The Poet's Poet Part 20

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 wors.h.i.+ped. One doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with Sh.e.l.ley'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 G.o.d, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of G.o.d, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of G.o.d as Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 const.i.tute poetry.

Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific G.o.ddess 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 pa.s.sivity 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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_, --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_, -- 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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 _Ta.s.so 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, _Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so'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 gla.s.sed; 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 G.o.d 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 mis...o...b.. 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, Ta.s.so [Footnote: See _Song for Ta.s.so_, Sh.e.l.ley; _Ta.s.so to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Ta.s.so 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 att.i.tude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Sh.e.l.ley have ascribed madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_; Sh.e.l.ley, _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, a.s.suring 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 cla.s.ses!

They gang in sticks and come out a.s.ses, Plain truth to speak, And syne they think to climb Parna.s.sus By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.]

The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century cla.s.sicists 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 scholars.h.i.+p. 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 G.o.d! the G.o.d! 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 p.r.o.nounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She muses over the t.i.tle 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.