The Poet's Poet Part 1

The Poet's Poet.

by Elizabeth Atkins.

PREFACE

Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps received less attention than they deserve. The tacit a.s.sumption of the majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the last man who should pa.s.s judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no means certain that this view is correct. Introspective a.n.a.lysis on the part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of aesthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider.

The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of individual poems treating of poets. a.n.a.lysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_ Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pa.s.s in review the main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years.

We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of pa.s.sing theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission.

It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is not somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt has been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the lover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the spiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that practically every utterance which we may consider,--even such as deal with the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or his health,--falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as the poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be the more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been the most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose nature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly harmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are attempting to present.

Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. In the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesque in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since it is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influenced Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small in the poetic world have the same general att.i.tude toward their gift. It is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the subject of their nature than have greater ones, but some attempt is here made to hold them within bounds, so that they may not drown out the more meaningful utterances of the master singers.

The last one hundred and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a peculiarly self-conscious att.i.tude in the poet, and brought his personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as enthusiasts like to term the new stirring of interest in verse) is revealing young poets of the present day even more frank in self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago.

The excursion through modern English poetry involved in these studies has been a pleasant one. The value and interest of such an investigation was first pointed out to me by Professor Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska. It is with sincere appreciation that I here express my indebtedness to her, both for the initial suggestion, and for the invaluable advice which I have received from her during my procedure. I owe much grat.i.tude also to President Wimam Allan Neilson of Smith College, who was formerly my teacher in Radcliffe College, and to Professor Hartley Burr Alexander, of the department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, who has given me unstinted help and generous encouragement.

ELIZABETH ATKINS.

CHAPTER I.

THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE

Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the "egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it "discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it is the mortal coil.

In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they a.s.sure us that by simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the quietude of transcendent beauty.

But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an ineffable vision, but advertis.e.m.e.nt of the author's importance? His argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered consciousness?

Indeed the poet's circle is likely to appear to us even more viciousthan that of other men. To be sure, we remember Sir Philip Sidney's contention, supported by his anecdote of the loquacious horseman, that men of all callings are equally disposed to vaunt themselves. If the poet seems especially voluble about his merits, this may be owing to the fact that, words being the tools of his trade, he is more apt than other men in giving expression to his self-importance. But our specific objection to the poet is not met by this explanation. Even the horseman does not expect panegyrics of his profession to take the place of horseshoes. The inventor does not issue an autobiography in lieu of a new invention. The public would seem justified in reminding the poet that, having a reasonable amount of curiosity about human nature, it will eagerly devour the poet's biography, properly labeled, but only after he has forgotten himself long enough to write a poem that will prove his genius, and so lend worth to the perusal of his idiosyncratic records, and his judgments on poetic composition.

The first impulse of our revulsion from the self-infatuated poet is to confute him with the potent name of Aristotle, and show him his doom foreordained in the book of poetic Revelations. "The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person," we read, "for it is not this that makes him an imitator." [Footnote: _Poetics_, 1460 a.] One cannot too much admire Aristotle's canniness in thus nipping the poet's egotism in the bud, for he must have seen clearly that if the poet began to talk in his own person, he would soon lead the conversation around to himself, and that, once launched on that inexhaustible subject, he would never be ready to return to his original theme.

We may regret that we have not Aristotle's sanction for condemning also extra-poetical advertis.e.m.e.nts of the poet's personality, as a hindrance to our seeing the ideal world through his poetry. In certain moods one feels it a blessing that we possess no romantic traditions of Homer, to get in the way of our pa.s.sing impartial judgment upon his works. Our intimate knowledge of nineteenth century poets has been of doubtful benefit to us. Wordsworth has shaken into what promises to be his permanent place among the English poets much more expeditiously than has Byron. Is this not because in Wordsworth's case the reader is not conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we to determine whether his sonnet, _When I Have Fears,_ is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for f.a.n.n.y Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard?

Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-wors.h.i.+ping generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his contention:

Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, _John Keats,_ p. 478.]

If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in _Blackwoods,_ we may be more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows:

Poetry should be great and un.o.btrusive, a thing that enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!".... I will cut all this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.... I don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and un.o.btrusive. [Footnote: _Ibid.,_ p. 253.]

If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's sonnets,

With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more _Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he.

[Footnote: _House._]

Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this our contention?

It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron, concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself--oh, that accursed selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E.

Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself at the reader's head.

It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no ident.i.ty; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no ident.i.ty." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.]

The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself, to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the self-obliterating splendor of his genius:

In poetry there is but one supreme, Though there are many angels round his throne, Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid.

[Footnote: _On Shakespeare_.]

But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that we are led to complain that the ma.s.sive outlines of the poet's figure obscure our view?

Now just here we who a.s.sail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in this world.

Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have no compet.i.tors to dispute his place as chief character.

At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental ent.i.ty, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_, "This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: -- 251.] Now, whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge:

In our life alone does nature live, Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.

[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._]

The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us,

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.

Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet called _The Love of Narcissus:_

Like him who met his own eyes in the river, The poet trembles at his own long gaze That meets him through the changing nights and days From out great Nature; all her waters quiver With his fair image facing him forever: The music that he listens to betrays His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor.

His dreams are far among the silent hills; His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain; With winds at night vague recognition thrills His lonely heart with piercing love and pain; He knows again his mirth in mountain rills, His weary tears that touch him in the rain.

Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is un.o.btrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Sh.e.l.ley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against "your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great feat." [Footnote: _Poem Outlines._]

In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse may point to the _Canterbury Tales,_ and show us Chaucer ambling along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached.

We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines,

Great poet, 'twas thy art, To know thyself, and in thyself to be Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart Can make of man.

[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.]

If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question.

"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January 13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, September 9, 1845.]

"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of Verlaine, "_c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme_." Of course if one concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is nature seen through a temperament."

Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, _Mimeseis_, did mean "seeing through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament."