Chapter II: The Mortal Coil (1)

If I might dwell where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,

sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude,--the same inconsistency that lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,--and yet it is to him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it as from a prison house.

One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all--a woman Sappho, suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine his spirit.

Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in poems even of such bulk as the _Prelude_ one does not find a complete analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In _Aurora Leigh_ one might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of qualities derived from more remote ancestors.

The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, [Footnote: See _Thalassius_.] since it typifies the union in the poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness.

There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of the woman who was "no churl" as

A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes,
And white hair blown back softly from a face
Etherially fierce, as might have looked
Cassandra in old age.
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. [Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, _The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D. Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.]

The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said to the little Viola,

If angels have hereditary wings,
If not by Salic law is handed down
The poet's laurel crown,
To thee, born in the purple of the throne,
The laurel must belong.
[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.]

But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in which they grow.

What have poets to say on the larger question of their social inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage.

Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of "Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. [Footnote: See _Lord Burleigh_, Eleanore in _A Becket_, and the Count in _The Falcon_.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are _The Troubadour_, Praed; _The King's Tragedy_, Rossetti; _David, Charles di Trocca_, Cale Young Rice.]

None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century poet as John Hughes, in lines _On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal Man_, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See _The Patron_.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] also, seem not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is merely personal:

Gie me ae spark of nature's fire!
That's a' the learning I desire.
Then, though I drudge through dub and mire
At plough or cart,
My muse, though homely in attire,
May touch the heart.
[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.]

It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with "nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns see Thomas Campbell, _Ode to Burns_; Whittier, _Burns_; Joaquim Miller, _Burns and Byron_; William Bennett, _To the Memory of Burns_; A. B. Street, _Robbie Burns_ (1867); O. W. Holmes, _The Burns Centennial_; Richard Realf, _Burns_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_ (1868); Shelley Halleck, _Burns_.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found in the character of the old pedlar, in the _Excursion_. The origin of Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is presumably modeled after Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_; Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_.] Here and there, the poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare, _The Peasant Poet_; Mrs. Browning, _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_; Robert Buchanan, _Poet Andrew_; T. E. Browne, _Tommy Big Eyes_; Whittier, _Eliot_; J. G. Saxe, _Murillo and his Slave_.] And at present, with the penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John Davidson, _A Ballad in Blank Verse_; Vachel Lindsay, _The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son_; John Masefield, _Dauber_; Francis Carlin, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_ (1918).] Still, for the most part, the present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning,

What if men have found
Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll
Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul?
[Footnote: Henry van Dyke, _Sonnet_.]

If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? since singers tell

us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,
Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.
[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.]

as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their father Spenser, who argues,

So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace, and amiable sight;
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
[Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.]

What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which

Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive
Plant_.]

Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his pronouncement, admitting--

Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd,
Either by chance, against the course of kind,
Or through unaptness of the substance found,
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground
That will not yield unto her form's direction,
But is preformed with some foul imperfection.

But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from Alcaeus' line,

Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho.

As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of his extant portrait:

A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of
Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright,
Low-lidded now, and luminous as love,
Anon soul-searching, ominous as night,
Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps
Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps.
[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth, _At the Mermaid_ (1889).]

The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti, _Sonnet on Chatterton_.] has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their imaginations inevitably turn to

The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair,
The lean, athletic body, deftly planned
To carry that swift soul of fire and air;
The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand
Heroic shoulders!
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.]

It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, _Rupert Brooke_.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage.

We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by no means universal;--that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's _Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy,

He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,
Is all that these eyes can adore.
He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love,
And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.

Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,

Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.]

for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.

Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and assures us,

Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.]

but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing features?

Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture of Keats,

The real Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls.
[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.]

It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero,

A lovely youth,
With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's.
[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.]

And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_ (1898); Frances Fuller, _To Edith May_ (1851); Metta Fuller, _Lines to a Poetess_ (1851).] Someone has pointed out that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it.

"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_; Browning, _Sordello_, _By the Fireside_; Mrs. Browning, _Aurora Leigh_; Principal Shairp, _Balliol Scholars_; Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermeid Inn_.] poets invariably possess, but the less phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas, _The Life of Charles Lamb_, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines _To a Poet Breaking Silence_, he asserts,

Yes, in this silent interspace
God sets his poems in thy face,

and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses,

How should I gage what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
As birds see not the casement for the sky.

It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical nature,--through his

Dream dazzled gaze
Aflame and burning like a god in song.
[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.]

Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." [Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_] Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser,

With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a fictitious poet that

His steadfast eye burnt inwardly
As burning out his soul,
[Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.]

we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before serious damage is done.

The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his

Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined
Before the sovran-thought of his own mind.
[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.]

Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.]

But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to

See, no longer blinded with his eyes,
[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.]

and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton,

The living throne, the sapphire blaze
Where angels tremble while they gaze
He saw, but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night,
[Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.]

and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C. Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may

By the darkness of thine eyes discern How piercing was the light within thy soul. [Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne, _Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the Sea_.]

Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an assertion as that of Keats,

There is a triple sight in blindness keen. [Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes, Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.]

Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth,

Thou that, when first my quickened ear
Thy deeper harmonies might hear,
I imaged to myself as old and blind,
For so were Milton and Maeonides,
[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).]

and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)]

But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's _Dispute of the Poets_. The spiritual one

Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes,

but his brother,

The one with brighter hues and darker curls
Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine,
Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life
Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight
From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought.

The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ is

A youth whose sultry eyes
Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust.

But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello,

Yourselves shall trace
(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,
A sharp and restless lip, so well combine
With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive
Delight at every sense; you can believe
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure...
* * * * *
You recognize at once the finer dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear.

Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the burly host,

He in the waast is shape as wel as I;
This were a popet in an arm tenbrace
For any woman, smal and fair of face?
[Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.]

Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the handsome young squire, who

Coude songes make, and wel endyte.
[Footnote: _Prologue_.]

Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, _The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to remain, though it begins with the line,

A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems.

And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." [Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.]

Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could _not_ be a glorious eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne, _Joyce Kilmer_.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." [Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday, _Memoir of Joyce Kilmer_, p. 62.] Of course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a poet.

It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.] and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that it was

Projected from the bilious Childe.
[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.]

But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid.

To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. [Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his favorite poet as

A man who measured six feet four:
Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest,
Compact his frame, his muscles of the best.
[Footnote: _A Portrait_.]

With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly verse-writers,

A heavy handed blow, I think,
Would make your veins drip scented ink.
[Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.]

But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the Poet_, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint,

We are compared to that sort of person,
Who wanders about announcing his sex
As if he had just discovered it.
[Footnote: _The Condolence_.]

The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora Leigh's cousin Romney to argue,

Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life,
You need the lower life to stand upon
In order to reach up unto that higher;
And none can stand a tip-toe in that place
He cannot stand in with two stable feet.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning,
May 6, 1845.]

Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael Angelo_ (1904).]

Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention:

In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These
semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration,
for in reality the beggars have the advantage
of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed
to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to
the point. We must dig painfully through the outer
layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the
invalids are all spirit.
[Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.]

That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art, _Degeneration_, was able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.]

Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of whom we learn,

Too long had sickness left her pining trace
With slow still touch on each decaying grace;
Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien;
Despair upon his languid smile was seen.
[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley_.]

We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_ Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction,

Death and love are yet contending for their prey,

and in _Adonais_ he appears as

A power
Girt round with weakness.
* * * * *
A light spear ...
Vibrated, as the everbearing heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it.

Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as consumption saps his strength:

You might see his colour come and go,
And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes;
And the breath with intermitting flow
Made his pale lips quiver and part.
[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.]

The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, _Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence.

Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero:

More tremulous
Than the soft star that in the azure East
Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day
Was his frail soul.
[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.]

Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death:

Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
He went, his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground.
He could not wait their passing; he is dead.

In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse:

The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn,
The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn,
The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell,
The almond face that Giotto drew so well,
The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._]

Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the _Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another,

Behold him, how Hell's reek
Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek.
[Footnote: _Dante at Verona._]

A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore:

And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell.
[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._]

In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is

A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.]

In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until

His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.

The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile.

Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast by Fate into the body of a woman?

As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,--in fact, it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_.] and Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, _Sappho_; Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; Kingsley, _Sappho_, Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Sapphics_, _Anactoria_; Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in Lenkos_.] to the long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: Browning, _One Word More_, _Preface to The Ring and the Book_; James Thomson, B. V., _E. B. B._; Sidney Dobell, _On the Death of Mrs. Browning_.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, _Ballad of Appeal to Christina Rossetti_, _New Year's Eve_, _Dedication to Christina Rossetti_.] Emily Bronte, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Bronte_.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, _Sister Songs_, _On her Photograph_, _To a Poet Breaking Silence_.] Felicia Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean, _Felicia Hemans_.] Adelaide Proctor, [Footnote: Edwin Arnold, _Adelaide Anne Proctor_.] Helen Hunt, [Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, _H_. _H_.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote: _Ibid_., _To E. Lazarus_.]--one finds woman the subject of complimentary verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her "manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_.] So the feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise.

As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal Friendship."_] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See _To Mrs. Henry Tighe_.] both deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, _The Blue Stocking_, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: See _The Catalogue_. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is _The Squinting Poetess_.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See _To a Poetess_. More seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See _To Write as Your Sweet Mother Does_.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and heroine,

In each lay poesy--for woman's heart
Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen;
And if it flow not through the tide of art,
Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween
It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked
The egress of rich words, it flows in thought,
And in its silent mirror doth reflect
Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought.
[Footnote: Milton.]

Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,--Cythna, in _The Revolt of Islam_.

It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his

Lyric love, half angel and half bird,

reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In _The Two Poets of Croisic_ he deals with the eighteenth century in France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning the admiration of the celebrities of the day--only to have his verse tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine _nom de plume_, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. [Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod."] If indifference is the attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted to Robert Browning, "is--that there is a natural inferiority of mind in women--of the intellect--not by any means of the moral nature--and that the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well.

In a short narrative poem, _Mother and Poet_, Mrs. Browning claims for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be found in _Aurora Leigh_. She feels that making her imaginary poet a woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. Romney declares,

Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,--and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.

Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. She confesses,

We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.

But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, _Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.]

Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit?

In answer, one is haunted by the line,

I too was born in Arcadia.

Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: See _Corydon_.] Collins, [Footnote: See _Selim, or the Shepherd's Moral_.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See _Pastoral on the Death of Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. [Footnote: See _Huggins and Duggins_, and _The Forlorn Shepherd's Complaint_.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes' _Letter to a Friend in the Country_, and Sidney Dyer's _A Country Walk_, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday.

With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the poet to nature becomes, of course, more intimate. But Cowper and Thomson keep themselves out of their nature poetry to such an extent that it is hard to tell what their ideal position would be, and not till the publication of Beattie's _The Minstrel_ do we find a poem in which the poet is nurtured under the influence of a natural scenery. At the very climax of the romantic period the poet is not always bred in the country. We find Byron revealing himself as one who seeks nature only occasionally, as a mistress in whose novelty resides a good deal of her charm. Shelley, too, portrays a poet reared in civilization, but escaping to nature. [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_, and _Alastor_.] Still, it is obvious that ever since the time of Burns and Wordsworth, the idea of a poet nurtured from infancy in nature's bosom has been extremely popular.

There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. [Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs,

So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth,
That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran
(And song is but the eloquence of truth).

The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, declaring of poetry,

Its seat is deeper in the savage breast
Than in the man of cities.
[Footnote: _Poetry_.]

To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all singers," in Longfellow's _Hiawatha_.

But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says

If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a meter none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore.
[Footnote: _Preludes_.]

The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature

More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too, were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See _Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The Prelude_.]

Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from civilization:

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings.

No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality. Stephen Phillips says of Emily Bronte's poetic gift,

Only barren hills
Could wring the woman riches out of thee,
[Footnote: _Emily Bronte_.]

and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See _The Palace of Art_.] and Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See _The Poet's Vow_; Letters to Robert Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe, _An Escape_; J. E. Flecker, _Dirge_; Madison Cawein, _Comrading_; Yeats, _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_.] he does not have everything his own way.