _Symposium_. It is union of the finite and the +infinite, says Socrates in the _Philebus_. Do the poet's desires +point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that +stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole +secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. +His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in +two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the +spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot +tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity +in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and +barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination +which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of +sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a +little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this +power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is +called _Voyage a L'Infine_: + + The swan existing + Is like a song with an accompaniment + Imaginary. + + Across the grassy lake, + Across the lake to the shadow of the willows + It is accompanied by an image, + --as by Debussy's + "Reflets dans l'eau." + + The swan that is + Reflects + Upon the solitary water--breast to breast + With the duplicity: + "The other one!" + + And breast to breast it is confused. + O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession! + It is accompanied by the image of itself + Alone. + + At night + The lake is a wide silence, + Without imagination. + +But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic +answering of sense to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered +by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and +spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the +spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense; +yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is +clearly either physical or spiritual; therefore they do not stand poised +between the two worlds with the perfect balance of interests which marks +the poet. The philosopher and the man of religion recognize their goal +as a spiritual and ascetic one. If they concern themselves more than is +needful with the temporal and sensual, they feel that they are false to +their ideal. The scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand, +are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss +consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of +course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius +of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But +if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph +just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the +invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is +not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us +conscious of the two worlds of sense and spirit, reflecting one another. + +Supposing that all this is true, what is gained by discovering, from a +consensus of poets' views, that the distinctive characteristic of the +poet is harmony of sense and spirit? Is not this so obvious as to be a +truism? It is perhaps so obvious that like all the truest things in the +world it is likely to be ignored unless insisted upon occasionally. +Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English +criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written +criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually +ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own +goal. + +It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of +English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of +the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's _School of +Abuse_, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who +had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry +were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan +criticism, that of Lodge, [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry, Musick and +Stage Plays._] Harrington, [Footnote: _Apology for Poetry._] Meres, +[Footnote: _Palladis Tamia._] Campion, [Footnote: _Observations in the +Art of English Poetry._] Daniel, [Footnote: _Defense of Rhyme._] and +even in lesser degree of Sidney, obscures the aesthetic problem by +turning it into an ethical one. + +In the criticism of Sidney, himself a poet, one does find implied a +recognition of the twofold significance of the poet's powers. He asserts +his spiritual pre-eminence strongly, declaring that the poet, unlike the +scientist, is not bound to the physical world.[Footnote: "He is not +bound to any such subjection, as scientists, to nature." _Defense of +Poetry._] On the other hand he is clearly aware of the need for a +sensuous element in poetry, since by it, Sidney declares, the poet may +lead men by "delight" to follow the forms of virtue. + +The next critic of note, Dryden, in his revulsion from the ascetic +character which the puritans would develop in the poet, swung too far to +the other extreme, and threw the poetic character out of balance by +belittling its spiritual insight. He did justice to the physical element +in poetry, defining poetic drama, the type of his immediate concern, as +"a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions, and +traverses of fortune," [Footnote: _English Garner,_ III, 513.] but +he appears to have felt the ideal aspect of the poet's nature as merely +a negation of the sensual, so that he was driven to the absurdity of +recommending a purely mechanical device, rhyme, as a means of elevating +poetry above the sordid plane of "a bare imitation." In the eighteenth +century, Edmund Burke likewise laid too much stress upon the physical +aspect of the poet's nature, in accounting for the sublime in poetry as +originating in the sense of pain, and the beautiful as originating in +pleasure. Yet he comes closer than most critics to laying his finger +onthe particular point which distinguishes poets from philosophers, +namely, their dependence upon sensation. + +With the single exception of Burke, however, the critics of the +eighteenth century labored under a misapprehension no less blind than +the moral obsession which twisted Elizabethan criticism. In the +eighteenth century critics were prone to confuse the spiritual element +in the poet's nature with intellectualism, and the sensuous element with +emotionalism. Such criticism tended to drive the poet either into an +arid display of wit, on the one hand, or into sentimental excess, on the +other, and the native English distrust of emotion led eighteenth century +critics to praise the poet when the intellect had the upper hand. But +surely poets have made it clear enough that the intellect is not the +distinctive characteristic of the poet. To be intelligent is merely to +be human. Intelligence is only a tool, poets have repeatedly insisted, +in their quarrel with philosophers. In proportion as one is intelligent +within one's own field, one excels, poets would admit. If one is +intelligent with respect to fisticuffs one is likely to become a good +prize-fighter, but no matter how far refinement of intelligence goes in +this direction, it will not make a pugilist into a poet. Intelligence +must belong likewise, in signal degree, to the great poet, but it is +neither one of the two essential elements in his nature. Augustan +critics starved the spiritual element in poetry, even while they +imagined that they were feeding it, for in sharpening his wit the poet +came no nearer expressing the "poor soul, the center of his sinful +earth" than when he reveled in emotion. We no longer believe that in the +most truly poetic nature the intelligence of a Pope is joined with the +emotionalism of a Rousseau. We believe that the spirituality of a +Crashaw is blent with the sensuousness of a Swinburne. + +Nineteenth century criticism, since it is almost entirely the work of +poets, should not be thus at odds with the conception of the poet +expressed in poetry. But although nineteenth century prose criticism +moves in the right direction, it is not entirely adequate. The poet is +not at his best when he is working in a prose medium. He works too +consciously in prose, hence his intuitive flashes are not likely to find +expression. After he has tried to express his buried life there, he +himself is likely to warn us that what he has said "is well, is +eloquent, but 'tis not true." Even Shelley, the most successful of +poet-critics, gives us a more vivid comprehension of the poetical +balance of sense and spirit through his poet-heroes than through _The +Defense of Poetry_, for he is almost exclusively concerned, in that +essay, with the spiritual aspect of poetry. He expresses, in fact, the +converse of Dryden's view in that he regards the sensuous as negation or +dross merely. He asserts: + + Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the + beauty of their conception in naked truth and splendor, and it + is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not + necessary to temper this planetary music to mortal ears. + +The harmony in Shelley's nature which made it possible for his +contemporaries to believe him a gross sensualist, and succeeding +generations to believe him an angel, is better expressed by Browning, +who says: + + His noblest characteristic I call his simultaneous perception + of Power and Love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in + the concrete, while he throws, from his poet-station between + them both, swifter, subtler and more numerous films for the + connection of each with each than have been thrown by any + modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.[Footnote: Preface + to the letters of Shelley (afterward found spurious).] + +Yet Browning, likewise, gives a more illuminating picture of the poetic +nature in his poetry than in his prose. + +The peculiar merit of poetry about the poet is that it makes a valuable +supplement to prose criticism. We have been tempted to deny that such +poetry is the highest type of art. It has seemed that poets, when they +are introspective and analytical of their gift, are not in the highest +poetic mood. But when we are on the quest of criticism, instead of +poetry, we are frankly grateful for such verse. It is analytical enough +to be intelligible to us, and still intuitive enough to convince us of +its truthfulness. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ has been condemned in +certain quarters as "a talking about poetry, not poetry itself," but in +part, at least, the _Prelude_ is truly poetry. For this reason it +gives us more valuable ideas about the nature of poetry than does the +_Preface to the Lyrical Ballads_. If it is worth while to analyze +the poetic character at all, then poetry on the poet is invaluable to +us. + +Perhaps it is too much for us to decide whether the picture of the poet +at which we have been gazing is worthy to be placed above Plato's +picture of the philosopher. The poet does not contradict Plato's charge +against him. His self-portrait bears out the accusation that he is +unable to see "the divine beauty--pure and clear and unalloyed, not +clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and +varieties of human life." [Footnote: _Symposium_, 212.] Plato would +agree with the analysis of the poetic character that Keats once +struggled with, when he exclaimed, + +What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in +literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean +_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in +uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after +fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine +isolated verisimilitude caught from the Pentralium of mystery, from +being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge--With a great +poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather +obliterates all consideration. + +Plato would agree with this,--all but the last sentence. Only, in place +of the phrase "negative capability," he would substitute "incapability," +and reflect that the poet fails to see absolute beauty because he is not +content to leave the sensual behind and press on to absolute reality. + +It may be that Plato is right, yet one cannot help wishing that sometime +a poet may arise of greater power of persuasion than any with whom we +have dealt, who will prove to Plato what he appears ever longing to be +convinced of, that absolute ideality is not a negation of the sensual, +and that poetry, in revealing the union of sense and spirit, is the +strongest proof of idealism that we possess. A poet may yet arise who +will prove that he is right in refusing to acknowledge that this world +is merely a surface upon which is reflected the ideals which constitute +reality and which abide in a different realm. The assumption in that +conception is that, if men have spiritual vision, they may apprehend +ideals directly, altogether apart from sense. On the contrary, the +impression given by the poet is that ideality constitutes the very +essence of the so-called physical world, and that this essence is +continually striving to express itself through refinement and remolding +of the outer crust of things. So, when the world of sense comes to +express perfectly the ideal, it will not be a mere representation of +reality. It will be reality. If he can prove this, we must acknowledge +that, not the rationalistic philosopher, but the poet, grasps reality +_in toto_. + +However inconclusive his proof, the claims of the poet must fascinate +one with their implications. The two aspects of human life, the physical +and the ideal, focus in the poet, and the result is the harmony which is +art. The fact is of profound philosophical significance, surely, for +union of the apparent contradictions of the sensual and the spiritual +can only mean that idealism is of the essence of the universe. What is +the poetic metaphor but the revelation of an identical meaning in the +physical and spiritual world? The sympathetic reader of poetry cannot +but see the reflection of the spiritual in the sensual, and the sensual +in the spiritual, even as does the poet, and one, as the other, must be +by temperament an idealist. + + + + +INDEX + + +Addison, Joseph, +"A.E." (see George William Russell), +Aeschylus, +Agathon, +Akins, Zoe, +Alcaeus, +Aldrich, Anne Reeve, +Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, +Alexander, Hartley Burr, +Alexander, William, +Allston, Washington, +Ambercrombe, Lascelles, +Anderson, Margaret Steele, +Angelo, Michael, +Arensberg, Walter Conrad, +Aristotle, +Arnold, Edwin, +Arnold, Matthew, + his discontent; + on the poet's death; + inspiration; + loneliness; morality; + religion; + usefulness; + youth; + his sense of superiority. +Arnold, Thomas, +Asquith, Herbert, +Austin, Alfred, + +Bacon, Josephine Dodge Daskam, +Baker, Karle Wilson, +Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, +Beatrice, +Beattie, James, +Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, +Beers, Henry A., +Benet, Stephen Vincent, +Benet, William Rose, +Bennet, William, +Binyon, Robert Lawrence, +Blake, William, + later poets on; + on inspiration; + on the poet as truthteller; + on the poet's religion. +Blunden, Edmund, +Boccaccio, +Boker, George Henry, +Borrow, George, +Bowles, William Lisle, +Branch, Anna Hempstead, +Brawne, Fanny H., +Bridges, Robert, +Bronte, Emily, +Brooke, Rupert, +Browne, T. E., +Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, + appearance; + _Aurora Leigh_; + on Keats; + on the poet's age; + content with his own time; + democracy; + eyes; + habitat; + health, + humanitarianism, + inferiority to his creations, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + pain, + personality, + religion, + resentment at patronage, + self-consciousness, + self-expression, + sex, + usefulness, + other poets on, + +Browning, Robert, + on fame, + on inspiration, + on the poet's beauty, + loneliness, + love, + morals, + persecutions, + pride, + religion, + self-expression, + sex, + superiority, + usefulness, + on Shakespeare, + on Shelley, + _Sordello_, + other poets on +Bryant, William Cullen +Buchanan, Robert +Bunker, John Joseph +Burke, Edmund +Burleigh, William Henry +Burnet, Dana +Burns, Robert, + his self-depreciation, + on the poet's caste, + habitat, + inspiration, + love of liberty, + morals, persecutions, + poverty, + superiority, + other poets on +Burton, Richard +Butler, Samuel +Byron, Lord, + his body, + escape from himself in poetry, + friendship with Shelley, + indifference to fame, + later poets on, + his morals, + his mother, + his religion, + self-portraits in verse, + superiority, + on Tasso + +Camoeens +Campbell, Thomas +Campion, Thomas +Candole, Alec de +Carlin, Francis +Carlyle, Thomas +Carman, Bliss +Carpenter, Rhys +Cary, Alice +Cary, Elisabeth Luther +Cassells, S. J. +Cavalcanti, Guido +Cawein, Madison +Cellini, Benvenuto +Cervantes +Chapman, George +Chatterton, Thomas +Chaucer, Geoffrey +Cheney, Annie Elizabeth +Chenier, Andre +Chesterton, Gilbert Keith +Chivers, Thomas Holley +Clare, John +Clough, Arthur Hugh +Coleridge, Hartley +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, + appearance; + on Blake; + on Chatterton; + friendship with Wordsworth; + on the poet's habitat; + health; + love; + morals; + reflection in nature; + religion; + youth; + usefulness; + later poets on +Collins, William, +Colonna, Vittoria, +Colvin, Sidney, +Conkling, Grace Hazard, +Cornwall, Barry (see Procter, Bryan Waller), +Cowper, William, +Cox, Ethel Louise, +Crabbe, George, +Crashaw, Richard, +Cratylus, + +Dana, Richard Henry, +Daniel, Samuel, +D'Annunzio, Gabriele, +Dante, + G.L. Raymond on; + Oscar Wilde on; + Sara King Wiley on; +Dargan, Olive, +David, +Davidson, John, +Davies, William Henry, +Dermody, Thomas, +Descartes, +Dickinson, Emily, +Dionysodorus, +Dobell, Sidney, +Dobson, Austin, +Dommett, Alfred, +Donne, John, +Dowden, Edward, +Dowson, Ernest, +Drake, Joseph Rodman, +Drinkwater, John, +Druce, C.J., +Dryden, John, +Dunbar, Paul Laurence, +Dunroy, William Reed, +Dunsany, Lord Edward, +Dyer, Sidney, +Ehrman, Max, +Elijah, +Eliot, Ebenezer, +Eliot, George, +Emerson, Ralph Waldo, + his contempt for the public; + his democracy; + his humility; + on inspiration; + on love of fame; + on the poet's divinity; + love; + morals; + poverty; + solitude; + usefulness +Euripedes, +Euthydemus, +Evans, Mrs. E.H., + +Fainier, C.H., +Fairfield, S. L., +Field, Eugene., +Flecker, James Elroy, +Flint, F.S., +French, Daniel Chester, +Freneau, Philip Morin, +Fuller, Frances, +Fuller, Metta, + +Gage, Mrs. Frances, +Garnett, Richard, +Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, +Giddings, Franklin Henry, +Gilbert, Sir William Schwenek +Gilder, Richard Watson; + on Helen Hunt Jackson; + on Emma Lazarus; + on the poet's age; + blindness; + inspiration; + morality; + normality; + poverty +Gillman, James +Giltinan, Caroline +Goethe +Gosse, Edmund +Gosson, Stephen +Graves, Robert +Gray, Thomas +Grenfil, Julian +Griffith, William +Guiterman, Arthur + +Hake, Thomas Gordon +Halleck, Shelley +Halpine, Charles Graham +Hardy, Thomas +Harris, Thomas Lake +Harrison, Birge +Hayne, Paul Hamilton +Hazlitt, William +Hemans, Felicia +Henderson, Daniel +Henley, William Ernest +Herbert, George +Herrick, Robert +Hewlett, Maurice +Hildreth, Charles Latin +Hill, H., +Hilliard, George Stillman +Hillyer, Robert Silliman +Hoffman, C. F. +Hogg, Thomas Jefferson +Holland, Josiah Gilbert +Holmes, Oliver Wendell +Homer +Hood, Thomas +Hooper, Lucy +"Hope, Lawrence" (see Violet + Nicolson) +Horne, Richard Hengest +Houghton, Lord +Houseman, Laurence +Hovey, Richard +Hubbard, Harvey +Hubner, Charles William +Hughes, John +Hugo, Victor +Hunt, Leigh + +Ingelow, Jean + +Jackson, Helen Hunt +Jameson, Mrs. Anna Brownell +Johnson, Donald F. Goold +Johnson, Lionel +Johnson, Robert Underwood, +Johnson, Rossiter +Johnson, Dr. Samuel +Jonson, Ben + +Kaufman, Herbert +Keats, John; + his body; + on Burns; + Christopher North on; + on his desire for fame; + his egotism; + on Elizabethan poets; + on expression; + on the harmony of poets + Homer's blindness; + on his indifference to the public; + on inspiration; + later poets on Keats; + on love; + quarrel with philosophy; + on the poet's democracy, + gift of prophecy, + habitat, + morals, + persecutions, + unpoetical character, + unobtrusiveness, + usefulness +Keble, John +Kemble, Frances Anne +Kent, Charles +Kenyon, James Benjamin +Kerl, Simon +Khayyam, Omar +Kilmer, Joyce +Kingsley, Charles +Kipling, Rudyard +Knibbs, Harry Herbert + +Lamb, Charles +Landor, Walter Savage; + on Byron; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + on Homer; + on intoxication and inspiration; + on the poet's age, + morals, + pride; + on poetry and reason; + on Shakespeare; + on Southey +Lang, Andrew +Lanier, Sidney +Larcom, Lucy +Laura +Lazarus, Emma +Ledwidge, Francis +Le Gallienne, Richard +Leonard, William Ellery +Lindsay, Vachel +Lockhart, John Gibson +Lodge, Thomas +Lombroso, Cesare +Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; + his democracy; + on grief and poetry; + _Michael Angelo_; + on the poet's morals, + solitude; + on the savage poet; + on inspiration +Longinus +Lord, William W. +Low, Benjamin R. C. +Lowell, Amy +Lowell, James Russell; + on Burns; + on the poet's age, + divinity, + habitat, + inspiration, + usefulness +Lucan +Lucretius +Lytton, Bulwer, on Andre Chenier; + on the female poet; + on Milton; + on the poet's appearance, + fame, + persecution, + usefulness + +McDonald, Carl +Mackaye, Percy +Maclean, L. E. +"Macleod, Fiona" (see William Sharp) +MacNiel, J. C. +Mann, Dorothea Lawrence +Mansfield, Richard +Map, Walter +Markham, Edwin +Marlowe, Christopher, + Alfred Noyes on, + Josephine Preston Peabody on, +Marquis, Don, +Masefield, John, +Massey, Gerald, +Masters, Edgar Lee, +Meres, Francis, +Meredith, George, +Meredith, Owen, +Meynell, Alice, +Meynell, Viola, +Middleton, Richard, +Millay, Edna St. Vincent, +Miller, Joaquin, +Milton, John, +Miriam, +Mitchell, L. E., +Mitchell, Stewart +Mitford, Mary Russell, +Montgomery, James, +Moody, William Vaughan, +Moore, Thomas, +Morley, Christopher, +Morris, Lewis, +Morris, William, +Myers, Frederick W. H. + +Naden, Constance, Nash, Thomas, +Neihardt, John Gneisenau, +Nero, +Nerval, Gerard de, +Newbolt, Henry, +Newman, Henry, +Newton, Sir Isaac, +Nicolson, Violet, +Nordau, Max Simon, +North, Christopher, +Noyes, Alfred, + +O'Connor, Norreys Jephson, +Osborne, James Insley, +O'Sheel, Shaemus, +Otway, Thomas, + +Pater, Walter, +Patmore, Coventry, on the + poet's expression, + indifference to fame, + love, + morals, + religion, + usefulness +Payne, John, +Peabody, Josephine Preston, +Percival, James Gates, +Percy, William Alexander, +Petrarch, +Phidias, +Phillips, Stephen, +Phillpotts, Eden, +Pierce, C. A., +Plato, + _Ion_, + _Phaedo_ + _Philebus_, + _Phaedrus_, + _Republic_, + _Symposium_, +Poe, Edgar Allan, +Pollock, Robert, +Pope, Alexander, +Pound, Ezra, +Praed, Winthrop Mackworth +Price, C. Augustus +Procter, Adelaide Anne +Procter, Bryan Cornwall + +Rand, Theodore Harding +Raphael +Raymond, George Lansing +Reade, Thomas Buchanan +Realf, Richard +Reno, Lydia M. +Rice, Cale Young +Rice, Harvey +Riley, James Whitcomb +Rittenhouse, Jessie +Rives, Hallie Erven +Robbins, Reginald Chauncey +Roberts, Cecil +Roberts, Charles George Douglas +Robinson, Edwin Arlington +Robinson, Mary +Rossetti, Christina +Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, + on Chatterton, + on Dante, + on Marston, + on the poet's age, + expression, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + usefulness +Rousseau, Jean Jacques +Ruskin, John +Russell, George William +Ryan, Abram J. + +Sampson, Henry Aylett +Sandburg, Carl +Sappho; + Alcaeus on, + modern poets on her genius, + on her passion +Savage, John +Saxe, John Godfrey +Scala, George Augustus +Schauffler, Robert Haven +Schiller, Johann Christoff Friedrich +Scott, Sir Walter +Seeger, Alan +Service, Robert +Shairp, Principal +Shakespeare, William +Sharp, William +Shelley, Percy Bysshe, + and Byron, + on female poets, + his hostility to the public, + his indifference to his body, + on Keats, + on the poet's early death, + habitat, + inspiration, + love, + madness, + loneliness, + morals, + persecutions, + poverty, + religion, + seership, + usefulness, + on prenatal life, + on Tasso +Shenstone, William +Sidney, Sir Philip +Sinclair, May +Smart, Christopher +Smith, Alexander, +Smith, J. Thorne, jr., +Socrates, +Solomon, +Soran, Charles, +Southey, Robert, +Spenser, Edmund, +Sprague, E.L., +Stedman, Edmund Clarence, +Stephens, James, +Stickney, Trumbull, +Stoddard, Charles Warren, +Sullivan, Sir Arthur, +Swinburne, Algernon, + chafing against moral restraints; + on Victor Hugo; + on Marston; + on his mother; + on the poet's age; + love of liberty; + morals; + parentage; + religion; + usefulness; + on Christina Rossetti; + on Sappho; + on Shelley +Symons, Arthur, + +Taine, Hippolyte Adolph, +Tannahill, John, +Tasso, Torquato, +Taylor, Bayard, +Teasdale, Sara, +Tennyson, Alfred, + burlesque on inspiration in wine; + his contempt for the public; + on the poet's death; + expression; + inspiration; + intuitions; + love of liberty; + lovelessness; + morality; + pantheism; + persecution; + rank; + religion; + superiority to art; + usefulness +Tertullian, Thomas, Edith, +Thompson, Francis, + confidence in immortality; + humility; + on inspiration; + on love and poetry; + on Alice Meynell; + on Viola Meynell; + on the poet's body; + expression; + grief; + habitat; + loneliness; + morals; + youth +Thomson, James, +Thomson, James (B.V.), + his atheism; + on Mrs. Browning; + on inspiration; + on pessimistic poetry; + on Platonic love; + on Shelley; + on Tasso; + on Weltschmerz +Timrod, Henry, +Tolstoi, Count Leo, +Towne, Charles Hanson, +Trench, Herbert, +Tupper, Martin Farquhar, + +Van Dyke, Henry, +Vergil, +Verlaine, Paul Marie, +Villon, Francois, +Viviani, Emilia, + +Waddington, Samuel +Ware, Eugene +Watts-Dunton, Theodore +Wesley, Charles +West, James Harcourt +Wheelock, John Hall +White, Kirke +Whitman, Walt; + confidence in immortality; + democracy; + on expression; + on the poet's idleness, + inspiration, + morals, + normality, + protean nature, + love, + reconciling of man and nature; + on the poet-warrior; + his zest +Whittier, John Greenleaf +Wilde, Oscar, on Byron; + on Dante; + on Keats; + on love and art; + his morals; + on the poet's prophecy; + on the uselessness of art +Wiley, Sara King +Winter, William +Woodberry, George Edward; + apology; + on friendship; on the poet's love; + on inspiration; + on Shelley +Wordsworth, William; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + his friendship with Coleridge; + on James Hogg; + on inspiration; + Keats' annoyance with Wordsworth; + on love poetry; + on the peasant poet; + on the poet's democracy, + habitat, + morals, + religion, + solitude; + the _Prelude_; + on prenatal life; + quarrel with philosophy; + repudiation of inspiration through wine +Wright, Harold Bell + +Yeats, William Butler +Young, Edmund + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE POET'S POET *** + +This file should be named 7ptpt10.txt or 7ptpt10.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 7ptpt11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 7ptpt10a.txt + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: The Poet's Poet + +Author: Elizabeth Atkins + +Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7928] +[This file was first posted on June 1, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1 + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE POET'S POET *** + + + + +Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + + +THE POET'S POET + +Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in +English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years + +By + +ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D. + +Instructor in English, University of Minnesota + + + + +TO + +HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER + + + + +PREFACE + + +Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps +received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the +majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the +last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no +means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the +part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of +æsthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer +of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the +poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic +philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only +incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, +whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider. + +The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of +individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_ +Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a +re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and +essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the +main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. +We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic +conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing +theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an +essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission. + +It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is +not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt +has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each +question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is +inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the +lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the +spiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that +practically every utterance which we may consider,--even such as deal +with the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or +his health,--falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as +the poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be +the more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been +the most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose +nature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly +harmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are +attempting to present. + +Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. In +the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesque +in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since it +is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influenced +Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that +in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where +the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a +large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to +the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small +in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It +is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the +subject of their nature than have greater ones, but some attempt is here +made to hold them within bounds, so that they may not drown out the more +meaningful utterances of the master singers. + +The last one hundred and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, +since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a +peculiarly self-conscious attitude in the poet, and brought his +personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within +the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as +enthusiasts like to term the new stirring of interest in verse) is +revealing young poets of the present day even more frank in +self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago. + +The excursion through modern English poetry involved in these studies +has been a pleasant one. The value and interest of such an investigation +was first pointed out to me by Professor Louise Pound of the University +of Nebraska. It is with sincere appreciation that I here express my +indebtedness to her, both for the initial suggestion, and for the +invaluable advice which I have received from her during my procedure. I +owe much gratitude also to President Wimam Allan Neilson of Smith +College, who was formerly my teacher in Radcliffe College, and to +Professor Hartley Burr Alexander, of the department of Philosophy at the +University of Nebraska, who has given me unstinted help and generous +encouragement. + +ELIZABETH ATKINS. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + +PREFACE + +I. THE EGO-CENTRIC CIRCLE + +Apparent futility of verse dealing with the poet.--Its +justification.--The poet's personality the hidden theme of all +verse,--The poet's egotism.--Belief that his inspirations are +divine.--Belief in the immortality of his poems.--The romantic view that +the creator is greater than his creations.--The poet's contempt for +uninspired men.--Reaction of the public to the poet's contempt.--Its +retaliation in jeers.--The poet's wounded vanity.--His morbid +self-consciousness.--His self-imposed solitude.--Enhancement of his +egotism by solitude. + +II. THE MORTAL COIL + +View that genius results from a happy combination of physical +conditions.--The poet's reluctance to embrace such a theory.--His +heredity.--Rank.--Patricians vs. children of the soil.--His +body.--Poetic beauty.--Features expressing alert and delicate +senses.--Contrary conception of poet rapt away from sense.-- +Blindness.--Physique.--Health.--Hypersensibility of invalids.-- +Escape from fleshly bondage afforded by perfect health.--The poet's +sex.--Limitations of the woman poet.--Her claims.--The poet's +habitat.--Vogue of romantic solitude.--Savage environment.--Its +advantages.--Growing popularity of the city poet.--The wanderer.-- +The financial status of the poet.--Poverty as sharpener of +sensibility.--The poet's age.--Vogue of the young poet.--Purity of +youthful emotions.--Early death.--Claims of the aged poet.-- +Contemplation after active life. + +III. THE POET AS LOVER + +The classic conception.--Love as a disturbing factor in +composition.--The romantic conception.--Love the source of +inspiration.--Fusion of intense passion with repose essential to +poetry.--Poetic love and Platonic love synonymous.--Sensual love not +suggestive.--The poet's ascent to ideal love.--Analogy with ascent +described in Plato's _Symposium_.--Discontent with ephemeralness of +passion.--Poetry a means of rendering passion eternal.--Insatiability of +the poet's affections.--Idealization of his mistress.--Ideal beauty the +real object of his love.--Fickleness.--Its justification.--Advantage in +seeing varied aspects of ideal beauty.--Remoteness as an essential +factor in ideal love.--Sluggishness resulting from complete +content.--Aspiration the poetic attitude.--Abstract love-poetry, +consciously addressed to ideal beauty.--Its merits and defects.--The +sensuous as well as the ideal indispensable to poetry. + +IV. THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + +Reticence of great geniuses regarding inspiration.--Mystery of +inspiration.--The poet's curiosity as to his inspired moments.--Wild +desire preceding inspiration.--Sudden arrest rather than satisfaction of +desire.--Ecstasy.--Analogy with intoxication.--Attitude of reverence +during inspired moments.--Feeling that an outside power is +responsible.--Attempts to give a rational account of inspiration.--The +theory of the sub-conscious.--Prenatal memory.--Reincarnation of dead +geniuses.--Varied conceptions of the spirit inspiring song as the Muse, +nature, the spirit of the universe.--The poet's absolute surrender to +this power.--Madness.--Contempt for the limitations of the human +reason.--Belief in infallibility of inspirations.--Limitations of +inspiration.--Transience.--Expression not given from without.--The work +of the poet's conscious intelligence.--Need for making the vision +intelligible.--Quarrel over the value of hard work. + +V. THE POET'S MORALITY + +The poet's reliance upon feeling as sole moral guide.--Attack upon his +morals made by philosophers, puritans, philistines.--Professedly wicked +poets.--Their rarity.--Revolt against mass-feeling.--The aesthetic +appeal of sin.--The morally frail poet, handicapped by susceptibility to +passion.--The typical poet's repudiation of immorality.--Feeling that +virtue and poetry are inseparable.--Minor explanations for this +conviction.--The "poet a poem" theory.--Identity of the good and the +beautiful.--The poet's quarrel with the philistine.--The poet's horror +of restraint.--The philistine's unfairness to the poet's innocence.--The +poet's quarrel with the puritan.--The poet's horror of asceticism.--The +poet's quarrel with the philosopher.--Feeling upon which the poet relies +allied to Platonic intuition. + +VI. THE POET'S RELIGION + +Threefold attack upon the poet's religion.--His lack of theological +temper.--His lack of reverence.--His lack of conformance.--The poet's +defense.--Materialistic belief deadening to poetry.--His idealistic +temper.--His pantheistic leanings.--His reverence for beauty.--His +repudiation of a religion that humbles him.--Compatibility of pride and +pantheism.--The poet's nonconformance.--His occasional perverseness.-- +Inspiring nature of doubt.--The poet's thirst for God.--The occasional +orthodox poet. + +VII. THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + +The poet's alleged uselessness,--His effeminacy.--His virility.--The +poet warrior.--Incompatibility of poets and materialists.--Plato'scharge +that poetry is inferior to actual life.--The concurrence of +certain soldier poets in Plato's charge.--Poetry as an amusement +only.--The value of faithful imitation.--The realists.--Poetry as a +solace.--Poetry a reflection of the ideal essence of things.--Love of +beauty the poet's guide in disentangling ideality from the accidents of +things.--Beauty as truth.--The poet as seer.--The quarrel with the +philosopher.--The truth of beauty vs. cold facts.--Proof of validity of +the poet's truth.--His skill as prophet.--The poet's mission as +reformer.--His impatience with practical reforms.--Belief in essential +goodness of men, since beauty is the essence of things.--Reform a matter +of allowing all things to express their essence.--Enthusiasm for +liberty.--Denial of the war-poet's charge.--Poets the authors of +liberty.--Poets the real rulers of mankind.--The world's appreciation of +their importance.--Their immortality. + +VIII. A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + +Denial that the views of poets on the poet are heterogeneous.--Poets' +identity of purpose in discussing poets.--Apparent contradictions in +views.-Apparent inconsistency in the thought of each poet.--The two-fold +interests of poets.--The poet as harmonizer of sensual and spiritual.-- +Balance of sense and spirit in the poetic temperament.--Injustice to +one element or the other in most literary criticism.--Limitations of +the poet's prose criticism.--Superiority of his critical expressions +in verse.--The poet's importance.--Poetry as a proof of the idealistic +philosophy. + +INDEX + + + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE + + +Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some +entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon +the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection +which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much +more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give +it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of +thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has +blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the +"egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are +but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it +"discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all +kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their +own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the +Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with +thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which +is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again +our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it +is the mortal coil. + +In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of +the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to +the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to +carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless +round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by +simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the +squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, +never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our +dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the +quietude of transcendent beauty. + +But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively +recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an +ineffable vision, but advertisement of the author's importance? His +argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you +because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my +superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the +rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered +consciousness? + +Indeed the poet's circle is likely to appear to us even more viciousthan +that of other men. To be sure, we remember Sir Philip Sidney's +contention, supported by his anecdote of the loquacious horseman, that +men of all callings are equally disposed to vaunt themselves. If the +poet seems especially voluble about his merits, this may be owing to the +fact that, words being the tools of his trade, he is more apt than other +men in giving expression to his self-importance. But our specific +objection to the poet is not met by this explanation. Even the horseman +does not expect panegyrics of his profession to take the place of +horseshoes. The inventor does not issue an autobiography in lieu of a +new invention. The public would seem justified in reminding the poet +that, having a reasonable amount of curiosity about human nature, it +will eagerly devour the poet's biography, properly labeled, but only +after he has forgotten himself long enough to write a poem that will +prove his genius, and so lend worth to the perusal of his idiosyncratic +records, and his judgments on poetic composition. + +The first impulse of our revulsion from the self-infatuated poet is to +confute him with the potent name of Aristotle, and show him his doom +foreordained in the book of poetic Revelations. "The poet should speak +as little as possible in his own person," we read, "for it is not this +that makes him an imitator." [Footnote: _Poetics_, 1460 a.] One cannot +too much admire Aristotle's canniness in thus nipping the poet's egotism +in the bud, for he must have seen clearly that if the poet began to talk +in his own person, he would soon lead the conversation around to +himself, and that, once launched on that inexhaustible subject, he would +never be ready to return to his original theme. + +We may regret that we have not Aristotle's sanction for condemning also +extra-poetical advertisements of the poet's personality, as a hindrance +to our seeing the ideal world through his poetry. In certain moods one +feels it a blessing that we possess no romantic traditions of Homer, to +get in the way of our passing impartial judgment upon his works. Our +intimate knowledge of nineteenth century poets has been of doubtful +benefit to us. Wordsworth has shaken into what promises to be his +permanent place among the English poets much more expeditiously than has +Byron. Is this not because in Wordsworth's case the reader is not +conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from +purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us +the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we +to determine whether his sonnet, _When I Have Fears,_ is great poetry or +not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love +for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard? + +Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping +generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his +contention: + +Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and +we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make +his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of +their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether +these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating +their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney +Colvin, _John Keats,_ p. 478.] + +If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in _Blackwoods,_ we may be +more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by +Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and +Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows: + +Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters into one's +soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its +subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose +their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire +me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!".... I will cut all +this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.... I +don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to +say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have +them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. [Footnote: _Ibid.,_ p. 253.] + +If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing +their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much +better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into +the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's +sonnets, + + With this key + Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more + _Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he. +[Footnote: _House._] + +Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less +the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this +our contention? + +It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are +practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of +themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron, +concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself--oh, that accursed +selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in +scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E. +Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather +hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself +at the reader's head. + +It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration +that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself +be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to +confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the +most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he +is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, +the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical +and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no +identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.] +The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a +luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself, +to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as +compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the +self-obliterating splendor of his genius: + + In poetry there is but one supreme, + Though there are many angels round his throne, + Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid. +[Footnote: _On Shakespeare_.] + +But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, +the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What +right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper +to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the +legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that +we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure +obscure our view? + +Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon +one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old +dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic +mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of +immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet +should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, +which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in +this world. + +Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way +through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the +opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and +Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying +their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet +should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, +he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we +maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone +of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have +no competitors to dispute his place as chief character. + +At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic +poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental +entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality +cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual +world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by +his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet +cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals +nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable +from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the +other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be +embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_, +"This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the +ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: § 251.] Now, +whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, +one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, +personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures +of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization +of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered +to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the +habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge: + + In our life alone does nature live, + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd. +[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._] + +The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; +his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the +philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own +toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret +of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's +personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his +conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us, + + There was a child went forth every day, + And the first object he looked upon, that object he became. + +Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet +called _The Love of Narcissus:_ + + Like him who met his own eyes in the river, + The poet trembles at his own long gaze + That meets him through the changing nights and days + From out great Nature; all her waters quiver + With his fair image facing him forever: + The music that he listens to betrays + His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways + His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor. + His dreams are far among the silent hills; + His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain; + With winds at night vague recognition thrills + His lonely heart with piercing love and pain; + He knows again his mirth in mountain rills, + His weary tears that touch him in the rain. + +Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the +poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in +poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into +realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent +mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when +we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold +representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses +his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist +gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against +"your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a +theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great +feat." [Footnote: _Poem Outlines._] + +In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse +may point to the _Canterbury Tales,_ and show us Chaucer ambling +along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of +distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our +view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet +is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern +poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all +the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the +destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached. + +We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of +Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that +criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the +personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines, + + Great poet, 'twas thy art, + To know thyself, and in thyself to be + Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, + Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart + Can make of man. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent +objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own +personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one +character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his +presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his +representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent +criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of +his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. +"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January +13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into +prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never +have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a +poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And +Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet +than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to +show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is +the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert +Browning, September 9, 1845.] + +"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes +enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of +Verlaine, "_c'est d'être absolument soi-même_." Of course if one +concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, +the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the +poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that +civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure +to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler +way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's +word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is +nature seen through a temperament." + +Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, _Mimeseis_, did mean "seeing +through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would +have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament." +Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind were +like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things. Modern +poets, on the other hand, are inclined to grant that a person has poetic +temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window, transforming +all that is seen through it, if by any chance something _is_ seen +through it. + +If the modern poet sees the world colored red or green or violet by his +personality, it is well for the interests of truth, we must admit, that +he make it clear to us that his nature is the transforming medium, but +how comes it that he fixes his attention so exclusively upon the colors +of things, for which his own nature is responsible, and ignores the +forms of things, which are not affected by him? How comes it that the +colored lights thrown on nature by the stained windows of his soul are +so important to him that he feels justified in painting for us, +notnature, but stained-glass windows? + +In part this is, as has often been said, a result of the individualizing +trend of modern art. The broad general outlines of things have been +"done" by earlier artists, and there is no chance for later artists to +vary them, but the play of light and shade offers infinite possibilities +of variation. If one poet shows us the world highly colored by his +personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their +attention caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw +upon it. The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will +be interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious," +Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet +otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.] + +This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of +course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more +plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One +wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his +inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of +creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration +is surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that +this accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in +his work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the +lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I +know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the +musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an +assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure. +Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend +of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme, +chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group, +Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently +portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that +the mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be +paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to +ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all +other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is +mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to +forget that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, +language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, +accordingly, to be dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" +for his inspiration. + +At least this mystery surrounding his creations has much to do with +removing the artist from the comparative freedom from self-consciousness +that we ascribe to the general run of men. In addition it removes him +from the comparative humility of other thinkers, who are wont to think +of their discoveries as following inevitably upon their data, so that +they themselves deserve credit only as they are persistent and +painstaking in following the clues. The genesis of Sir Isaac Newton's +discovery has been compared to poetical inspiration; yet even in this +case the difference is apparent, and Newton did not identify himself +with the universe he conceived, as the poet is in the habit of doing. + +Not being able to account for his inspirations, the poet seems to be +driven inevitably either into excessive humility, since he feels that +his words are not his own, or into inordinate pride, since he feels that +he is able to see and express without volition truths that other men +cannot glimpse with the utmost effort. He may disclaim all credit for +his performance, in the words of a nineteenth-century verse-writer: + + This is the end of the book + Written by God. + I am the earth he took, + I am the rod, + The iron and wood which he struck + With his sounding rod. +[Footnote: L. E. Mitchell, _Written at the End of a Book._] + +a statement that provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such +amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is +really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious +states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist +"experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is +considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, +not to one's self, but to the Almighty. + +The minor American poets in the middle of the last century are often +found exhorting one another to humility, quite after the prayer-meeting +tradition. Bitter is their denunciation of the poet's arrogance: + + A man that's proud--vile groveller in the dust, + Dependent on the mercy of his God + For every breath. +[Footnote: B. Saunders, _To Chatterton._] + +Again they declare that the poet should be + + Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy._] + +telling him, + + Think not of thine own self, +[Footnote: Richard Gilder, _To the Poet._] + +adding, + + Always, O bard, humility is power. +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Poet If on a Lasting Fame._] + +One is reminded of Mrs. Heep's repeated adjuration, "Be 'umble, Ury," +and the likeness is not lessened when we find them ingratiatingly +sidling themselves into public favor. We hear them timidly inquiring of +their inspiration, + + Shall not the violet bloom? +[Footnote: Mrs. Evans, _Apologetic._] + +and pleading with their critics, + + Lightly, kindly deal, + My buds were culled amid bright dews + In morn of earliest youth. +[Footnote: Lydia M. Reno, _Preface to Early Buds._] + +At times they resort to the mixed metaphor to express their innocuous +unimportance, declaring, + + A feeble hand essays + To swell the tide of song, +[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, _Invocation._] + +and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness: + + Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts, + Win in each heart and memory a home. +[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, _Dedication._] + +But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a +librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be +absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere +expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have +taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the +genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, _In a Dull Uncertain +Brain_; Whittier, _To my Namesake_; Sidney Lanier, _Ark of the Future_; +Oliver Wendell Holmes, _The Last Reader_; Bayard Taylor, _L'Envoi_; +Robert Louis Stevenson, _To Dr. Hake_; Francis Thompson, _To My +Godchild_.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong +in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the +habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so +sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of +himself: + + I am nae poet, in a sense, + But just a rhymer like, by chance, + And hae to learning nae pretense, + Yet what the matter? + Whene'er my muse does on me glance, + I jingle at her. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik._] + +Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the +title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about +the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the +minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the +average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who +casually disposes of the poet's immortality: + + Let but the verse befit a hero's fame; + Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name. +[Footnote: _Introduction to Don Roderick._] + +Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's +conceit, assuring him: + + Ye are not great because creation drew + Large revelations round your earliest sense, + Nor bright because God's glory shines for you. +[Footnote: _Mountaineer and Poet_.] + +But in her other poetry, notably in _Aurora Leigh_ and _A Vision of +Poets,_ she amply avows her sense of the preëminence of the singer, as +well as of his song. + +While it is easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the +nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical +spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it +is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. +Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are +likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a +friend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life +engenders pride and egotism!' True--I know it does: but this pride and +egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could, +so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23, +1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is +completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of +composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and +preserving it. + +Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his +verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic +type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long +tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it +appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a +beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor, + + Well I remember how you smiled + To see me write your name upon + The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child, + You think you're writing upon stone!" + I have since written what no tide + Shall ever wash away, what men + Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide, + And find Ianthe's name again, + +or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, _Ad Amicam_, which expresses +the author's purpose to + + Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time, + Telling him that he is too insolent + Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme, + Whereof to one because thou life hast given, + The other yet shall give a life to thee, + Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven, + And compassed weaker immortality, + +or Yeats' lines _Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved_, +wherein he takes pride in the reflection: + + Weigh this song with the great and their pride; + I made it out of a mouthful of air; + Their children's children shall say they have lied. + +But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the +most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony, + + Yet to me I feel + That an internal brightness is vouchsafed + That must not die, +[Footnote: _Home at Grasmere_.] + +or in Walt Whitman's injunction: + + Recorders ages hence, + Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive + Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me. +[Footnote: See also, _Long Long Hence_.] + +Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the +importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the +clutches of the old-fashioned habit of apology, to be sure, [Footnote: +See _My Country_.]--perhaps this is one reason the radicals are so +opposed to him; but in the ranks of the radicals themselves we find very +few retaining any doubt of themselves. [Footnote: Exceptions are Jessie +Rittenhouse, _Patrius_; Lawrence Houseman, _Mendicant Rhymes_; +Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Poor Faltering Rhymes_.] Self-assertion +is especially characteristic of their self-appointed leader, Ezra Pound, +in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom +he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote: +_Lustra_.] A typical assertion is that in _Salutation the Second_, + + How many will come after me, + Singing as well as I sing, none better. + +There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the +present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile +immortality" [Footnote: _Refuge._] or James Stephens' exultation in +_A Tune Upon a Reed,_ + + Not a piper can succeed + When I lean against a tree, + Blowing gently on a reed, + +and in _The Rivals,_ where he boasts over a bird, + + I was singing all the time, + Just as prettily as he, + About the dew upon the lawn, + And the wind upon the lea; + So I didn't listen to him + As he sang upon a tree. + +If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded +monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the +nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further +than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have +needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German +idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of +the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its +rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another +century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the +fashion of _A Song of Myself:_ + + I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin, + Hoping to cease not till death. + +Whitman is conscious of--perhaps even exaggerates--the novelty of his +task, + + Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited + itself (the great pride of man in himself) + Chanter of personality. + +While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of +their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not +have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older +singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted +in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The +favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, +Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as +proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by +following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's +characterization of Byron in _Julian and Maddalo_, + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light, + +has been followed by many expressions of the same thought, at first +wholly sympathetic, lately, it must be confessed, somewhat ironical. + +Consciousness of partnership with God in composition naturally lifts the +poet, in his own estimation, at least, to a super-human level. The myth +of Apollo disguised as a shepherd strikes him as being a happy +expression of his divinity. [Footnote: See James Russell Lowell, _The +Shepherd of King Admetus._] Thus Emerson calls singers + + Blessed gods in servile masks. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +The hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a +Poet_ soars to a monotheistic conception of his powers, asserting + + Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness + Is God. I suffer. I am God. + +Another poet-hero is characterized: + + He would reach the source of light, + And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might. +[Footnote: Harvey Rice, _The Visionary_ (1864). + +In recent years a few poets have modestly disclaimed equality with God. +See William Rose Benét, _Imagination,_ and Joyce Kilmer, _Trees._ The +kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of _The Lonely Poet_ +(1919), by John Hall Wheelock.] + +On the other hand, recent poets' hatred of orthodox religion has led +them to idealize the Evil One, and regard him as no unworthy rival as +regards pride. One of Browning's poets is "prouder than the devil." +[Footnote: _Waring._] Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin +to Milton through his Satan's pride." [Footnote: Sonnet, _To +Chatterton._] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares, + + You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell, + And keep the lowest circle to yourself. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_ (1911).] + +There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over +the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer +takes the trouble to declare, + + Artists truly great + Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange + Their fate for that of any potentate. +[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.] + +Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an +attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to +say, + + Think not, although my aim is art, + I cannot toy with empire easily. +[Footnote: _Nero_.] + +Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: +See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A +Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a +disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example +and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt +Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the +street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to +earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems +absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity +in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The +Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment, + + No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I + Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die. + +It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, +singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that +he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude +harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare +endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young +friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man +from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame +seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. +The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their +art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for +Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of +Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in +_Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives +indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet: + + He, from above descending, stooped to touch + The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though + It scarce deserved his verse. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of +late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young +Rice: + + I have felt the ineffable sting + Of life, though I be art's valet. + I have painted the cloud and the clod, + Who should have possessed the earth. +[Footnote: _Limitations_.] + +It depressed Alan Seeger: + + I, who, conceived beneath another star, + Had been a prince and played with life, + Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far + From the fair things my faith has merited. +[Footnote: _Liebestod_.] + +It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive: + + Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams, + Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at, + And know we be its rulers, though but dreams. +[Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] + +Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is +made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide. + +The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere +in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it +seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate +him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that +his genius is judged by a public that is vastly inferior to him. This +galling thought usually drives him into an attitude of indifference or +of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at +the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is +to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his +brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his +worth.[Footnote: See _To Darwin_.] But the average poet of the last +century and a half goes a step beyond this attitude, and appears to feel +that there is something contemptible about popularity. Literary +arrogance seems far from characteristic of Burns, yet he tells us how, +in a mood of discouragement, + + I backward mused on wasted time, + How I had spent my youthful prime, + And done naething + But stringin' blithers up in rhyme + For fools to sing. +[Footnote: _The Vision._] + +Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most +thoroughgoing expression of this contempt for the public. The sentiment +in _Childe Harold_ is one that Byron never tires of harping on: + I have not loved the world, nor the world me; + I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed + To its idolatries a patient knee. + +And this attitude of Byron's has been adopted by all his disciples, who +delight in picturing his scorn: + + With terror now he froze the cowering blood, + And now dissolved the heart in tenderness, + Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself, + But back into his soul retired alone, + Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously + On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet. +[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] + +Of the other romantic poets, Sir Walter Scott alone remains on good +terms with the public, expressing a child's surprise and delight over +the substantial checks he is given in exchange for his imaginings. But +Shelley starts out with a chip on his shoulder, in the very +advertisements of his poems expressing his unflattering opinion of +The public's judgment, and Keats makes it plain that his own criticisms +concern him far more than those of other men. + +The consciously aristocratic, sniffing attitude toward the public, which +ran its course during Victoria's reign, is ushered in by Landor, who +confesses, + + I know not whether I am proud, + But this I know, I hate the crowd, + Therefore pray let me disengage + My verses from the motley page, + Where others, far more sure to please + Pour forth their choral song with ease. + +The same gentlemanly indifference to his plebeian readers is diffused +all through Matthew Arnold's writing, of course. He casually disposes of +popularity: + + Some secrets may the poet tell + For the world loves new ways; + To tell too deep ones is not well,-- + It knows not what he says. +[Footnote: See _In Memory of Obermann._] + +Mrs. Browning probably has her own success in mind when she makes the +young poetess, Aurora Leigh, recoil from the fulsome praise of her +readers. Browning takes the same attitude in _Sordello,_ contrasting +Eglamor, the versifier who servilely conformed to the taste of the mob, +with Sordello, the true poet, who despised it. In _Popularity_, Browning +returns to the same theme, of the public's misplaced praises, and in +_Pacchiarotto_ he outdoes himself in heaping ridicule upon his readers. +Naturally the coterie of later poets who have prided themselves on their +unique skill in interpreting Browning have been impressed by his +contempt for his readers. Perhaps they have even exaggerated it. No less +contemptuous of his readers than Browning was that other Victorian, so +like him in many respects, George Meredith. + +It would be interesting to make a list of the zoological metaphors by +which the Victorians expressed their contempt for the public. Landor +characterized their criticisms as "asses' kicks aimed at his head." +[Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Life of Swinburne_, p. 103.] Browning +alternately represented his public cackling and barking at him. +[Footnote: See Thomas J. Wise, Letters, Second Series, Vol. 2, p. 52.] +George Meredith made a dichotomy of his readers into "summer flies" and +"swinish grunters." [Footnote: _My Theme_.] Tennyson, being no +naturalist, simply named the public the "many-headed beast." [Footnote: +_In Memoriam_.] + +In America there has been less of this sort of thing openly expressed by +genuine poets. Emerson is fairly outspoken, telling us, in _The +Poet_, how the public gapes and jeers at a new vision. But one must +go to our border-line poets to find the feeling most candidly put into +words. Most of them spurn popularity, asserting that they are too +worthwhile to be appreciated. They may be even nauseated by the slight +success they manage to achieve, and exclaim, + + Yet to know + That we create an Eden for base worms! + +If the consciousness of recent writers is dominated by contempt for +mankind at large, such a mood is expressed with more caution than +formerly. Kipling takes men's stupidity philosophically. [Footnote: See +_The Story of Ung._] Edgar Lee Masters uses a fictional character +as a mask for his remarks on the subject. [Footnote: See _Having His +Way._] Other poets have expressed themselves with a degree of mildness. +[Footnote: See Watts-Dunton, _Apollo in Paris;_ James Stephens, _The +Market;_ Henry Newbolt, _An Essay in Criticism;_ William Rose Benét, +_People._] But of course Ezra Pound is not to be suppressed. He +inquires, + + Will people accept them? + (i.e., these songs) + As a timorous wench from a centaur + (or a centurion) + Already they flee, howling in terror + * * * * * + Will they be touched with the verisimilitude? + Their virgin stupidity is untemptable. + +He adds, + + I beg you, my friendly critics, + Do not set about to procure me an audience. + +Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public, + + Salute them with your thumbs to your noses. + +It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in +another poem, + + May my poems be printed this week? + +The naïveté of this last question brings up insistently a perplexing +problem. If the poet despises his readers, why does he write? He may +perhaps evade this question by protesting, with Tennyson, + + I pipe but as the linnets do, + And sing because I must. + +But why does he publish? If he were strictly logical, surely he would do +as the artist in Browning's _Pictor Ignotus,_ who so shrank from +having his pictures come into contact with fools, that he painted upon +hidden, moldering walls, thus renouncing all possibility of fame. But +one doubts whether such renunciation has been made often, especially in +the field of poetry. Rossetti buried his poems, of course, but their +resurrection was not postponed till the Last Judgment. Other writers +have coyly waved fame away, but have gracefully yielded to their +friends' importunities, and have given their works to the world. When +one reads such expressions as Byron's; + + Fame is the thirst of youth,--but I am not + So young as to regard men's frown or smile + As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot, +[Footnote: _Childe Harold._] + +one wonders. Perhaps the highest genius takes absolutely no account of +fame, as the sun-god asserts in Watts-Dunton's poem, _Apollo in Paris:_ + + I love the song-born poet, for that he + Loves only song--seeks for love's sake alone + Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown + To feudaries of fame, are known to thee. +[Footnote: See also Coventry Patmore, from _The Angel in the House,_ "I +will not Hearken Blame or Praise"; Francis Carlin, _The Home Song_ +(1918).] + +But other poets, with the utmost inconsistency, have admitted that they +find the thought of fame very sweet. [Footnote: See Edward Young, _Love +of Fame;_ John Clare, _Song's Eternity, Idle Fame, To John Milton;_ +Bulwer Lytton, _The Desire of Fame;_ James Gates Percival, _Sonnet 379;_ +Josephine Peston Peabody, _Marlowe._] Keats dwells upon the thought of +it. [Footnote: See the _Epistle to My Brother George._] Browning shows +both of his poet heroes concerned over the question. In _Pauline_ the +speaker confesses, + + I ne'er sing + But as one entering bright halls, where all + Will rise and shout for him. + +In _Sordello,_ again, Browning analyzes the desire for fame: + + Souls like Sordello, on the contrary, + Coerced and put to shame, retaining will, + Care little, take mysterious comfort still, + But look forth tremblingly to ascertain + If others judge their claims not urged in vain, + And say for them their stifled thoughts aloud. + So they must ever live before a crowd: + --"Vanity," Naddo tells you. + +Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame, + Nor can dispense + With Persia for an audience. +[Footnote: _Saadi._] + +Can it be that when the poet renounces fame, we must concur with Austin +Dobson's paraphrase of his meaning, + + But most, because the grapes are sour, + Farewell, renown? +[Footnote: _Farewell Renown._] + +Perhaps the poet is saved from inconsistency by his touching confidence +that in other times and places human nature is less stupid and +unappreciative than it proves itself in his immediate audience. He +reasons that in times past the public has shown sufficient insight to +establish the reputation of the master poets, and that history will +repeat itself. Several writers have stated explicitly that their quarrel +with humanity is not to be carried beyond the present generation. Thus +Arnold objects to his time because it is aesthetically dead. [Footnote: +See _Persistency of Poetry._] But elsewhere he objects because it shows +signs of coming to life, [Footnote: See _Bacchanalia._] so it is hard to +determine how our grandfathers could have pleased him. Similarly +unreasonable discontent has been expressed by later poets with our own +time. [Footnote: See William Ernest Henley, _The Gods are Dead;_ Edmund +Gosse, _On Certain Critics;_ Samuel Waddington, _The Death of Song;_ +John Payne, _Double Ballad of the Singers of the Time_(1906).] Only +occasionally a poet rebukes his brethren for this carping attitude. Mrs. +Browning protests, in _Aurora Leigh,_ + + 'Tis ever thus + With times we live in,--evermore too great + To be apprehended near.... + I do distrust the poet who discerns + No character or glory in his times, + And trundles back his soul five hundred years. +[Footnote: See Robert Browning, Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12, +1845.] + +And Kipling is a notorious defender of the present generation, but these +two stand almost alone. [Footnote: See also James Elroy Flecker, _Oak +and Olive;_ Max Ehrmann, _Give Me Today._] + +Several mythical explanations for the stupidity of the poet's own times +have been offered in verse. Browning says that poetry is like wine; it +must age before it grows sweet. [Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto +Volume._] Emerson says the poet's generation is deafened by the thunder +of his voice. [Footnote: _Solution._] A minor writer says that poetry +must be written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one +before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, _The Way of +the World_ (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is +worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, _A Poet's +Question._] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the +poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by +Shelley, in the _Defense of Poetry:_ + + No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the + jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to + all time, must be composed of his peers. + +Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not +the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost +forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition +to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much +farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most +nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words, +as + + Antidotes + Of medicated music, answering for + Mankind's forlornest uses. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese._] + +And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose. +Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as +Browning did, + + My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste + On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste! + A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick-- + I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath, + Henceforward with nettle-broth. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume._] + +Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are +hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly +to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry +hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a +stick. + +The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating. +They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does +not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, +and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his +fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious +circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the +belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result +his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public +more deliberately expressed. + +At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to +have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival +from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the _Castle +of Indolence,_ Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also _To Mr. Thomson, +Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem,_ by H. Hill.] and Thomas +Hood [Footnote: See _To the Late Lord Mayor._] both concerned +themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that +patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the _Ode +Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle._] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, +offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because +of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son. +[Footnote: _The Patron._] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for +the poet, in _Lady Geraldine's Courtship,_ and upheld the nobility of +the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him +appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified +contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose +manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People +are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to +cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there +have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who +have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of +circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in +thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See _Common Sense and +Genius,_ and _Rhymes by the Road._] Later libelers have been, usually, +writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the +course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, _The Green +Carnation,_ which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets. +[Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's _Patience_ made an even greater +sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English +ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim, + + I say an artist + Who does not wholly give himself to art, + Who has about him nothing marked or strange, + But tries to suit himself to all the world + Will ne'er attain to greatness. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo._] + +Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his +conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder +insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on +thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss +him. He repeats the world's query: + + How shall we know him? + Ye shall know him not, + Till, ended hate and scorn, + To the grave he's borne. +[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._] + +Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original +attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring + + Of these states the poet is the equable man, + Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, + fail of their full returns. +[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] + +As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the +poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet +resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the +wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth +telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the +tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's +delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys +and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G. +Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._] + +To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded +his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in +on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, +_More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an +ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new +singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for +his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is +doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who +does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of +beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: +Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ +Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The +Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, +_Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ +George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); +S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New +Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An +Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts- +Dunton, _The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming +Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The +Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous +designs of the public. + +A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who +exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the +Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently +believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the +maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are +described: + + Where the heart of each should beat, + There seemed a wound instead of it, + From whence the blood dropped to their feet. + +The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally +shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit +leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter +waters, + + And toads seen crawling on his hand, + And clinging bats, but dimly scanned, + Full in his face their wings expand. + A paleness took the poet's cheek; + "Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek + The lady's will with utterance meek: + "Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:" + (And this time she spoke cheerfully) + Behooves thee know world's cruelty. + +The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which +to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. +From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems +of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides. +[Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's +Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our +poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." +[Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great +renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt +from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously +represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging, +imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, +aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare, +Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante +[Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and +Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_.] and +Tasso [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Tasso_; Shelley, _Song for +Tasso_; James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_.] have received most +attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of +several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's +poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred +Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.] + +Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those +of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement +who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme +youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that +caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody +on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James +Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_; +Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's +Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by +Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an +indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's +faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all +geniuses: + + Alas! what snows are shed + Upon thy laurelled head, + Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs! + Malignity lets none + Approach the Delphic throne; + A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's + hundred tongues. +[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.] + +The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The +centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse. + +Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, +remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the +more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, +[Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and +_Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_ +(1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by +him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought, + + The Pythian of the age one arrow drew + And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow, + They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low. +[Footnote: _Adonais._] + +The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as +formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his +critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far toward +giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the +youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._] +brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but +for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One +is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile +criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile +self-characterization into his mouth: + + I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse + They hounded on to death's untimely doom. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).] + +In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is +expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his +enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized +as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... never content till +they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they +worship her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, +1845.] + +With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have +raised the most indignant storm of protest is Shelley. Several poets, as +the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr. +Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Shelley almost part of +their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Shelley's life warrant +such sympathy. Then too, Shelley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, +is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in +his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for +Shelley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his +scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human +race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches +for the sincerity of his statement, in the _Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty_: + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. + +Accordingly Shelley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden +hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets +have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: +See E. C. Stedman, _Ariel_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Alfred +Austin, _Shelley's Death_; Stephen Vincent Benét, _The General Public_.] + +The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts +of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the +mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one + + Who in another's fate now wept his own. + +Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor +in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate +of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of +popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne +springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that +the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these +defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the +persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent +crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet +is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, +it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century +wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a +personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the +romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, +Joaquin Miller, _I Shall Remember_, and _Vale_; Francis Ledwidge, _The +Visitation of Peace_.] + +Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose +of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the _Canterbury +Tales_, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in +keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in +the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction +so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the +plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole +social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this +friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his +ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American +public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed +it." [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] Emerson tries to get on +common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to +some extent,[Footnote: See _The Enchanter_.] and it is consistent +with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as +Emerson: + + There cannot be confusion of sound forgot, + A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry. +[Footnote: _Pandeen._] + +But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, +"Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley +have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. +W. Holmes, _To Longfellow_; P. H. Hayne, _To Henry W. Longfellow_; T. B. +Read, _A Leaf from the Past_; E. C. Stedman, _J. G. H._; P. L. Dunbar, +_James Whitcombe Riley_; J. W. Riley, _Rhymes of Ironquill_.] for their +promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the +part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who +commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the +public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages +of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the +level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches. + +There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the +hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples +of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, +because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone +is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is +essential to the poet. In the _Prelude_ he relates how, from early +childhood, + + I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, + The self-sufficing power of solitude. + +Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse: + + These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk + Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night. +[Footnote: _Personal Talk_.] + +So he describes the poet's character: + + He is retired as noontide dew + Or fountain in a noonday grove. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Epitaph_.] + +In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, +and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries. +Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed +none." [Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] Emerson expressed the same mood +frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind: + + Think me not unkind and rude + That I walk alone in grove and glen; + I go to the god of the wood, + To fetch his word to men. +[Footnote: _The Apology_.] + +He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet: + + Men consort in camp and town, + But the poet dwells alone. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of +the poet's personality: + + I have no brothers and no peers + And the dearest interferes; + When I would spend a lonely day, + Sun and moon are in my way. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find +his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this +picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, +usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is +characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the +stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, +even while his heart thirsts for companionship.[Footnote: See John +Clare, _The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am_; James Gates Percival, +_The Bard_; Joseph Rodman Drake, _Brorix_ (1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade, +_My Heritage_; Whittier, _The Tent on the Beach_; Mrs. Frances Gage, +_The Song of the Dreamer_ (1867); R. H. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Abram J. +Ryan, _Poets_; Richard H. Dana, _The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet_; +Frances Anne Kemble, _The Fellowship of Genius_ (1889); F. S. Flint, +_Loneliness_(1909); Lawrence Hope, _My Paramour was Loneliness_ (1905); +Sara Teasdale, _Alone_.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last +century, asserting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet +declares: + + For me, I'd rather live + With this weak human heart and yearning blood, + Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls. + More brave, more beautiful than myself must be + The man whom I can truly call my friend. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +So the poet is limited to the companionship of rare souls, who make up +to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this +compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, +because the affections that most people expend on many human +relationships are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the +world's indifference to him, Shelley takes comfort in the assurance of +such communion, saying to Mary, + + If men must rise and stamp with fury blind + On his pure name who loves them--thou and I, + Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity + Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,-- + Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by, + That burn from year to year with inextinguished light. +[Footnote: Introduction to _The Revolt of Islam_.] + +But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's +love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his +loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and +discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most +nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as +Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: +The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, +however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth +century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal +comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the +Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas +at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from +Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes' +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the +gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in +acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his +epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal +conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish +among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no +glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The +closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary +verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an +extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for +Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in +Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the +philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is +the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists +are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from +unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and +Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on +some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the +Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_. +For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, +_To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding +Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).] + +Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships +in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so +notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were +the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his +sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines: + + Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, + And cast them into shape some other day; + Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, + And shattered with the fall, I stand alone. + +The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was +of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is +a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel +it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. +(Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and +more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate +that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which +understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the +premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for +their celebration in verse, from classic times onward. + +Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and +transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest +of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been +written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, +in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost +obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a +Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." +Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says, +"The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his +own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told, + + He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. + +Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas +Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem +he says of himself, + + He came the last, neglected and apart, + +and describes himself as + + companionless + As the last cloud of an expiring storm, + Whose thunder is its knell. + +Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's +lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in +_The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all +human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in +isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without +friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A +Renegade Poet on the Poet:_ + + He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no + company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, + and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority + of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument + I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should + ever do as other men. + +One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his +isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something +beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, +however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, +indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and +characterizes himself, + + I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, + Love their love or mine own love to them teach, + A bastard barred from their inheritance, + * * * * * + In antre of this lowly body set, + Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he +finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually +draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable +consequence of his genius,--that he + + Spares but the cloudy border of his base + To the foiled searching of mortality. +[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, _Shakespeare_.] + +The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, +when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet +he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must +exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, +for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy, +_To Shakespeare_.] + +Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure +perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds +introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride +breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility +and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation +breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second +revolution of the egocentric circle. + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE MORTAL COIL + + If I might dwell where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + +sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There +is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude,--the same inconsistency that +lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees +this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,--and yet it is to +him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it +as from a prison house. + +One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the +flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler +spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a +derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all--a woman Sappho, +suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of +us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can +consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material +endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that +there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the +mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him +an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal +on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine +his spirit. + +Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to +attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his +grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in +poems even of such bulk as the _Prelude_ one does not find a complete +analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into +a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story +told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the +only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the +restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement +and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, +but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In _Aurora +Leigh_ one might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism +of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her +English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in +giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, +if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of +qualities derived from more remote ancestors. + +The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical +poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, +[Footnote: See _Thalassius_.] since it typifies the union in the +poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is +lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the +poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful +strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In +the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption +in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete +otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness. + +There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; +this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. +Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything +patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben +Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of +the woman who was "no churl" as + + A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes, + And white hair blown back softly from a face + Etherially fierce, as might have looked + Cassandra in old age. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. +Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. +[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; +Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; +J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; +Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, +_The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of +woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is +hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while +she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's +adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D. +Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might +almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage +indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as +making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A +Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.] + +The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted +upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her +Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley +Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert +and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a +double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of +versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in +heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's +career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject +of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was +Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said +to the little Viola, + + If angels have hereditary wings, + If not by Salic law is handed down + The poet's laurel crown, + To thee, born in the purple of the throne, + The laurel must belong. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in +which they grow. + +What have poets to say on the larger question of their social +inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the +nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the +varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. +The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than +to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the +genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the +beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new +exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that +the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage. + +Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of +opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, +confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd +guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble +of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns +his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of +"Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. +[Footnote: See _Lord Burleigh_, Eleanore in _A Becket_, and the Count in +_The Falcon_.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the +two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, +yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In +Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political +leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his +hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are _The +Troubadour_, Praed; _The King's Tragedy_, Rossetti; _David, Charles di +Trocca_, Cale Young Rice.] + +None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, +and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a +tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer +who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin +was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century +poet as John Hughes, in lines _On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal +Man_, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the +breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See _The +Patron_.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] also, seem +not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes +of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes +into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is +merely personal: + + Gie me ae spark of nature's fire! + That's a' the learning I desire. + Then, though I drudge through dub and mire + At plough or cart, + My muse, though homely in attire, + May touch the heart. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given +sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with +"nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns +see Thomas Campbell, _Ode to Burns_; Whittier, _Burns_; Joaquim Miller, +_Burns and Byron_; William Bennett, _To the Memory of Burns_; A. B. +Street, _Robbie Burns_ (1867); O. W. Holmes, _The Burns Centennial_; +Richard Realf, _Burns_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_ (1868); Shelley Halleck, +_Burns_.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few +of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his +belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found +in the character of the old pedlar, in the _Excursion_. The origin of +Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on +caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his +Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is presumably modeled after +Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching +realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry +with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even +while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: +Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is +Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the +Golden Shoe_; Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_.] Here and there, the +poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last +century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare, _The +Peasant Poet_; Mrs. Browning, _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_; Robert +Buchanan, _Poet Andrew_; T. E. Browne, _Tommy Big Eyes_; Whittier, +_Eliot_; J. G. Saxe, _Murillo and his Slave_.] And at present, with the +penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight +revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are +popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness +than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John +Davidson, _A Ballad in Blank Verse_; Vachel Lindsay, _The North Star +Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son_; John Masefield, _Dauber_; Francis +Carlin, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_ (1918).] Still, for the most part, the +present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of +indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than +caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would +probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning, + + What if men have found + Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll + Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul? +[Footnote: Henry van Dyke, _Sonnet_.] + +If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict +the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most +minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the +poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? +since singers tell + + us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth, + Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar. +[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.] + +as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to +frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses +it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look +for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not +troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the +phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their +father Spenser, who argues, + + So every spirit, as it is most pure, + And hath in it the more of heavenly light, + So it the fairer body doth procure + To habit in, and it more fairly dight + With cheerful grace, and amiable sight; + For of the soul the body form doth take, + For soul is form, and doth the body make. +[Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.] + +What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy +Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed +Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable +geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like +the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which + + Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive +Plant_.] + +Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his +pronouncement, admitting-- + + Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind + Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd, + Either by chance, against the course of kind, + Or through unaptness of the substance found, + Which it assumed of some stubborn ground + That will not yield unto her form's direction, + But is preformed with some foul imperfection. + +But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does +Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and +insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on +Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that +she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from +Alcæus' line, + + Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho. + +As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of +his extant portrait: + + A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of + Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright, + Low-lidded now, and luminous as love, + Anon soul-searching, ominous as night, + Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps + Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps. +[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth, _At the Mermaid_ (1889).] + +The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their +brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for +geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of +his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti, _Sonnet on Chatterton_.] +has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. +Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies +of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their +imaginations inevitably turn to + + The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair, + The lean, athletic body, deftly planned + To carry that swift soul of fire and air; + The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand + Heroic shoulders! +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a +belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face +of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire +of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have +encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes +Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever +saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the +invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in +all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident +that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into +existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the +frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made +beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert +Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, _Rupert +Brooke_.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate +days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. +Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be +led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of +the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer +to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage. + +We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the +romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made +with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a +conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of +allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication +that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary +sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic +might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by +no means universal;--that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly +bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's +_Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the +latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy, + + He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love, + Is all that these eyes can adore. + He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love, + And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore. + +Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line +with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, +likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the +brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River, + + Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street + For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk, +[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.] + +for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" +of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable. + +Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and +assures us, + + Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped, +[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.] + +but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic +topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing +features? + +Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably +wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, +there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture +of Keats, + + The real Adonis, with the hymeneal + Fresh vernal buds half sunk between + His youthful curls. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero, + + A lovely youth, + With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_ (1898); Frances Fuller, _To Edith May_ (1851); +Metta Fuller, _Lines to a Poetess_ (1851).] Someone has pointed out +that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the +heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the +same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the +poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it. + +"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, _On the Death of +James Hogg_; Browning, _Sordello_, _By the Fireside_; Mrs. Browning, +_Aurora Leigh_; Principal Shairp, _Balliol Scholars_; Alfred Noyes, +_Tales of the Mermeid Inn_.] poets invariably possess, but the less +phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The +differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, +as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of +Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its +ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas, +_The Life of Charles Lamb_, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was +especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines _To a Poet Breaking +Silence_, he asserts, + + Yes, in this silent interspace + God sets his poems in thy face, + +and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses, + + How should I gage what beauty is her dole, + Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, + As birds see not the casement for the sky. + +It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most +radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical +nature,--through his + + Dream dazzled gaze + Aflame and burning like a god in song. +[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.] + +Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he +surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there +probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward +look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." +[Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John +Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the +heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_] +Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser, + + With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But +Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a +fictitious poet that + + His steadfast eye burnt inwardly + As burning out his soul, +[Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.] + +we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before +serious damage is done. + +The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in +varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half +closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet +it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his + + Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined + Before the sovran-thought of his own mind. +[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.] + +Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and +his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. +I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.] + +But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to + + See, no longer blinded with his eyes, +[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.] + +and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's +noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, +undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is +seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse +having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial +explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton, + + The living throne, the sapphire blaze + Where angels tremble while they gaze + He saw, but blasted with excess of light, + Closed his eyes in endless night, +[Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.] + +and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John +Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in +Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C. +Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, +also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may + + By the darkness of thine eyes discern + How piercing was the light within thy soul. +[Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne, +_Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the +Sea_.] + +Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an +assertion as that of Keats, + + There is a triple sight in blindness keen. +[Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes, +Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.] + +Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, +one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth, + + Thou that, when first my quickened ear + Thy deeper harmonies might hear, + I imaged to myself as old and blind, + For so were Milton and Maeonides, +[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).] + +and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to +his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See +also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)] + +But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up +here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, +for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture +of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite +picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very +beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally +distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more +spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural +tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely +aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The +brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly +school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's +_Dispute of the Poets_. The spiritual one + + Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes, + +but his brother, + + The one with brighter hues and darker curls + Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine, + Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life + Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight + From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought. + +The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, +seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of +John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ is + + A youth whose sultry eyes + Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust. + +But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous +features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello, + + Yourselves shall trace + (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, + A sharp and restless lip, so well combine + With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive + Delight at every sense; you can believe + Sordello foremost in the regal class + Nature has broadly severed from her mass + Of men, and framed for pleasure... + * * * * * + You recognize at once the finer dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear. + +Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more +easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," +as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. +Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never +seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a +celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne +undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is +so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no +further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be +deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of +English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the +burly host, + + He in the waast is shape as wel as I; + This were a popet in an arm tenbrace + For any woman, smal and fair of face? +[Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.] + +Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. +Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from +the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the +handsome young squire, who + + Coude songes make, and wel endyte. +[Footnote: _Prologue_.] + +Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, +_The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from +Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine +unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid +flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it +philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, +interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to +remain, though it begins with the line, + + A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems. + +And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's +callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly +decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." +[Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.] + +Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as +another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent +realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could _not_ be a glorious +eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other +men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne, +_Joyce Kilmer_.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike +shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce +Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a +delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." +[Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday, _Memoir of Joyce Kilmer_, p. 62.] Of +course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic +distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the +idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's +proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and +drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut +him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a +poet. + +It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands +of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the +stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. +Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length +in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation +of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds +them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from +tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, +excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been +alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last +century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the +melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman +does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive +disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.] +and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that +it was + + Projected from the bilious Childe. +[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.] + +But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with +emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid. + +To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ +describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position +we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, +assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was +the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. +[Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his +favorite poet as + + A man who measured six feet four: + Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest, + Compact his frame, his muscles of the best. +[Footnote: _A Portrait_.] + +With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has +again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been +noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly +verse-writers, + + A heavy handed blow, I think, + Would make your veins drip scented ink. +[Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.] + +But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share +of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the +Poet_, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers +resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began +his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt +against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself +unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint, + + We are compared to that sort of person, + Who wanders about announcing his sex + As if he had just discovered it. +[Footnote: _The Condolence_.] + +The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in +poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora +Leigh's cousin Romney to argue, + + Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life, + You need the lower life to stand upon + In order to reach up unto that higher; + And none can stand a tip-toe in that place + He cannot stand in with two stable feet. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +May 6, 1845.] + +Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific +account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the +result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael +Angelo_ (1904).] + +Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is +illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, +outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of +essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention: + + In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These + semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration, + for in reality the beggars have the advantage + of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed + to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to + the point. We must dig painfully through the outer + layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the + invalids are all spirit. +[Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.] + +That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last +century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their +ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if +anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello +turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So +nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max +Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art, _Degeneration_, was +able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a +disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.] + +Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as +Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be +significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a +sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil +from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let +us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our +earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of +whom we learn, + + Too long had sickness left her pining trace + With slow still touch on each decaying grace; + Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien; + Despair upon his languid smile was seen. +[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley_.] + +We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that +tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that +he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that +Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. +Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out +of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_ +Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction, + + Death and love are yet contending for their prey, + +and in _Adonais_ he appears as + + A power + Girt round with weakness. + * * * * * + A light spear ... + Vibrated, as the everbearing heart + Shook the weak hand that grasped it. + +Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as +consumption saps his strength: + + You might see his colour come and go, + And the softest strain of music made + Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade + Amid the dew of his tender eyes; + And the breath with intermitting flow + Made his pale lips quiver and part. +[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.] + +The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, +_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so +affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough +became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the +last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to +Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame +of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the +anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. + +Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the +poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus +Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: + + More tremulous + Than the soft star that in the azure East + Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day + Was his frail soul. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in +thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: his heroes harried by their +genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the +mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the +realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,--in fact, +it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows +struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry +them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned +with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, +or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_.] and +Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; +Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Sapphics_, _Anactoria_; +Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy +Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in Lenkos_.] to the +long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: +Browning, _One Word More_, _Preface to The Ring and the Book_; James +Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the Death of Mrs. +Browning_.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, _Ballad of +Appeal to Christina Rossetti_, _New Year's Eve_, _Dedication to +Christina Rossetti_.] Emily Brontë, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, +_Emily Brontë_.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister +Songs_, _On her Photograph_, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] Felicia +Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans_.] Adelaide Proctor, +[Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor_.] Helen Hunt, +[Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H_. _H_.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote: +_Ibid_., _To E. Lazarus_.]--one finds woman the subject of complimentary +verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we +should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their +greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it +plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her +style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her +"manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_.] So the +feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise. + +As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing +thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, +woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were +sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of +their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal +Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe_.] both +deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could +not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The +Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed +to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations +when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: +See _The Catalogue_. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The +Squinting Poetess_.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall +took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love +rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess_. More +seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend +with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother +Does_.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the +nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a +literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical his heroes +harried by their genius into ill health, prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the +mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, + + Some life of men unblest + He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. + He went, his piping took a troubled sound + Of storms that rage outside our happy ground. + He could not wait their passing; he is dead. + +In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark +upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by +Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse: + + The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn, + The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn, + The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell, + The almond face that Giotto drew so well, + The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._] + +Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the +_Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that +he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another, + + Behold him, how Hell's reek + Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek. +[Footnote: _Dante at Verona._] + +A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore: + + And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell. +[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._] + +In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying +hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius +into ill health, Prince Athanase is + + A youth who as with toil and travel + Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. +[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] + +In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until + + His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, + Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, + Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand + Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; + Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone + As in a furnace burning secretly + From his dark eyes alone. + +The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed +out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book 1.] is marked in +the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the +poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile. + +Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to +themutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some +persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the +matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast +by Fate into the body of a woman? + +As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of +endeavor in the last century, of their complaint must be significant. A +jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a sufferer in turning +his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil from the suggestion +that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let us ask them to +explain its real character to us. To take one of our earliest examples, +what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of whom we learn, + Too long had sickness left her pining trace + With slow still touch on each decaying grace; + Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien; + Despair upon his languid smile was seen. +[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley._] + +We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that +tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that +he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that +Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. +Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out +of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam_, +Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction, + + Death and love are yet contending for their prey, + +and in _Adonais_ he appears as + + A power + Girt round with weakness. + * * * * * + A light spear ... + Vibrated, as the everbeating heart + Shook the weak hand that grasped it. + +Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as +consumption saps his strength: + + You might see his colour come and go, + And the softest strain of music made + Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade + Amid the dew of his tender eyes; + And the breath with intermitting flow + Made his pale lips quiver and part. +[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen._] + + +The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, +_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, +so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the +cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for +the last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to +Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame +of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the +anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. + +Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the +poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus +Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: + + More tremulous + Than the soft star that in the azure East + Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day + Was his frail soul. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in +thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: it of course has left its +traces in the realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be +light,--in fact, it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most +of the blows struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few +efforts to parry them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, +in verse concerned with specific woman poets, men have not failed to +give them their due, or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, +_Miriam_.] and Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument +of Phaon_; Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs, Sapphics, +Anactoria;_ Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song;_ J. G. Percival, +_Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in +Lenkos._] to the long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. +Browning, [Footnote: Browning, _One Word More, Preface to The Ring and +the Book;_ James Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the +Death of Mrs. Browning._] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, +_Ballad of Appeal to Christina. Rossetti, New Year's Eve, Dedication to +Christina Rossetti._] Emily Brontë, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily +Brontë._] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister Songs, +on her Photograph, To a Poet Breaking Silence._] Felicia Hemans, +[Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans._] Adelaide Proctor, +[Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor._] Helen Hunt, +[Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H. H._] Emma Lazarus +[Footnote: _Ibid., To E. Lazarus._]--one finds woman the subject of +complimentary verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of +here, we should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to +their greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made +it plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of +her style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail +her "manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs._] So the +feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise. +As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing the +courage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, +woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were +sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of +their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal +Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe._] both +deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could +not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The +Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed +to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations +when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: +See _The Catalogue._ Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The +Squinting Poetess._] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall +took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love +rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess._] More +seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend +with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother +Does._] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the +nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a +literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer +Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and +heroine, + + In each lay poesy--for woman's heart + Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen; + And if it flow not through the tide of art, + Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween + It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked + The egress of rich words, it flows in thought, + And in its silent mirror doth reflect + Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought. +[Footnote: Milton.] + +Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on +her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, +appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an +anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written +by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober +judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of +Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, +Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but +who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,--Cythna, in +_The Revolt of Islam_. + +It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of +sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to +the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his + + Lyric love, half angel and half bird, + +reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position +on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In +_The Two Poets of Croisic_ he deals with the eighteenth century in +France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. +Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning +the admiration of the celebrities of the day--only to have his verse +tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by +her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact +that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine +_nom de plume_, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. +[Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod."] If indifference is the +attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that +her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her +entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we +must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to +approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted +to Robert Browning, "is--that there is a natural inferiority of mind in +women--of the intellect--not by any means of the moral nature--and that +the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." +[Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this +private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well. + +In a short narrative poem, _Mother and Poet_, Mrs. Browning claims +for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the +average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper +sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be +found in _Aurora Leigh_. She feels that making her imaginary poet a +woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much +of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must +have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring +insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the +charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. +Romney declares, + + Women as you are, + Mere women, personal and passionate, + You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, + Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints! + We get no Christ from you,--and verily + We shall not get a poet, in my mind. + +Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in +charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. +She confesses, + + We women are too apt to look to one, + Which proves a certain impotence in art. + +But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry +even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to +be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an +advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, +because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails +verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question +of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, +_Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.] + +Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's +physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the +chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit? + +In answer, one is haunted by the line, + + I too was born in Arcadia. + +Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In +the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of +the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: +See _Corydon_.] Collins, [Footnote: See _Selim, or the Shepherd's +Moral_.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See _Pastoral on the Death of +Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal +sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly +necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving +a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. +[Footnote: See _Huggins and Duggins_, and _The Forlorn Shepherd's +Complaint_.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes' +_Letter to a Friend in the Country_, and Sidney Dyer's _A Country +Walk_, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He +is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday. + +With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the +poet to nature becomes, of course, more intimate. But Cowper and Thomson +keep themselves out of their nature poetry to such an extent that it is +hard to tell what their ideal position would be, and not till the +publication of Beattie's _The Minstrel_ do we find a poem in which +the poet is nurtured under the influence of a natural scenery. At the +very climax of the romantic period the poet is not always bred in the +country. We find Byron revealing himself as one who seeks nature only +occasionally, as a mistress in whose novelty resides a good deal of her +charm. Shelley, too, portrays a poet reared in civilization, but +escaping to nature. [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_, and _Alastor_.] +Still, it is obvious that ever since the time of Burns and Wordsworth, +the idea of a poet nurtured from infancy in nature's bosom has been +extremely popular. + +There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the +hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth +were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were +not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too +tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. +[Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so +far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the +Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. +[Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society +every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of +Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs, + + So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth, + That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran + (And song is but the eloquence of truth). + +The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, +declaring of poetry, + + Its seat is deeper in the savage breast + Than in the man of cities. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of +acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all +singers," in Longfellow's _Hiawatha_. + +But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian +reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from +nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that +response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical +experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of +imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to +add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come +to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. +Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of +nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says + + If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach + My heart their beautiful parts of speech, + And the natural art they say these with, + My soul would sing of beauty and myth + In a rhyme and a meter none before + Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore. +[Footnote: _Preludes_.] + +The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, +was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not +intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature + + More like a man + Flying from something that he dreads, than one + Who sought the thing he loved. + +What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. +Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: +See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too, +were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting +nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's +life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See +_Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The +Prelude_.] + +Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him +to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to +the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic +solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run +its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges +the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar +Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and +preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from +civilization: + + For early didst thou leave the world, with powers + Fresh, undiverted to the world without, + Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; + Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt + Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings. + +No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality. +Stephen Phillips says of Emily Brontë's poetic gift, + + Only barren hills + Could wring the woman riches out of thee, +[Footnote: _Emily Brontë_.] + +and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. +But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was +developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See _The Palace of Art_.] and +Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See _The Poet's Vow_; Letters to Robert +Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning +as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the +eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe, +_An Escape_; J. E. Flecker, _Dirge_; Madison Cawein, _Comrading_; Yeats, +_The Lake Isle of Innisfree_.] he does not have everything his own way. + +For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely +anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared +in +London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter +of course, + + The coy muse, with me she would not live + In this dark city, +[Footnote: _Epistle to George Felton Mathew_. Wordsworth's sonnet, +"Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at +this time.] + +and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet, + + In cities he was low and mean; + The mountain waters washed him clean. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse, + + She can find a nobler theme for song + In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight + Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore. +[Footnote: _L'Envoi_.] + +A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in +London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to +the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of +the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, +_The Rossettis_, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral +verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. +Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they +were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this +regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the +city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See _The +City of Dreadful Night_.] this is not the same thing as the romantic +poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment. + +Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an +anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: +See _On London Stones_.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious +about his city poets. [Footnote: See _Fleet Street Eclogues_.] But as +landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the +most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more +and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to +take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. +Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. +[Footnote: See _Paris_.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl +Sandburg, _Chicago Poems_; Edgar Lee Masters, _The Loop_; William +Griffith, _City Pastorals_; Charles H. Towne, _The City_.] are beginning +to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called _A Winter +Night_ reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the +most bucolic shepherd among his flocks. + +To poets' minds the only unæsthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the +country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry +inspired by it, the reader of the _Spoon River Anthology_ is still +disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist +whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment. + +So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern +poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of +course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, +but usually, as in the Old English poem, _The Wanderer_, he has been +unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the +habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See +_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] But Byron set the fashion among poets +of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] +and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since +Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] +The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's +autobiographical novels, _Rest Harrow_ and _Open Country_, and William +H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. +[Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, _Denby the Rhymer_ (1918); Henry +Herbert Knibbs, _Songs of the Trail_ (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, +concurred in the view, declaring, + + Down the free roads of human happiness + I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Sidney_.] + +"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels +with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as +has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? +What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's +_Complaint to His Empty Purse_, onward, English poetry has borne +the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled +with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for +their destitution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camöens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, +Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want +exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse. + +The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well +inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of +course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time +on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, +also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from +illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there +are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's _Bohemia_ reveals the +fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of +his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller +the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, +the cost _per caput_ will be _nil_. Not only so, but the poet is likely +to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready +cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of +contemptuous amusement from a poet's statement, + + Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay! + One would I sell and daffodils buy + To feed my soul. +[Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.] + +What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually +asking. + +What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking +of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but +only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines +_Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_ + + Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased + And yet can starve the author of the pleasure. + +Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as +bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in +poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public, + + You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me + After you've starved me and driven me dead. + Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread. +[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.] + +Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's +_Ina_, the author himself appears, raving, + + A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool! + Would you know what it means to be a poet? + It is to want a friend, to want a home, + A country, money,--aye, to want a meal. +[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.] + +But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to +pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious +horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. +Browning boasts, + + The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented + Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, + But culls his Faustus from philosophers + And not from poets. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true +artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his +mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington +Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a +Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to +remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the +couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See +_Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, +Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been +held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry +Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see +Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are +comparatively safe from a poet's strike. + +Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his +financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A +Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their +terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this +subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy, + + Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes + Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers; + What is a world of vanities + To a world as fair as ours? + +In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle +to Davie, Fellow Poet_: + + To lie in kilns and barns at e'en + When bones are crazed, and blind is thin + Is doubtless great distress, + Yet then content would make us blest. + +Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_, + + Our simple life wants little, and true taste + Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste + The scene it would adorn. + +Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward +poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as +_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston +Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G. +Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G. +Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf +of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet, +_In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The +poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish +it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take +away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only +the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. +With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries, + + Starving, still I smile, + Laugh at want and wrong, + He is fed and clothed + To whom God giveth song. +[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, _A Crowned Poet_.] + +It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's +satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect, + + One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye, + The cave of Poverty and Poetry. + Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, + Emblem of music caused by emptiness, +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of +compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates +on the poet, + + The Muse gave special charge + His learning should be deep and large,-- + * * * * * + His flesh should feel, his eyes should read + Every maxim of dreadful need. + * * * * * + By want and pain God screeneth him + Till his appointed hour. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal +conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's +physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as +the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is +appalling. What can account for it? + +In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of +constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another +popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes +it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him, + + For I had the share of life that might have filled a century, + Before its fourth in time had passed me by. +[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] + +A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects, + + ... For my thirty years, + Dashed with sun and splashed with tears, + Wan with revel, red with wine, + Other wiser happier men + Take the full three score and ten. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with +recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily +Brontë, of whom it is written: + + They live not long of thy pure fire composed; + Earth asks but mud of those that will endure. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Brontë_.] + +Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness. +Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death + + Far from the trembling throng + Whose souls are never to the tempest given. +[Footnote: _Adonais_.] + +With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis +Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home +to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong +for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are +screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream +about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his +article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne +speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has +written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is +nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense +must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less +wild-winged." + +It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or +to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to +mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with +regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not +wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a +departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to +overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to +retract his superlative claims for his protégé's promise. + +More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In +Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic +muses, + + He died--'twas shrewd: + And came with all his youth and unblown hopes + On the world's heart, and touched it into tears. + +In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses +this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been +expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_: + + I have seen more glory in sunrise + Than in the deepening of azure noon, + +or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_: + + I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, + In predecease of his just-sickening song, + Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme, + Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long. + +Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in +English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east +must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a +poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth +and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot +Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the +Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_; +George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a +Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson, +_From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis +Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_; +Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The +Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919); +Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The +Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died +Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes +through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_: + + Youth rambles on life's arid mount, + And strikes the rock and finds the vein, + And brings the water from the fount. + The fount which shall not flow again. + + The man mature with labor chops + For the bright stream a channel grand, + And sees not that the sacred drops + Ran off and vanished out of hand. + + And then the old man totters nigh + And feebly rakes among the stones; + The mount is mute, the channel dry, + And down he lays his weary bones. + +But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if +nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. +For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by +prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might +bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them +to do so [Footnote: See Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Landor, _Dull is +my Verse_; J. G. Percival, _Invocation_; Matthew Arnold, _Growing Old_; +Longfellow, _My Books_; O. W. Holmes, _The Silent Melody_; C. W. +Stoddard, _The Minstrel's Harp_; P. H. Hayne, _The Broken Chords_; J. C. +MacNiel, _A Prayer_; Harvey Hubbard, _The Old Minstrel_.]--but it would +never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we +have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their +unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, _Age and Song, The Centenary +of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo_; O. W. Holmes, _Whittier's Eightieth +Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday_; E. E. Stedman, _Ad Vatem_; P. +H. Hayne, _To Longfellow_; Richard Gilder, _Jocoseria_; M. F. Tupper, +_To the Poet of Memory_; Edmund Gosse, _To Lord Tennyson on his +Eightieth Birthday_; Alfred Noyes, _Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of +Swinburne_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Eightieth Birthday_; Lucy Larcom, +_J. G. Whittier_; Mary Clemmer, _To Whittier_; Percy Mackaye, _Browning +to Ben Ezra_.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating +the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still +singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, +Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman +continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may +have had a genuine influence on younger writers. + +Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the +self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is +equivocal, as Landor's + + Dull is my verse: not even thou + Who movest many cares away + From this lone breast and weary brow + Canst make, as once, its fountains play; + No, nor those gentle words that now + Support my heart to hear thee say, + The bird upon the lonely bough + Sings sweetest at the close of day. + +It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding +convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. +Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_ +and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for +his belief in + + The last of life for which the first was made, + +as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found +its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get +the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself +at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and +Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by +their longevity. + +But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and +in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the +youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems +indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the +Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's +minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. +[Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of +these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. +The poet in Campbell's poem explains, + + 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore. + +Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the +old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can +express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares, + + I count it strange and hard to understand + That nearly all young poets should write old. + ... It may be perhaps + Such have not settled long and deep enough + In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still + The memory mixes with the vision, spoils + And works it turbid. Or perhaps again + In order to discover the Muse Sphinx + The melancholy desert must sweep around + Behind you as before. + +Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She +sighs, remembering her own youth, + + Alas, near all the birds + Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take + The chaffering swallow for the holy lark. + +Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment: + ... Many men are poets in their youth, + But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong + Even through all age the indomitable song. + [Footnote: _Genius in Beauty_.] + +Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See _To any Poet_.] too, and Richard Watson +Gilder [Footnote: See _Life is a Bell_.] feel that increasing power of +song comes with age. + +It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon +the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas +old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them +to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required +before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not +surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at +thirty, asserting, + + In me thou seest the glowing of such fire + As on the ashes of his youth doth lie, + +and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come +from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own +day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See +_There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, +[Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of +Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his +inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their +future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling +and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, +Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his +juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later +poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, +into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, +once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and +passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection, + + White-bearded and with eyes that look afar + From their still region of perpetual snow, + Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men. +[Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.] + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +THE POET AS LOVER + + +Do the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ leave anything to be said on the +relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The +poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new +philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the +power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his +gratitude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that +love has received many encomiums before. + +It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the +part of the uninitiated. + + Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle, + +Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been +no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the +fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which associates +all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion, +which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the +contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the +singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like +the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by +the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of classic +Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly +escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of +the present time says much for himself. + +In the first place, our non-lover may assure us, the nature of love is +such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard. For love is a mad +pursuit of life at first hand, in its most engrossing aspect, and it +renders one deaf and blind to all but the object of the chase; while +poetry is, as Plato points out, [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, § +599-601; and _Phaedrus_, § 248.] only a pale and lifeless imitation +of the ardors and delights which the lover enjoys at first hand. +Moreover, one who attempts to divide his attention between the muse and +an earthly mistress, is likely not only to lose the favor of the former, +but, as the ubiquity of the rejected poet in verse indicates, to lose +the latter as well, because his temperament will incline him to go into +retirement and meditate upon his lady's charms, when he should be +flaunting his own in her presence. It will not be long, indeed, before +he has so covered the object of his affection with the leafage of his +fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all. The +non-lover may remind us that even so ardent an advocate of love as Mrs. +Browning voices this danger, confessing, in _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, +[Footnote: Sonnet XXIX.] + + My thoughts do twine and bud + About thee, as wild vines about a tree + Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see + Except the straggling green that hides the wood. + +The non-lover may also recall to our minds the notorious egotism and +self-sufficiency of the poet, which seem incompatible with the humility +and insatiable yearning of the lover. He exults in the declaration of +Keats, + + My solitude is sublime,--for, instead of what I have + described (_i.e._, domestic bliss) there is sublimity + to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and + the stars through the windowpanes are my children; the + mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have, + stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. + [Footnote: Letter to George Keats, October 31, 1818.] + +Borne aloft by his admiration for this passage, the non-lover may +himself essay to be sublime. He may picture to us the frozen heights on +which genius resides, where the air is too rare for earthly affection. +He may declare that Keats' Grecian Urn is a symbol of all art, which +must be + + All breathing human passion far above. + +He will assert that the mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and +see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure +out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw +his view out of perspective. + +Finally, the enemy of love may call as witnesses poets whom he fancies +he has led astray. Strangely enough, considering the dedication of the +_Ring and the Book_, he is likely to give most conspicuous place among +these witnesses to Browning. Like passages of Holy Writ, lines from +Browning have been used as the text for whatever harangue a new +theorist sees fit to give us. In _Youth and Art_, the non-lover +will point out the characteristic attitude of young people who are +"married to their art," and consequently have no capacity for other +affection. In _Pauline_, he will gloat over the hero's confession +that he is inept in love because he is concerned with his perceptions +rather than with their objects, and his explanation, + + I am made up of an intensest life; + Of a most clear idea of consciousness + Of self ... + And I can love nothing,--and this dull truth + Has come at last: but sense supplies a love + Encircling me and mingling with my life. + +He will point out that Sordello is another example of the same type, for +though Sordello is ostensibly the lover of Palma, he really finds +nothing outside himself worthy of his unbounded adoration. [Footnote: +Compare Browning's treatment of Sordello with the conventional treatment +of him as lover, in _Sordello_, by Mrs. W. Buck (1837).] Turning to +Tennyson, in _Lucretius_ the non-lover will note the tragic death +of the hero that grows out of the asceticism in love engendered by his +absorption in composition. With the greatest pride the enemy of love +will point to his popularity in the 1890's, when the artificial and +heartless artist enjoyed his greatest vogue. As his most scintillating +advocate he will choose Oscar Wilde. Assuring us of many prose passages +in his favor, he will read to us the expression of conflict between love +and art in _Flower of Love_, where Wilde exclaims, + + I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and though my youth is + gone in wasted days, + I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's + crown of bays, + +and he will read the record of the same sense of conflict, in different +mood, expressed in the sonnet _Hélas_: + + To drift with every passion till my soul + Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, + Is it for this that I have given away + Mine ancient wisdom and austere control? + Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll + Scrawled over on some boyish holiday + With idle songs for pipe and virelai, + Which do but mar the secret of the whole. + Surely there was a time I might have trod + The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance + Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God. + Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod + I did but touch the honey of romance, + And must I lose a soul's inheritance? + +And yet, when the non-lover has finally arrived at the peroration of his +defense, we may remain unshaken in our conviction that from the _Song +of Solomon_ to the _Love Songs of Sara Teasdale_, the history of poetry +constitutes an almost unbroken hymn to the power of love, "the poet, and +the source of poetry in others," [Footnote: _The Symposium_ of Plato, § +196.] as Agathon characterized him at the banquet in Love's honour. +Within the field of our especial inquiry, the last century, we may rest +assured that there is no true poet whose work, rightly interpreted, is +out of tune with this general acclaim. Even Browning and Oscar Wilde are +to be saved, although, it may be, only as by fire. + +The influence of love upon poetry, which we are assuming with such _a +priori_ certainty, is effected in various ways. The most obvious, of +course, is by affording new subject matter. The confidence of +Shakespeare, + + How can my muse want subject to invent + While thou dost breathe, that pourest into my verse + Thine own sweet argument? + +is at least as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth +century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to +the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to +contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon +poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, with any +number of other personal experiences that have thrilled the poet to +composition. + +The scope of love's influence is widened when one reflects upon its +efficacy as a prize held up before the poet, spurring him on to express +himself. In this aspect poetry is often a form of spiritual display +comparable to the gay plumage upon the birds at mating season. In the +case of women poets, verse often affords an essentially refined and +lady-like manner of expressing one's sentiments toward a possible +suitor. The convention so charmingly expressed in William Morris' lines, +_Rhyme Slayeth Shame_, seems to be especially grateful to them. At +times the ruse fails, as a writer has recently admitted: + + All sing it now, all praise its artless art, + But ne'er the one for whom the song was made, +[Footnote: Edith Thomas, _Vos non Nobis_.] + +but perhaps the worth of the poetry is not affected by the stubbornness +of its recipient. Sara Teasdale very delicately names her anthology of +love poems by women, _The Answering Voice_, but half the poems reveal +the singer speaking first, while a number of them show her expressing an +open-minded attitude toward any possible applicant for her hand among +her readers. But it is not merely for its efficacy as a matrimonial +agency that poets are indebted to love. + +Since the nineteenth century is primarily the age of the love story, +personal experience of love has been invaluable to the poet in a third +way. The taste of the time has demanded that the poet sing of the tender +theme almost exclusively, whether in dramatic, lyric or narrative, +whether in historical or fictional verse. This is, of course, one reason +that, wherever the figure of a bard appears in verse, he is almost +always portrayed as a lover. Not to illustrate exhaustively, three of +the most widely read poems with poet heroes, of the beginning, middle +and end of the century respectively, _i. e._, Moore's _Lalla +Rookh_, Mrs. Browning's _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, and +Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, all depend for plot +interest upon their hero's implication in a love affair. The authors' +love affairs were invaluable, no doubt, since a poet is not be expected +to treat adequately a passion which he has not experienced himself. It +is true that one hears from time to time, notably in the 1890's, that +the artist should remain apart from, and coldly critical of the emotions +he portrays. But this is not the typical attitude of our period. When +one speaks thus, he is usually thought to be confusing the poet with the +literary man, who writes from calculation rather than from inspiration. +The dictum of Aristotle, "Those who feel emotion are most convincing +through a natural sympathy with the characters they represent," +[Footnote: _Poetics_ XVII, Butcher's translation.] has appeared +self-evident to most critics of our time. + +But the real question of inspiration by love goes deeper and is +connected with Aristotle's further suggestion that poetry involves "a +strain of madness," a statement which we are wont to interpret as +meaning that the poet is led by his passions rather than by his reason. +This constitutes the gist of the whole dispute between the romanticist +and the classicist, and our poets are such ardent devotees of love as +their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the +temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is +obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the +offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then +equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is +doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not +as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel +filled from without. His afflatus comes upon him and departs, without +his control or understanding. Poetical inspiration, to such a +temperament, naturally assumes the shape of passion. Bryant's expression +of this point of view is so typical of the general attitude as to seem +merely commonplace. He tells us, in _The Poet_, + + No smooth array of phrase, + Artfully sought and ordered though it be, + Which the cold rhymer lays + Upon his page languid industry + Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed. + * * * * * + The secret wouldst thou know + To touch the heart or fire the blood at will? + Let thine own eyes o'erflow; + Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill. + Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past, + And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast. + +Coleridge's comprehension of this fact led him to cry, "Love is the +vital air of my genius." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1799.] + +All this, considering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps +only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most +sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal +of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to +understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of +emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar +Lee Masters' _Monsieur D---- and the Psycho-Analyst_.] + +Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their +passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his +biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably +passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet +being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life +afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly +assures us, + +Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to +write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by +my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. +[Footnote: See Arthur Symons, _The Romantic Movement_, p. 92 (from +Myers, _Life of Wordsworth_).] + +Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who +shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of +temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in +_My Namesake_, says of himself, + + Few guessed beneath his aspect grave + What passions strove in chains. + +Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion, + + But you are blind, and to the blind + The touch of ice and fire is one. + +The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled _Our +Elder Poets_.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an +expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet +somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from +the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion. + +Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine +of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity +for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned +themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life +writing them up. Childe Harold is + + Grown aged in this world of woe, + In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, + So that no wonder waits him, nor below + Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife, + Cut to his heart again with the keen knife + Of silent, sharp endurance. + +The very imitative hero of Praed's _The Troubadour_, after +disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six +dismisses passion forever. We are assured that + + The joys that wound, the pains that bless, + Were all, were all departed, + And he was wise and passionless + And happy and cold-hearted. + +The popularity of this sort of poet was, however, ephemeral. Of late +years poets have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who +attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely, +beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted +poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy +of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he +had not wantonly wasted his emotions. + +One is justified in asking why, on the other hand, the poet should not +be one who, instead of spending his love on a finite mistress, should +devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry +is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are +portrayed in Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, where the hero agonizes for +relief from his too ardent love: + + O that my heart was quiet as a grave + Asleep in moonlight! + For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold + Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul + A passion burns from basement to the cope. + Poesy, poesy! +But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly +unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly +with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to +the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher +described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, +is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to +be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without +doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. +One of our minor American poets declares, + + The bard who yields to flesh his emotion + Knows naught of the frenzy divine. +[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest +against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.] + +But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a +Platonist--and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B. +Alexander, _Poetry and the Individual_, p. 46.]--the poet is led upward +to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of +sense. Thus in one of the most Platonic of our poems, G. E. Woodberry's +_Agathon_, Eros says of the hero, who is the young poet of the +_Symposium_, + + A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed, + Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense + In him is amorous and passionate. + Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out + So with pure thought and care of things divine + To touch his soul that it partake the gods. + +This does not imply that romantic love is the only avenue to ideal +beauty. Rupert Brooke's _The Great Lover_ might dissipate such an +idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for +sensuousbeauty. + + These I have loved, + +Brooke begins, + + White plates and cups, clean gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood. + +And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of +his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than +such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to +result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design, +unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great passion, +which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously, +affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other +impressions. Of course the exceptionally idealistic poet, who is +conscious of a religious ideal, can say with Milton, "I am wont day and +night to seek the _idea_ of beauty through all the forms and faces +of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it +leading me on with certain assured traces." [Footnote: _Prose +Works_, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symmons ed.] To him there is no need of +the unifying influence of romantic love. In his case the mission of a +strong passion is rather to humanize the ideal, lest it become purely +philosophical (as that of G. E. Woodberry is in danger of doing) or +purely ethical, as is the case of our New England poets. On the other +hand, to the poet who denies the ideal element in life altogether, the +unifying influence of love is indispensable. Such deeply tragic poetry +as that of James Thomson, B. V., for instance, which asserts Macbeth's +conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter +chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the +memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and +beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair. + +In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that +the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as +the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual +beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's +perturbation. He inquires: + + Can proportion of the outward part + Move such affection in the inward mind + That it can rob both sense and reason blind? + Why do not then the blossoms of the field, + Which are arrayed with much more orient hue + And to the sense most daintie odors yield, + Work like impression in the looker's view? +[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.] + +Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic +mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in +asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the +senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all +creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they +declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love +poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such +heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most +beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's. + +It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its +most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit +kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an +instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the +analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames +that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of +Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the +title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he +learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court. + + Thou art a glorious madman, + +Lodge exclaims, + + Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, + And rise again to immortality. + +Marlowe replies, + + Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, + What if? I shall have drained my splendor down + To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness, + And mirk and mire and black oblivion, + Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, + Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest + To be so damned. + +Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for +the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her +living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See +Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip +Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_; +Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_; +Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice, +_Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho +and Phaon_; Zoë Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander +Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims +this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for +sympathy, + + For all my days as all thy days from birth + My heart as thy heart was in me as thee + Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea + Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth + Is fuel enough to feed, + While day sows night, and night sows day for seed. + +This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the +poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. +The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical +quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is +needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, +in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal +love and beauty, declaring, + + Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; + Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; + Love has no habitation but the heart: + Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, + Cling, and are borne into the night apart, + The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover. + +Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love. +Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct, +Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, +arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, + + What had all we done + That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, + And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, + And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins? + +Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal +the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, +[Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire." +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to +immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea: + + Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, + But mine are beauty and immortal love. + Therefore I will be tyrant of myself-- + Mine own law will I be! And I will make + Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms + Are wrought of loveliness without decay, + And wild desire without satiety, + And joy and aspiration without death. + And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho! + Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, + Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens + Are fallen and withered. + +To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to +note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho. +[Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in +Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our +enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope +to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have +been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable +matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as +mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her +love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her +temperament, + + Night and day + A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, + And all her veins ran fever, +[Footnote: _Sappho_.] + +conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her, + + Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, + Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love. +[Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.] + +It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her +genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing +her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert, + + But having made me, me he shall not slay: + Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his, + Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss + Contents them. + +It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in +the body as in an oyster shell," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, § 250.] +while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the +senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara +Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself, + + Who would run at dusk + Along the surges creeping up the shore + When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, + And running, running till the night was black, + Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand, + And quiver with the winds from off the sea. + Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides + Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me + Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest. +[Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, +in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this +destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite, + + If I sing no more + To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, + It is that thou hast made my life too sweet + To hold the added sweetness of a song. + * * * * * + I taught the world thy music; now alone + I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.] + +Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in +her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In _Anactoria_ +she tells the object of her infatuation: + + I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated + With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead. + * * * * * + I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, + Intense device and superflux of pain. + +And after detailing with gusto the bloody ingenuities of her plan of +torture, she states that her motive is, + + To wring thy very spirit through the flesh. + +The myth that Sappho's agony resulted from an offense done to Aphrodite, +is several times alluded to. In _Sappho and Phaon_ she asserts her +independence of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the goddess turns +Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thalassa, the mother of his +children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest +of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning +passion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is +mentioned. This is the sole theme of _Sapphics_, in which poem the +goddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual +delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her: + + Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho," + Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not + Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids.... + Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, + Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, + Full of music; only beheld among them + Soar as a bird soars + Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel + Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, + Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, + Clothed with the wind's wings. + +It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory +indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while +incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits +of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's +drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who +conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in +her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a +meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in +the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is +more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus +Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely +spiritual conception. + +Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having +no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual +beauty which is shining through the flesh, and which is the real object +of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it +seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is +some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual +loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking +the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as +the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of +his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for +the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would +be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess. +Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no +impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is +the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith +and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes +under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the +meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, _Hélas_, quoted above. + +While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must +remember that Burns, in some of his accounts of inspiration, ascribes +quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the +barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as +much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one. +The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the +"swinish trough," which Alfred Austin asserts them to be. [Footnote: In +_Off Mesolonghi_.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it constitutes the +strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote: +In _Lines To a Lady_.] + + Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke + Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak, + Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near, + Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere. + The puny heart within him swells to view, + The man grows loftier and the poet too. + +Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence. +The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance +sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the +finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his +beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's + + Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts + Which I by lacking have supposed dead, + +is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compass_, + + Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone, + But as the meaning of all things that are; + A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar + Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon, + Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; + Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar, + Being of its furthest fires oracular, + The evident heart of all life sown and mown. + +Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves, + + Their shining fronts, + Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same, + As river water hallowed into founts) + Met in thee. +[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.] + +Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the +conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of +Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_: + + Lady, I fain would tell how evermore + Thy soul I know not from thy body nor + Thee from myself, neither our love from God. + +The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here +implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti +identifies her lover with her Christian faith: + + Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such + I cannot love you if I love not Him, + I cannot love Him if I love not you. +[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of +Love_ (a sonnet sequence).] + +It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there +is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of +the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a +matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has +affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture +their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent +of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form +is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general +is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty +in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: _Symposium_, Jowett +translation, §210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting +enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In _Epipsychidion_ +Shelley declares, + + I never was attached to that great sect + Whose doctrine is that each one should select + Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, + And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend + To cold oblivion.... + + True love in this differs from gold and clay, + That to divide is not to take away. + Love is like understanding, that grows bright + Gazing on many truths.... + + Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, + The life that wears, the spirit that creates + One object and one form, and builds thereby + A sepulchre for its eternity. + +These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the +goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to +another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has +departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See +Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke +is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which +begins, + + There was a damned successful poet, + There was a woman like the Sun. + And they were dead. They did not know it. + They did not know his hymns + Were silence; and her limbs + That had served love so well, + Dust, and a filthy smell. + +The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through +manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at +least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses +his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration: + + As a bathtub lined with white porcelain + When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,-- + So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, + My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady. + +As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal +beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting +affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible +vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through +first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of +the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This +is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our +writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and +blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the +ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or +belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho +compares her sensations + + Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year + When I love thee. + +In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love +of the poetess, she asserts of herself, + + I doubt if ever she saw form of man + Or maiden either whom, being beautiful, + She hath not loved. + +When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins, + + All + That breathes to her is passion, love itself + All passionate. + +The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills +her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the +nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines +wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her: + + How should they know that Sappho lived and died + Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, + Never transfused and lost in what she loved, + Never so wholly loving nor at peace. + I asked for something greater than I found, + And every time that love has made me weep + I have rejoiced that love could be so strong; + For I have stood apart and watched my soul + Caught in a gust of passion as a bird + With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind + Struggles and frees itself to find the sky. + +She continues, apostrophizing beauty, + + In many guises didst thou come to me; + I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, + Phaon allured me with a look of thine, + In Anactoria I knew thy grace. + I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, + But never wholly, soul and body mine + Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. + +The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as +for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists +of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the +rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the +half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her +passion: + + I love thee to the depth and breadth and height + My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight + For the ends of Being and ideal grace. + +It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate +response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences +that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of +philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude +with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. +[Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's +passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On +the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne +Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_ +(1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and Fanny Brawne_ (1919); James B. +Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).] + +Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it +follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the +fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the +transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy +object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted +for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is +beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phædrus_, +255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an +unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara +Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool, + + O wondrous deep, + I love you, I give you my light to keep. + Oh, more profound than the moving sea, + That never has shown myself to me. + * * * * * + But out of the woods as night grew cool + A brown pig came to the little pool; + It grunted and splashed and waded in + And the deepest place but reached its chin. + +The tragedy in such love is the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe, +_At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. The dramatist comes to London as +a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His +innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman: + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + +But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her +revelation of her character: + + Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay, + Wedded and one with it, he moaned. + * * * * * + Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace + Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew, + Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face. + +It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that +he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen +woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into +forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan +only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller's _The Ideal and the +Real_ is an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into +this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet +idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's +_Jenny_, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem, +_A Vision of Woman_. [Footnote: See also Kirke White, _The Prostitute_; +Whitman, _To a Common Prostitute_; Joaquin Miller, _A Dove of St. Mark_; +and Olive Dargan, _A Magdalen to Her Poet_.] + +To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious +denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is +purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes +with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's _Non Sum +Qualis Eram Bonæ sub Regno Cynaræ_: + + Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine + There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed + Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; + And I was desolate and sick of an old passion; + Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: + I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. + +The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of +his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May +Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is irresistibly impelled +to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her +touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a _reductio +ad absurdum_ of a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort +can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in the +_Vita Nuova_. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, +by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote: _Dante_] and by Sara King Wiley. +[Footnote: _Dante and Beatrice_] Both these writers, however, show +a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents +their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by +apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting +Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, +stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his gratitude +for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists +are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their +plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's +double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another +famous Renaissance lover for the hero of _A Night in Avignon_, a +play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his +long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for +consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate +Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this +inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's +devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering +the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the +subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of +contrition. + +Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his +admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the +dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the +other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When +he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the +object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, +comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his +burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of +good and evil. He explains, + + I serve a lady so imperial fair, + June paled when she was born. Indeed no star, + No dream, no distance, but a very woman, + Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake; + Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit + That thou hast heard of ... + ... I would eat, and have all human joy, + And know,--and know. + +He continues, + + But, for the Evening Star, I have it there. + I would not have it nearer. Is that love + As thou dost understand? Yet is it mine + As I would have it: to look down on me, + Not loving and not cruel; to be bright, + Out of my reach; to lighten me the dark + When I lift eyes to it, and in the day + To be forgotten. But of all things, far, + Far off beyond me, otherwise no star. + +Marlowe's closing words bring us to another important question, _i. e._, +the stage of love at which it is most inspiring. This is the subject of +much difference of opinion. Mrs. Browning might well inquire, in one of +her love sonnets, + + How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use? + A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine + Sad memory with thy songs to interfuse? + A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine? + A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose. +[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, XVII.] +Each of these situations has been celebrated as begetting the poet's +inspiration. + +To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the +married state as least likely to be spiritually creative. It is true +that we find a number of poems addressed by poets to their wives. But +these are more likely to be the contented purring of one who writes by a +cozy fireside, than the passionate cadence of one whose genius has been +fanned to flame. One finds but a single champion of the married state +considered abstractly. This is Alfred Austin, in whose poem, _The Poet +and the Muse_, his genius explains to the newly betrothed poet: + + How should you, poet, hope to sing? + The lute of love hath a single string. + Its note is sweet as the coo of the dove, + But 'tis only one note, and the note is love. + + But when once you have paired and built your nest, + And can brood thereon with a settled breast, + You will sing once more, and your voice will stir + All hearts with the sweetness gained from her. + +And perhaps even Alfred Austin's vote is canceled by his inconsistent +statement in his poem on Petrarch, _At Vaucluse_, + + Let this to lowlier bards atone, + Whose unknown Laura is their own, + Possessing and possessed: + + Of whom if sooth they do not sing, + 'Tis that near her they fold their wing + To drop into her nest. + +Let us not forget Shelley's expression of his need for his wife: + + Ah, Mary dear, come to me soon; + I am not well when thou art far; + As twilight to the sphered moon, + As sunset to the evening star, + Thou, beloved, art to me. +[Footnote: _To Mary_.] + +Perhaps it is unworthy quibbling to object that the figure here suggests +too strongly Shelley's consciousness of the merely atmospheric function +of Mary, in enhancing his own personality, as contrasted with the +radiant divinity of Emilia Viviani, to whom he ascribes his +creativeness. [Footnote: Compare Wordsworth, _She Was a Phantom of +Delight_, _Dearer Far than Life_; Tennyson, _Dedication of +Enoch Arden_.] + +It is customary for our bards gallantly to explain that the completeness +of their domestic happiness leaves them no lurking discontent to spur +them onto verse writing. This is the conclusion of the happily wedded +heroes of Bayard Taylor's _A Poet's Journal_, and of Coventry +Patmore's _The Angel in the House_; likewise of the poet in J. G. +Holland's _Kathrina_, who excuses his waning inspiration after his +marriage: + + She, being all my world, had left no room + For other occupation than my love. + ... I had grown enervate + In the warm atmosphere which I had breathed. + +Taken as a whole, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the remote love, +prevented in some way from reaching its culmination. To requote Alfred +Noyes, the poet knows that ideal love must be + + Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star. +[Footnote: Marlowe.] + +In _Sister Songs_ Francis Thompson asserts that such remoteness is +essential to his genius: + + I deem well why life unshared + Was ordained me of yore. + In pairing time, we know, the bird + Kindles to its deepmost splendour, + And the tender + Voice is tenderest in its throat. + Were its love, forever by it, + Never nigh it, + It might keep a vernal note, + The crocean and amethystine + In their pristine + Lustre linger on its coat. +[Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. +Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in _Monna Innominata_ +XIV, mourning for + + The silence of a heart that sang its songs + When youth and beauty made a summer morn, + Silence of love that cannot sing again.] + +Byron, in the _Lament of Tasso_, causes that famous lover likewise +to maintain that distance is necessary to idealization. He sighs, + + Successful love may sate itself away. + The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate + To have all feeling save the one decay, + And every passion into one dilate, + As rapid rivers into ocean pour. + But ours is bottomless and hath no shore. + +The manner of achieving this necessary remoteness is a nice problem. Of +course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss +Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt's _Cormac, +Son of Ogmond_. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are +often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is +something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not +till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in +poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. +Browning, Sonnet VII. + + And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday, + Are only dear, the singing angels know + Because thy name moves right in what they say.] + +The minor poet, to be sure, is often discovered solicitously feeling his +pulse to gauge the effect of love on his rhymes, but one does not feel +that his verse gains by it. Therefore, an external obstacle is usually +made to intervene. + +As often as not, this obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One +finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. +The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and +poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not +be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility +and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, +she being unaware that it is the reflection of his own soul that the +poet is worshipping in her. One can feel some sympathy with the lady in +Thomas Hardy's _I Rose Up as My Custom Is_, who, when her lover's +ghost discovers her beside a snoring spouse, confesses that she is +content with her lot: + + He makes no quest into my thoughts, + But a poet wants to know + What one has felt from earliest days, + Why one thought not in other ways, + And one's loves of long ago. + +It may be, too, that an instinct for protection has something to do with +the lady's rejection, for a recent poet has openly proclaimed the effect +of attaining, in successful love, one step toward absolute beauty: + + O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows + In tender yielding unto me, + A vast desire awakes and grows + Unto forgetfulness of thee. +[Footnote: "A. E.," _The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty_.] + +Rejection is apt to prove an obstacle of double worth to the poet, since +it not only removes him to a distance where his lady's human frailties +are less visible, so that the divine light shining through her seems +less impeded, but it also fires him with a very human ambition to prove +his transcendent worth and thus "get even" with his unappreciative +beloved. [Footnote: See Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; G. L. Raymond, +_"Loving,"_ from _A Life in Song_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_. + +Richard Realf in _Advice Gratis_ satirically depicts the lady's +altruism in rejecting her lover: + + It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verse + If you dropped some aloes into his wine, + They write supremely under a curse.] + +There is danger, of course, that the disillusionment produced by the +revelation of low ideals which the lady makes in her refusal will +counterbalance these good effects. Still, though the poet is so +egotistical toward all the world beside, in his attitude toward his lady +the humility which Emerson expresses in _The Sphinx_ is not without +parallel in verse. Many singers follow him in his belief that the only +worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is +impossible. [Footnote: See _The Sphinx_-- + + Have I a lover who is noble and free? + I would he were nobler than to love me. + +See also Walt Whitman, _Sometimes with One I Love_, and Mrs. Browning, +"I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to love +me--the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to Robert +Browning, December 24, 1845.] + +To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided +attachments, Alexander Smith's _A Life Drama_ is a treasury of +suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at +sufficient distance to be useful. With the aid of intercalations Smith +exhibits the poet removed from his lady by scornful rejection, by +parental restraint, by an unhappy marriage, by self-reproach, and by +death. All these devices have been popular in our poetry. + +The lady's marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love, +though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for +idealization. The poet's worship is so supersensual as to be +inoffensive. To confine ourselves to poetic dramas treating historical +poets,--Beatrice,[Footnote: G. L. Raymond's and S. K. Wiley's dramas, +_Dante_, and _Dante and Beatrice_.] Laura, [Footnote: Cale Young Rice, +_A Night in Avignon_.] Vittoria Colonna, [Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael +Angelo_.] and Alison [Footnote: Peabody, _Marlowe_.] are all married to +one man while inspiring another. A characteristic autobiographical love +poem of this type, is that of Francis Thompson, who asserts the ideality +of the poet's affection in his reference to + + This soul which on thy soul is laid, + As maid's breast upon breast of maid. +[Footnote: See also _Ad Amicam_, _Her Portrait_, _Manus Animon Pinxit_.] + +There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death. +Translation of love into Platonic idealism is then almost inevitable. +Alexander Smith describes the change accomplished by the death of the +poet's sweetheart: + + Two passions dwelt at once within his soul, + Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky. + And as the sunset dies along the west, + Eve higher lifts her front of trembling stars + Till she is seated in the middle sky, + So gradual one passion slowly died + And from its death the other drew fresh life, + Until 'twas seated in the soul alone, + The dead was love, the living, poetry. + +The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, +mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, +perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: See _On the Vita Nuova of Dante_; +also _Dante at Verona_.] Much the same kind of translation is +described in _Vane's Story_, by James Thomson, B.V., which appears +to be a sort of mystic autobiography. + +The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote: +_Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase +of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense +to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this +increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last +step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's passion for +disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, +indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in +his sonnet sequence, _Ideal Passion_, thus exalts his mistress, the +abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets: + + Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go + From star to star, upward, all heavens above, + The grave forgot, forgot the human woe. + Though glorified, their love was human love, + One unto one; a greater love I know. + +But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its +brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love. + +Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love +as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, +who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar +very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to +vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole +way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to +supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and +twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of +their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic +character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most +idealistic verse. + +However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and +philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of +abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. +Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing +than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take +his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to +appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our +"muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies. + +Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of +widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical +love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it +seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See +Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.] + +Bulwer Lytton's _Milton_ was, if one may believe the press notices, +the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of +aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the +intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long +lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too +physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this +vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he +abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after +death. Bulwer Lytton cites the _Phædrus_ of Plato as the basis of +his allegory, reminding us, + + The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend + From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be), + Dim broken memories of the state before, + Form what we call our reason... + ... Is not Love, + Of all those memories which to parent skies + Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above, + In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:) + Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest? + +Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George +Edward Woodberry. His poem, _Agathon_, dealing with the young poet of +Plato's _Symposium_, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism. +Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize +his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He +chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, +one of those + + Whose eyes were more divinely touched + In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth. + +As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of +nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the +beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the _Symposium_, +he expresses his unhappiness: + + Still must I mourn + That every lovely thing escapes the heart + Even in the moment of its cherishing. + +Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he +may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be +ennobled: + + Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts. + Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace; + So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb, + Their music linger here, the joy of men. + +Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros, +corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros +for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes +the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love: + + The waste desire be his, and sightless fate, + Him light shall not revisit; late he knows + The love that mates the heaven weds the grave. + +Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable +decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying, + + In its fiery womb I saw + The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene, + And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell. + +In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to +him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality: + + Let not dejection on thy heart take hold + That nature hath in thee her sure effects, + And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes, + Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress, + The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain? + +But, he continues, + + In fair things + There is another vigor, flowing forth + From heavenly fountains, the glad energy + That broke on chaos, and the outward rush + Of the eternal mind;... + ... Hence the poet's eye + That mortal sees, creates immortally + The hero more than men, not more than man, + The type prophetic. + +Agathon, in an ecstasy of comprehension, chants the praises of love +which Plato puts into his mouth in the _Symposium_. In conclusion, +Urania sums up the mystery of love and genius: + + For truth divine is life, not love, + Creative truth, and evermore + Fashions the object of desire + Through love that breathes the spirit's fire. + +We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with +the _Epipsychidion_, not merely because it is the most idealistic of +the interpretations of Platonic love given by nineteenth century poets, +but because by virtue of the fact that it describes Shelley's personal +experience, it should be most valuable in revealing the attitude toward +love of one possessing the purest of poetic gifts. [Footnote: Treatment +of this theme is foreshadowed in _Alastor_.] + +The prominence given to Shelley's earthly loves in this poem has led J. +A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks, + +While Shelley's doctrine in _Epipsychidion_ seems Platonic, it will +not square with the _Symposium_.... When a man has formed a just +conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who +find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested +by this standard, Shelley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with +so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is +spurious Platonism.[Footnote: _Shelley_, p. 142.] + +Perhaps this failure to break altogether with the physical is precisely +the distinction between the love of the poet and the love of the +philosopher with whom Plato is concerned. I do not believe that the +Platonism of this poem is intrinsically spurious; the conception of +Emilia seems to be intended simply as a poetic personification of +abstract beauty, but it is undeniable that at times this vision does not +mean abstract beauty to Shelley at all, but the actual Emilia Viviani. +He has protested against this judgment, "The _Epipsychidion_ is a +mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal with +those articles." The revulsion of feeling that turned him away from +Emilia, however, taught him how much of his feeling for her had entered +into the poem, so that, in June, 1822, Shelley wrote, + + The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot bear to look at. I think + one is always in love with something or other; the + error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in + flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a + mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal. + +Shelley begins his spiritual autobiography with his early mystical +intuition of the existence of spiritual beauty, which is to be the real +object of his love throughout life. By Plato, of course, this love is +made prenatal. Shelley says, + + She met me, robed in such exceeding glory + That I beheld her not. + +As this vision was totally disjoined from earthly objects, it won the +soul away from all interest in life. Therefore Shelley says, + + She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way + And lured me towards sweet death. + +This early vision passed away, however, + + Into the dreary cone of our life's shade. + +This line is evidently Shelley's Platonic fashion of referring to the +obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision +has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its +concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is +regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, +but an abiding presence in the soul. + +The first step toward this goal was a mistaken one. Shelley describes +his marriage with Harriet as a yielding to the senses merely, in other +words, as slavery to the Venus Pandemos. He describes this false vision, + + Whose voice was venomed melody. + * * * * * + The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers, + Her touch was as electric poison. + +Shelley was more successful in his second love, for Mary, whom he calls +the "cold, chaste moon." The danger of this stage in the ascent toward +beauty is that one is likely to be content with the fragmentary glimpse +of beauty gained through the loved one, and by losing sight of its other +embodiments fail to aspire to more complete vision. So Shelley says of +this period, "I was laid asleep, spirit and limb." By a great effort, +however, the next step was taken,--the agonizing one of breaking away +from the bondage of this individual, in order that beauty in all its +forms may appeal to one. Shelley writes, + + What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, + Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lips + Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse. + +Finally, the dross of its earthly embodiments being burned away by this +renunciation, ideal beauty is revealed to the poet, not merely in a +flash of inspiration, as at the beginning of his quest, but as an +abiding presence in the soul. At least this is the ideal, but, being a +poet, Shelley cannot claim the complete merging with the ideal that the +philosopher possesses. At the supersensual consummation of his love, +Shelley sinks back, only half conceiving of it, and cries, + + Woe is me! + The winged words on which my soul would pierce + Into the height of Love's rare universe + Are chains of lead around its flight of fire; + I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN + + +Dare we venture into the holy of holies, where the gods are said to come +upon the poet? Is there not danger that the divine spark which kindles +his song may prove a bolt to annihilate us, because of our presumptuous +intrusion? What voice is this, which meets us at the threshold? + + Beware! Beware! + His flashing eyes, his floating hair! + Weave a circle round him thrice, + And close your eyes in holy dread-- + +It is Coleridge, warning us of our peril, if we remain open-eyed and +curious, trying to surprise the secret of the poet's visitation. + +Yet are we not tolerably safe? We are under the guidance of an initiate; +the poet himself promises to unveil the mystery of his inspiration for +us. As Vergil kept Dante unscathed by the flames of the divine vision, +will not our poet protect us? Let us enter. + +But another doubt, a less thrilling one, bids us pause. Is it indeed the +heavenly mystery that we are bid gaze upon, or are we to be the dupe of +self-deceived impostors? Our intimacy is with poets of the last two +centuries,--not the most inspired period in the history of poetry. And +in the ranks of our multitudinous verse-writers, it is not the most +prepossessing who are loudest in promising us a fair spectacle. How +harsh-voiced and stammering are some of these obscure apostles who are +offering to exhibit the entire mystery of their gift of tongues! We see +more impressive figures, to be sure. Here is the saturnine Poe, who with +contemptuous smile assures us that we are welcome to all the secrets of +his creative frenzies. Here is our exuberant Walt Whitman, crying, "Stop +this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all +poems." [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] But though we scan every face +twice, we find here no Shakespeare promising us the key to creation of a +_Hamlet_. + +Still, is it not well to follow a forlorn hope? Among the less +vociferous, here are singers whose faces are alight with a mysterious +radiance. Though they promise us little, saying that they themselves are +blinded by the transcendent vision, so that they appear as men groping +in darkness, yet may they not unawares afford us some glimpse of their +transfiguration? + +If we refuse the poet's revelation, we have no better way of arriving at +the truth. The scientist offers us little in this field; and his account +of inspiration is as cold and comfortless as a chemical formula. Of +course the scientist is amused by this objection to him, and asks, "What +more do you expect from the effusions of poets? Will not whatever secret +they reveal prove an open one? What will it profit you to learn that the +milk of Paradise nourishes the poetic gift, since it is not handled by +an earthly dairy?" But when he speaks thus, our scientific friend is +merely betraying his ignorance regarding the nature of poetry. Longinus, +[Footnote: _On the Sublime,_ I.] and after him, Sidney, [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry._] long ago pointed out its peculiar action, +telling us that it is the poet's privilege to make us partakers of his +ecstasy. So, if the poet describes his creative impulses, why should he +not make us sharers of them? + +This is not an idle question, for surely Plato, that involuntary poet, +has had just this effect upon his readers. Have not his pictures, in the +_Phaedrus_ and the _Ion_, of the artist's ecstasy touched Shelley and +the lesser Platonic poets of our time with the enthusiasm he depicts? +Incidentally, the figure of the magnet which Plato uses in the +Ion may arouse hope in the breasts of us, the humblest readers of +Shelley and Woodberry. For as one link gives power of suspension to +another, so that a ring which is not touched by the magnet is yet +thrilled with its force, so one who is out of touch with Plato's +supernal melodies, may be sensitized by the virtue imparted to his +nineteenth century disciples, who are able to "temper this planetary +music for mortal ears." + +Let us not lose heart, at the beginning of our investigation, though our +greatest poets admit that they themselves have not been able to keep +this creative ecstasy for long. To be sure this is disillusioning. We +should prefer to think of their silent intervals as times of insight too +deep for expression; as Anna Branch phrases it, + + When they went + Unto the fullness of their great content + Like moths into the grass with folded wings. +[Footnote: _The Silence of the Poets._] + +This pleasing idea has been fostered in us by poems of appeal to silent +singers. [Footnote: See Swinburne, _A Ballad of Appeal to Christina +Rossetti_; and Francis Thompson, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] +But we have manifold confessions that it is not commonly thus with the +non-productive poet. Not merely do we possess many requiems sung by +erst-while makers over their departed gift, [Footnote: See especially +Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Kirke White, _Hushed is the Lyre_; +Landor, _Dull is My Verse_, and _To Wordsworth_; James Thomson, B. V., +_The Fire that Filled My Heart of Old_, and _The Poet and the Muse_; +Joaquin Miller, _Vale_; Andrew Lang, _The Poet's Apology_; Francis +Thompson, _The Cloud's Swan Song_.] but there is much verse indicating +that, even in the poet's prime, his genius is subject to a mysterious +ebb and flow. [Footnote: See Burns, _Second Epistle to Lapraik_; Keats, +_To My Brother George_; Winthrop Mackworth Praed, _Letter from Eaton_; +William Cullen Bryant, _The Poet_; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _Invita +Minerva_; Emerson, _The Poet, Merlin_; James Gates Percival, _Awake My +Lyre_, _Invocation_; J. H. West, _To the Muse_, _After Silence_; Robert +Louis Stevenson, _The Laureate to an Academy Class Dinner_; Alice +Meynell, _To one Poem in Silent Time_; Austin Dobson, _A Garden Idyl_; +James Stevens, _A Reply_; Richard Middleton, _The Artist_; Franklin +Henry Giddings, _Song_; Benjamin R. C. Low, _Inspiration_; Robert +Haven Schauffler, _The Wonderful Hour_; Henry A. Beers, _The Thankless +Muse_; Karl Wilson Baker, _Days_.] Though he has faith that he is not +"widowed of his muse," [Footnote: See Francis Thompson, _The Cloud's +Swan Song_.] she yet torments him with all the ways of a coquette, so +that he sadly assures us his mistress "is sweet to win, but bitter to +keep." [Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ballade of the Poet's Thought_.] The +times when she solaces him may be pitifully infrequent. Rossetti, musing +over Coleridge, says that his inspired moments were + + Like desert pools that show the stars + Once in long leagues. +[Footnote: _Sonnet to Coleridge_.] + +Yet, even so, upon such moments of insight rest all the poet's claims +for his superior personality. It is the potential greatness enabling him +at times to have speech with the gods that makes the rest of his life +sacred. Emerson is more outspoken than most poets; he is not perhaps at +variance with their secret convictions, when he describes himself: + + I, who cower mean and small + In the frequent interval + When wisdom not with me resides. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +However divine the singer considers himself in comparison with ordinary +humanity, he must admit that at times + + Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn, + The child of genius sits forlorn, + * * * * * + A cripple of God, half-true, half-formed. +[Footnote: Emerson, _The Poet_. See also George Meredith, _Pegasus_.] + +Like Dante, we seem disposed to faint at every step in our revelation. +Now a doubt crosses our minds whether the child of genius in his +crippled moments is better fitted than the rest of us to point out the +pathway to sacred enthusiasm. It appears that little verse describing +the poet's afflatus is written when the gods are actually with him. In +this field, the sower sows by night. Verse on inspiration is almost +always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the +intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful +curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual +introspection he is seeking the charm, so to speak, that will render his +afflatus permanent. The rigidity in much of such verse surely betrays, +not the white heat of genius, but a self-conscious attitude of readiness +for the falling of the divine spark. + +One wonders whether such preparation has been of much value in hastening +the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the +loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged +that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive +divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a +number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange +hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge +liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through +straggling branches.] This, however, is Emerson in a singularly +flat-footed moment. The real poet scoffs at such suggestions. Instead, +he feels that it is not for him to know the times and seasons of his +powers. Indeed, it seems to him, sometimes, that pure contrariety marks +the god's refusal to come when entreated. Thus we are told of the god of +song, + + Vainly, O burning poets! + Ye wait for his inspiration. + * * * * * + Hasten back, he will say, hasten back + To your provinces far away! There, at my own good time + Will I send my answer to you. +[Footnote: E. C. Stedman, _Apollo_. _The Hillside Door_ by the same +author also expresses this idea. See also Browning, _Old Pictures +in Florence_, in which he speaks "of a gift God gives me now and then." +See also Longfellow, _L'Envoi_; Keats, _On Receiving a Laurel Crown_; +Cale Young Rice, _New Dreams for Old_; Fiona Macleod, _The Founts of +Song_.] + +Then, at the least expected moment, the fire may fall, so that the poet +is often filled with naïve wonder at his own ability. Thus Alice Meynell +greets one of her poems, + + Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine? + This winter of a silent poet's heart + Is suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art, + Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine. + +But if the poet cannot predict the time of his afflatus, he indicates +that he does know the attitude of mind which will induce it. In certain +quarters there is a truly Biblical reliance upon faith as bringer of the +gift. A minor writer assures us, "Ah, if we trust, comes the song!" +[Footnote: Richard Burton, _Singing Faith_.] Emerson says, + + The muses' hill by fear is guarded; + A bolder foot is still rewarded. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +And more extreme is the counsel of Owen Meredith to the aspiring artist: + + The genius on thy daily walks + Shall meet, and take thee by the hand; + But serve him not as who obeys; + He is thy slave if thou command. +[Footnote: _The Artist_.] + +The average artist is probably inclined to quarrel with this last +high-handed treatment of the muse. Reverent humility rather than +arrogance characterizes the most effectual appeals for inspiration. The +faith of the typical poet is not the result of boldness, but of an +aspiration so intense that it entails forgetfulness of self. Thus one +poet accounts for his inspired hour: + + Purged with high thoughts and infinite desire + I entered fearless the most holy place; + Received between my lips the sacred fire, + The breath of inspiration on my face. +[Footnote: C. G. Roberts, _Ave_.] + +Another writer stresses the efficacy of longing no less strongly; +speaking of + + The unsatiated, insatiable desire + Which at once mocks and makes all poesy. +[Footnote: William Alexander, _The Finding of the Book_. See also Edward +Dowden, _The Artist's Waiting_.] + +There is nothing new in this. It is only what the poet has implied in +all his confessions. Was he inspired by love? It was because thwarted +love filled him with intensest longing. So with his thirst for purity, +for religion, for worldly vanities. Any desire, be it fierce enough, and +hindered from immediate satisfaction, may engender poetry. As Joyce +Kilmer phrases it, + + Nothing keeps a poet + In his high singing mood, + Like unappeasable hunger + For unattainable food. +[Footnote: _Apology_.] + +But the poet would not have us imagine that we have here sounded the +depths of the mystery. Aspiration may call down inspiration, but it is +not synonymous with it. Mrs. Browning is fond of pointing out this +distinction. In _Aurora Leigh_ she reminds us, "Many a fervid man +writes books as cold and flat as gravestones." In the same poem she +indicates that desire is merely preliminary to inspiration. There are, +she says, + + Two states of the recipient artist-soul; + One forward, personal, wanting reverence, + Because aspiring only. We'll be calm, + And know that when indeed our Joves come down, + We all turn stiller than we have ever been. + +What is this mysterious increment, that must be added to aspiration +before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can +understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the +poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and +leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the contrary, seems +to give him a fictitious satisfaction; it is an arrest of his desire +that affords him a delicate poise and repose, on tiptoe, so to speak. +[Footnote: Compare Coleridge's statement that poetry is "a more than +usual state of emotion with more than usual order." _Biographia +Literaria_, Vol. II, Chap. I, p. 14, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge.] + +Does not the fact that inspiration works in this manner account for the +immemorial connection of poetic creativeness with Bacchic frenzy? To the +aspiring poet wine does not bring his mistress, nor virtue, nor +communion with God, nor any object of his longing. Yet it does bring a +sudden ease to his craving. So, wherever there is a romantic conception +of poetry, one is apt to find inspiration compared to intoxication. + +Such an idea did not, of course, find favor among typical eighteenth +century writers. Indeed, they would have seen more reason in ascribing +their clear-witted verse to an ice-pack, than to the bibulous hours +preceding its application to the fevered brow. We must wait for William +Blake before we can expect Bacchus to be reinstated among the gods of +song. Blake does not disappoint us, for we find his point of view +expressed, elegantly enough, in his comment on artists, "And when they +are drunk, they always paint best." [Footnote: _Artist Madmen: On the +Great Encouragement Given by the English Nobility and Gentry to +Correggio, etc_.] + +As the romantic movement progresses, one meets with more lyrical +expositions of the power in strong drink. Burns, especially, is never +tired of sounding its praise. He exclaims, + + There's naething like the honest nappy. + * * * * * + I've seen me daist upon a time + I scarce could wink or see a styme; + Just ae half mutchkin does me prime; + Aught less is little, + Then back I rattle with the rhyme + As gleg's a whittle. +[Footnote: _The First Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Again he assures us, + + But browster wives and whiskey stills, + They are my muses. +[Footnote: _The Third Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +Then, in more exalted mood: + + O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink! + Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink, + Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink + In glorious faem, + Inspire me, till I lisp and wink + To sing thy name. +[Footnote: _Scotch Drink_.] + +Keats enthusiastically concurs in Burns' statements. [Footnote: See the +_Sonnet on the Cottage Where Burns Was Born_, and _Lines on the Mermaid +Tavern_.] + +Landor, also, tells us meaningly, + + Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingales + Sing cheerily but when the throat is moist. +[Footnote: _Homer_; _Laertes_; _Agatha_.] + +James Russell Lowell, in _The Temptation of Hassan Khaled_, +presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy: + + The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom + The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume, + And when the sun is warm within his blood + It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood, + Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they find + Interpretation in the poet's mind. + If wine be evil, song is evil too. + +His _Bacchic Ode_ is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received +his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in +England. Swinburne, [Footnote: See _Burns_.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote: +See _Vinum Daemonum_.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: See _A Villanelle of +the Poet's Road_.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: See _A Sequence to +Wine_.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent. +Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: See _A Toast to Omar Khayyam_.] +was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme. + +Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats +[Footnote: See _Lines on the Mermaid Inn_.] to Josephine Preston +Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan +dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially +stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the +centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group +keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson: + + And Ben was there, + Humming a song upon the old black settle, + "Or leave a kiss within the cup + And I'll not ask for wine," + But meanwhile, he drank malmsey. + [Footnote: _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +Fortunately for the future of American verse, there is another side to +the picture. The teetotaler poet is by no means non-existent in the last +century. Wordsworth takes pains to refer to himself as "a simple, +water-drinking bard," [Footnote: See _The Waggoner_.] and in lines +_To the Sons of Burns_ he delivers a very fine prohibition lecture. +Tennyson offers us _Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue, a reductio ad +absurdum_ of the claims of the bibulous bard. Then, lest the +temperance cause lack the support of great names, Longfellow causes the +title character of _Michael Angelo_ to inform us that he "loves not +wine," while, more recently, E. A. Robinson pictures Shakespeare's +inability to effervesce with his comrades, because, Ben Jonson confides +to us, + + Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, + He's wondering what's to pay on his insides. +[Footnote: _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_. See also +Poe's letter, April 1, 1841, to Snodgrass, on the unfortunate results of +his intemperance.] + +No, the poet will not allow us to take his words too seriously, lest we +drag down Apollo to the level of Bacchus. In spite of the convincing +realism in certain eulogies, it is clear that to the poet, as to the +convert at the eucharist, wine is only a symbol of a purely spiritual +ecstasy. But if intoxication is only a figure of speech, it is a +significant one, and perhaps some of the other myths describing the +poet's sensations during inspiration may put us on the trail of its +meaning. Of course, in making such an assumption, we are precisely like +the expounder of Plato's myths, who is likely to say, "Here Plato was +attempting to shadow forth the inexpressible. Now listen, and I will +explain exactly what he meant." Notwithstanding, we must proceed. + +The device of Chaucer's _House of Fame_, wherein the poet is carried to +celestial realms by an eagle, occasionally occurs to the modern poet as +an account of his _Aufschwung_. Thus Keats, in _Lines to Apollo_, avers, + + Aye, when the soul is fled + Too high above our head, + Affrighted do we gaze + After its airy maze + As doth a mother wild + When her young infant child + Is in an eagle's claws. + +"Poetry, my life, my eagle!" [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] cries Mrs. +Browning, likening herself to Ganymede, ravished from his sheep to the +summit of Olympus. The same attitude is apparent in most of her poems, +for Mrs. Browning, in singing mood, is precisely like a child in a +swing, shouting with delight at every fresh sensation of soaring. +[Footnote: See J. G. Percival, _Genius Awaking_, for the same +figure.] + +Again, the crash of the poet's inspiration upon his ordinary modes of +thought is compared to "fearful claps of thunder," by Keats [Footnote: +See _Sleep and Poetry_.] and others. [Footnote: See _The Master_, A. E. +Cheney.] Or, more often, his moment of sudden insight seems a lightning +flash upon the dark ways in which he is ordinarily groping. Keats says +that his early visions were seen as through a rift of sheet lightning. +[Footnote: See _The Epistle to George Keats_.] Emerson's impression is +the same; visions come "as if life were a thunderstorm wherein you can +see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand." [Footnote: +_Essay on Inspiration_.] Likewise Alexander Smith declares, + + Across the midnight sea of mind + A thought comes streaming like a blazing ship + Upon a mighty wind, + A terror and a glory! Shocked with light, + His boundless being glares aghast. +[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] + +Perhaps this is a true expression of the poet's feelings during the +deepest inspiration, yet we are minded of Elijah's experience with the +wind and the fire and the still small voice. So we cannot help +sympathizing with Browning's protest against "friend Naddo's" view that +genius is a matter of bizarre and grandiose sensations. [Footnote: +_Sordello_.] At least it is pleasant to find verse, by minor +writers though it be, describing the quietude and naturalness of the +poet's best moments. Thus Holmes tells us of his inspiration: + + Soft as the moonbeams when they sought + Endymion's fragrant bower, + She parts the whispering leaves of thought + To show her full-leaved flower. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +Edwin Markham says, + + She comes like the hush and beauty of the night. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same: + + How to the singer comes his song? + How to the summer fields + Come flowers? How yields + Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night + Bring stars? +[Footnote: _How to the Singer Comes His Song?_] + +Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired +moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such +moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to +him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet, _Wise Passiveness_, says this +plainly: + + Think you I choose or that or this to sing? + I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream + Dreaming among green fields its summer dream, + Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring + Into its quiet bosom. + +To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, _Accident in Art_, +by Richard Hovey. He inquires, + + What poet has not found his spirit kneeling + A sudden at the sound of such or such + Strange verses staring from his manuscript, + Written, he knows not how, but which will sound + Like trumpets down the years. + +Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this +creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his +afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and +Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a +ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse +describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare +Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor in _Sordello_, +Book II.] In _The Song-Tree_ Alfred Noyes describes his first sensation +as a conscious poet: + + The first note that I heard, + A magical undertone, + Was sweeter than any bird + --Or so it seemed to me-- + And my tears ran wild. + This tale, this tale is true. + The light was growing gray, + And the rhymes ran so sweet + (For I was only a child) + That I knelt down to pray. + +But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense +were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess, + + She almost shrank + To feel the secret and expanding might + Of her own mind, +[Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.] + +the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. +Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple +Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of +her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, +when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent +reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is +"all me." + +However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good +his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged +divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack +of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal +to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his +verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of +his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, +some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent +scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on +Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And +in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of +thought: + + The everlasting universe of things + Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, + Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom-- + Now lending splendor, where from secret springs + The source of human thought its tribute brings + Of waters. + +Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says, + + The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible + influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory + brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a + flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the + conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its + approach or departure. + +Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his +mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us, + + A plastic power + Abode with me, a forming hand, at times + Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, + A local spirit of its own, at war + With general tendency, but for the most + Subservient strictly to external things + With which it communed. An auxiliary light + Came from my mind which on the setting sun + Bestowed new splendor-- +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] + +Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness +is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon +her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken, + + As the earth + Plunges in fury, when the internal fires + Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat + The marts and temples, the triumphal gates + And towers of observation, clears herself + To elemental freedom. + +We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who +relates how the vision of _Sordello_ arises to consciousness: + + Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, + Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears + Its outline, kindles at the core--. + +Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have +really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it +is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a +mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the +poet. + +"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The +Poet's Sleep_.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. +There was surely no reason why Keats' title, _Sleep and Poetry_, +should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of +Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. +The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in +the middle ages,--and even the prominence of _Night Thoughts_ in +eighteenth century verse--testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep +has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his +account of the composition of _Kubla Khan_.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: +See _Alastor_, and _Prince Athanase_. See also Edmund Gosse, +_Swinburne_, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three +stanzas of _A Vision of Spring_ in his sleep.]--it is the romanticists +who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And +once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, +asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. +Thus he tells us of the singer in _Prince Athanase:_ + + And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour + Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes, + Were driven within him by some secret power + Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar, + Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower. + +Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, +even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, +Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as +something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of +modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of +myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to +account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to +be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually +swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in +any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things +to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world. + + Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold, +[Footnote: _A Life Drama._] + +says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the +line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the +poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair. + +Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure +than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain +artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory +of one's past youth, or--to stay closer home--Wordsworth, with his +theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,--such artists +have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably +representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory +to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers +are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation, + + Live in the past; await no more + The rush of heaven-sent wings; + Earth still has music left in store + While memory sighs and sings. +[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.] + +But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, +like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to +admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her +title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we +have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their +existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, +reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the +body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a +vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries ... beholding +apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; +shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the +living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the +body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.] + +For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to +himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is +always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in +recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which +He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.] + +If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he +is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the +visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of +memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious +of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the +soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince +Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.] +Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on +Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in +verse of other poets. One writer inquires, + + Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes, + Indeed the product of my heart and brain? +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.] + +and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of +insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. +Another maintains of poetry, + + Her touch is a vibration and a light + From worlds before and after. +[Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal +inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by +Dorothea Laurence Mann.] + +Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural +and unforced of these verses. She muses: + + ... Mixed with memories not my own + The sweet streams throng into my breast. + Before this life began to be + The happy songs that wake in me + Woke long ago, and far apart. + Heavily on this little heart + Presses this immortality. + +This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic +theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather +than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. +She continues, + + I come from nothing, but from where + Come the undying thoughts I bear? + Down through long links of death and birth, + From the past poets of the earth, + My immortality is there. + +Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical +argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last +statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing +itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding +expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this +attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he +attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells +his brother poets: + + I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried + To work his will, the hand that moved my pen + Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask + Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps + With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, + Oracular glories, visionary gleams, + And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] + +The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's +appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead +wife shall inspire his poetry. + +One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have +nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as +this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their +special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works +which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what +is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in +some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to +Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good +genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often +called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests +such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to +be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into +his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes: + + I do but rave, for it is better thus; + Were once thy starry nature given to mine, + In the one life which would encircle us + My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine; + Better to bear the far sublimer pain + Of thought that has not ripened into speech. + To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing + Divinely to the brain; + For thus the poet at the last shall reach + His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string. +[Footnote: _Ode to Shelly._] + +In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there +is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It +tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright +plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret +Steele Anderson, _Other People's Wreaths,_ and John Drinkwater, +_My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power +outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly +his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the +suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She +wistfully inquires: + + My own best poets, am I one with you? + . . . When my joy and pain, + My thought and aspiration, like the stops + Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb + Unless melodious, do you play on me, + My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play, + Would no sound come? Or is the music mine; + As a man's voice or breath is called his own, + Inbreathed by the life-breather? + +Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his +own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as +compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naïve dependence +upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as +a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses +her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the +Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, +to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of +the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not +be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante +impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call +upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is +conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth +century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any +Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of +invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory +flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the +century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept +up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of +the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the +Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See _On +Lucinda's Tea-table_.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It +is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses _On the Death of His +Mother_, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that +his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement +progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth +century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the +goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen +from the sty." [Footnote: See _On a Report of a Monument to a Late +Author_.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled +hizzie," [Footnote: See the _Epistle to Lapraik_.] and sets the +fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that +each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom +he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer +nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than +apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he +confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift: + + 'Twas not much at any time + She could hitch into a rhyme, + Never was the muse sublime + Who has fled. +[Footnote: _A Poet's Apology_.] + +Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day +feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's +earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as +always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as +little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse +that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who +inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she +is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One +doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with +Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner +nature through our own." [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry_.] + +What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. +There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of +genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is +a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that +the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the +power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up +with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, +namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the +poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of +God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the +world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, +in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last +century, his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. All poets are +idealists. + +There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may +seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It +is expressed in the opening of Shelley's _Alastor_, and informs the +whole of the _Ode to the West Wind_. It pervades Wordsworth, for if +he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet +profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of +nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers +that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. +There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern +poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, +going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth +century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song +into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than +most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the +intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern +conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing +himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise +chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute +poetry. + +Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or +to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming +"into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his +communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that +it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the +revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe +the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel +that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be +deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the +singer, + + One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; + The next he writes his soul's memorial. +[Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.] + +So Shelley describes the experience: + + Meaning on his vacant mind + Flashed like strong inspiration. +[Footnote: _Alastor_.] + +The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He +becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the +flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, +enabling them, like Lucy, to be + + Rolled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees. + +Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer +cannot escape Plato's conclusion, + + There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been + inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer + in him: when he has not attained to this state he is + powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: + _Ion_, §534.] + +And again, + + There is a ... kind of madness which is a possession of the + Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and + there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other + numbers.... But he who, not being inspired, and having no + touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks + he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, + and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at + all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote: + _Phaedrus_, § 245.] + +Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as +to say, + + Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of + madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any + character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. + [Footnote: _Poetics_, XVII.] + +One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier +ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no +longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation +of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally +he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a +hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot +was + + Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting + Of all too greatly giving + The kingdom of his mind to those + Who for it deemed him mad. +[Footnote: Cale Young Rice, _Meredith_.] + +In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to +which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of +madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See _Gladys +and Her Island_.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See _Tasso to +Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's +Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward +Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur +in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply +because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the +cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he +prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than +the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the +writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, +are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he +leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered +in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal +realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is +not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The +tone of his poem, _Tasso and Leonora_, is very gloomy. The Italian +poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms +where eternal beauty dwells. He muses, + + Yes--as Love is truer far + Than all other things; so are + Life and Death, the World and Time + Mere false shows in some great Mime + By dreadful mystery sublime. + +But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders, + + For were life no flitting dream, + Were things truly what they seem, + Were not all this world-scene vast + But a shade in Time's stream glassed; + Were the moods we now display + Less phantasmal than the clay + In which our poor spirits clad + Act this vision, wild and sad, + I must be mad, mad,--how mad! + +However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly +convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the +manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not +merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come +upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not +understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal +inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been +applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: See _Kathrina_, by J. +G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern +poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares, + + As for the old seers + Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life + Of the unfolding ages, I must doubt + Whether they comprehended what they saw.] + +Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare +commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way +granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting +Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the +poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are +typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she +makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects, + + And ah, we poets, I misdoubt + Are little more than thou. + We speak a lesson taught, we know not how, + And what it is that from us flows + The hearer better than the utterer knows. +[Footnote: _Sister Songs._] + +One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this +inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as +a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much +attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the +romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John +Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the +mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: See _Song for Tasso_, +Shelley; _Tasso to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_, +E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles, _The Harp and Despair +of Cowper_; Mrs. Browning, _Cowper's Grave_; Lord Houghton, _On Cowper's +Cottage at Olney_.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last +century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during +periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is +not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing +the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional +poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed +madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_; +Shelley, _Rosalind and Helen_.] while the American, J. G. Holland, +represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a +hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland, +_Kathrina_. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benét, +_Mad Blake_; Amy Lowell, _Clear, With Light Variable Winds_; Cale Young +Rice, _The Mad Philosopher_; Edmund Blunden, _Clare's Ghost_.] + +It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly +incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced +by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad +poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries, + + All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought + Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat. +[Footnote: See fragment CI.] + +What chance did he have of recognition? + +This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired +poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic +madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines, + + Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense) + And once betrayed me into common sense. +[Footnote: _Dunciad_.] + +And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon +dry reason alone: + + A set o' dull, conceited hashes + Confuse their brains in college classes! + They gang in sticks and come out asses, + Plain truth to speak, + And syne they think to climb Parnassus + By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.] + +The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century +classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the _Prelude_.] +and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: +See _The Scholar_.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See _The Master of the +Dance_. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the +persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants +varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful +or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies +the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns +the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the +poet's mind. [Footnote: See _The Poet's Mind_.] So Richard Gilder +maintains of the singer, + + He was too wise + Either to fear, or follow, or despise + Whom men call science--for he knew full well + All she had told, or still might live to tell + Was known to him before her very birth. +[Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J. +E. Flecker.] + +The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that +his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the +scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes +Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus: + + Yours is the living pall, + The aloof and frozen place of listeners + And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine + The fount of life itself, the burning fount + Pierian. I pity you. +[Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.] + +Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the +average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are +infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of +reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many +cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young: + + How proud the poet's billow swells! + The God! the God! his boast: + A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! + Dead bards stench every coast. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of +inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning +is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She +muses over the title of poet: + + The name + Is royal, and to sign it like a queen + Is what I dare not--though some royal blood + Would seem to tingle in me now and then + With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes + And manias usual to the race. Howbeit + I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad + And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; + The thing's too common. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, + For me, I wrote + False poems, like the rest, and thought them true + Because myself was true in writing them.] + +Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? +Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of +posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. +Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether +they be of God. What is his proof? + +Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers, + + I hung my verses in the wind. + Time and tide their faults may find. + All were winnowed through and through: + Five lines lasted sound and true; + Five were smelted in a pot + Than the south more fierce and hot. +[Footnote: _The Test_.] + +The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's +passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by +time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once +troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a +certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he +inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which +Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it +does." [Footnote: _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, "A Memorable +Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is +doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious +enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence. + +The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of +the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse +by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender +to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with +the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season +of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, +and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, +though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay on +_Imagination_.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief +in his visions by Tertullian's motto, _Credo quod absurdum_. + +If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence +arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning +matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred +pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer +seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he +ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his +moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete. + +The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the +poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain +men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of +Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of _Kubla Khan_, +are notorious. Tennyson, in _The Poet's Mind_, warns all intruders +away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them, + + In your eye there is death; + There is frost in your breath + Which would blight the plants. + * * * * * + In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; + It would fall to the ground if you came in. + +But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to +an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so +delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says, + + There are open hours + When the God's will sallies free, + And the dull idiot might see + The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;-- + Sudden, at unawares, + Self-moved, fly to the doors, + Nor sword of angels could reveal + What they conceal. +[Footnote: _Merlin_.] + +What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a +frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded +from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was +finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he +declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But +the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of +casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is +never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is +already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been +communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original +conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem +is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly +sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as +Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to +be dead. + +There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is +most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' +composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem +Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, +_How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the +Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert +Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the +other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter: + + Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke. + Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed, + Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke + Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed + Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul! + Indeed? + Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare: + Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage + Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: + Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age + Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. +[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in +the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James +Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.] + +Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be +as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden +gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a +poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and +phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.] + +It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we +misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets +bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not +because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but +because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words +was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says +William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable +and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the +poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage." + +Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression +of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he +works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to +Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any +other artist possesses, [Footnote: See _The Republic_, IX, 588 D.] +yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis +Thompson, + + Our untempered speech descends--poor heirs! + Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers; + Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, + Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit! +[Footnote: _Her Portrait_.] + +Walt Whitman voices the same complaint: + + Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself; + It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically, + "Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?" +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] + +Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the +singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, +"For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my +Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily +and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and +the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, +_Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; +Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The +Sculptor_; William Rose Benét, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman +Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and +Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, +_Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing +the Song of Her_.] + +Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are +coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which +refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly +unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep +for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is +likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his +hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an +impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is +significant that the singers who are most aware of their +inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no +thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are +obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, +herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the +problem for us. She avers, + + I found the phrase to every thought + I ever had, but one; + And that defies me,--as a hand + Did try to chalk the sun. + + To races nurtured in the dark;-- + How would your own begin? + Can blaze be done in cochineal, + Or noon in mazarin? + +"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the +poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of +his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their +darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of +Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the +apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.] + +Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most +often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the +question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a +divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth +century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of +adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too +frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He +may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not +attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his +thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his +public. + +Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less +aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, +throughout, the tenor of the first stanza: + + My counsel to the budding bard + Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard." + Your "gentle public," my good friend, + Won't read what they can't comprehend. + +This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and +one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's +audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. +Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is +enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to +face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall +the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own +delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse? + +There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the +intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been +reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments +that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to +make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his +materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for +his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And +he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries, + + O for ten years, that I may overwhelm + Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed + My soul has to herself decreed. +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother +George, April, 1817.] + +Bryant warns the poet, + + Deem not the framing of a deathless lay + The pastime of a drowsy summer day; + But gather all thy powers + And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of +avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet, + + Touch the crude line with fear + But in the moments of impassioned thought. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so +deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of +it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the +poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to +beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of +artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to +wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his +hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered +robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form +which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, +not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it. +Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson +delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger +of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than +these others, no doubt, even though he did not illustrate the efficacy +of his search, when he described his interest in reading old manuscripts +with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and +anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing +one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these. +The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped +off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with +more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the +beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the +conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an +accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they +are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn +his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the +cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades +and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is +proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of +most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning +advises them, + + Keep up the fire + And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or +whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation +of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he +realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than +this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of +revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers +of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does +not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over +the poet, + + When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, + Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead, + And though he cherisheth + The babe most strangely born from out her death, + Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, + It is not she. + [Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] + +We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the +blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of +contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his +arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes +into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks +the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's +attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. Alice Gary +pleads, + + Hear me tell + How much my will transcends my feeble powers, + As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowers + Their tender hues. +[Footnote: _To the Spirit of Song_.] + +And there is not a poet in the last century of such prominence that he +does not reverence such a confession, [Footnote: Some poems showing the +similarity in such an attitude of great and small alike, follow: +_Epistle to Charles C. Clarke_, Keats; _The Soul's Expression_, Mrs. +Browning; _Memorial Verses to Wm. B. Scott_, Swinburne; _Sister Songs_, +_Proemion to Love in Dian's Lap_, _A Judgment in Heaven_, Francis +Thompson; _Urania_, Matthew Arnold; _There Have Been Vast Displays of +Critic Wit_, Alexander Smith; _Invita Minerva_ and _L'Envoi to the +Muse_, J. R. Lowell; _The Voiceless_, O. W. Holmes; _Fata Morgana_, and +_Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought_, Longfellow; _L'Envoi_, +Kipling; _The Apology_, and _Gleam on Me, Fair Ideal_, Lewis Morris; +_Dedication to Austin Dobson_, E. Gosse; _A Country Nosegay_, and +_Gleaners of Fame_, Alfred Austin; _Another Tattered Rhymster in the +Ring_, G. K. Chesterton; _To Any Poet_, Alice Meynell; _The Singer_, and +_To a Lady on Chiding Me For Not Writing_, Richard Realf; _The Will and +the Wing_ and _Though Dowered with Instincts Keen and High_, P. H. +Haynes; _Dull Words_, Trumbull Stickney; _The Inner Passion_, Alfred +Noyes; _The Veiled Muse_, William Winter; _Sonnet_, William Bennett; +_Tell Me_, Max Ehrmann; _The Singer's Plea_, Edward Dowden; _Genius_, R. +H. Home; _My Country_, George Woodberry; _Uncalled_, Madison Cawein; +Thomas Bailey Aldrich, _At the Funeral of a Minor Poet_; Robert Haven +Schauffler, _Overtones, The Silent Singers_; Stephen Vincent Benét, _A +Minor Poet_; Alec de Candole, _The Poets_.] and aver that he too is an +earnest and humble suppliant in the temple of beauty. For the clearer +his glimpse of the transcendent vision has been, the more conscious he +is of his blindness after the glory has passed, and the more +unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE POET'S MORALITY + + +If English poets of the last century are more inclined to parade their +moral virtue than are poets of other countries, this may be the result +of a singular persistency on the part of England in searching out and +punishing sins ascribed to poetic temperament. Byron was banished; +Shelley was judged unfit to rear his own children; Keats was advertised +as an example of "extreme moral depravity"; [Footnote: By _Blackwoods_.] +Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; Swinburne was castigated as "an unclean +fiery imp from the pit." [Footnote: By _The Saturday Review_.] These are +some of the most conspicuous examples of a refusal by the British public +to countenance what it considers a code of morals peculiar to poets. It +is hardly to be wondered at that verse-writers of the nineteenth and +twentieth centuries have not been inclined to quarrel with Sir Philip +Sidney's statement that "England is the stepmother of poets," [Footnote: +_Apology for Poetry_.] and that through their writings should run a vein +of aggrieved protest against an unfair discrimination in dragging their +failings ruthlessly out to the light. + +It cannot, however, be maintained that England is unique in her +prejudice against poetic morals. The charges against the artist have +been long in existence, and have been formulated and reformulated in +many countries. In fact Greece, rather than England, might with some +justice be regarded as the parent of the poet's maligners, for Plato has +been largely responsible for the hue and cry against the poet throughout +the last two millennia. Various as are the counts against the poet's +conduct, they may all be included under the declaration in the +_Republic_, "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of +withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." +[Footnote: Book X, 606, Jowett translation.] + +Though the accusers of the poet are agreed that the predominance of +passion in his nature is the cause of his depravity, still they are a +heterogeneous company, suffering the most violent disagreement among +themselves as to a valid reason for pronouncing his passionate impulses +criminal. Their unfortunate victim is beset from so many directions that +he is sorely put to it to defend himself against one band of assailants +without exposing himself to attack from another quarter. + +This hostile public may be roughly divided into three camps, made up, +respectively, of philistines, philosophers, and puritans. Within recent +years the distinct grievance of each group has been made articulate in a +formal denunciation of the artist's morals. + +There is, first, that notorious indictment, _Degeneration_, by Max +Nordau. Nordau speaks eloquently for all who claim the name "average +plain citizen," all who would hustle off to the gallows anyone found +guilty of breaking the lockstep imposed upon men by convention. +Secondly, there is a severe criticism of the poet from an ostensibly +unbiased point of view, _The Man of Genius_, by Césare Lombroso. +Herein are presented the arguments of the thinkers, who probe the poet's +foibles with an impersonal and scientific curiosity. Last, there is the +severe arraignment, _What Is Art?_ by Tolstoi. In this book are +crystallized the convictions of the ascetics, who recognize in beauty a +false goddess, luring men from the stern pursuit of holiness. + +How does it come about that, in affirming the perniciousness of the +poet's passionate temperament, the man of the street, the philosopher, +and the puritan are for the nonce in agreement? The man of the street is +not averse to feeling, as a rule, even when it is carried to egregious +lengths of sentimentality. A stroll through a village when all the +victrolas are in operation would settle this point unequivocally for any +doubter. It seems that the philistine's quarrel with the poet arises +from the fact that, unlike the makers of phonograph records, the poet +dares to follow feeling in defiance of public sentiment. Like the +conservative that he is, the philistine gloats over the poet's lapses +from virtue because, in setting aside mass-feeling as a gauge of right +and wrong, and in setting up, instead, his own individual feelings as a +rule of conduct, the poet displays an arrogance that deserves a fall. +The philosopher, like the philistine, may tolerate feeling within +limits. His sole objection to the poet lies in the fact that, far from +making emotion the handmaiden of the reason, as the philosopher would +do, the poet exalts emotion to a seat above the reason, thus making +feeling the supreme arbiter of conduct. The puritan, of course, gives +vent to the most bitter hostility of all, for, unlike the philistine and +the philosopher, he regards natural feeling as wholly corrupt. Therefore +he condemns the poet's indulgence of his passionate nature with equal +severity whether he is within or without the popular confines of proper +conduct, or whether or not his conduct may be proved reasonable. + +Much of the inconsistency in the poet's exhibitions of his moral +character may be traced to the fact that he is addressing now one, now +another, of his accusers. The sobriety of his arguments with the +philosopher has sometimes been interpreted by the man of the street as +cowardly side-stepping. On the other hand, the poet's bravado in defying +the man of the street might be interpreted by the philosopher as an +acknowledgment of imperviousness to reason. + +It seems as though the first impulse of the poet were to set his back +against the wall and deal with all his antagonists at once, by +challenging their right to pry into his private conduct. It is true that +certain poets of the last century have believed it beneath their dignity +to pay any attention to the insults and persecution of the public. But +though a number have maintained an air of stolid indifference so long as +the attacks have remained personal, few or none have been content to +disregard defamation of a departed singer. + +The public cannot maintain, in many instances, that this vicarious +indignation arises from a sense of sharing the frailties of the dead +poet who is the direct object of attack. Not thus may one account for +the generous heat of Whittier, of Richard Watson Gilder, of Robert +Browning, of Tennyson, in rebuking the public which itches to make a +posthumous investigation of a singer's character. [Footnote: See +Whittier, _My Namesake_; Richard W. Gilder, _A Poet's Protest_, and +_Desecration_; Robert Browning, _House_; Tennyson, _In Memoriam_.] +Tennyson affords a most interesting example of sensitiveness with +nothing, apparently, to conceal. There are many anecdotes of his morbid +shrinking from public curiosity, wholly in key with his cry of +abhorrence, + + Now the poet cannot die + Nor leave his music as of old, + But round him ere he scarce be cold + Begins the scandal and the cry: + Proclaim the faults he would not show, + Break lock and seal; betray the trust; + Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but just + The many-headed beast should know. + +In protesting against the right of the public to judge their conduct, +true poets refuse to bring themselves to a level with their accusers by +making the easiest retort, that they are made of exactly the same clay +as is the _hoi polloi_ that assails them. This sort of recrimination is +characteristic of a certain blustering type of claimant for the title of +poet, such as Joaquin Miller, a rather disorderly American of the last +generation, who dismissed attacks upon the singer with the words, + + Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealed + That he was more than man or less? +[Footnote: _Burns_ and _Byron_.] + +The attitude is also characteristic of another anomalous type which +flourished in America fifty years ago, whose verse represents an +attempted fusion of emasculated poetry and philistine piety. A writer of +this type moralizes impartially over the erring bard and his accusers, + + Sin met thy brother everywhere, + And is thy brother blamed? + From passion, danger, doubt and care + He no exemption claimed. +[Footnote: Ebenezer Eliot, _Burns_.] + +But genuine poets refuse to compromise themselves by admitting that they +are no better than other men. + +They are not averse, however, to pointing out the unfitness of the +public to cast the first stone. So unimpeachable a citizen as Longfellow +finds even in the notoriously spotted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, an +advantage over his maligners because + + He is not + That despicable thing, a hypocrite. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Most of the faults charged to them, poets aver, exist solely in the evil +minds of their critics. Coleridge goes so far as to expurgate the poetry +of William Blake, "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from +the too probable want of it in the readers." [Footnote: Letter to Charles +Augustus Tulk, Highgate, Thursday Evening, 1818, p. 684, Vol. II, +_Letters_, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge.] + +The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the +more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak +of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for +autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in +which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says +of Burns, "We can see horribly clear in the work of such a man his whole +life, as if we were God's spies." [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, +p. 285.] The Rousseau-like nudity of the poet's soul is sometimes put +forward as a plea that the public should close its eyes to possible +shortcomings. Yet, as a matter of fact, it is precisely in the lack of +privacy characterizing the poet's life that his enemies find their +justification for concerning themselves with his morality. Since by +flaunting his personality in his verse he propagates his faults among +his admirers, the public is surely justified in pointing out and +denouncing his failings. + +Poets cannot logically deny this. To do so, they would have to confess +that their inspirations are wholly unaffected by their personalities. +But this is, naturally, a very unpopular line of defense. That unhappy +worshiper of puritan morals and of the muses, J. G. Holland, does make +such a contention, averring, + + God finds his mighty way + Into his verse. The dimmest window panes + Let in the morning light, and in that light + Our faces shine with kindled sense of God + And his unwearied goodness, but the glass + Gets little good of it; nay, it retains + Its chill and grime beyond the power of light + To warm or whiten ... + ... The psalmist's soul + Was not a fitting place for psalms like his + To dwell in overlong, while wanting words. +[Footnote: _Kathrina._] + +But the egotism of the average poet precludes this explanation. No more +deadly insult could be offered him than forgiveness of his sins on the +ground of their unimportance. Far from holding that his personality does +not affect his verse, he would have us believe that the sole worth of +his poetry lies in its reflection of his unique qualities of soul. +Elizabeth Barrett, not Holland, exhibits the typical poetic attitude +when she asks Robert Browning, "Is it true, as others say, that the +productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature,--that in the +minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is _not_ true, +to my mind." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 3, 1845.] + +The glass houses in which the poet's accusers may reside really have +nothing to do with the question. The immorality of these men is of +comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's +personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his +works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn +have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne +muses happily over the sins of Villon, + + But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire, +[Footnote: _A Ballad of François Villon._] +it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a +claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without +recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral +history from his writings. + +Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the +ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them +that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead +him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and +philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of +virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by +making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous +charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition. + +There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the +obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness +of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their +voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which +finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly +ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege. + +So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its +members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to +present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are +heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose +only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days +when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting +their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is +untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to +dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say +when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing +at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to +choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and +the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. +Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period +wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted +morality, towers above most of his contemporaries? + +Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an +addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine +element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes +too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling +conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under +the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the +sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among +men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law. + +Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking +back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to + + Come down and redeem us from virtue, + +upon his youthful zest in leaving + + The lilies and languors of virtue + For the roses and raptures of vice, + +he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic +ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous +life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, +there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish +and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse, +_Life of Swinburne,_ p. 309.] + +So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, +however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the +contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression +must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most +conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the +time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration +of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes +did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore: + + If on his cheek unholy blood + Burned for one youthful hour, + 'Twas but the flushing of the bud + That bloomed a milk-white flower. +[Footnote: _After a Lecture on Moore_.] + +One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures +must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's +moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is +unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, +"I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to +the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have +recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent +to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to +feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of +Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his +obligatory feelings did not flower in a _Christabel_ or a _Kubla Khan_. + +The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of +poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from +conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what +even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if +unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness +added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of +virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its +æsthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains +unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been +on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose +aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic +expression. + +The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect +life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it. +He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to +tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to +indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until +he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, +Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, +A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No Lust Like to +Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth +century. A characteristic renaissance attitude toward life and art was +caught by Browning in a passage of _Sordello_. The hero, in a momentary +reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from +vice and exclaims, + + Leave untried + Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze + Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees + Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust, + All tyrannies in every shape be thrust + Upon this now. + +Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a +passing impulse in Sordello's life. + +The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in +the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If +the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a +very short-lived one. The blasé note is so dominant in Byron's +autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don +Juan_--as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably +in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's +_Villanelle of the Poet's Road_ is a typical expression of the +mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines, + + Wine and women and song, + Three things garnish our way: + Yet is day overlong. + Three things render us strong, + Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. + Yet is day overlong. +Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, +rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices +is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an +inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover +it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic +feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. +This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian +period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to +it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the +most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the +_Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and +Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these +youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so +innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance +for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of +Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but +inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss +Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that +everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly +by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; +May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and +Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which +would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor, +cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into +their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." +[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.] + +Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as +yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him +into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a +yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take +an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the +_Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, +as in the lines, + + There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me, + I like the lassies--Gude forgie me. + +But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his +artist's temperament. The muse tells him, + + I saw thy pulses' maddening play, + Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way, + And yet the light that led astray + Was light from Heaven. + +And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided +poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time. + +Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height +about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor +over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_; +Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of François Villon_.] At the same time +Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, +_Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis +Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared +to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this +time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving +cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded + + What expiating agony + May for him damned to poesy + Shut in that little sentence be,-- + What deep austerities of strife,-- + He lived his life. He lived his life. +[Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.] + +Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case +more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, +puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as +the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their +charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to +temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper +course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but +to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a +disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. +[Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease +is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the +overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his +nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand +temptation. + +Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders +to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in +sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that +this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major +conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting +every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a +sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds +only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the +perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each +expression of his theories. + +In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, +[Footnote: See _Edmund Shore_, _Villars_.] Praed [Footnote: See _The +Talented Man_, _To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry_.] and Landor. [Footnote: +See _Few Poets Beckon_, _Apology for Gebir_.] Later, when the wave of +Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the +cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, +in _Michael Angelo_.] Protest against the group of decadents who +flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, +though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as +seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to +dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the +laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet +reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus: + + There will be fools that in the name of art + Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, + I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard + From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves + Far, far above them. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. See also +Richard Le Gallienne, _The Decadent to his Soul_, _Proem to the +Reader in English Poems_; Joyce Kilmer, _A Ballad of New Sins_.] + +Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral +natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. +In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is +ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of +wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if +a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all +scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth +century this mode of passing judgment was most naïvely manifest in +verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal +lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, +without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In +the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to +prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same +simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral +reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, +Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective +attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.] + +It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that +considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The +highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though +poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his +critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his +protégé, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, +Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been +represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of +their poetical wares. + +Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead +one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain +quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate +connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously +moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that +the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing +the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in _In Memoriam_: + + Loveliness of perfect deeds, + More strong than all poetic thought, + +and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the +tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's _Letters of Life and Morning_, in +which she exhorts the young poet, + + Learn to sing, + But first in all thy learning, learn to be. + +The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the +conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, +not poetry, holds his first allegiance. + + He held his manly name + Far dearer than the muse, +[Footnote: J. G. Saxe, _A Poet's Elegy_.] + +we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan +carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' +talent and their respectability, averring, + + They are like angels, but some angels fell. +[Footnote: _Poets_.] + +Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be +mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes, + + Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these + The poet seems beside the man; + His life is now his noblest strain. +[Footnote: _To Bryant on His Birthday_.] + +When the poet of more firmly grounded conviction attempts to show reason +for his confidence in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument +for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by +Carlyle in his essay, _The Hero as Poet_. This is the theory that, far +from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, +the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as +preëminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry +is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from +certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have +been unlimited. Longfellow has seized upon this conception of the poet +in his drama, _Michael Angelo_, as has G. L. Raymond in his drama, +_Dante_. In the latter poem the argument for the poet's moral supremacy +is baldly set forth. + +Artistic sensibility, Dante says, far from excusing moral laxity, binds +one to stricter standards of right living. So when Cavalcanti argues in +favor of free love, + + Your humming birds may sip the sweet they need + From every flower, and why not humming poets? + +Raymond makes Dante reply, + + The poets are not lesser men, but greater, + And so should find unworthy of themselves + A word, a deed, that makes them seem less worthy. + +Owing to the growth of specialization in modern life, this argument, +despite Carlyle, has not attained much popularity. Even in idealized +fictions of the poet, it is not often maintained that he is equally +proficient in every line of activity. Only one actual poet within our +period, William Morris, can be taken as representative of such a type, +and he does not afford a strong argument for the poet's distinctive +virtue, inasmuch as tradition does not represent him as numbering +remarkable saintliness among his numerous gifts. + +There is a decided inconsistency, moreover, in claiming unusual strength +of will as one of the poet's attributes. The muscular morality resulting +from training one's will develops in proportion to one's ability to +overthrow one's own unruly impulses. It is almost universally maintained +by poets, on the contrary, that their gift depends upon their yielding +themselves utterly to every fugitive impulse and emotion. Little modern +verse vaunts the poet's stern self-control. George Meredith may cry, + + I take the hap + Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails + Propels, but I am helmsman. +[Footnote: _Modern Love_.] + +Henley may thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, +however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry +than is this one. + +Hardly more popular than the superman theory is another argument for the +poet's virtue that appears sporadically in verse. It has occurred to a +few poets that their virtue is accounted for by the high subject-matter +of their work, which exercises an unconscious influence upon their +lives. Thus in the eighteenth century Young finds it natural that in +Addison, the author of _Cato_, + + Virtues by departed heroes taught + Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame, + Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame. +[Footnote: _Lines to Mr. Addison_.] + +Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same +view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live + + With pureness in youth and religion in age. +[Footnote: _What Is a Poet_.] + +since he conceives as the function of poetry + + To raise and purify the grovelling soul, + * * * * * + And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill. +[Footnote: _Poetry_.] + +This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a +Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of +the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming +his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more +efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps. + +These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real +ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his +subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,--the +fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful. + +There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility +with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves +his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: See the +_Republic_, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher +are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is +riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the +confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that +the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are +unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its +most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an +irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher. + +Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged +throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain +of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the +erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one +phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England, +where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again +in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading +across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The +only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the +Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to +English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his +Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian æsthetics, +he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his +creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to +make of his own life a true poem. + +"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the +beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the +shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain +assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] +The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of +beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and +repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering +sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry, + + Tis not in + The harmony of things--this hard decree, + This ineradicable taint of sin, + This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree + Whose root is earth. +[Footnote: _Childe Harold_.] + +If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it +is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been +undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems +wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and +the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, _Ode on the Poetical Character_; +John Hughes, _Ode on Divine Poetry_.] Among the romantic poets, the +Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he +says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the +opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad +feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this +particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's +allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in +the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the +poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. +One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor +poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet, + + O singing heart, think not of aught save song, + Beauty can do no wrong. +[Footnote: _Song_.] + +Again one hears of the singer, + + Pure must he be; + Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear + Where others hear not; see where others see + With a dazed vision, +[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_.] + +and again, + + To write a poem, a man should be as pure + As frost-flowers. +[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_.] + +Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who + + Lived beyond men, and so stood + Admitted to the brotherhood + Of beauty. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _The Dreamer of Dreams_.] + +It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all +of them look to a single standard to govern them æsthetically and +morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises, + +Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread +save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of +sin. [Footnote: _The Silent Voices_.] + +Such is the poet's case for himself. But no matter how eloquently he +presents his case, his quarrel with his three enemies remains almost as +bitter as before, and he is obliged to pay some attention to their +individual charges. + +The poet's quarrel with the philistine, in particular, is far from +settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the +good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What +is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the +plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any +charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which +reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? +Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary +folk are. If the poet professes to be able to achieve righteousness +without effort, the only way to prove it is to conform his conduct to +that of men who achieve righteousness with groaning of spirit. It is too +easy for the poet to justify any and every aberration with the +announcement, "My sixth sense for virtue, which you do not possess, has +revealed to me the propriety of such conduct." Thus reasons the +philistine. + +The beauty-blind philistine doubtless has some cause for bewilderment, +but the poet takes no pains to placate him. The more genuine is one's +impulse toward goodness, the more inevitably, the poet says, will it +bring one into conflict with an artificial code of morals. Shelley +indicated this at length in _The Defense of Poetry_, and in both +_Rosalind and Helen_ and _The Revolt of Islam_ he showed his bards +offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of +the poet-hero in _Prince Athanase_ Shelley tells us, + + Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise. + What he dared do or think, though men might start + He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes. + +It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative +verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a +typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora +Leigh_, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid, +and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and +chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage +with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical +resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too +respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath +with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry +Patmore. In Patmore's poem, _Olympus_, the bard decides to spend an +evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the +coarse jests, and flees home to + + The milk-soup men call domestic bliss. + +Likewise, in _The Angel in the House_, the poet follows a most +domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he +fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself. This sin +consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after +shamefacedly confessing it, he adds, + + And ere I slept, on bended knee + I owned myself, with many a tear + Unseasonable, disorderly. + +But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience +to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other +extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands +of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from +conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being + + Tall galleons, + Out of their very beauty driven to dare + The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night. +[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_, Alfred Noyes.] + +He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such +courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine +Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public, + + My sins they learn by rote, + And never miss one; no, no miser of them, + * * * * * + Avid of foulness, so they hound me out + Away from blessing that they prate about, + But never saw, and never dreamed upon, + And know not how to long for with desire. +[Footnote: _Marlowe_.] + +In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in lines _On the Morals of +Poets_, warns their detractor, + + Bigot, one folly of the man you flout + Is more to God than thy lean life is whole. + +If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out +that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He +acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps, +but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a +childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the +world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The +innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and +purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical +pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's _The Minstrel_, +suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the +world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The +innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by +like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating +him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the +shock of awakening to conditions as they are. But environment alone does +not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of +whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize +evil motives when they are face to face with them. + +Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic +nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. +Browning, [Footnote: See _A Vision of Poets_.] Swinburne [Footnote: +See _A New Year's Ode_.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See _Sister +Songs_.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it +has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an +ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so +noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the +poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in +literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley, + + The curse of Cain + Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast + And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest. + +Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the +poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes of _Rosalind and Helen, +The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion_ and _Prince Athanase_, +share the disposition of the last-named one: + + Naught of ill his heart could understand, + But pity and wild sorrow for the same. + +It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of +Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic +readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is +reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many +respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's +character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting +glimpses of Shelley in _Sordello_, and to have acknowledged them in +his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's +revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of +Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley +as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of +later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven. +Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the +earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the +saint's white purity," being + + A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong, + * * * * * + With heavenly inspiration, too divine + For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine. +[Footnote: _Shelley_.] + +Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven +heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission. + +Aside from Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently +chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the +poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, _The +Death of Marlowe_, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's +depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it +moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted +Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye. In the drama by +Josephine Preston Peabody, the persecutions of hypocritical puritans +hound Marlowe to his death. [Footnote: _Marlowe._] + +The most representative view of Marlowe as an innocent, deceived youth +is that presented by Alfred Noyes, in _At the Sign of the Golden +Shoe_. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group +thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies + + Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl, + Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown. + +While there float in from the street, at intervals, the cries of the +ballad-mongers hawking their latest doggerel, + + Blaspheming Tamborlin must die, + And Faustus meet his end; + Repent, repent, or presently + To hell you must descend, + +Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringing +his possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also, + All unshielded, all unarmed, + A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams. + +His manner, + + Untamed, adventurous, but still innocent, + +exposed him to the clutches of the underworld. One woman, in particular, + + Used all her London tricks + To coney-catch the country greenhorn. + +Won by her pathetic account of her virtues and trials Marlowe tried to +help her to escape from London-then, because he was utterly unused to +the wiles of women, and was + + Simple as all great, elemental things, + +when she expressed an infatuation for him, then + + In her treacherous eyes, + As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, + Here did he see his own eternal skies. + * * * * * + And all that God had meant to wake one day + Under the Sun of Love, suddenly woke + By candle-light, and cried, "The Sun, the Sun." + +At last, holding him wrapped in her hair, the woman attempted to +tantalize him by revealing her promiscuous amours. In a horror of agony +and loathing, Marlowe broke away from her. The next day, as Nash was +loitering in a group including this woman and her lover, Archer, someone +ran in to warn Archer that a man was on his way to kill him. As Marlowe +strode into the place, Nash was struck afresh by his beauty: + + I saw his face, + Pale, innocent, just the clear face of that boy + Who walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick, + The little cobbler's son. Yet--there I caught + My only glimpse of how the sun-god looked-- + +Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that + + His were, perchance, the noblest steeds of all, + And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawn + Above the world.... Before his hand + Had learned to quell them, he was dashed to earth. + +Minor writers are most impartial in clearing the names of any and all +historical artists by such reasoning as this. By negligible American +versifiers one too often finds Burns lauded as one whom "such purity +inspires," [Footnote: A. S. G., _Burns_.] and, more astonishingly, +Byron conceived of as a misjudged innocent. If one is surprised to hear, +in verse on Byron's death, + + His cherub soul has passed to its eclipse, +[Footnote: T. H. Chivers, _On the Death of Byron_.] + +this fades into insignificance beside the consolation offered Byron by +another writer for his trials in this world, + + Peace awaits thee with caressings, + Sitting at the feet of Jesus. + +Better known poets are likely to admit a streak of imperfection in a few +of their number, while maintaining their essential goodness. It is +refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find +James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of +philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines +Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first +of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that +ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly +toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the +end, Burns' great charity is felt to offset all his failings, and Lowell +adds, of poets in general, + + These larger hearts must feel the rolls + Of stormier-waved temptation; + These star-wide souls beneath their poles + Bear zones of tropic passion. +[Footnote: _At the Burns Centennial_.] + +Browning is willing to allow even fictitious artists to be driven into +imperfect conduct by the failure of those about them to live up to their +standards. For example, Fra Lippo Lippi, disgusted with the barren +virtue of the monks, confesses, + + I do these wild things in sheer despite + And play the fooleries you catch me at + In sheer rage. + +But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author +assures the philistine public that it is entirely to blame. + +If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which +he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with +the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain +man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be +satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and +systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to +him. + +The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in +the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. +Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and +consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that +time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. +Robert Browning devoted a poem, _With Francis Furini_, to exposing the +incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in _The +Poet's Vow_, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken +determination to retire from the world, + + That so my purged, once human heart, + From all the human rent, + May gather strength to pledge and drink + Your wine of wonderment, + While you pardon me all blessingly + The woe mine Adam sent. + +In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the +best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts. + +No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a +flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in +their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's +mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a +failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is +truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives +in _Sordello_. + +One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument +again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than +Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and +sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," +[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing +himself into all phases of life. + +It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop +from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to +develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in +_Pauline_, + + I had resolved + No age should come on me ere youth was spent, + For I would wear myself out, + +Omar Khayyam's + + While you live + Drink!--for once dead you never shall return, + +Swinburne's cry of despair, + + Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has + grown gray with thy breath; + We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the + fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.] + +show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less +than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become +easy for the poet to carry his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His +talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to +guide aright his + + principle of restlessness + That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all +[Footnote: _Pauline_.] + +The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses +that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times. +Emerson admits this, telling us, in _The Poet_, that although the +singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which + + Turn his heart from lovely maids, + And make the darlings of the earth + Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth, + +these moments of exaltation pass, and the singer finds himself a mere +man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature, + + Eager for good, not hating ill; + On his tense chords all strokes are felt, + The good, the bad, with equal zeal. + +It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions +of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage +at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is +quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's +_Ode to Duty_ does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception +of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the +grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for +poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic +principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of +Arthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the +disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She +reflected grimly, + + Does the road wind uphill all the way? + Yes, to the very end! + Will the day's journey take the whole long day? + From morn till night, my friend. +[Footnote: _Uphill._] + +It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern +conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty +is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough +and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas +in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness +is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then +so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights. +Thus in the _Prelude_ he described an unconscious purification of +his life by his worship of physical beauty, saying of nature, + + If in my youth I have been pure in heart, + If, mingling with the world, I am content + With my own modest pleasures, and have lived + With God and Nature communing, removed + From little enmities and low desires, + The gift is yours. + +Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature +in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical +aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to +Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem +to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as +possible--as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The +Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing +incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for +they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to +Duty,_ + + When love is an unerring light, + And joy its own felicity. + +For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has +capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's +life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such +misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_ +wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, +because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted. +He resolves, + + The world shall bow to me conceiving all + Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small + Afar--not tasting any; no machine + To exercise my utmost will is mine, + Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive + What I could do, a mastery believe + Asserted and established to the throng + By their selected evidence of song, + Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek + To be, I am. + +The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet +the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser +whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the +philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the +good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion? +What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the +essential nature of the highest good as is the reason? + +There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on +this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and +the poet who + + dares to take + Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake, +[Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._] + +there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the +rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic +of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but +not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the +world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, +not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of +the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically asserting, "I hold +virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the +disposition, each a _feeling,_ not a principle." [Footnote: _Letter to +Charles Dallas,_ January 21, 1808.] + +On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as +that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher, +is governed by reason solely,--that the poetic imagination is a purely +intellectual function. [Footnote: See the _Southern Literary +Messenger,_ II, 328, April, 1836.] + +The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes +are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,--Browning, Tennyson, +Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual +pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral +conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their +natures. + +The most profound utterances of poets on this subject, however, show +them to be, not rationalists, but thoroughgoing Platonists. The feeling +in which they trust is a Platonic intuition which includes the reason, +but exists above it. At least this is the view of Shelley, and Shelley +has, more largely than any other man, moulded the beliefs of later +English poets. It is because he judges imaginative feeling to be always +in harmony with the deepest truths perceived by the reason that he +advertises his intention to purify men by awakening their feelings. +Therefore, in his preface to _The Revolt of Islam_ he says "I would +only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of +true virtue." in the preface to the _Cenci,_ again, he declares, +"Imagination is as the immortal God which should take flesh for the +redemption of human passion." + +The poet, while thus expressing absolute faith in the power of beauty to +redeem the world, yet is obliged to take into account the Platonic +distinction between the beautiful and the lover of the beautiful. +[Footnote: _Symposium,_ § 204.] + +No man is pure poet, he admits, but in proportion as he approaches +perfect artistry, his life is purified. Shelley is expressing the +beliefs of practically all artists when he says, "The greatest poets +have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate +prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the +most fortunate of men; and the exceptions, as they regard those who +possess the poetical faculty in a high, yet an inferior degree, will be +found upon consideration to confirm, rather than to destroy, the rule." +[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry._] + +Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Shelley precisely. In +_The Crystal,_ Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been +embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts +their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And in _Life +and Song_ he repeats the same idea: + + None of the singers ever yet + Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, + Or truly sung his true, true thought. + +Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life +arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and +the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the +poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with +the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges, +instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote: +Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the +senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal. + +Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic +expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence +to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in +the nature of a farewell to verse writing. In _The Symbol Seduces,_ +"A. E." exclaims, + + I leave + For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower, + For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive; + For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower. + +But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as +Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging +to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does +not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him, +and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the +imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to +him "a dome of many colored glass" that reveals, yet stains, "the white +radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty +apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her +ravishing. + +This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic +problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the +revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a +great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of +his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in +contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands +that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly +passions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to +separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may, +according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of +Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this +time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the +preëminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the +disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was +compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel +that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede +to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature +of the artist is manifest. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE POET'S RELIGION + + +There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the +priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not +tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed +of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing +no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest +critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, assert +with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with +their interpretation of that word. + +As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the +refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are +in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as +incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is +unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic +philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is, +as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the +poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The +poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society. + +The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in +evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry +is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn +pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions +of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the +period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for +art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers +could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had +said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we +must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This +narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within +the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be +characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in +what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their +philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds +and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send +their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue +philosophers. + +Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a +sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his +thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not +unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. +But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because +he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot +conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting +philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world +of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of +philosophy to which he objected, as follows: + + To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant + to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first + sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome + hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and + _species_ and _differentia_, into formal classes, + under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels + fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or + physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our + flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: _Plato and + Platonism._] + +But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which +is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet +demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we +may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most +purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, +"The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. +Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other +the image." [Footnote: _The Romantic Movement,_ p. 129.] That is, +to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual. + +Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true +that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of +subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Shelley is +the classic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's +theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of +his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, in _Queen Mab_. +But Shelley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the +incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that +Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under +the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely +able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the +course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more +truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with +spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, +were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who +declared, "After I had read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary,_ +I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart." +[Footnote: James Gillman, _Life of Coleridge_, p. 23.] + +A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at +the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing +materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their +admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in +his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that +materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the +curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the +reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If +idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which +poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the +_fin de siècle_ school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, +already drooping. + +It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, +Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these +men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, +the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible +explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for +poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic +views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To +Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that +one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. +"I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about +which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life." +[Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.] + +It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the +poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only +where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the +horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the +most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from +obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which +expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank +paper. + +One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the +notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose +atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of _The City of Dreadful +Night_. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, +with the words, + + And now at last authentic word I bring + Witnessed by every dead and living thing; + Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: + There is no God; no fiend with name divine + Made us and tortures us; if we must pine + It is to satiate no Being's gall. + +But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of +James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically +speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of +his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world +in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of +him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It +would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. +Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City +of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William +Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful +envy, + + He came to the desert of London town, + Mirk miles broad; + He wandered up and he wandered down, + Ever alone with God. +[Footnote: _William Blake._] + +Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner +world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be +distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his +impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of +his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it +is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the +"aesthetic repose." + +Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third +element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim +sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the +eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning, + + Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells + Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine. +[Footnote: _Poets._] + +Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every +verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of +the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, +John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benét, +_The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged +persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the +present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his +birds are + + Summer-saulting for God's sake. + +Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and +spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at +best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas +Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought +"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously +excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause +of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas +which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, +however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost +reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the +flower itself. He muses, + + Flower in the crannied wall, + I pluck you out of the crannies;-- + I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, + Little flower--but if I could understand + What you are, root and all and all in all, + I should know what God and man is. + +By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets +designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning +of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the +instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All +poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the +sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one. + +A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's +unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as +Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to +do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If +he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina +Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by + + The foolishest fond folly of a heart + Divided, neither here nor there at rest, + That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth. +[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.] + +On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely +physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his +nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. +Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both +elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him. + +Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a +conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the +unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Shelley devoted +a large part of _Prometheus Unbound_ and the conclusion of _Adonais_ to +his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the +sense world which was yet spiritual, + + The Being that is in the clouds and air, + That is in the green leaves among the groves, +[Footnote: _Hart Leap Well._] + +and was led to the conclusion, + + It is my faith that every flower + Enjoys the air it breathes. +[Footnote: _Lines Written in Early Spring._] + +Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever +returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. +Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now +rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in _Empedocles on +Ætna,_ in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and +out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is +most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's +pantheistic faith. Swinburne's _Hertha_ is one of the most thorough +going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much +of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit. +One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne's +_Natural Religion,_ wherein he explains the grounds of his faith, + + Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air + I cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?" + Sudden the answer like a flute I heard; + It was an angel, though it seemed a bird. + +On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's +charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the +realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to +establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe +with him. + +The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of +the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, +that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly +incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards +himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a +religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. +Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated +"without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter +to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the +same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does +poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence +from this power of revelation. + +But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the +poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit +characteristic of religious reverence. + +It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is +one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings. + + There is no God, O son! + If thou be none, +[Footnote: _On the Downs._] + +Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet +exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry +the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter +of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any +qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the +ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, +any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I +wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but +assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, +p. 309.] + +Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by +Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the +other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the +third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's +divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification +of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own +image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet +God." [Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.] + +Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of +the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in +carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. +In the _Prophetic Books_, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all +that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not +humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it. + +Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, +in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not +flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the +puritan himself feels the power of Emily Brontë's _Last Lines,_ in which +she cries with proud and triumphant faith, + + Though earth and man were gone, + And suns and universes ceased to be, + And Thou wert left alone, + Every existence would exist in Thee. + + There is not room for Death, + Nor atom that his might could render void; + Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, + And what Thou art may never be destroyed. + +There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has +the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical +illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome +importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if +these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully +repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious +demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the +romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him. + +In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to +placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the +appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this +attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. +So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of +the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also +was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the +unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch +as Byron's _A Vision of Judgment,_ with its irresistible satire on +Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet. + +The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the +romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance +of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century +inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest +of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring +conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of +yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I _do_ believe," +said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but +the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the +orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of +religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the +Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See +also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] _Cain,_ +however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief +significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in +arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians. + +Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional +religion. In _Julian and Maddalo_, he causes Byron to say of him, + + You were ever still + Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel. + +Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was +persecuted by the church. In _Rosalind and Helen_, the hero was +hated by the clergy, + + For he made verses wild and queer + Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear, + +and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in +Lionel's death, for + + The ministers of misrule sent + Seized on Lionel and bore + His chained limbs to a dreary tower, + For he, they said, from his mind had bent + Against their gods keen blasphemy. + +The most notable illustration of this phase of Shelley's thought is +_The Revolt of Islam,_ wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put +to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies. + +Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets +have gloried in his attitude. + +Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he + + Smote the God of base men's choice + At God's own gate. +[Footnote: _Burns._] + +Young poets have not yet lost their taste for religious persecution. It +is a great disappointment to them to find it difficult to strike fire +from the faithful in these days. Swinburne in his early poetry denounced +the orthodox God with such vigor that he roused a momentary flutter of +horror in the church, but nowadays the young poet who craves to manifest +his spiritual daring is far more likely to find himself in the position +of Rupert Brooke, of whom someone has said, "He imagines the poet as +going on a magnificent quest to curse God on his throne of fire, and +finding--nothing." + +The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, +however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his +finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, +indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in +which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, +frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter +Day._] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See _In Memoriam._] of Arnold, [Footnote: +See _Dover Beach._] of Clough. [Footnote: See _The New Sinai, Qui +Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium._] So, too, James Thomson muses +with regret, + + How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray + With all the others whom we love so well! + All disbelief and doubt might pass away, + And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell. + Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, + Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast. +[Footnote: _The Reclusant._] + +In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet +sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious +questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick +to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, +rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his +contemporaries, + + There lives more faith in honest doubt, + Believe me, than in half the creeds. + +Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he +expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any +more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the +heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and +love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards +proved spurious).] + +The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who +prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a +shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very +satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in +that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the +quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question +that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious +doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has +been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious +poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is +good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will +seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the +last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in +purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold. + +Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet +can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is +strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a +thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a +recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest +doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry, + + Ah, but there should be one! + There should be one. And there's the bitterness + Of this unending torture-place for men, + For the proud soul that craves a perfectness + That might outwear the rotting of all things + Rooted in earth. +[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe._] + +The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his +quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free +himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures +purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward +religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of +Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to +the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than +Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious +satisfaction. Thus the hero of _Pauline_ comes to no triumphant +issue, though he maintains, + + I have always had one lode-star; now + As I look back, I see that I have halted + Or hastened as I looked towards that star, + A need, a trust, a yearning after God. + +The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses, + + Of a power above you still, + Which, utterly incomprehensible, + Is out of rivalry, which thus you can + Love, though unloving all conceived by man-- + What need! And of--none the minutest duct + To that out-nature, naught that would instruct + And so let rivalry begin to live-- + But of a Power its representative + Who, being for authority the same, + Communication different, should claim + A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed, + This human clear, as that Divine concealed-- + What utter need! + +There is, after all, small need that the public should charge the poet +with deliberate failure to gain a satisfactory view of the deity. The +quest of a God who satisfies the poet's demand that He shall include all +life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and +embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears +inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and +troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in + + The too-bold dying song of her whose soul + Knew no fellow for might, + Passion, vehemence, grief, + Daring, since Byron died. +[Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, _Haworth Churchyard._] + +A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous +as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him, + + Who dropped his plummet down the broad + Deep universe, and said, "No God," + Finding no bottom. +[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets._] + +If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful +issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the +conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel +with Tennyson, + + Our little systems have their day, + They have their day and cease to be; + They are but broken lights of thee, + And thou, O Lord, art more than they, +[Footnote: _In Memoriam._] + +yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to + + Let lore of all theology + Be to thy soul what it can be. +[Footnote: _Soothsay._] + +Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of +tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the +part of the church. + +In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with +thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of +the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the +frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as +akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who +causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, _A Life in Song,_ +and _The Real and the Ideal,_ to begin by being poets, and end by +becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly +less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's _Bitter Sweet_ is a +thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman +who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and +hers likewise. In _Kathrina,_ though the hero, rebellious on account of +the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the +end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his +incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an +irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the +tradition of the poet-revivalist. + +Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina +Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean +Ingelow, in _Letters of Life and Morning_, offers most conventional +religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's _The +Angel in the House_, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the +eighteenth century could afford. + +The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother +of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson, +Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a +more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived, +perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in +evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded +in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute. +There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a +formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God +and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June +28, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert +Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the +suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically +advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline +Kilmer, April 21, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters_, +ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers +the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors. + +Perhaps a history of art would not square with the repugnance one feels +toward such censorship. Conformance to the religious beliefs of his time +certainly does not seem to have handicapped Homer or Dante, to say +nothing of the preëminent men in other fields of art, Phidias, Michael +Angelo, Raphael, etc. Yet in the modern consciousness, the theory of art +for art's sake has become so far established that we feel that any +compromise of the purely aesthetic standard is a loss to the artist. The +deity of the artist and the churchman may be in some measure the same, +since absolute beauty and absolute goodness are regarded both by poets +and theologians as identical, but there is reason to believe that the +poet may not go so far astray if he cleaves to his own immediate +apprehension of absolute beauty as he will if he fashions his beliefs +upon another man's stereotyped conception of the absolute good. + +Then, too, it is not unlikely that part of the poet's reluctance to +embrace the creed of his contemporaries arises from the fact that he, in +his secret heart, still hankers for his old title of priest. He knows +that it is the imaginative faculty of the poet that has been largely +instrumental in building up every religious system. The system that +holds sway in society is apt to be the one that he himself has just +outgrown; he has, accordingly, an artist's impatience for its +immaturity. There is much truth to the poet's nature in verses entitled +_The Idol Maker Prays_: + + Grant thou, that when my art hath made thee known + And others bow, I shall not worship thee, + But as I pray thee now, then let me pray + Some greater god,--like thee to be conceived + Within my soul. +[Footnote: By Arthur Guiterman.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE + + +No matter how strong our affection for the ingratiating ne'er-do-well, +there are certain charges against the poet which we cannot ignore. It is +a serious thing to have an alleged madman, inebriate, and experimenter +in crime running loose in society. But there comes a time when our +patience with his indefatigable accusers is exhausted. Is not society +going a step too far if, after the poet's positive faults have been +exhausted, it institutes a trial for his sins of omission? Yet so it is. +If the poet succeeds in proving to the satisfaction of the jury that his +influence is innocuous, he must yet hear the gruff decision, "Perhaps, +as you say, you are doing no real harm. But of what possible use are +you? Either become an efficient member of society, or cease to exist." +Must we tamely look on, while the "light, winged, and holy creature," as +Plato called the poet, is harnessed to a truck wagon, and made to +deliver the world's bread and butter? Would that it were more common for +poets openly to defy society's demands for efficiency, as certain +children and malaperts of the poetic world have done! It is pleasant to +hear the naughty advice which that especially impractical poet, Emily +Dickinson, gave to a child: "Be sure to live in vain, dear. I wish I +had." [Footnote: Gamaliel Bradford, _Portraits of American Women_, +p. 248 (Mrs. Bianchi, p. 37).] And one is hardly less pleased to hear +the irrepressible Ezra Pound instruct his songs, + + But above all, go to practical people, go, jangle their door-bells. + Say that you do no work, and that you will live forever. +[Footnote: _Salutation the Second_.] + +Surely no one else has had so bad a time with efficiency experts as has +the poet, even though everyone whose occupation does not bring out sweat +on the brow is likely to fall under their displeasure. The scholar, for +instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he +has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have +dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even +bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to +maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is +often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging +aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to +loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him? + +The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be +confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of +his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James +Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_ (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. +Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, _The Poet and the Fisher_, +and _Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship_; +Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman, +_Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P. H. Hayne, +_An Idle Poet Dreaming_; Henry Timrod, _They Dub Thee Idler_; Washington +Allston, _Sylphs of the Seasons_; C. W. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Alan Seeger, +_Oneata_; J. G. Neihardt, _The Poet's Town_.] Sometimes he gives them +the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But +occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries +to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his +bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet. + +When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers +laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to +make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional +fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and +Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_, and _The Real +and the Ideal_.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few +scattered figures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.] +Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of +Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio, +Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See +_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must +admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet- +politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to +celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a +protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look +to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as +following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, +for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing +Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist +is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the +citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. +[Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama, +Richard Garnett.] + +If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he +may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will +vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He +is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer, + + When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's + work, + You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. + There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the + Turk, + And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword + in his hand. + It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, + And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was + strong, + And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, + Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song. +[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.] + +It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, +Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet +lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the +poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. +From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer +may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in +war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet +as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, +The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, +Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of +the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the +Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley, +_Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates, +Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David, +Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert +Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud +Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, +Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the +Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter +Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _Hell Gate of Soissons_; +Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace +Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the +Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_; +Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said, +"The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: +See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the +poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The +verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that +warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might +have done Byron's, + + When the true lightning of his soul was bared, + Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch. +[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Brontë_.] + +But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his +character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does +not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be +pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him +that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of +strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he +has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too +likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet? +Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his +title as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some +merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims +for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at +fault when he excused his occupation: + + I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse, + And wrote verse. +[Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.] + +How can the poet satisfy the philistine world that his songs are worth +while? Need we ask? Business men will vouch for their utility, if he +will but conform to business men's ideas of art. Here is a typical +expression of their views, couched in verse for the singer's better +comprehension: + + The days of long-haired poets now are o'er, + The short-haired poet seems to have the floor; + For now the world no more attends to rhymes + That do not catch the spirit of the times. + The short-haired poet has no muse or chief, + He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef. +[Footnote: "The Short-haired Poet," in _Common-Sense_, by E. F. Ware.] + +But the poet utterly repudiates such a view of himself as this, for he +cannot draw his breath in the commercial world. [Footnote: Several poems +lately have voiced the poet's horror of materialism. See Josephine +Preston Peabody, _The Singing Man_; Richard Le Gallienne, _To R. W. +Emerson, Richard Watson Gilder_; Mary Robinson, _Art and Life_.] In vain +he assures his would-be friends that the intangibilities with which he +deals have a value of their own. Emerson says, + + One harvest from thy field + Homeward brought the oxen strong; + A second crop thine acres yield + Which I gather in a song. +[Footnote: _Apology_] + +But for this second crop the practical man says he can find absolutely +no market; hence overtures of friendliness between him and the poet end +with sneers and contempt on both sides. Doubtless the best way for the +poet to deal with the perennial complaints of the practical-minded, is +simply to state brazenly, as did Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite +useless." [Footnote: Preface to _Dorian Gray_.] + +Is the poet justified, then, in stopping his ears to all censure, and +living unto himself? Not so; when the hub-bub of his sordid accusers +dies away, he is conscious of another summons, before a tribunal which +he cannot despise or ignore. For once more the poet's equivocal position +exposes him to attacks from all quarters. He stands midway between the +spiritual and the physical worlds, he reveals the ideal in the sensual. +Therefore, while the practical man complains that the poet does not +handle the solid objects of the physical world, but transmutes them to +airy nothings, the philosopher, on the contrary, condemns the poet +because he does not wholly sever connections with this same physical +world, but is continually hovering about it, like a homesick ghost. + +Like the plain man, the philosopher gives the poet a chance to vindicate +his usefulness. Plato's challenge is not so age-worn that we may not +requote it. He makes Socrates say, in the _Republic_, + +Let us assure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation +that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered state, +we shall be delighted to receive her.... We are very conscious of her +charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth.... Shall I +propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this +condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some +other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are +lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on +her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful +to states and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. +[Footnote: _Republic_, Book X, 607.] + + * * * * * + +One wonders why the lovers of Poetry have been so much more solicitous +for her cause than Poetry herself has appeared to be. Aristotle, and +after him many others,--in the field of English literature, Sidney, +Shelley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,--have made most eloquent +defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been +forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to +attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the +last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the +impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them +to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but +here are some things I might say for myself, if I wished." + +Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal +conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give +the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy. +But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded +man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the +philosopher assures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than +is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at +least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the +philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet +distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet +pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, +but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious +system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of +himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is +really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body. + +Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical +man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of +the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and +one by the poet. [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, 596 B ff.] Now +the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well +known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the +room: + + "I know what is and what has been; + Not anything to me comes strange, + Who in so many years have seen + And lived through every kind of change. + I know when men are bad or good, + When well or ill," he slowly said, + "When sad or glad, when sane or mad + And when they sleep alive or dead." +[Footnote: _In the Room_] + +Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious +memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not +come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript +product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is +on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror +across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a +person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would +seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow +imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing +higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport." +[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.] + +It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake +their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd +enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of +dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel +the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow +assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude: + + Painting and sculpture are but images; + Are merely shadows cast by outward things + On stone or canvas, having in themselves + No separate existence. Architecture, + As something in itself, and not an image, + A something that is not, surpasses them + As substance shadow. +[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] + +Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us +as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and +buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has +become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's +charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. +The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney +and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find +that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not +from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries +of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we +have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak +of commonness in the speaker's nature,--of a disposition to value the +clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined +to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, +"I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect. +It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an +earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of +the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than +one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A. +E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing, + + He who might have wrought in flame + Only traced upon the foam. +[Footnote: _Epilogue_] + +In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his +death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty +in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: +Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le +Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet +who died a soldier: + + A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, + Are greater than a poet's art, + And greater than a poet's fame + A little grave that has no name. +[Footnote: _Soliloquy_.] + +Is not our idealization of poets who died in war a confession that we +ourselves believe that they chose the better part,--that they did well +to discard imitation of life for life itself? + +It is not fair to force an answer to such a question till we have more +thoroughly canvassed poets' convictions on this matter. Do they all +admit the justice of Plato's characterization of poetry as a sport, +comparable to golf or tennis? In a few specific instances, poets have +taken this attitude toward their own verse, of course. There was the +"art for art's sake" cry, which at the end of the last century surely +degenerated into such a conception of poetry. There have been a number +of poets like Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang, who have frankly regarded +their verse as a pastime to while away an idle hour. There was +Swinburne, who characterized many of his poems as being idle and light +as white butterflies. [Footnote: See the _Dedication to Christina +Rossetti_, and _Envoi_.] But when we turn away from these +prestidigitators of rhymes and rhythms, we find that no view of poetry +is less acceptable than this one to poets in general. They are far more +likely to earn the world's ridicule by the deadly seriousness with which +they take verse writing. If the object of his pursuit is a sport, the +average poet is as little aware of it as is the athlete who suffers a +nervous collapse before the big game of the season. + +But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an +imitation of life? It depends, of course, upon how broadly we interpret +the phrase, "imitation of life." In one sense almost every poet would +say that Plato was right in characterizing poetry thus. The usual +account of inspiration points to passive mirroring of life. Someone has +said of the poet, + + As a lake + Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, + Shall he reflect our great humanity. +[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.] + +And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's +function, but they leave us leeway to quarrel over the nature of the +reflection mentioned, just as we quarrel over the exact connotations of +Plato's and Aristotle's word, imitation. Even if we hold to the narrower +meaning of imitation, there are a few poets who intimate that imitation +alone is their aim in writing poetry. Denying that life has an ideal +element, they take pains to mirror it, line for line, and blemish for +blemish. How can they meet Plato's question as to their usefulness? If +life is a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear +what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the +case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war +poetry. [Footnote: See _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_.] Perhaps his +defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication +contained in his two lines, + + If there's good in war and crime, + There may be in my bits of rhyme. +[Footnote: See _Ibid_.] + +Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least +James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most +thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in +English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_. +Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he +says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence +may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade +before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But +would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is +doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of +life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the +despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than +reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from +its realism, but from the idealism of the writer. + +We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection +of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. +Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its +misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let +the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and +dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple +haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, +for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is. + + And they shall be accounted poet-kings + Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, +[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose +inevitably calls up William Morris: + + Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, + Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? + Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme + Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, + Telling a tale, not too importunate + To those who in the sleepy region stay, + Lulled by the singer of an empty day. +[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.] + +Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He +would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's +minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about +ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead +for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, +_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other +justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of +man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.] + +We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea +that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought +of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the +breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to +suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says, + + 'Tis the privilege of art + Thus to play its cheerful part + Man on earth to acclimate + And bend the exile to his fate. +[Footnote: _Art_.] + +It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings +this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art +accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of +life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, +and is its essence. + +Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems +strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to +render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the +artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not +precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally +Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. +Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the +essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's +light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who +portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives +usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that +gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover +of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is +truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a +mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a +representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a +service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All +that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning +says, + + Paint a body well, + You paint a soul by implication. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual +accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is +useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward +a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and +that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he +tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye +and save the soul beside," [Footnote: _The Ring and the Book_.] as +Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things +under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest +insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, +without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers, + + If you get simple beauty and naught else, + You get about the best thing God invents. +[Footnote: _Fra, Lippo Lippi_.] + +Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of +the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be +expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy +Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist +simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword +Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. +Cook, June 28, 1918.] + +Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that +the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal +and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should +this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, +harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity. + +The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it +has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as + + A many-sided mirror, + Which could distort to many a shape of error + This true, fair world of things. +[Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the +artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of +things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him +irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in +this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described +the poet's achievement: + + With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, + The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes. +[Footnote: _Ode_.] + +"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is +truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different +mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the +artist's imitation of life, inquiring, + + What is art + But life upon the larger scale, the higher, + When, graduating up a spiral line + Of still expanding and ascending gyres + It pushes toward the intense significance + Of all things, hungry for the infinite. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, +then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their +objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely +superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things +than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work: + + He will watch from dawn to gloom + The lake-reflected sun illume + The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, + Nor heed nor see, what things they be; + But from these create he can + Forms more real than living man, + Nurslings of immortality. +[Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.] + +Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of +imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees +walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the +essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of +essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the +discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; +[Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only +teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are +some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: +Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a +Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_ +Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_ +Rossetti, _Sonnet, Shelley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_ +Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow, +_The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_; +Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_; +Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on +_Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the +Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren +Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_; +Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A +Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_; +Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of +the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The +Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.] + +Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher +and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook +human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same +pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one +another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to +the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth, +Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of +the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? +Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher +rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies +himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_; +Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the +quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows +trivial, but let us see how the case stands. + +From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of +methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being + + Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes. +[Footnote: _To William Wordsworth_.] + +Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts, + + Think you, mid all this mighty sum + Of things forever speaking, + That nothing of itself will come, + We must be ever seeking? +[Footnote: _Expostulation and Reply_.] + +But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate +intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he +asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can +only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the +breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression +which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the +poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, +"Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the +body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: _A +Defense of Poetry_.] + +To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making +discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a +sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends, + + True science investigates and brings to human perception such + truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and + society consider most important. Art transmits these truths + from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And + thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a + correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: _What is + Art?_] + +Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to +acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has +pronounced the philosopher's attitude of mind wholly antagonistic to +poetry. + + Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, + Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: +_A Poet's Epitaph_.] + +Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other +poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a +flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a +recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers, + + We are they who dream no dreams, + Singers of a rising day, + Who undaunted, + Where the sword of reason gleams, + Follow hard, to hew away + The woods enchanted. +[Footnote: E. Flecker, _Donde Estan_.] + +One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He +declares, + + Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art! + Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, + Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, + Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? + How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, + Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering + To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, + Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? + Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, + And driven the Hamadryad from the wood + To seek for shelter in some happier star? + Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, + The Elfin from the green grass, and from me + The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? +[Footnote: _To Science_.] + +If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the +philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's +hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which +must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the +poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed, + + Most true it is that I have looked on truth + Askance and strangely, + +and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, +the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." +[Footnote: Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_.] If poets complain that + all charms fly + At the mere touch of cold philosophy, +[Footnote: _Lamia_.] + +are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of +distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars? + +In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has +identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for +the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the +realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to +the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to +make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower +of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things. + +What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has +just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet +answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the +scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for +the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need +laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his +love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and +reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this +subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning, +_Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein, +_Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of + + The loftiest star of unascended heaven, + Pinnacled dim in the intense inane, + +in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense +against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his +non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his +sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to +sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the +philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they +represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly +medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's +thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a +somber tapestry. + +It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to +fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, +as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth +century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, +he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, +"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled +conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See +_The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both +warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry. +Even Landor reflected, + + A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, + And showing but the broken sky + Too surely is the sweetest lay + That wins the ear and wastes the day + Where youthful Fancy pouts alone + And lets not wisdom touch her zone. +[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.] + +But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such +distinctions. + +If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal +values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of +things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his +test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this +poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge +that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works. + +The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points +out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The +poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney +Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with +nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." +[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is +to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on +Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there +is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must +be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: +Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination +may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." +[Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] + +If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, +that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a +prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic +shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the +phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the +one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are +not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing +with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association +of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of +superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can +foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The +Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, +_Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many +poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. +[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_, +_Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_; +Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry +Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J. R. Lowell, _Massaccio_, Sonnet +XVIII; Owen Meredith, _The Prophet_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; O. W. +Holmes, _Shakespeare_; T. H. Olivers, _The Poet_, _Dante_; Alfred +Austin, _The Poet's Corner_; Swinburne, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_; +Herbert Trench, _Stanzas on Poetry_.] Holmes' view is typical: + + We call those poets who are first to mark + Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,-- + Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark + While others only note that day is gone; + For them the Lord of light the curtain rent + That veils the firmament. +[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.] + +Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Shelley +does; as a more recent poet has phrased it: + + Strange hints + Of things past, present and to come there lie + Sealed in the magic pages of that music, + Which, laying hold on universal laws, + Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh. +[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] + +The poet's defense is not finished when he establishes the truth of his +vision. How shall the world be served, he is challenged, even though it +be true that the poet's dreams are of reality? Plato demanded of his +philosophers that they return to the cave of sense, after they had seen +the heavenly vision, and free the slaves there. Is the poet willing to +do this? It has been charged that he is not. Browning muses, + + Ah, but to find + A certain mood enervate such a mind, + Counsel it slumber in the solitude + Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good + Its nature just, as life and time accord. + --Too narrow an arena to reward + Emprize--the world's occasion worthless since + Not absolutely fitted to evince + Its mastery! +[Footnote: _Sordello_.] + +But one is inclined to question the justice of Browning's charge, at +least so far as it applies peculiarly to the poet. Logically, he should +devote himself to sense-blinded humanity, not reluctantly, like the +philosopher descending to a gloomy cave which is not his natural +habitat, but eagerly, since the poet is dependent upon sense as well as +spirit for his vision. "This is the privilege of beauty," says Plato, +"that, being the loveliest of the ideas, she is also the most palpable +to sight." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_.] Accordingly the poet has no +horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an +enthusiasm to make the world of sense a more transparent medium of +beauty. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet's humanitarian +aspect, see Bowles, _The Visionary Boy_, _On the Death of the +Rev. Benwell_; Wordsworth, _The Poet and the Caged Turtle Dove_; +Arnold, _Heine's Grave_; George Eliot, _O May I Join the Choir +Invisible_; Lewis Morris, _Food Of Song_; George Meredith, _Milton_; +Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Swinburne, +_Centenary of Landor_, _Victor Hugo_, _Victor Hugo in 1877_, _Ben +Jonson_, _Thomas Decker_; Whittier, _To J. P._, and _The Tent on the +Beach_; J. R. Lowell, _To The Memory of Hood_; O. W. Holmes, _At a +Meeting of the Burns Club_; Emerson, _Solution_; R. Realf, _Of Liberty +and Charity_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the +Golden Age_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_; C. W. Hubner, _The Poet_; J. +H. West, _O Story Teller Poet_; Gerald Massey, _To Hood Who Sang the +Song of the Shirt_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; +Sidney Lanier, _Wagner_, _Clover_; C. A. Pierce, _The Poet's Ideal_; E. +Markham, _The Bard_, _A Comrade Calling Back_, _An April Greeting_; G. +L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_; Richard Gilder, _The City_, _The Dead +Poet_; E. L. Cox, _The Master_, _Overture_; R. C. Robbins, _Wordsworth_; +Carl McDonald, _A Poet's Epitaph_.] It is inevitable that every poet's +feeling for the world should be that of Shelley, who says to the spirit +of beauty, + + Never joy illumed my brow + Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free + This world from its dark slavery. +[Footnote: _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_.] +For, unlike the philosopher, the poet has never departed from the world +of sense, and it is hallowed to him as the incarnation of beauty. +Therefore he is eager to make other men ever more and more transparent +embodiments of their true selves, in order that, gazing upon them, the +poet may have ever deeper inspiration. This is the central allegory in +_Enydmion_, that the poet must learn to help humanity before the mystery +of poetship shall be unlocked to him. Browning comments to this effect +upon Bordello's unwillingness to meet the world: + + But all is changed the moment you descry + Mankind as half yourself. + +Matthew Arnold is the sternest of modern poets, perhaps, in pointing out +the poet's responsibility to humanity: + + The poet, to whose mighty heart + Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, + Subdues that energy to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. + Though he move mountains, though his day + Be passed on the proud heights of sway, + Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, + Though he hath borne immortal pains, + Action and suffering though he know, + He hath not lived, if he lives so. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by +which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their +essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is +peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the +moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must +be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something +beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to +the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. If beauty is the +heart of the universe (and it must be, the poet argues, since it abides +in sense as well as spirit), there is no place for the corrupt will. If +men are free, they are expressing their real natures; they are +beautiful. + +Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise +men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do +not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of +tyranny." [Footnote: _Republic._] Few enemies of poets nowadays +would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas +Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry, +asserted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's +potentates. [Footnote: See _The Four Ages of Poetry._] Once, it must +be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into +disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his +friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim, + + If thou hast ever done amiss + It was, O Southey, but in this, + That, to redeem the lost estate + Of the poor Muse, a man so great + Abased his laurels where some Georges stood + Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood. + Was ever genius but thyself + Friend or befriended of a Guelf? + +But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization +of the modern poet as liberty-lover. + +Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented +to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's +allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like +the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French +revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against +oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the +loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward +monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of +poet-laureate. + +The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of +history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry +during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our +history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles +II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be +expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and +virtue." Gray, in _The Progress of Poesy_, draws the same +conclusion as Shelley: + + Her track, where'er the goddess roves, + Glory pursue, and generous shame, + The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame. + +Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert +no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. +[Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's +Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The +Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, +_Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here +Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The +Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To +Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, +_Miriam_; Shelley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, +_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, +_Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, +_To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, +_The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in +a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, +Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; +Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Shore_, _For You_, +_O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; +Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of +Liberty and Charity_; Henry van Dyke, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; +Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles +Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit +of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, +_MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce +Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert +Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden +Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that +in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, +though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose +themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming, + + Where's the poet? Show him, show him, + Muses mine, that I may know him! + 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king + Or poorest of the beggar clan. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, +but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be +false to poetry, and he answers his detractors, + + Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise, + That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope + Of his pure song. + +In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent +champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for +ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom: + + Poets (hear the word) + Half-poets even, are still whole democrats. + Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high, + But loyal to the low, and cognizant + Of the less scrutable majesties. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote: +_See The Poet_.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the +liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See _Mater Triumphilis_, _Prelude_, +_Epilogue_, _Litany of Nations_, and _Hertha_.] till our new group of +singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident. + +It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always +synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to +distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise +Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs. +Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate +socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as +is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is +simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his +truest self. + +If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager +to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains +against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings +in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall +become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society +is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" +[Footnote: See _Sordello_.] of the world, here amending a law, here +building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the +poet. Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, makes much of the issue, +and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's +inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world + + Forgets + To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back + Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down + To the empty grave of Christ ... + ... Who has time, + An hour's time--think!--to sit upon a bank + And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, +February 17, 1845.] + +The poet has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and +proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas +Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the +Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization in +reform the gauge of a poet's merit. Where, in that case, would Keats be +beside Hood? In our day, where would Sara Teasdale be beside Edwin +Markham? Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as +an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his +claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See +_Aurora Leigh_.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely +unsettling society,--for what end? He himself will soon have +forgotten--will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is +more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other +men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the +beauty of holiness. Let reformers beware how they assert the poet's +uselessness, our singers say, for it is an indication that they +themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be +leading men. The work of the reformer inevitably degenerates into the +mere strenuosity of the campaign, + + Unless the artist keep up open roads + Betwixt the seen and unseen, bursting through + The best of our conventions with his best, + The speakable, imaginable best + God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond + Both speech and imagination. +[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] + +Thus speaks Mrs. Browning. + +The reforms that make a stir in the world, being merely external, mean +little or nothing apart from the impulse that started them, and the poet +alone is powerful to stir the impulse of reform in humanity. "To be +persuaded rests usually with ourselves," said Longinus, "but genius +brings force sovereign and irresistible to bear upon every hearer." +[Footnote: _On the Sublime_.] The poet, in ideal mood, is as +innocent of specific designs upon current morality as was Pippa, when +she wandered about the streets of Asolo, but the power of his songs is +ever as insuperable as was that of hers. It is for this reason that +Emerson advises the poet to leave hospital building and statute revision +for men of duller sight than he: + + Oft shall war end and peace return + And cities rise where cities burn + Ere one man my hill shall climb + Who can turn the golden rhyme. + Let them manage how they may, + Heed thou only Saadi's lay. +[Footnote: _Saadi_.] + +Here the philosopher may demur. If the poet were truly an idealist,--if +he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, +which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he +might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's +failing that he gives men no vision of abstract beauty. He represents +his visions in the contemporary dress of his times. Thus he idealizes +the past and the present, showing beauty shining through the dullness +and error of human history. Is he not, then, the enemy of progress, +since he will lead his readers to imagine that things are ideal as they +are? + +Rather, men will be filled with reverence for the idealized portrait of +themselves that the poet has drawn, and the intervention of the reformer +will be unnecessary, since they will voluntarily tear off the shackles +that disfigure them. The poet, said Shelley, "redeems from decay the +visitations of the divinity in man." Emerson said of Wordsworth, "He +more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." Mrs. +Browning said (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet--by analyzing +humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions +of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] +This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of +life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines +through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty +incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through which +beauty does not shine. + +Therefore, the poet repeats, he is the true author of reform. Tennyson +says of freedom, + + No sword + Of wrath her right arm whirled, + But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word + She shook the world. +[Footnote: _The Poet_.] + +This brings us back to our war poets who have so recently died. Did they +indeed disparage the Muse whom they deserted? Did they not rather die to +fulfill a poet's prophesy of freedom? A poet who did not carry in his +heart the courage of his song--what could be more discreditable to +poetry than that? The soldier-poets were like a general who rushes into +the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a +man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the +engagement, that saved the day. + +If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his +reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says, + + The gods talk in the breath of the woods, + They talk in the shaken pine, + And fill the long reach of the old seashore + With dialogue divine. + And the poet who overhears + Some random word they say + Is the fated man of men + Whom the nations must obey. +[Footnote: Fragment on _The Poet_.] + +What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his +vision is true he shall join + + The choir invisible + Of those immortal dead who live again + In minds made better by their presence: live + In pulses stirred to generosity, + In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, + And with their mild persistence urge man's search + To vaster issues. +[Footnote: George Eliot, _The Choir Invisible_.] + +Does this mean simply the immortality of fame? It is a higher thing than +that. The beauty which the poet creates is itself creative, and having +the principle of life in it, can never perish. Whitman cries, + + Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! + Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for, + But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, + greater than before known, + Arouse! for you must justify me! +[Footnote: _Poets to Come_.] + +Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the +snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his +name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the +_Symposium_, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of +beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he +is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself. +So, though he be as fragile as a windflower, he may assure himself, + + I shall not die; I shall not utterly die, + For beauty born of beauty--that remains. +[Footnote: Madison Cawein, _To a Windflower_.] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT + + +Not even a paper shortage has been potent to give the lie to the author +of _Ecclesiastes_, but it has fanned into flame the long smouldering +resentment of those who are wearily conscious that of making many books +there is no end. No longer is any but the most confirmed writer suffered +to spin out volume after volume in complacent ignorance of his readers' +state of mind, for these victims of eye-strain and nerves turn upon the +newest book, the metaphorical last straw on the camel's load, with the +exasperated cry, Why? Why? and again Why? + +Fortunately for themselves, most of the poets who have taken the poet's +character as their theme, indulged their weakness for words before that +long-suffering bookworm, the reader, had turned, but one who at the +present day drags from cobwebby corners the accusive mass of material on +the subject, must seek to justify, not merely the loquacity of its +authors, but one's own temerity as well, in forcing it a second time +upon the jaded attention of the public. + +If one had been content merely to make an anthology of poems dealing +with the poet, one's deed would perhaps have been easier to excuse, for +the public has been so often assured that anthologies are an economical +form of publication, and a time-saving form of predigested food, that it +usually does not stop to consider whether the material was worth +collecting in the first place. Gleaner after gleaner has worked in the +field of English literature, sorting and sifting, until almost the last +grain, husk, straw and thistle have been gathered and stored with their +kind. But instead of making an anthology, we have gone on the assumption +that something more than accidental identity of subject-matter holds +together the apparently desultory remarks of poets on the subject of the +poet's eyebrows, his taste in liquors, his addiction to midnight +rambles, and whatnot. We have followed a labyrinthine path through the +subject with faith that, if we were but patient in observing the clues, +we should finally emerge at a point of vantage on the other side of the +woods. + +The primary grounds of this faith may have appeared to the skeptic +ridiculously inadequate. Our faith was based upon the fact that, more +than two thousand years ago, a serious accusation had been made against +poets, against which they had been challenged to defend themselves. This +led us to conclude that there must be unity of intention in poetry +dealing with the poet, for we believed that when English poets talked of +themselves and their craft, they were attempting to remove the stigma +placed upon the name of poet by Plato's charge. + +Now it is easy for a doubter to object that many of the poems on the +subject show the poet, not arraying evidence for a trial, but leaning +over the brink of introspection in the attitude of Narcissus. One need +seek no farther than self-love, it may be suggested, to find the motive +for the poet's absorption in his reflection. Yet it is incontrovertible +that the self-infatuation of our Narcissus has its origin in the +conviction that no one else understands him, and that this conviction is +founded upon a very real attitude of hostility on the part of his +companions. The lack of sympathy between the English poet and the public +is so notorious that Edmund Gosse is able to state as a truism: + While in France poetry has been accustomed to reflect the + general tongue of the people, the great poets of England have + almost always had to struggle against a complete dissonance + between their own aims and interests and those of the nation. + The result has been that England, the most inartistic of the + modern races, has produced the largest number of exquisite + literary artists. [Footnote: _French Profiles_, p. 344.] + +Furthermore, even though everyone may agree that a lurking sense of +hostile criticism is back of the poet's self-absorption, another ground +for skepticism may lie in our assumption that Plato is the central +figure in the opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy +of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the +student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt +their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal +and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in +classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher +North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces +of cipher foolishness, abstractions which we named the puritan, the +philosopher, the philistine. Possibly by so doing we have given the +impression that poets are beating the air against an abstraction when +they are in reality delivering thumping blows upon the body of a +personal enemy. And if these generalizations appear indefensible, still +more misleading, it may be urged, is an attempt to represent that the +poet, when he takes issue with this and that opponent, is answering a +challenge hidden away from the unstudious in the tenth book of Plato's +_Republic_. It is doubtful even whether a number of our poets are +aware of the existence of Plato's challenge, and much more doubtful +whether they have it in mind as they write. + +Second thought must make it clear, however, that to prove ignorance of +Plato's accusation on the part of one poet and another does not at all +impair the possibility that it is his accusation which they are +answering. So multiple are the threads of influence leading from the +_Republic_ through succeeding literatures and civilizations that it +is unsafe to assert, offhand, that any modern expression of hostility to +poetry may not be traced, by a patient untangler of evidence, to a +source in the _Republic_. But even this is aside from the point. +One might concede that the wide-spread modern antagonism to poetry would +have been the same if Plato had never lived, and still maintain that in +the _Republic_ is expressed for all time whatever in anti-aesthetic +criticism is worthy of a serious answer. Whether poets themselves are +aware of it or not, we have a right to assert that in concerning +themselves with the character of the ideal poet, they are responding to +Plato's challenge. + +This may not be enough to justify our faith that these defensive +expositions lead us anywhere. Let us agree that certain poets of the +nineteenth and twentieth centuries have answered Plato's challenge. But +has the Poet likewise answered it? If from their independent efforts to +paint the ideal poet there has emerged a portrait as sculpturally clear +in outline as is Plato's portrait of the ideal philosopher, we shall +perhaps be justified in saying, Yes, the Poet, through a hundred mouths, +has spoken. + +Frankly, the composite picture which we have been considering has not +sculptural clarity. To the casual observer it bears less resemblance to +an alto-relief than to a mosaic; no sooner do distinct patterns spring +out of myriad details than they shift under the onlooker's eyes to a +totally different form. All that we can claim for the picture is +excellence as a piece of impressionism, which one must scan with +half-closed eyes at a calculated distance, if one would appreciate its +central conception. + +Apparently readers of English poetry have not taken the trouble to scan +it with such care. They may excuse their indifference by declaring that +an attempt to discover a common aesthetic principle in a collection of +views as catholic as those with which we have dealt is as absurd as an +attempt to discover philosophical truth by taking a census of general +opinion. Still, obvious as are the limitations of a popular vote in +determining an issue, it has a certain place in the discovery of truth. +One would not entirely despise the benefit derived from a general survey +of philosophers' convictions, for instance. Into the conclusions of each +philosopher, even of the greatest, there are bound to enter certain +personal whimsicalities of thought, which it is profitable to eliminate, +by finding the common elements in the thought of several men. If the +quest of a universal least common denominator forces one to give up +everything that is of significance in the views of philosophers, there +is profit, at least, in learning that the title of philosopher does not +carry with it a guarantee of truth-telling. On the other hand if we find +universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common _cogito ergo +sum_, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a +discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex +system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no +real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar +census of the views of poets. + +After hearkening to the general suffrage of poets on the question of the +poet's character, we must bring a serious charge against them if a +deafening clamor of contradiction reverberates in our ears. In such a +case their claim that they are seers, or masters of harmony, can be +worth little. The unbiased listener is likely to assure us that +clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets' +speaking amounts to, but we shall be slow to acknowledge as much. Have +we been merely the dupe of pretty phrasing when we felt ourselves +insured against discord by the testimony of Keats? Hear him: + + How many bards gild the lapses of time! + * * * * * + ... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme, + These will in throngs before my mind intrude, + But no confusion, no disturbance rude + Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. + +However incompatible the characteristics of the poets celebrated by +Wordsworth and by Swinburne, by Christina Rossetti and by Walt Whitman +may have seemed in immediate juxtaposition, we have trusted that we need +only retire to a position where "distance of recognizance bereaves" +their individual voices, in order to detect in their mingled notes +"pleasing music, and not wild uproar." + +The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our +multitudinous verse-writers may point out that we should have had more +right to expect concord if we had shown some discernment in sifting true +poets from false. Those who have least claim to the title of poet have +frequently been most garrulous in voicing their convictions. Moreover, +these pseudo-poets outnumber genuine poets one hundred to one, yet no +one in his right mind would contend that their expressions of opinion +represent more than a straw vote, if they conflict with the judgment of +a single true poet. + +Still, our propensity for listening to the rank breath of the multitude +is not wholly indefensible. In the first place pseudo-poets have not +created so much discord as one might suppose. A lurking sense of their +own worthlessness has made them timid of utterance except as they echo +and prolong a note that has been struck repeatedly by singers of +reputation. This echoing, it may be added, has sometimes been effective +in bringing the traditions of his craft to the attention of a young +singer as yet unaware of them. Thus Bowles and Chivers, neither of whom +has very strong claim to the title of bard, yet were in a measure +responsible for the minor note in Coleridge's and Poe's description of +the typical poet. + +Even when the voices of spurious bards have failed to chime with the +others, the resulting discord has not been of serious moment. A +counterfeit coin may be as good a touchstone for the detection of pure +silver, as is pure silver for the detection of counterfeit. Not only are +a reader's views frequently clarified by setting a poetaster beside a +poet as a foil, but poets themselves have clarified their views because +they have been incited by declarations in false verse to express their +convictions more unreservedly than they should otherwise have done. +Pseudo-poets have sometimes been of genuine benefit by their +exaggeration of some false note which they have adopted from poetry of +the past. No sooner do they exaggerate such a note, than a concerted +shout of protest from true poets drowns the erroneous statement, and +corrects the misleading impression which careless statements in earlier +verse might have left with us. Thus the morbid singer exhibited in minor +American verse of the last century, and the vicious singer lauded in one +strain of English verse, performed a genuine service by calling forth +repudiation, by major poets, of traits which might easily lead a singer +in the direction of morbidity and vice. + +The confusion of sound which our critic complains of is not to be +remedied merely by silencing the chorus of echoic voices. If we dropped +from consideration all but poets of unquestionable merit, we should not +be more successful in detecting a single clear note, binding all their +voices together. When the ideal poet of Shelley is set against that of +Byron, or that of Matthew Arnold against that of Browning, there is no +more unison than when great and small in the poetic world are allowed to +speak indiscriminately. + +Does this prove that only the supreme poet speaks truly, and that we +must hush all voices but his if we would learn what is the essential +element in the poetic character? Then we are indeed in a hard case. +There is no unanimity of opinion among us regarding the supreme English +poet of the last century, and if we dared follow personal taste in +declaring one of higher altitude than all the others only a small +percentage of readers would be satisfied when we set up the _Prelude_ or +_Adonais_ or _Childe Harold_ or _Sordello_ beside the _Republic_ as +containing the one portrait of the ideal singer worthy to stand beside +the portrait of the ideal philosopher. And this is not the worst of the +difficulty. Even if we turn from Shelley to Byron, from Wordsworth to +Browning, in quest of the one satisfactory conception of the poet, we +shall not hear in anyone of their poems the single clear ringing note +for which we are listening. When anyone of these men is considering the +poetic character, his thought behaves like a pendulum, swinging back and +forth between two poles. + +Thus we ourselves have admitted the futility of our quest of truth, the +critic may conclude. But no, before we admit as much, let us see exactly +what constitutes the lack of unity which troubles us. After its +persistence in verse of the same country, the same period, the same +tradition, the same poet, even, has led us to the brink of despair, its +further persistence rouses in us fresh hope, or at least intense +curiosity, for what impresses us as the swinging of a pendulum keeps up +its rhythmical beat, not merely in the mind of each poet, but in each +phase of his thought. We find the same measured antithesis of thought, +whether he is considering the singer's environment or his health, his +inspiration or his mission. + +In treatment even of the most superficial matters related to the poet's +character, this vibration forces itself upon our attention. Poets are +sofar from subscribing to Taine's belief in the supreme importance of +environment as molder of genius that the question of the singer's proper +habitat is of comparative indifference to them, yet the dualism that we +have noted runs as true to form here as in more fundamental issues. When +one takes the suffrage of poets in general on the question of +environment, two voices are equally strong. Genius is fostered by +solitude, we hear; but again, genius is fostered by human companionship. +At first we may assume that this divergence of view characterizes +separate periods. Writers in the romantic period, we say, praised the +poet whose thought was turned inward by solitude; while writers in the +Victorian period praised the poet whose thought was turned upon the +spectacle of human passions. But on finding that this classification is +true only in the most general way, we go farther. Within the Victorian +period Browning, we say, is the advocate of the social poet, as Arnold +is the advocate of the solitary one. But still our classification is +inadequate. Is Browning the expositor of the gregarious poet? It is true +that he feels it necessary for the singer to "look upon men and their +cares and hopes and fears and joys." [Footnote: _Pauline_.] But he +makes Sordello flee like a hunted creature back to Goito and solitude in +quest of renewed inspiration. Is Arnold the expositor of the solitary +poet? True, he urges him to fly from "the strange disease of modern +life". [Footnote: _The Scholar Gypsy_.] Yet he preaches that the +duty of the poet is + + to scan + Not his own course, but that of man. +[Footnote: _Resignation_.] + +Within the romantic period the same phenomenon is evident. Does +Wordsworth paint the ideal poet dwelling apart from human distractions? +Yet he declares that his deepest insight is gained by listening to "the +still sad music of humanity". In Keats, Shelley, Byron, the same +antithesis of thought is not less evident. + +We cannot justly conclude that a compromise between contradictions, an +avoidance of extremes, is what anyone of these poets stands for. It is +complete absorption in the drame of human life that makes one a poet, +they aver; but again, it is complete isolation that allows the inmost +poetry of one's nature to rise to consciousness. At the same time they +make it clear that the supreme poet needs the gifts of both +environments. To quote Walt Whitman, + + What the full-grown poet came, + Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe + with all its shows of day and night) saying, He + is mine; + But out spake too the Soul of men, proud, jealous + and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone; + --Then the full-grown poet stood between the two and + took each by the hand; + And today and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly + holding hands, + Which he will never release till he reconciles the two, + And wholly and joyously blends them. + +The paradox in poets' views was equally perplexing, no matter what phase +of the poetic character was considered. A mere resumé of the topics +discussed in these essays is enough to make the two horns of the dilemma +obtrude themselves. Did we consider the financial status of the poet? We +heard that he should experience all the luxurious sensations that wealth +can bring; on the other hand we heard that his poverty should shield him +from distractions that might call him away from accumulation of +spiritual treasure. Did we consider the poet's age? We heard that the +freshness of sensation possessed only by youth carries the secret of +poetry; on the other hand we heard that the secret lies in depth of +spiritual insight possible only to old age. So in the allied question of +the poet's body. He should have + + The dress + Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness + At eye and ear, + +that no beauty in the physical world may escape him. Yet he should be +absorbed in the other world to such a degree that blindness, even, is a +blessing to him, enabling him to "see, no longer blinded by his eyes." +The question of the poet's health arose. He should have the exuberance +and aplomb of the young animal; no, he should have a body frail enough +to enable him, like the mediæval mystic, to escape from its +importunatedemands upon the spirit. + +In the more fundamental questions that poets considered, relating to the +poet's temperament, his loves, his inspiration, his morality, his +religion, his mission, the same cleavage invariably appeared. What +constitutes the poetic temperament? It is a fickle interchange of joy +and grief, for the poet is lifted on the wave of each new sensation; it +is an imperturbable serenity, for the poet dwells apart with the eternal +verities. What is the distinguishing characteristic of his love? The +object of his worship must be embodied, passionate, yet his desire is +for purely spiritual union with her. What is the nature of his +inspiration? It fills him with trancelike impassivity to sensation; it +comes upon him with such overwhelming sensation that he must touch the +walls to see whether they or his visions are the reality. [Footnote: See +Christopher Wordsworth, _Memoirs of Wordsworth_, Vol. II, p. 480.] +How is his moral life different from that of other men? He is more +fiercely tempted, because he is more sensitive to human passions; he is +shut away from all temptations because his interest is solely in the +principle of beauty. What is the nature of his religious instinct? He is +mad with thirst for God; he will have no God but his own humanity. What +is his mission? He must awaken men to the wonder of the physical world +and fit them to abide therein; he must redeem them from physical +bondage, and open their eyes to the spiritual world. + +The impatient listener to this lengthy catalogue of the poet's views may +assert that it has no significance. It merely shows that there are many +kinds of poets, who attempt to imitate many aspects of human life. But +surely our catalogue does not show just this. There is no multiform +picture of the poet here. The pendulum of his desire vibrates +undeviatingly between two points only. Sense and spirit, spirit and +sense, the pulse of his nature seems to reiterate incessantly. There is +no poet so absorbed in sensation that physical objects do not +occasionally fade into unreality when he compares them with the spirit +of life. Even Walt Whitman, most sensuous of all our poets, exclaims, + + Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul + That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, + concepts, non-realities. +[Footnote: _Apparitions_.] + +On the other hand there is no poet whose taste is so purely spiritual +that he is indifferent to sensation. The idealism of Wordsworth, even, +did not preclude his finding in sensation + + An appetite, a feeling and a love + That had no need of a remoter charm + By thought supplied. + +Is this systole and diastole of the affection from sense to spirit, from +spirit to sense, peculiarly characteristic of English poets? There may +be some reason for assuming that it is. Historians have repeatedly +pointed out that there are two strains in the English blood, the one +northern and ascetic, the other southern and epicurean. In the modern +English poet the austere prophetic character of the Norse scald is +wedded to the impressionability of the troubadour. No wonder there is a +battle in his breast when he tries to single out one element or the +other as his most distinctive quality of soul. Yet, were it not unsafe +to generalize when our data apply to only one country, we should venture +the assertion that the dualism of the poet's desires is not an insular +characteristic, but is typical of his race in every country. + +Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world, +shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an +irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves +singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over +and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is +harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says +Eurymachus in the _Symposium_. It is union of the finite and the +infinite, says Socrates in the _Philebus_. Do the poet's desires +point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that +stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole +secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. +His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in +two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the +spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot +tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity +in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and +barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination +which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of +sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a +little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this +power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is +called _Voyage à L'Infine_: + + The swan existing + Is like a song with an accompaniment + Imaginary. + + Across the grassy lake, + Across the lake to the shadow of the willows + It is accompanied by an image, + --as by Debussy's + "Réflets dans l'eau." + + The swan that is + Reflects + Upon the solitary water--breast to breast + With the duplicity: + "The other one!" + + And breast to breast it is confused. + O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession! + It is accompanied by the image of itself + Alone. + + At night + The lake is a wide silence, + Without imagination. + +But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic +answering of sense to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered +by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and +spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the +spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense; +yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is +clearly either physical or spiritual; therefore they do not stand poised +between the two worlds with the perfect balance of interests which marks +the poet. The philosopher and the man of religion recognize their goal +as a spiritual and ascetic one. If they concern themselves more than is +needful with the temporal and sensual, they feel that they are false to +their ideal. The scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand, +are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss +consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of +course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius +of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But +if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph +just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the +invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is +not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us +conscious of the two worlds of sense and spirit, reflecting one another. + +Supposing that all this is true, what is gained by discovering, from a +consensus of poets' views, that the distinctive characteristic of the +poet is harmony of sense and spirit? Is not this so obvious as to be a +truism? It is perhaps so obvious that like all the truest things in the +world it is likely to be ignored unless insisted upon occasionally. +Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English +criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written +criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually +ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own +goal. + +It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of +English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of +the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's _School of +Abuse_, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who +had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry +were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan +criticism, that of Lodge, [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry, Musick and +Stage Plays._] Harrington, [Footnote: _Apology for Poetry._] Meres, +[Footnote: _Palladis Tamia._] Campion, [Footnote: _Observations in the +Art of English Poetry._] Daniel, [Footnote: _Defense of Rhyme._] and +even in lesser degree of Sidney, obscures the aesthetic problem by +turning it into an ethical one. + +In the criticism of Sidney, himself a poet, one does find implied a +recognition of the twofold significance of the poet's powers. He asserts +his spiritual pre-eminence strongly, declaring that the poet, unlike the +scientist, is not bound to the physical world.[Footnote: "He is not +bound to any such subjection, as scientists, to nature." _Defense of +Poetry._] On the other hand he is clearly aware of the need for a +sensuous element in poetry, since by it, Sidney declares, the poet may +lead men by "delight" to follow the forms of virtue. + +The next critic of note, Dryden, in his revulsion from the ascetic +character which the puritans would develop in the poet, swung too far to +the other extreme, and threw the poetic character out of balance by +belittling its spiritual insight. He did justice to the physical element +in poetry, defining poetic drama, the type of his immediate concern, as +"a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions, and +traverses of fortune," [Footnote: _English Garner,_ III, 513.] but +he appears to have felt the ideal aspect of the poet's nature as merely +a negation of the sensual, so that he was driven to the absurdity of +recommending a purely mechanical device, rhyme, as a means of elevating +poetry above the sordid plane of "a bare imitation." In the eighteenth +century, Edmund Burke likewise laid too much stress upon the physical +aspect of the poet's nature, in accounting for the sublime in poetry as +originating in the sense of pain, and the beautiful as originating in +pleasure. Yet he comes closer than most critics to laying his finger +onthe particular point which distinguishes poets from philosophers, +namely, their dependence upon sensation. + +With the single exception of Burke, however, the critics of the +eighteenth century labored under a misapprehension no less blind than +the moral obsession which twisted Elizabethan criticism. In the +eighteenth century critics were prone to confuse the spiritual element +in the poet's nature with intellectualism, and the sensuous element with +emotionalism. Such criticism tended to drive the poet either into an +arid display of wit, on the one hand, or into sentimental excess, on the +other, and the native English distrust of emotion led eighteenth century +critics to praise the poet when the intellect had the upper hand. But +surely poets have made it clear enough that the intellect is not the +distinctive characteristic of the poet. To be intelligent is merely to +be human. Intelligence is only a tool, poets have repeatedly insisted, +in their quarrel with philosophers. In proportion as one is intelligent +within one's own field, one excels, poets would admit. If one is +intelligent with respect to fisticuffs one is likely to become a good +prize-fighter, but no matter how far refinement of intelligence goes in +this direction, it will not make a pugilist into a poet. Intelligence +must belong likewise, in signal degree, to the great poet, but it is +neither one of the two essential elements in his nature. Augustan +critics starved the spiritual element in poetry, even while they +imagined that they were feeding it, for in sharpening his wit the poet +came no nearer expressing the "poor soul, the center of his sinful +earth" than when he reveled in emotion. We no longer believe that in the +most truly poetic nature the intelligence of a Pope is joined with the +emotionalism of a Rousseau. We believe that the spirituality of a +Crashaw is blent with the sensuousness of a Swinburne. + +Nineteenth century criticism, since it is almost entirely the work of +poets, should not be thus at odds with the conception of the poet +expressed in poetry. But although nineteenth century prose criticism +moves in the right direction, it is not entirely adequate. The poet is +not at his best when he is working in a prose medium. He works too +consciously in prose, hence his intuitive flashes are not likely to find +expression. After he has tried to express his buried life there, he +himself is likely to warn us that what he has said "is well, is +eloquent, but 'tis not true." Even Shelley, the most successful of +poet-critics, gives us a more vivid comprehension of the poetical +balance of sense and spirit through his poet-heroes than through _The +Defense of Poetry_, for he is almost exclusively concerned, in that +essay, with the spiritual aspect of poetry. He expresses, in fact, the +converse of Dryden's view in that he regards the sensuous as negation or +dross merely. He asserts: + + Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the + beauty of their conception in naked truth and splendor, and it + is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not + necessary to temper this planetary music to mortal ears. + +The harmony in Shelley's nature which made it possible for his +contemporaries to believe him a gross sensualist, and succeeding +generations to believe him an angel, is better expressed by Browning, +who says: + + His noblest characteristic I call his simultaneous perception + of Power and Love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in + the concrete, while he throws, from his poet-station between + them both, swifter, subtler and more numerous films for the + connection of each with each than have been thrown by any + modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.[Footnote: Preface + to the letters of Shelley (afterward found spurious).] + +Yet Browning, likewise, gives a more illuminating picture of the poetic +nature in his poetry than in his prose. + +The peculiar merit of poetry about the poet is that it makes a valuable +supplement to prose criticism. We have been tempted to deny that such +poetry is the highest type of art. It has seemed that poets, when they +are introspective and analytical of their gift, are not in the highest +poetic mood. But when we are on the quest of criticism, instead of +poetry, we are frankly grateful for such verse. It is analytical enough +to be intelligible to us, and still intuitive enough to convince us of +its truthfulness. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ has been condemned in +certain quarters as "a talking about poetry, not poetry itself," but in +part, at least, the _Prelude_ is truly poetry. For this reason it +gives us more valuable ideas about the nature of poetry than does the +_Preface to the Lyrical Ballads_. If it is worth while to analyze +the poetic character at all, then poetry on the poet is invaluable to +us. + +Perhaps it is too much for us to decide whether the picture of the poet +at which we have been gazing is worthy to be placed above Plato's +picture of the philosopher. The poet does not contradict Plato's charge +against him. His self-portrait bears out the accusation that he is +unable to see "the divine beauty--pure and clear and unalloyed, not +clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and +varieties of human life." [Footnote: _Symposium_, 212.] Plato would +agree with the analysis of the poetic character that Keats once +struggled with, when he exclaimed, + +What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in +literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean +_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in +uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after +fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine +isolated verisimilitude caught from the Pentralium of mystery, from +being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge--With a great +poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather +obliterates all consideration. + +Plato would agree with this,--all but the last sentence. Only, in place +of the phrase "negative capability," he would substitute "incapability," +and reflect that the poet fails to see absolute beauty because he is not +content to leave the sensual behind and press on to absolute reality. + +It may be that Plato is right, yet one cannot help wishing that sometime +a poet may arise of greater power of persuasion than any with whom we +have dealt, who will prove to Plato what he appears ever longing to be +convinced of, that absolute ideality is not a negation of the sensual, +and that poetry, in revealing the union of sense and spirit, is the +strongest proof of idealism that we possess. A poet may yet arise who +will prove that he is right in refusing to acknowledge that this world +is merely a surface upon which is reflected the ideals which constitute +reality and which abide in a different realm. The assumption in that +conception is that, if men have spiritual vision, they may apprehend +ideals directly, altogether apart from sense. On the contrary, the +impression given by the poet is that ideality constitutes the very +essence of the so-called physical world, and that this essence is +continually striving to express itself through refinement and remolding +of the outer crust of things. So, when the world of sense comes to +express perfectly the ideal, it will not be a mere representation of +reality. It will be reality. If he can prove this, we must acknowledge +that, not the rationalistic philosopher, but the poet, grasps reality +_in toto_. + +However inconclusive his proof, the claims of the poet must fascinate +one with their implications. The two aspects of human life, the physical +and the ideal, focus in the poet, and the result is the harmony which is +art. The fact is of profound philosophical significance, surely, for +union of the apparent contradictions of the sensual and the spiritual +can only mean that idealism is of the essence of the universe. What is +the poetic metaphor but the revelation of an identical meaning in the +physical and spiritual world? The sympathetic reader of poetry cannot +but see the reflection of the spiritual in the sensual, and the sensual +in the spiritual, even as does the poet, and one, as the other, must be +by temperament an idealist. + + + + +INDEX + + +Addison, Joseph, +"A.E." (see George William Russell), +Aeschylus, +Agathon, +Akins, Zoe, +Alcaeus, +Aldrich, Anne Reeve, +Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, +Alexander, Hartley Burr, +Alexander, William, +Allston, Washington, +Ambercrombe, Lascelles, +Anderson, Margaret Steele, +Angelo, Michael, +Arensberg, Walter Conrad, +Aristotle, +Arnold, Edwin, +Arnold, Matthew, + his discontent; + on the poet's death; + inspiration; + loneliness; morality; + religion; + usefulness; + youth; + his sense of superiority. +Arnold, Thomas, +Asquith, Herbert, +Austin, Alfred, + +Bacon, Josephine Dodge Daskam, +Baker, Karle Wilson, +Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, +Beatrice, +Beattie, James, +Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, +Beers, Henry A., +Benét, Stephen Vincent, +Benét, William Rose, +Bennet, William, +Binyon, Robert Lawrence, +Blake, William, + later poets on; + on inspiration; + on the poet as truthteller; + on the poet's religion. +Blunden, Edmund, +Boccaccio, +Boker, George Henry, +Borrow, George, +Bowles, William Lisle, +Branch, Anna Hempstead, +Brawne, Fanny H., +Bridges, Robert, +Brontë, Emily, +Brooke, Rupert, +Browne, T. E., +Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, + appearance; + _Aurora Leigh_; + on Keats; + on the poet's age; + content with his own time; + democracy; + eyes; + habitat; + health, + humanitarianism, + inferiority to his creations, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + pain, + personality, + religion, + resentment at patronage, + self-consciousness, + self-expression, + sex, + usefulness, + other poets on, + +Browning, Robert, + on fame, + on inspiration, + on the poet's beauty, + loneliness, + love, + morals, + persecutions, + pride, + religion, + self-expression, + sex, + superiority, + usefulness, + on Shakespeare, + on Shelley, + _Sordello_, + other poets on +Bryant, William Cullen +Buchanan, Robert +Bunker, John Joseph +Burke, Edmund +Burleigh, William Henry +Burnet, Dana +Burns, Robert, + his self-depreciation, + on the poet's caste, + habitat, + inspiration, + love of liberty, + morals, persecutions, + poverty, + superiority, + other poets on +Burton, Richard +Butler, Samuel +Byron, Lord, + his body, + escape from himself in poetry, + friendship with Shelley, + indifference to fame, + later poets on, + his morals, + his mother, + his religion, + self-portraits in verse, + superiority, + on Tasso + +Camöens +Campbell, Thomas +Campion, Thomas +Candole, Alec de +Carlin, Francis +Carlyle, Thomas +Carman, Bliss +Carpenter, Rhys +Cary, Alice +Cary, Elisabeth Luther +Cassells, S. J. +Cavalcanti, Guido +Cawein, Madison +Cellini, Benvenuto +Cervantes +Chapman, George +Chatterton, Thomas +Chaucer, Geoffrey +Cheney, Annie Elizabeth +Chénièr, André +Chesterton, Gilbert Keith +Chivers, Thomas Holley +Clare, John +Clough, Arthur Hugh +Coleridge, Hartley +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, + appearance; + on Blake; + on Chatterton; + friendship with Wordsworth; + on the poet's habitat; + health; + love; + morals; + reflection in nature; + religion; + youth; + usefulness; + later poets on +Collins, William, +Colonna, Vittoria, +Colvin, Sidney, +Conkling, Grace Hazard, +Cornwall, Barry (see Procter, Bryan Waller), +Cowper, William, +Cox, Ethel Louise, +Crabbe, George, +Crashaw, Richard, +Cratylus, + +Dana, Richard Henry, +Daniel, Samuel, +D'Annunzio, Gabriele, +Dante, + G.L. Raymond on; + Oscar Wilde on; + Sara King Wiley on; +Dargan, Olive, +David, +Davidson, John, +Davies, William Henry, +Dermody, Thomas, +Descartes, +Dickinson, Emily, +Dionysodorus, +Dobell, Sidney, +Dobson, Austin, +Dommett, Alfred, +Donne, John, +Dowden, Edward, +Dowson, Ernest, +Drake, Joseph Rodman, +Drinkwater, John, +Druce, C.J., +Dryden, John, +Dunbar, Paul Laurence, +Dunroy, William Reed, +Dunsany, Lord Edward, +Dyer, Sidney, +Ehrman, Max, +Elijah, +Eliot, Ebenezer, +Eliot, George, +Emerson, Ralph Waldo, + his contempt for the public; + his democracy; + his humility; + on inspiration; + on love of fame; + on the poet's divinity; + love; + morals; + poverty; + solitude; + usefulness +Euripedes, +Euthydemus, +Evans, Mrs. E.H., + +Fainier, C.H., +Fairfield, S. L., +Field, Eugene., +Flecker, James Elroy, +Flint, F.S., +French, Daniel Chester, +Freneau, Philip Morin, +Fuller, Frances, +Fuller, Metta, + +Gage, Mrs. Frances, +Garnett, Richard, +Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, +Giddings, Franklin Henry, +Gilbert, Sir William Schwenek +Gilder, Richard Watson; + on Helen Hunt Jackson; + on Emma Lazarus; + on the poet's age; + blindness; + inspiration; + morality; + normality; + poverty +Gillman, James +Giltinan, Caroline +Goethe +Gosse, Edmund +Gosson, Stephen +Graves, Robert +Gray, Thomas +Grenfil, Julian +Griffith, William +Guiterman, Arthur + +Hake, Thomas Gordon +Halleck, Shelley +Halpine, Charles Graham +Hardy, Thomas +Harris, Thomas Lake +Harrison, Birge +Hayne, Paul Hamilton +Hazlitt, William +Hemans, Felicia +Henderson, Daniel +Henley, William Ernest +Herbert, George +Herrick, Robert +Hewlett, Maurice +Hildreth, Charles Latin +Hill, H., +Hilliard, George Stillman +Hillyer, Robert Silliman +Hoffman, C. F. +Hogg, Thomas Jefferson +Holland, Josiah Gilbert +Holmes, Oliver Wendell +Homer +Hood, Thomas +Hooper, Lucy +"Hope, Lawrence" (see Violet + Nicolson) +Horne, Richard Hengest +Houghton, Lord +Houseman, Laurence +Hovey, Richard +Hubbard, Harvey +Hubner, Charles William +Hughes, John +Hugo, Victor +Hunt, Leigh + +Ingelow, Jean + +Jackson, Helen Hunt +Jameson, Mrs. Anna Brownell +Johnson, Donald F. Goold +Johnson, Lionel +Johnson, Robert Underwood, +Johnson, Rossiter +Johnson, Dr. Samuel +Jonson, Ben + +Kaufman, Herbert +Keats, John; + his body; + on Burns; + Christopher North on; + on his desire for fame; + his egotism; + on Elizabethan poets; + on expression; + on the harmony of poets + Homer's blindness; + on his indifference to the public; + on inspiration; + later poets on Keats; + on love; + quarrel with philosophy; + on the poet's democracy, + gift of prophecy, + habitat, + morals, + persecutions, + unpoetical character, + unobtrusiveness, + usefulness +Keble, John +Kemble, Frances Anne +Kent, Charles +Kenyon, James Benjamin +Kerl, Simon +Khayyam, Omar +Kilmer, Joyce +Kingsley, Charles +Kipling, Rudyard +Knibbs, Harry Herbert + +Lamb, Charles +Landor, Walter Savage; + on Byron; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + on Homer; + on intoxication and inspiration; + on the poet's age, + morals, + pride; + on poetry and reason; + on Shakespeare; + on Southey +Lang, Andrew +Lanier, Sidney +Larcom, Lucy +Laura +Lazarus, Emma +Ledwidge, Francis +Le Gallienne, Richard +Leonard, William Ellery +Lindsay, Vachel +Lockhart, John Gibson +Lodge, Thomas +Lombroso, Césare +Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; + his democracy; + on grief and poetry; + _Michael Angelo_; + on the poet's morals, + solitude; + on the savage poet; + on inspiration +Longinus +Lord, William W. +Low, Benjamin R. C. +Lowell, Amy +Lowell, James Russell; + on Burns; + on the poet's age, + divinity, + habitat, + inspiration, + usefulness +Lucan +Lucretius +Lytton, Bulwer, on André Chénier; + on the female poet; + on Milton; + on the poet's appearance, + fame, + persecution, + usefulness + +McDonald, Carl +Mackaye, Percy +Maclean, L. E. +"Macleod, Fiona" (see William Sharp) +MacNiel, J. C. +Mann, Dorothea Lawrence +Mansfield, Richard +Map, Walter +Markham, Edwin +Marlowe, Christopher, + Alfred Noyes on, + Josephine Preston Peabody on, +Marquis, Don, +Masefield, John, +Massey, Gerald, +Masters, Edgar Lee, +Meres, Francis, +Meredith, George, +Meredith, Owen, +Meynell, Alice, +Meynell, Viola, +Middleton, Richard, +Millay, Edna St. Vincent, +Miller, Joaquin, +Milton, John, +Miriam, +Mitchell, L. E., +Mitchell, Stewart +Mitford, Mary Russell, +Montgomery, James, +Moody, William Vaughan, +Moore, Thomas, +Morley, Christopher, +Morris, Lewis, +Morris, William, +Myers, Frederick W. H. + +Naden, Constance, Nash, Thomas, +Neihardt, John Gneisenau, +Nero, +Nerval, Gerard de, +Newbolt, Henry, +Newman, Henry, +Newton, Sir Isaac, +Nicolson, Violet, +Nordau, Max Simon, +North, Christopher, +Noyes, Alfred, + +O'Connor, Norreys Jephson, +Osborne, James Insley, +O'Sheel, Shaemus, +Otway, Thomas, + +Pater, Walter, +Patmore, Coventry, on the + poet's expression, + indifference to fame, + love, + morals, + religion, + usefulness +Payne, John, +Peabody, Josephine Preston, +Percival, James Gates, +Percy, William Alexander, +Petrarch, +Phidias, +Phillips, Stephen, +Phillpotts, Eden, +Pierce, C. A., +Plato, + _Ion_, + _Phaedo_ + _Philebus_, + _Phaedrus_, + _Republic_, + _Symposium_, +Poe, Edgar Allan, +Pollock, Robert, +Pope, Alexander, +Pound, Ezra, +Praed, Winthrop Mackworth +Price, C. Augustus +Procter, Adelaide Anne +Procter, Bryan Cornwall + +Rand, Theodore Harding +Raphael +Raymond, George Lansing +Reade, Thomas Buchanan +Realf, Richard +Reno, Lydia M. +Rice, Cale Young +Rice, Harvey +Riley, James Whitcomb +Rittenhouse, Jessie +Rives, Hallie Erven +Robbins, Reginald Chauncey +Roberts, Cecil +Roberts, Charles George Douglas +Robinson, Edwin Arlington +Robinson, Mary +Rossetti, Christina +Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, + on Chatterton, + on Dante, + on Marston, + on the poet's age, + expression, + inspiration, + love, + morals, + usefulness +Rousseau, Jean Jacques +Ruskin, John +Russell, George William +Ryan, Abram J. + +Sampson, Henry Aylett +Sandburg, Carl +Sappho; + Alcaeus on, + modern poets on her genius, + on her passion +Savage, John +Saxe, John Godfrey +Scala, George Augustus +Schauffler, Robert Haven +Schiller, Johann Christoff Friedrich +Scott, Sir Walter +Seeger, Alan +Service, Robert +Shairp, Principal +Shakespeare, William +Sharp, William +Shelley, Percy Bysshe, + and Byron, + on female poets, + his hostility to the public, + his indifference to his body, + on Keats, + on the poet's early death, + habitat, + inspiration, + love, + madness, + loneliness, + morals, + persecutions, + poverty, + religion, + seership, + usefulness, + on prenatal life, + on Tasso +Shenstone, William +Sidney, Sir Philip +Sinclair, May +Smart, Christopher +Smith, Alexander, +Smith, J. Thorne, jr., +Socrates, +Solomon, +Soran, Charles, +Southey, Robert, +Spenser, Edmund, +Sprague, E.L., +Stedman, Edmund Clarence, +Stephens, James, +Stickney, Trumbull, +Stoddard, Charles Warren, +Sullivan, Sir Arthur, +Swinburne, Algernon, + chafing against moral restraints; + on Victor Hugo; + on Marston; + on his mother; + on the poet's age; + love of liberty; + morals; + parentage; + religion; + usefulness; + on Christina Rossetti; + on Sappho; + on Shelley +Symons, Arthur, + +Taine, Hippolyte Adolph, +Tannahill, John, +Tasso, Torquato, +Taylor, Bayard, +Teasdale, Sara, +Tennyson, Alfred, + burlesque on inspiration in wine; + his contempt for the public; + on the poet's death; + expression; + inspiration; + intuitions; + love of liberty; + lovelessness; + morality; + pantheism; + persecution; + rank; + religion; + superiority to art; + usefulness +Tertullian, Thomas, Edith, +Thompson, Francis, + confidence in immortality; + humility; + on inspiration; + on love and poetry; + on Alice Meynell; + on Viola Meynell; + on the poet's body; + expression; + grief; + habitat; + loneliness; + morals; + youth +Thomson, James, +Thomson, James (B.V.), + his atheism; + on Mrs. Browning; + on inspiration; + on pessimistic poetry; + on Platonic love; + on Shelley; + on Tasso; + on Weltschmerz +Timrod, Henry, +Tolstoi, Count Leo, +Towne, Charles Hanson, +Trench, Herbert, +Tupper, Martin Farquhar, + +Van Dyke, Henry, +Vergil, +Verlaine, Paul Marie, +Villon, François, +Viviani, Emilia, + +Waddington, Samuel +Ware, Eugene +Watts-Dunton, Theodore +Wesley, Charles +West, James Harcourt +Wheelock, John Hall +White, Kirke +Whitman, Walt; + confidence in immortality; + democracy; + on expression; + on the poet's idleness, + inspiration, + morals, + normality, + protean nature, + love, + reconciling of man and nature; + on the poet-warrior; + his zest +Whittier, John Greenleaf +Wilde, Oscar, on Byron; + on Dante; + on Keats; + on love and art; + his morals; + on the poet's prophecy; + on the uselessness of art +Wiley, Sara King +Winter, William +Woodberry, George Edward; + apology; + on friendship; on the poet's love; + on inspiration; + on Shelley +Wordsworth, William; + confidence in immortality; + on female poets; + his friendship with Coleridge; + on James Hogg; + on inspiration; + Keats' annoyance with Wordsworth; + on love poetry; + on the peasant poet; + on the poet's democracy, + habitat, + morals, + religion, + solitude; + the _Prelude_; + on prenatal life; + quarrel with philosophy; + repudiation of inspiration through wine +Wright, Harold Bell + +Yeats, William Butler +Young, Edmund + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE POET'S POET *** + +This file should be named 8ptpt10.txt or 8ptpt10.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8ptpt11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8ptpt10a.txt + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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