The Poet's Poet Part 9

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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 att.i.tude 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 s.e.x 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 att.i.tude. "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 s.e.x 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 a.s.signs 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 s.e.x.

Romney declares,

Women as you are, Mere women, personal and pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sionate" 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 a.s.sails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's s.e.x 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 const.i.tution 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 a.s.suming 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. Sh.e.l.ley, 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. Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley, [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.

For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared in London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter of course,

The coy muse, with me she would not live In this dark city, [Footnote: _Epistle to George Felton Mathew_. Wordsworth's sonnet, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at this time.]

and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet,

In cities he was low and mean; The mountain waters washed him clean.

[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse,

She can find a n.o.bler theme for song In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight Than in the broad expanse of sea and sh.o.r.e.

[Footnote: _L'Envoi_.]

A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, _The Rossettis_, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there.

Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See _The City of Dreadful Night_.] this is not the same thing as the romantic poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment.

Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: See _On London Stones_.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious about his city poets. [Footnote: See _Fleet Street Eclogues_.] But as landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course.

Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer.

[Footnote: See _Paris_.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl Sandburg, _Chicago Poems_; Edgar Lee Masters, _The Loop_; William Griffith, _City Pastorals_; Charles H. Towne, _The City_.] are beginning to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called _A Winter Night_ reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the most bucolic shepherd among his flocks.

To poets' minds the only unaesthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry inspired by it, the reader of the _Spoon River Anthology_ is still disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment.

So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, but usually, as in the Old English poem, _The Wanderer_, he has been unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] But Byron set the fashion among poets of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.]

and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.]