Chapter 5

as a conscious poet:

The first note that I heard, A magical undertone, Was sweeter than any bird --Or so it seemed to me-- And my tears ran wild. This tale, this tale is true. The light was growing gray, And the rhymes ran so sweet (For I was only a child) That I knelt down to pray.

But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess,

She almost shrank To feel the secret and expanding might Of her own mind, [Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.]

the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is "all me."

However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of thought:

The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom-- Now lending splendor, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters.

Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says,

The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or departure.

Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us,

A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand, at times Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local spirit of its own, at war With general tendency, but for the most Subservient strictly to external things With which it communed. An auxiliary light Came from my mind which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendor-- [Footnote: _The Prelude_.]

Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken,

As the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat The marts and temples, the triumphal gates And towers of observation, clears herself To elemental freedom.

We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who relates how the vision of _Sordello_ arises to consciousness:

Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears Its outline, kindles at the core--.

Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the poet.

"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The Poet's Sleep_.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. There was surely no reason why Keats' title, _Sleep and Poetry_, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in the middle ages,--and even the prominence of _Night Thoughts_ in eighteenth century verse--testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his account of the composition of _Kubla Khan_.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: See _Alastor_, and _Prince Athanase_. See also Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three stanzas of _A Vision of Spring_ in his sleep.]--it is the romanticists who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. Thus he tells us of the singer in _Prince Athanase:_

And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes, Were driven within him by some secret power Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar, Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower.

Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world.

Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold, [Footnote: _A Life Drama._]

says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair.

Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory of one's past youth, or--to stay closer home--Wordsworth, with his theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,--such artists have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation,

Live in the past; await no more The rush of heaven-sent wings; Earth still has music left in store While memory sighs and sings. [Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.]

But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries ... beholding apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.]

For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.]

If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.] Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in verse of other poets. One writer inquires,

Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes, Indeed the product of my heart and brain? [Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.]

and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. Another maintains of poetry,

Her touch is a vibration and a light From worlds before and after. [Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by Dorothea Laurence Mann.]

Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural and unforced of these verses. She muses:

... Mixed with memories not my own The sweet streams throng into my breast. Before this life began to be The happy songs that wake in me Woke long ago, and far apart. Heavily on this little heart Presses this immortality.

This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. She continues,

I come from nothing, but from where Come the undying thoughts I bear? Down through long links of death and birth, From the past poets of the earth, My immortality is there.

Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells his brother poets:

I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried To work his will, the hand that moved my pen Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, Oracular glories, visionary gleams, And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings. [Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.]

The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead wife shall inspire his poetry.

One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes:

I do but rave, for it is better thus; Were once thy starry nature given to mine, In the one life which would encircle us My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine; Better to bear the far sublimer pain Of thought that has not ripened into speech. To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing Divinely to the brain; For thus the poet at the last shall reach His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string. [Footnote: _Ode to Shelly._]

In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret Steele Anderson, _Other People's Wreaths,_ and John Drinkwater, _My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She wistfully inquires:

My own best poets, am I one with you? . . . When my joy and pain, My thought and aspiration, like the stops Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb Unless melodious, do you play on me, My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play, Would no sound come? Or is the music mine; As a man's voice or breath is called his own, Inbreathed by the life-breather?

Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naive dependence upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See _On Lucinda's Tea-table_.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses _On the Death of His Mother_, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen from the sty." [Footnote: See _On a Report of a Monument to a Late Author_.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled hizzie," [Footnote: See the _Epistle to Lapraik_.] and sets the fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift:

'Twas not much at any time She could hitch into a rhyme, Never was the muse sublime Who has fled. [Footnote: _A Poet's Apology_.]

Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our own." [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry_.]

What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last century, his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. All poets are idealists.

There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It is expressed in the opening of Shelley's _Alastor_, and informs the whole of the _Ode to the West Wind_. It pervades Wordsworth, for if he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute poetry.

Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming "into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the singer,

One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; The next he writes his soul's memorial. [Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.]

So Shelley describes the experience:

Meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration. [Footnote: _Alastor_.]

The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, enabling them, like Lucy, to be

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees.

Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer cannot escape Plato's conclusion,

There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: _Ion_, Sec.534.]

And again,

There is a ... kind of madness which is a possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other numbers.... But he who, not being inspired, and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, Sec. 245.]

Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as to say,

Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. [Footnote: _Poetics_, XVII.]

One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot was

Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting Of all too greatly giving The kingdom of his mind to those Who for it deemed him mad. [Footnote: Cale Young Rice, _Meredith_.]

In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See _Gladys and Her Island_.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See _Tasso to Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The tone of his poem, _Tasso and Leonora_, is very gloomy. The Italian poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms where eternal beauty dwells. He muses,

Yes--as Love is truer far Than all other things; so are Life and Death, the World and Time Mere false shows in some great Mime By dreadful mystery sublime.

But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders,

For were life no flitting dream, Were things truly what they seem, Were not all this world-scene vast But a shade in Time's stream glassed; Were the moods we now display Less phantasmal than the clay In which our poor spirits clad Act this vision, wild and sad, I must be mad, mad,--how mad!

However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: See _Kathrina_, by J. G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares,

As for the old seers Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life Of the unfolding ages, I must doubt Whether they comprehended what they saw.]

Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects,

And ah, we poets, I misdoubt Are little more than thou. We speak a lesson taught, we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows. [Footnote: _Sister Songs._]

One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: See _Song for Tasso_, Shelley; _Tasso to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_, E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles, _The Harp and Despair of Cowper_; Mrs. Browning, _Cowper's Grave_; Lord Houghton, _On Cowper's Cottage at Olney_.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_; Shelley, _Rosalind and Helen_.] while the American, J. G. Holland, represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benet, _Mad Blake_; Amy Lowell, _Clear, With Light Variable Winds_; Cale Young Rice, _The Mad Philosopher_; Edmund Blunden, _Clare's Ghost_.]

It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries,

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat. [Footnote: See fragment CI.]

What chance did he have of recognition?

This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines,

Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense) And once betrayed me into common sense. [Footnote: _Dunciad_.]

And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon dry reason alone:

A set o' dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college classes! They gang in sticks and come out asses, Plain truth to speak, And syne they think to climb Parnassus By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.]

The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the _Prelude_.] and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: See _The Scholar_.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See _The Master of the Dance_. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the poet's mind. [Footnote: See _The Poet's Mind_.] So Richard Gilder maintains of the singer,

He was too wise Either to fear, or follow, or despise Whom men call science--for he knew full well All she had told, or still might live to tell Was known to him before her very birth. [Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J. E. Flecker.]

The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus:

Yours is the living pall, The aloof and frozen place of listeners And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine The fount of life itself, the burning fount Pierian. I pity you. [Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.]

Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young:

How proud the poet's billow swells! The God! the God! his boast: A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! Dead bards stench every coast. [Footnote: _Resignation_.]

There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She muses over the title of poet:

The name Is royal, and to sign it like a queen Is what I dare not--though some royal blood Would seem to tingle in me now and then With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes And manias usual to the race. Howbeit I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; The thing's too common. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true Because myself was true in writing them.]

Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether they be of God. What is his proof?

Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers,

I hung my verses in the wind. Time and tide their faults may find. All were winnowed through and through: Five lines lasted sound and true; Five were smelted in a pot Than the south more fierce and hot. [Footnote: _The Test_.]

The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it does." [Footnote: _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, "A Memorable Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence.

The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay on _Imagination_.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief in his visions by Tertullian's motto, _Credo quod absurdum_.

If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete.

The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of _Kubla Khan_, are notorious. Tennyson, in _The Poet's Mind_, warns all intruders away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them,

In your eye there is death; There is frost in your breath Which would blight the plants. * * * * * In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; It would fall to the ground if you came in.

But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says,

There are open hours When the God's will sallies free, And the dull idiot might see The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;-- Sudden, at unawares, Self-moved, fly to the doors, Nor sword of angels could reveal What they conceal. [Footnote: _Merlin_.]

What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]

Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to be dead.

There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, _How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter:

Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke. Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul! Indeed? Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. [Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.]

Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]

It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage."

Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any other artist possesses, [Footnote: See _The Republic_, IX, 588 D.] yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis Thompson,

Our untempered speech descends--poor heirs! Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers; Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit! [Footnote: _Her Portrait_.]

Walt Whitman voices the same complaint:

Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself; It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically, "Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.]

Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, "For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The Sculptor_; William Rose Benet, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, _Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing the Song of Her_.]

Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is significant that the singers who are most aware of their inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the problem for us. She avers,

I found the phrase to every thought I ever had, but one; And that defies me,--as a hand Did try to chalk the sun.

To races nurtured in the dark;-- How would your own begin? Can blaze be done in cochineal, Or noon in mazarin?

"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.]

Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his public.

Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, throughout, the tenor of the first stanza:

My counsel to the budding bard Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard." Your "gentle public," my good friend, Won't read what they can't comprehend.

This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse?

There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries,

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed My soul has to herself decreed. [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother George, April, 1817.]

Bryant warns the poet,

Deem not the framing of a deathless lay The pastime of a drowsy summer day; But gather all thy powers And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave. [Footnote: _The Poet_.]

It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet,

Touch the crude line with fear But in the moments of impassioned thought. [Footnote: _The Poet_.]

Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it. Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than these others, no doubt, even though he did not illustrate the efficacy of his search, when he described his interest in reading old manuscripts with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these. The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning advises them,

Keep up the fire And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over the poet,

When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead, And though he cherisheth The babe most strangely born from out her death, Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, It is not she. [Footnote: _Sister Songs_.]

We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. Alice Gary pleads,

Hear me tell How much my will transcends my feeble powers, As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowers Their tender hues. [Footnote: _To the Spirit of Song_.]

And there is not a poet in the last century of such prominence that he does not reverence such a confession, [Footnote: Some poems showing the similarity in such an attitude of great and small alike, follow: _Epistle to Charles C. Clarke_, Keats; _The Soul's Expression_, Mrs. Browning; _Memorial Verses to Wm. B. Scott_, Swinburne; _Sister Songs_, _Proemion to Love in Dian's Lap_, _A Judgment in Heaven_, Francis Thompson; _Urania_, Matthew Arnold; _There Have Been Vast Displays of Critic Wit_, Alexander Smith; _Invita Minerva_ and _L'Envoi to the Muse_, J. R. Lowell; _The Voiceless_, O. W. Holmes; _Fata Morgana_, and _Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought_, Longfellow; _L'Envoi_, Kipling; _The Apology_, and _Gleam on Me, Fair Ideal_, Lewis Morris; _Dedication to Austin Dobson_, E. Gosse; _A Country Nosegay_, and _Gleaners of Fame_, Alfred Austin; _Another Tattered Rhymster in the Ring_, G. K. Chesterton; _To Any Poet_, Alice Meynell; _The Singer_, and _To a Lady on Chiding Me For Not Writing_, Richard Realf; _The Will and the Wing_ and _Though Dowered with Instincts Keen and High_, P. H. Haynes; _Dull Words_, Trumbull Stickney; _The Inner Passion_, Alfred Noyes; _The Veiled Muse_, William Winter; _Sonnet_, William Bennett; _Tell Me_, Max Ehrmann; _The Singer's Plea_, Edward Dowden; _Genius_, R. H. Home; _My Country_, George Woodberry; _Uncalled_, Madison Cawein; Thomas Bailey Aldrich, _At the Funeral of a Minor Poet_; Robert Haven Schauffler, _Overtones, The Silent Singers_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _A Minor Poet_; Alec de Candole, _The Poets_.] and aver that he too is an earnest and humble suppliant in the temple of beauty. For the clearer his glimpse of the transcendent vision has been, the more conscious he is of his blindness after the glory has passed, and the more unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation.