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THE POET'S POET

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

By

ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D.

Instructor in English, University of Minnesota

TO

HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER

PREFACE

Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of æsthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider.

The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's Prelude, Browning's Sordello, and the like, could scarcely give more than a re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission.

It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the spiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that practically every utterance which we may consider,—even such as deal with the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or his health,—falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as the poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be the more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been the most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose nature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly harmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are attempting to present.

Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. In the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesque in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since it is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influenced Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the subject of their nature than have greater ones, but some attempt is here made to hold them within bounds, so that they may not drown out the more meaningful utterances of the master singers.

The last one hundred and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a peculiarly self-conscious attitude in the poet, and brought his personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as enthusiasts like to term the new stirring of interest in verse) is revealing young poets of the present day even more frank in self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago.

The excursion through modern English poetry involved in these studies has been a pleasant one. The value and interest of such an investigation was first pointed out to me by Professor Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska. It is with sincere appreciation that I here express my indebtedness to her, both for the initial suggestion, and for the invaluable advice which I have received from her during my procedure. I owe much gratitude also to President Wimam Allan Neilson of Smith College, who was formerly my teacher in Radcliffe College, and to Professor Hartley Burr Alexander, of the department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, who has given me unstinted help and generous encouragement.

ELIZABETH ATKINS.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. THE EGO-CENTRIC CIRCLE

Apparent futility of verse dealing with the poet.—Its justification.—The poet's personality the hidden theme of all verse,—The poet's egotism.—Belief that his inspirations are divine.—Belief in the immortality of his poems.—The romantic view that the creator is greater than his creations.—The poet's contempt for uninspired men.—Reaction of the public to the poet's contempt.—Its retaliation in jeers.—The poet's wounded vanity.—His morbid self-consciousness.—His self-imposed solitude.—Enhancement of his egotism by solitude.

II. THE MORTAL COIL

View that genius results from a happy combination of physical conditions.—The poet's reluctance to embrace such a theory.—His heredity.—Rank.—Patricians vs. children of the soil.—His body.—Poetic beauty.—Features expressing alert and delicate senses.—Contrary conception of poet rapt away from sense.— Blindness.—Physique.—Health.—Hypersensibility of invalids.— Escape from fleshly bondage afforded by perfect health.—The poet's sex.—Limitations of the woman poet.—Her claims.—The poet's habitat.—Vogue of romantic solitude.—Savage environment.—Its advantages.—Growing popularity of the city poet.—The wanderer.— The financial status of the poet.—Poverty as sharpener of sensibility.—The poet's age.—Vogue of the young poet.—Purity of youthful emotions.—Early death.—Claims of the aged poet.— Contemplation after active life.

III. THE POET AS LOVER

The classic conception.—Love as a disturbing factor in composition.—The romantic conception.—Love the source of inspiration.—Fusion of intense passion with repose essential to poetry.—Poetic love and Platonic love synonymous.—Sensual love not suggestive.—The poet's ascent to ideal love.—Analogy with ascent described in Plato's Symposium.—Discontent with ephemeralness of passion.—Poetry a means of rendering passion eternal.—Insatiability of the poet's affections.—Idealization of his mistress.—Ideal beauty the real object of his love.—Fickleness.—Its justification.—Advantage in seeing varied aspects of ideal beauty.—Remoteness as an essential factor in ideal love.—Sluggishness resulting from complete content.—Aspiration the poetic attitude.—Abstract love-poetry, consciously addressed to ideal beauty.—Its merits and defects.—The sensuous as well as the ideal indispensable to poetry.

IV. THE SPARK FROM HEAVEN

Reticence of great geniuses regarding inspiration.—Mystery of inspiration.—The poet's curiosity as to his inspired moments.—Wild desire preceding inspiration.—Sudden arrest rather than satisfaction of desire.—Ecstasy.—Analogy with intoxication.—Attitude of reverence during inspired moments.—Feeling that an outside power is responsible.—Attempts to give a rational account of inspiration.—The theory of the sub-conscious.—Prenatal memory.—Reincarnation of dead geniuses.—Varied conceptions of the spirit inspiring song as the Muse, nature, the spirit of the universe.—The poet's absolute surrender to this power.—Madness.—Contempt for the limitations of the human reason.—Belief in infallibility of inspirations.—Limitations of inspiration.—Transience.—Expression not given from without.—The work of the poet's conscious intelligence.—Need for making the vision intelligible.—Quarrel over the value of hard work.

V. THE POET'S MORALITY

The poet's reliance upon feeling as sole moral guide.—Attack upon his morals made by philosophers, puritans, philistines.—Professedly wicked poets.—Their rarity.—Revolt against mass-feeling.—The aesthetic appeal of sin.—The morally frail poet, handicapped by susceptibility to passion.—The typical poet's repudiation of immorality.—Feeling that virtue and poetry are inseparable.—Minor explanations for this conviction.—The "poet a poem" theory.—Identity of the good and the beautiful.—The poet's quarrel with the philistine.—The poet's horror of restraint.—The philistine's unfairness to the poet's innocence.—The poet's quarrel with the puritan.—The poet's horror of asceticism.—The poet's quarrel with the philosopher.—Feeling upon which the poet relies allied to Platonic intuition.

VI. THE POET'S RELIGION

Threefold attack upon the poet's religion.—His lack of theological temper.—His lack of reverence.—His lack of conformance.—The poet's defense.—Materialistic belief deadening to poetry.—His idealistic temper.—His pantheistic leanings.—His reverence for beauty.—His repudiation of a religion that humbles him.—Compatibility of pride and pantheism.—The poet's nonconformance.—His occasional perverseness.— Inspiring nature of doubt.—The poet's thirst for God.—The occasional orthodox poet.

VII. THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE

The poet's alleged uselessness,—His effeminacy.—His virility.—The poet warrior.—Incompatibility of poets and materialists.—Plato'scharge that poetry is inferior to actual life.—The concurrence of certain soldier poets in Plato's charge.—Poetry as an amusement only.—The value of faithful imitation.—The realists.—Poetry as a solace.—Poetry a reflection of the ideal essence of things.—Love of beauty the poet's guide in disentangling ideality from the accidents of things.—Beauty as truth.—The poet as seer.—The quarrel with the philosopher.—The truth of beauty vs. cold facts.—Proof of validity of the poet's truth.—His skill as prophet.—The poet's mission as reformer.—His impatience with practical reforms.—Belief in essential goodness of men, since beauty is the essence of things.—Reform a matter of allowing all things to express their essence.—Enthusiasm for liberty.—Denial of the war-poet's charge.—Poets the authors of liberty.—Poets the real rulers of mankind.—The world's appreciation of their importance.—Their immortality.

VIII. A SOBER AFTERTHOUGHT

Denial that the views of poets on the poet are heterogeneous.—Poets' identity of purpose in discussing poets.—Apparent contradictions in views.-Apparent inconsistency in the thought of each poet.—The two-fold interests of poets.—The poet as harmonizer of sensual and spiritual.— Balance of sense and spirit in the poetic temperament.—Injustice to one element or the other in most literary criticism.—Limitations of the poet's prose criticism.—Superiority of his critical expressions in verse.—The poet's importance.—Poetry as a proof of the idealistic philosophy.

INDEX

CHAPTER I.

THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE

Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the "egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it "discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it is the mortal coil.

In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the quietude of transcendent beauty.

But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an ineffable vision, but advertisement of the author's importance? His argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered consciousness?

Indeed the poet's circle is likely to appear to us even more viciousthan that of other men. To be sure, we remember Sir Philip Sidney's contention, supported by his anecdote of the loquacious horseman, that men of all callings are equally disposed to vaunt themselves. If the poet seems especially voluble about his merits, this may be owing to the fact that, words being the tools of his trade, he is more apt than other men in giving expression to his self-importance. But our specific objection to the poet is not met by this explanation. Even the horseman does not expect panegyrics of his profession to take the place of horseshoes. The inventor does not issue an autobiography in lieu of a new invention. The public would seem justified in reminding the poet that, having a reasonable amount of curiosity about human nature, it will eagerly devour the poet's biography, properly labeled, but only after he has forgotten himself long enough to write a poem that will prove his genius, and so lend worth to the perusal of his idiosyncratic records, and his judgments on poetic composition.

The first impulse of our revulsion from the self-infatuated poet is to confute him with the potent name of Aristotle, and show him his doom foreordained in the book of poetic Revelations. "The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person," we read, "for it is not this that makes him an imitator." [Footnote: Poetics, 1460 a.] One cannot too much admire Aristotle's canniness in thus nipping the poet's egotism in the bud, for he must have seen clearly that if the poet began to talk in his own person, he would soon lead the conversation around to himself, and that, once launched on that inexhaustible subject, he would never be ready to return to his original theme.

We may regret that we have not Aristotle's sanction for condemning also extra-poetical advertisements of the poet's personality, as a hindrance to our seeing the ideal world through his poetry. In certain moods one feels it a blessing that we possess no romantic traditions of Homer, to get in the way of our passing impartial judgment upon his works. Our intimate knowledge of nineteenth century poets has been of doubtful benefit to us. Wordsworth has shaken into what promises to be his permanent place among the English poets much more expeditiously than has Byron. Is this not because in Wordsworth's case the reader is not conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we to determine whether his sonnet, When I Have Fears, is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard?

Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his contention:

Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, John Keats, p. 478.]

If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in Blackwoods, we may be
more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by
Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and
Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows:

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!"…. I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular…. I don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. [Footnote: Ibid., p. 253.]

If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's sonnets,

                            With this key
  Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more
  Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he.
[Footnote: House.]

Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this our contention?

It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron, concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself—oh, that accursed selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E. Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself at the reader's head.

It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.] The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself, to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the self-obliterating splendor of his genius:

  In poetry there is but one supreme,
  Though there are many angels round his throne,
  Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid.
[Footnote: On Shakespeare.]

But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure obscure our view?

Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in this world.

Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have no competitors to dispute his place as chief character.

At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the Phaedrus, "This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: § 251.] Now, whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge:

  In our life alone does nature live,
  Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.
[Footnote: Ode to Dejection.]

The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us,

  There was a child went forth every day,
  And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.

Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet called The Love of Narcissus:

  Like him who met his own eyes in the river,
  The poet trembles at his own long gaze
  That meets him through the changing nights and days
  From out great Nature; all her waters quiver
  With his fair image facing him forever:
  The music that he listens to betrays
  His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways
  His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor.
  His dreams are far among the silent hills;
  His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain;
  With winds at night vague recognition thrills
  His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
  He knows again his mirth in mountain rills,
  His weary tears that touch him in the rain.

Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against "your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great feat." [Footnote: Poem Outlines.]

In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse may point to the Canterbury Tales, and show us Chaucer ambling along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached.

We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines,

  Great poet, 'twas thy art,
  To know thyself, and in thyself to be
  Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
  Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart
  Can make of man.
[Footnote: Shakespeare.]

If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. "You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January 13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,—'R.B.', a poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to show us his own nature, to be "greatly himself always, which is the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, September 9, 1845.]

"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "L'art, mes enfants," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of Verlaine, "c'est d'être absolument soi-même." Of course if one concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is nature seen through a temperament."

Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, Mimeseis, did mean "seeing through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament." Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind were like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things. Modern poets, on the other hand, are inclined to grant that a person has poetic temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window, transforming all that is seen through it, if by any chance something is seen through it.

If the modern poet sees the world colored red or green or violet by his personality, it is well for the interests of truth, we must admit, that he make it clear to us that his nature is the transforming medium, but how comes it that he fixes his attention so exclusively upon the colors of things, for which his own nature is responsible, and ignores the forms of things, which are not affected by him? How comes it that the colored lights thrown on nature by the stained windows of his soul are so important to him that he feels justified in painting for us, notnature, but stained-glass windows?

In part this is, as has often been said, a result of the individualizing trend of modern art. The broad general outlines of things have been "done" by earlier artists, and there is no chance for later artists to vary them, but the play of light and shade offers infinite possibilities of variation. If one poet shows us the world highly colored by his personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their attention caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw upon it. The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will be interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious," Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.]

This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration is surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that this accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in his work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure. Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme, chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group, Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that the mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to forget that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, accordingly, to be dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" for his inspiration.

At least this mystery surrounding his creations has much to do with removing the artist from the comparative freedom from self-consciousness that we ascribe to the general run of men. In addition it removes him from the comparative humility of other thinkers, who are wont to think of their discoveries as following inevitably upon their data, so that they themselves deserve credit only as they are persistent and painstaking in following the clues. The genesis of Sir Isaac Newton's discovery has been compared to poetical inspiration; yet even in this case the difference is apparent, and Newton did not identify himself with the universe he conceived, as the poet is in the habit of doing.

Not being able to account for his inspirations, the poet seems to be driven inevitably either into excessive humility, since he feels that his words are not his own, or into inordinate pride, since he feels that he is able to see and express without volition truths that other men cannot glimpse with the utmost effort. He may disclaim all credit for his performance, in the words of a nineteenth-century verse-writer:

  This is the end of the book
  Written by God.
  I am the earth he took,
  I am the rod,
  The iron and wood which he struck
  With his sounding rod.
[Footnote: L. E. Mitchell, Written at the End of a Book.]

a statement that provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist "experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, not to one's self, but to the Almighty.

The minor American poets in the middle of the last century are often found exhorting one another to humility, quite after the prayer-meeting tradition. Bitter is their denunciation of the poet's arrogance:

  A man that's proud—vile groveller in the dust,
  Dependent on the mercy of his God
  For every breath.
[Footnote: B. Saunders, To Chatterton.]

Again they declare that the poet should be

  Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain,
[Footnote: Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy.]

telling him,

  Think not of thine own self,
[Footnote: Richard Gilder, To the Poet.]

adding,

  Always, O bard, humility is power.
[Footnote: Henry Timrod, Poet If on a Lasting Fame.]

One is reminded of Mrs. Heep's repeated adjuration, "Be 'umble, Ury," and the likeness is not lessened when we find them ingratiatingly sidling themselves into public favor. We hear them timidly inquiring of their inspiration,

  Shall not the violet bloom?
[Footnote: Mrs. Evans, Apologetic.]

and pleading with their critics,

  Lightly, kindly deal,
  My buds were culled amid bright dews
  In morn of earliest youth.
[Footnote: Lydia M. Reno, Preface to Early Buds.]

At times they resort to the mixed metaphor to express their innocuous unimportance, declaring,

  A feeble hand essays
  To swell the tide of song,
[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, Invocation.]

and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness:

  Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts,
  Win in each heart and memory a home.
[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, Dedication.]

But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, In a Dull Uncertain Brain; Whittier, To my Namesake; Sidney Lanier, Ark of the Future; Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Last Reader; Bayard Taylor, L'Envoi; Robert Louis Stevenson, To Dr. Hake; Francis Thompson, To My Godchild.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of himself:

  I am nae poet, in a sense,
  But just a rhymer like, by chance,
  And hae to learning nae pretense,
  Yet what the matter?
  Whene'er my muse does on me glance,
  I jingle at her.
[Footnote: Epistle to Lapraik.]

Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who casually disposes of the poet's immortality:

  Let but the verse befit a hero's fame;
  Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name.
[Footnote: Introduction to Don Roderick.]

Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's conceit, assuring him:

  Ye are not great because creation drew
  Large revelations round your earliest sense,
  Nor bright because God's glory shines for you.
[Footnote: Mountaineer and Poet.]

But in her other poetry, notably in Aurora Leigh and A Vision of Poets, she amply avows her sense of the preëminence of the singer, as well as of his song.

While it is easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a friend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life engenders pride and egotism!' True—I know it does: but this pride and egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could, so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23, 1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and preserving it.

Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor,

  Well I remember how you smiled
  To see me write your name upon
  The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child,
  You think you're writing upon stone!"
  I have since written what no tide
  Shall ever wash away, what men
  Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide,
  And find Ianthe's name again,

or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, Ad Amicam, which expresses the author's purpose to

  Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time,
  Telling him that he is too insolent
  Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme,
  Whereof to one because thou life hast given,
  The other yet shall give a life to thee,
  Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven,
  And compassed weaker immortality,

or Yeats' lines Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved, wherein he takes pride in the reflection:

  Weigh this song with the great and their pride;
  I made it out of a mouthful of air;
  Their children's children shall say they have lied.

But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony,

      Yet to me I feel
  That an internal brightness is vouchsafed
  That must not die,
[Footnote: Home at Grasmere.]

or in Walt Whitman's injunction:

  Recorders ages hence,
  Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive
  Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me.
[Footnote: See also, Long Long Hence.]

Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the clutches of the old-fashioned habit of apology, to be sure, [Footnote: See My Country.]—perhaps this is one reason the radicals are so opposed to him; but in the ranks of the radicals themselves we find very few retaining any doubt of themselves. [Footnote: Exceptions are Jessie Rittenhouse, Patrius; Lawrence Houseman, Mendicant Rhymes; Robert Silliman Hillyer, Poor Faltering Rhymes.] Self-assertion is especially characteristic of their self-appointed leader, Ezra Pound, in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote: Lustra.] A typical assertion is that in Salutation the Second,

  How many will come after me,
  Singing as well as I sing, none better.

There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile immortality" [Footnote: Refuge.] or James Stephens' exultation in A Tune Upon a Reed,

  Not a piper can succeed
  When I lean against a tree,
  Blowing gently on a reed,

and in The Rivals, where he boasts over a bird,

  I was singing all the time,
  Just as prettily as he,
  About the dew upon the lawn,
  And the wind upon the lea;
  So I didn't listen to him
  As he sang upon a tree.

If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the fashion of A Song of Myself:

  I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin,
  Hoping to cease not till death.

Whitman is conscious of—perhaps even exaggerates—the novelty of his task,

  Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited
    itself (the great pride of man in himself)
  Chanter of personality.

While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's characterization of Byron in Julian and Maddalo,

  The sense that he was greater than his kind
  Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind
  By gazing on its own exceeding light,

has been followed by many expressions of the same thought, at first wholly sympathetic, lately, it must be confessed, somewhat ironical.

Consciousness of partnership with God in composition naturally lifts the poet, in his own estimation, at least, to a super-human level. The myth of Apollo disguised as a shepherd strikes him as being a happy expression of his divinity. [Footnote: See James Russell Lowell, The Shepherd of King Admetus.] Thus Emerson calls singers

  Blessed gods in servile masks.
[Footnote: Saadi.]

The hero of John Davidson's Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a
Poet soars to a monotheistic conception of his powers, asserting

  Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness
  Is God. I suffer. I am God.

Another poet-hero is characterized:

  He would reach the source of light,
  And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might.
[Footnote: Harvey Rice, The Visionary (1864).

In recent years a few poets have modestly disclaimed equality with God. See William Rose Benét, Imagination, and Joyce Kilmer, Trees. The kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of The Lonely Poet (1919), by John Hall Wheelock.]

On the other hand, recent poets' hatred of orthodox religion has led them to idealize the Evil One, and regard him as no unworthy rival as regards pride. One of Browning's poets is "prouder than the devil." [Footnote: Waring.] Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin to Milton through his Satan's pride." [Footnote: Sonnet, To Chatterton.] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares,

  You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell,
  And keep the lowest circle to yourself.
[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, Marlowe (1911).]

There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer takes the trouble to declare,

      Artists truly great
  Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange
  Their fate for that of any potentate.
[Footnote: Longfellow, Michael Angelo.]

Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to say,

  Think not, although my aim is art,
  I cannot toy with empire easily.
[Footnote: Nero.]

Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: See Helen Hunt Jackson, The King's Singer; E. L. Sprague, A Shakespeare Ode; Eugene Field, Poet and King.] betraying a disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, Collect.] In these days, when the idlest man of the street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of The Lament of Tasso express the pacifist sentiment,

  No!—still too proud to be vindictive, I
  Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die.

It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young friend is largely the theme of a poem, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, Lillian, How to Rhyme for Love, The Talented Man; Byron, Childe Harold, Don Juan.] A few of Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in Becket; and the Count, in The Falcon.] Again and again Byron gives indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet:

  He, from above descending, stooped to touch
  The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though
  It scarce deserved his verse.
[Footnote: Robert Pollock, The Course of Time.]

After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young Rice:

  I have felt the ineffable sting
  Of life, though I be art's valet.
  I have painted the cloud and the clod,
  Who should have possessed the earth.
[Footnote: Limitations.]

It depressed Alan Seeger:

  I, who, conceived beneath another star,
  Had been a prince and played with life,
  Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far
  From the fair things my faith has merited.
[Footnote: Liebestod.]

It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive:

  Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams,
  Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at,
  And know we be its rulers, though but dreams.
[Footnote: Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry.]

Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide.

The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that his genius is judged by a public that is vastly inferior to him. This galling thought usually drives him into an attitude of indifference or of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his worth.[Footnote: See To Darwin.] But the average poet of the last century and a half goes a step beyond this attitude, and appears to feel that there is something contemptible about popularity. Literary arrogance seems far from characteristic of Burns, yet he tells us how, in a mood of discouragement,

  I backward mused on wasted time,
  How I had spent my youthful prime,
  And done naething
  But stringin' blithers up in rhyme
  For fools to sing.
[Footnote: The Vision.]

Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most
thoroughgoing expression of this contempt for the public. The sentiment
in Childe Harold is one that Byron never tires of harping on:
  I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
  I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
  To its idolatries a patient knee.

And this attitude of Byron's has been adopted by all his disciples, who delight in picturing his scorn:

  With terror now he froze the cowering blood,
  And now dissolved the heart in tenderness,
  Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself,
  But back into his soul retired alone,
  Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously
  On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet.
[Footnote: Robert Pollock, The Course of Time.]

Of the other romantic poets, Sir Walter Scott alone remains on good terms with the public, expressing a child's surprise and delight over the substantial checks he is given in exchange for his imaginings. But Shelley starts out with a chip on his shoulder, in the very advertisements of his poems expressing his unflattering opinion of The public's judgment, and Keats makes it plain that his own criticisms concern him far more than those of other men.

The consciously aristocratic, sniffing attitude toward the public, which ran its course during Victoria's reign, is ushered in by Landor, who confesses,

  I know not whether I am proud,
  But this I know, I hate the crowd,
  Therefore pray let me disengage
  My verses from the motley page,
  Where others, far more sure to please
  Pour forth their choral song with ease.

The same gentlemanly indifference to his plebeian readers is diffused all through Matthew Arnold's writing, of course. He casually disposes of popularity:

  Some secrets may the poet tell
    For the world loves new ways;
  To tell too deep ones is not well,—
    It knows not what he says.
[Footnote: See In Memory of Obermann.]

Mrs. Browning probably has her own success in mind when she makes the young poetess, Aurora Leigh, recoil from the fulsome praise of her readers. Browning takes the same attitude in Sordello, contrasting Eglamor, the versifier who servilely conformed to the taste of the mob, with Sordello, the true poet, who despised it. In Popularity, Browning returns to the same theme, of the public's misplaced praises, and in Pacchiarotto he outdoes himself in heaping ridicule upon his readers. Naturally the coterie of later poets who have prided themselves on their unique skill in interpreting Browning have been impressed by his contempt for his readers. Perhaps they have even exaggerated it. No less contemptuous of his readers than Browning was that other Victorian, so like him in many respects, George Meredith.

It would be interesting to make a list of the zoological metaphors by which the Victorians expressed their contempt for the public. Landor characterized their criticisms as "asses' kicks aimed at his head." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, Life of Swinburne, p. 103.] Browning alternately represented his public cackling and barking at him. [Footnote: See Thomas J. Wise, Letters, Second Series, Vol. 2, p. 52.] George Meredith made a dichotomy of his readers into "summer flies" and "swinish grunters." [Footnote: My Theme.] Tennyson, being no naturalist, simply named the public the "many-headed beast." [Footnote: In Memoriam.]

In America there has been less of this sort of thing openly expressed by genuine poets. Emerson is fairly outspoken, telling us, in The Poet, how the public gapes and jeers at a new vision. But one must go to our border-line poets to find the feeling most candidly put into words. Most of them spurn popularity, asserting that they are too worthwhile to be appreciated. They may be even nauseated by the slight success they manage to achieve, and exclaim,

                Yet to know
  That we create an Eden for base worms!

If the consciousness of recent writers is dominated by contempt for mankind at large, such a mood is expressed with more caution than formerly. Kipling takes men's stupidity philosophically. [Footnote: See The Story of Ung.] Edgar Lee Masters uses a fictional character as a mask for his remarks on the subject. [Footnote: See Having His Way.] Other poets have expressed themselves with a degree of mildness. [Footnote: See Watts-Dunton, Apollo in Paris; James Stephens, The Market; Henry Newbolt, An Essay in Criticism; William Rose Benét, People.] But of course Ezra Pound is not to be suppressed. He inquires,

  Will people accept them?
    (i.e., these songs)
  As a timorous wench from a centaur
    (or a centurion)
  Already they flee, howling in terror
       * * * * *
  Will they be touched with the verisimilitude?
  Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.

He adds,

  I beg you, my friendly critics,
  Do not set about to procure me an audience.

Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public,

Salute them with your thumbs to your noses.

It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in another poem,

May my poems be printed this week?

The naïveté of this last question brings up insistently a perplexing problem. If the poet despises his readers, why does he write? He may perhaps evade this question by protesting, with Tennyson,

  I pipe but as the linnets do,
  And sing because I must.

But why does he publish? If he were strictly logical, surely he would do as the artist in Browning's Pictor Ignotus, who so shrank from having his pictures come into contact with fools, that he painted upon hidden, moldering walls, thus renouncing all possibility of fame. But one doubts whether such renunciation has been made often, especially in the field of poetry. Rossetti buried his poems, of course, but their resurrection was not postponed till the Last Judgment. Other writers have coyly waved fame away, but have gracefully yielded to their friends' importunities, and have given their works to the world. When one reads such expressions as Byron's;

  Fame is the thirst of youth,—but I am not
  So young as to regard men's frown or smile
  As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot,
[Footnote: Childe Harold.]

one wonders. Perhaps the highest genius takes absolutely no account of fame, as the sun-god asserts in Watts-Dunton's poem, Apollo in Paris:

  I love the song-born poet, for that he
  Loves only song—seeks for love's sake alone
  Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown
  To feudaries of fame, are known to thee.
[Footnote: See also Coventry Patmore, from The Angel in the House, "I
will not Hearken Blame or Praise"; Francis Carlin, The Home Song
(1918).]

But other poets, with the utmost inconsistency, have admitted that they find the thought of fame very sweet. [Footnote: See Edward Young, Love of Fame; John Clare, Song's Eternity, Idle Fame, To John Milton; Bulwer Lytton, The Desire of Fame; James Gates Percival, Sonnet 379; Josephine Peston Peabody, Marlowe.] Keats dwells upon the thought of it. [Footnote: See the Epistle to My Brother George.] Browning shows both of his poet heroes concerned over the question. In Pauline the speaker confesses,

      I ne'er sing
  But as one entering bright halls, where all
  Will rise and shout for him.

In Sordello, again, Browning analyzes the desire for fame:

  Souls like Sordello, on the contrary,
  Coerced and put to shame, retaining will,
  Care little, take mysterious comfort still,
  But look forth tremblingly to ascertain
  If others judge their claims not urged in vain,
  And say for them their stifled thoughts aloud.
  So they must ever live before a crowd:
  —"Vanity," Naddo tells you.

Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame,
            Nor can dispense
  With Persia for an audience.
[Footnote: Saadi.]

Can it be that when the poet renounces fame, we must concur with Austin
Dobson's paraphrase of his meaning,

  But most, because the grapes are sour,
  Farewell, renown?
[Footnote: Farewell Renown.]

Perhaps the poet is saved from inconsistency by his touching confidence that in other times and places human nature is less stupid and unappreciative than it proves itself in his immediate audience. He reasons that in times past the public has shown sufficient insight to establish the reputation of the master poets, and that history will repeat itself. Several writers have stated explicitly that their quarrel with humanity is not to be carried beyond the present generation. Thus Arnold objects to his time because it is aesthetically dead. [Footnote: See Persistency of Poetry.] But elsewhere he objects because it shows signs of coming to life, [Footnote: See Bacchanalia.] so it is hard to determine how our grandfathers could have pleased him. Similarly unreasonable discontent has been expressed by later poets with our own time. [Footnote: See William Ernest Henley, The Gods are Dead; Edmund Gosse, On Certain Critics; Samuel Waddington, The Death of Song; John Payne, Double Ballad of the Singers of the Time(1906).] Only occasionally a poet rebukes his brethren for this carping attitude. Mrs. Browning protests, in Aurora Leigh,

                  'Tis ever thus
  With times we live in,—evermore too great
  To be apprehended near….
  I do distrust the poet who discerns
  No character or glory in his times,
  And trundles back his soul five hundred years.
[Footnote: See Robert Browning, Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12,
1845.]

And Kipling is a notorious defender of the present generation, but these two stand almost alone. [Footnote: See also James Elroy Flecker, Oak and Olive; Max Ehrmann, Give Me Today.]

Several mythical explanations for the stupidity of the poet's own times have been offered in verse. Browning says that poetry is like wine; it must age before it grows sweet. [Footnote: Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume.] Emerson says the poet's generation is deafened by the thunder of his voice. [Footnote: Solution.] A minor writer says that poetry must be written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, The Way of the World (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, A Poet's Question.] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by Shelley, in the Defense of Poetry:

No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers.

Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words, as

    Antidotes
  Of medicated music, answering for
  Mankind's forlornest uses.
[Footnote: Sonnets from the Portuguese.]

And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose.
Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as
Browning did,

  My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste
  On a tongue that's fur, and a palate—paste!
  A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick—
  I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath,
  Henceforward with nettle-broth.
[Footnote: Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume.]

Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a stick.

The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating. They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public more deliberately expressed.

At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the Castle of Indolence, Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also To Mr. Thomson, Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem, by H. Hill.] and Thomas Hood [Footnote: See To the Late Lord Mayor.] both concerned themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the Ode Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle.] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son. [Footnote: The Patron.] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for the poet, in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, and upheld the nobility of the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See Common Sense and Genius, and Rhymes by the Road.] Later libelers have been, usually, writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, The Green Carnation, which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets. [Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience made an even greater sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim,

  I say an artist
  Who does not wholly give himself to art,
  Who has about him nothing marked or strange,
  But tries to suit himself to all the world
  Will ne'er attain to greatness.
[Footnote: Michael Angelo.]

Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss him. He repeats the world's query: