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

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

A feeble hand essays To swell the tide of song,

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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." 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,

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,

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,

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.

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

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

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.

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 Chanter of personality.

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. Thus Emerson calls singers

Blessed gods in servile masks.

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.

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." Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin to Milton through his Satan's pride." 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.

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.

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.

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

He, from above descending, stooped to touch The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though It scarce deserved his verse.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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