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Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in
English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years

By

Instructor in English, University of Minnesota

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  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.]

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.

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.]