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The Poet\'s Poet

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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.

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