Read Ebook: 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 Atkins Elizabeth

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Ebook has 1057 lines and 87279 words, and 22 pages

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.

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.

INDEX

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 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.

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." 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.

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?

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.

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,

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." 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." 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.

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.

In our life alone does nature live, Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.

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.

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."

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.

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?"

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.

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.

Again they declare that the poet should be

Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain,

telling him,

Think not of thine own self,

adding,

Always, O bard, humility is power.

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?

and pleading with their critics,

Lightly, kindly deal, My buds were culled amid bright dews In morn of earliest youth.

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

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