TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the biographical passages cited in the text relative to the difference of literary atmosphere in New York and Boston. Read W. D. Howells’s “A Hazard of New Fortunes” for a further contrast between the two cities.
Read Stoddard’s poems with a view to marking definite literary influences as shown in poems which seem evidently imitative.
Read a group of the four-line and eight-line poems of Aldrich and compare them in spirit and execution with similar bits by Stoddard and by Emerson.
Read Stedman’s critical essays on one or two of the New England poets and on two or three of his fellow New Yorkers. Read his essay on Walt Whitman. Does Stedman’s own verse confirm the theory of his criticisms of Whitman?
Read Gilder’s poems in the newer verse forms and compare them with one of the contemporary poets mentioned in the last chapter of this book.
Is there a legitimate connection to be mentioned between Gilder’s poems on civic themes and the movement for better citizenship in the 1890’s? Can you cite political events and characters and novels or plays on political life which belong to this period?
CHAPTER XXIII
THE POETRY OF THE SOUTH
The non-mention of any Southern writers for nearly two centuries in a history of American literature is likely to mislead the unthinking reader. Certain qualifying facts should be reckoned with in drawing any deductions. The first and most specific is that Poe, although born in Boston and largely active in Philadelphia and New York, belongs to the South. His poems and tales are without time and space, but his criticisms are often vigorously sectional; yet he was really an isolated character, speaking for himself without associates or disciples.
For the comparative withdrawal of the South during a long period from the writing and publishing of poems, essays, and stories, there are two main reasons. One is the general nature of the early settlement (see pp. 3, 4, 6). The spread of the population over a wide area and the consequent lack of large towns gave no encouragement to printers and publishers before the Revolution and furnished no such gathering places as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Literature, like all the other arts, thrives best in fellowship. With the Revolution and after it the richest culture of the South devoted itself to statesmanship and expressed itself in oratory. John Adams, governmental specialist, regretted that he had no leisure for the arts (see p. 69), but Thomas Jefferson, his successor in the White House, was a creative educator, a linguist, an architect, and not unversed in music. Southern gentlemen from the days of Jefferson and Madison to those of Abraham Lincoln read “Mr. Addison” and “Mr. Steele” and “Mr. Pope,” fashioned their speech and writing after those courtly models, and, when they wrote at all, circulated their efforts among friends, not submitting them to the sordid touch of the publisher.
Moreover, the literary consciousness of the South is shown in the history of the American theater. The earliest performances of which there is record were given on Southern estates in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The Hallam company of players, arriving from England in 1752, secured their first hearing in Maryland and Virginia. Smaller Southern communities held their own with New York and Philadelphia in the patronage of the stage, while surviving Puritan prejudice made New England an arid field for the drama until well into the next century. Again, the founding of the University of Virginia, preëminent though not the oldest among Southern colleges, was a doubly important event in American education, for it was first among state universities, with a curriculum recognizing the demands of citizenship, and it was unique in the beauty of its housing. Finally, journalism was not neglected in the South, keeping pace with the progress in the rest of the country; and the Southern Literary Messenger (1834–1865) held an enviable place among American periodicals during its thirty years of life.
From 1850 the natural course of events in the South began to develop literary centers, of which Charleston, South Carolina, was the most notable. At this date William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) was in the high prime of life and was the unchallenged leader by virtue of age, literary achievement, and force of personality. He had appeared before the public with two volumes of poems in 1827, without foregoing poetry had gone on to prolific writing of adventure stories, and had produced at the rate of more than a book a year. He was an aboundingly vigorous, somewhat turbulent man, with a stimulating gift for talk and a very generous interest in all men of literary feeling and especially in younger aspirants. Around him and John Russell, the bookseller, there gathered by social gravitation a group who became for Charleston what the frequenters of the Old Corner Book Store were to Boston and rather more than what the “Bohemians” of Pfaff’s restaurant were to New York. Russell’s became a rendezvous for the best people during the daytimes—perhaps to buy, perhaps only to talk—and in the evenings the men gathered in the spirit of a literary club, though without organization or name. Russell’s Magazine was the natural fruit of the group-spirit thus engendered, just as the Atlantic Monthly (see p. 288) was of similar associations in Boston or as the Dial had been of the Transcendental Club in 1840 (see p. 195).
It was a further consequence of this plowing of the cultural soil that two Charleston boys born in 1829 and 1830 were encouraged as young men not only to write but to publish their poems and that one became the first editor and the other a frequent contributor to the local periodical. These were Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Of the two friends, somewhat as in the case of Halleck and Drake, Timrod, the one who showed promise of finer things, was the victim of an early death. As a youth he was given to the introspective seriousness and the grave extravagances of the growing poet—characteristics which are not wholly sacrificed in the grown poet, as they are in the average “sensible” man. His inclination to extol emotion as an end in itself, however, was fostered by a native hospitality toward sentimentalism for which there was little to correspond in the more prosaic North. In fact “the susceptibility of early feeling” which Irving wished to keep alive (see p. 126) and which was the central thread in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” was, and still is, a cue to certain prevailing Southern traits. Whatever may have been the origin of Southern speech and manners, they have continued in some measure to resemble those which we associate with English literature of the mid-eighteenth century. Both have a touch of courtly formality, a tendency toward the oratorical style, an explicit insistence on honor and chivalry, a display of deference to womanhood and to all beauty, and both are in constant danger from the insincerity which besets a speech or a literature which relies on conventional phrasing until the original locutions lose their original vitality.[32]
Timrod as a youthful versifier passed through his period of unconvincing extravagance, and even in his earlier work showed by occasional flashes that he had his own gift for expression as well as a receptive mind for poetry. In 1859 his first book of poems was published. It had the coveted distinction of the Ticknor and Fields, Boston, imprint, but it was indubitably the utterance of a Charleston poet. The sonnet “I know not why, but all this weary day” is full of genuine feeling, and in its ominous despair foretells the coming war:
Now it has been a vessel losing way,
Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray
Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main;
And then, a banner, drooping in the rain,
And meadows beaten into bloody clay.
Timrod’s two greater poems were dedicated to the Confederacy. They are the outpourings of loyalty to the shortlived nation, full of passion, no freer from hate and recrimination than the average poems from the North, but positive in their ardent faith in the beneficent part the Confederacy was to play in future history. Like all other war poets he suffered from the embittering effects of the conflict. His first inclination was to think more about his hopes for the South than about his hatred of the North; yet even in “The Cotton Boll” and in “Ethnogenesis” he saw red at times, as any human partisan was bound to do. The newly federated South was to send out from its whitened fields an idealized cotton crop that “only bounds its blessings by mankind.” The labors of the planter were to strengthen the sinews of the world. Yet into this finely altruistic mood came the acrid thought of the war which was in progress, and in a moment he was vilifying the “Goth” in the same breath that he was resolving to be merciful. Timrod endured without flinching as an individual. As a confederate patriot he dreamed
Not only for the glories which the years
Shall bring us; not for lands from sea to sea,
And wealth, and power, and peace, though these shall be;
But for the distant peoples we shall bless,
And the hushed murmurs of a world’s distress.
But when the war was over, in his “Address to the Old Year” (1866) he was all for complete and speedy reconciliation.
A time of peaceful prayer,
Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain—
These are the visions of the coming reign
Now floating to them on this wintry air.
Fortunately, in the slow approach toward this millennial conclusion Timrod was spared the brutal blunders of the Reconstruction period, for he died within the next twelvemonth, serene in his hopes.
Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–1886), a man of moderate talents and of achievement that was greater in bulk than quality, was whole-heartedly devoted to literature. With the founding of Russell’s, while the bookseller supplied the capital and Simms the general stimulus, Hayne was the obviously willing and capable young man to carry the editorial routine. If the war had not cut short the life of the magazine within three years, Hayne might have fulfilled a long and useful career in its guidance. Moreover, the kind of criticism to which his work would have accustomed him might have refined his own verse and reduced its quantity as it did for Aldrich and Gilder. But a career like theirs was denied him when Russell’s was discontinued, and he was forced into the precarious existence of living by his pen without the assurance of any regular salary. Though this may be a sordid detail, it is not a negligible one, for the lack of a certain income not only disturbs the artist’s mind but goads him to writing for monetary rather than artistic ends. This result is apparent in Hayne’s work. He had to force himself, and he wrote in consequence the only kind of poetry that industry and good will can produce.
Much of it was for special occasions. He wrote on demand for everything, from art exhibits to cotton expositions, always conscientiously without any special lightness or felicity. He fell into the conventional nineteenth-century habit of writing on romantic subjects located in parts of the earth which he knew only from other men’s poetry. His best work, of course, sprang more directly from his experience. Some of his war lyrics are stirring, though seldom up to Timrod’s best. Some of his protests after the war are spirited and wholly justified by the stupid clumsiness of Northern control. “South Carolina to the States of the North” and “The Stricken South to the North” suggest in verse what Page’s “Red Rock” and Tourgée’s “A Fool’s Errand” present through the detail of extended novels. Hayne’s tributes to other poets, particularly to Longfellow and Whittier, are full of generous admiration, and his nature poems ring finely true. Most of all the Southern pine fascinated him by its perennial grace and strength and its mysterious voice. A pine-tree anthology could be culled from his verse.
To be the poet of a class or a district and no more than that is ordinarily not a notable achievement, but the fact that they represented an epoch as well as a section emphasizes the significance of Timrod and Hayne. They were products of freshly stimulating conditions in the South; before the war they began to sing for a neighborhood that had long been comparatively silent. And when the war came on, and after its conclusion, they were not only its best singers but they were remarkable in war literature for the fineness of their positive spirit and their relative freedom from abusive rancor. They reaped in love and praise the reward that their impoverished constituency could not pay them in money.
Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842. He was therefore twelve or thirteen years younger than Hayne or Timrod, and his productive period was correspondingly later, namely, in the 70’s. He could trace his Lanier ancestry back to the court musicians of the Stuarts, and beyond them to a conjectured past in France. His mother sang and played in the home, and his father, a courtly and refined lawyer, was a “gentle reader” of the old Southern school. Macon was a town of extreme orthodoxy where “the only burning issues were sprinkling versus immersion, freewill versus predestination,” but where the rigors of Calvinism were mollified by innocent merrymaking and the amenities of Southern hospitality. From here Lanier went, in 1857, to Oglethorpe University as a member of the sophomore class, graduating from the modest college with first honors in 1860. Though successful in scholarship, he had found his chief enjoyments in wide reading of romantic literature and in flute-playing. He was convinced that his talents were in music, but his strong ethical bias led him to check them because he could not satisfactorily answer the question, What is the province of music in the economy of the world? On his appointment as tutor at Oglethorpe he decided to remain in college-teaching, rounding out his preparation by two years at Heidelberg. When the war broke he seemed to be well started on the path trod by Longfellow and Lowell.
In “Tiger Lilies,” his early romance, he described how the “afflatus of war” swept the South as it sweeps any land in the first hours of decision. “Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts, conditioning impatient lovers with war services. It thundered splendidly in the impassioned words of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in barrooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms.... It offered tests to all allegiances and loyalties,—of church, of state; of private loves, of public devotion; of personal consanguinity, of social ties.” In 1861 Lanier enlisted in the first Georgia regiment to leave for the front. Four years later he returned with health permanently impaired by the hardships of service and of a prison camp.
Even though wrecked in health, he came out from the war saddened but not embittered, and convinced as early as 1867 that the saving of the Union had been worth the ordeal. His insistence that hatreds should be buried was maintained in face of every influence to the contrary. The countryside had been devastated and business brought to a stop. Libraries had been destroyed and colleges closed. As recuperation began the magnanimous influence of Lincoln waned, and the reign of the “carpetbaggers” inflamed the worst elements in the South, drove some of the better in despair to other parts of the country, and reduced the rest to bruised and heartsick indignation. Lanier could not be unaffected by such conditions. He took refuge in grinding work: first in teaching and then in several years of law practice in the examination of title deeds. “Tiger Lilies” was published in 1867 by Hurd and Houghton in New York, and a number of poems were printed there in the Round Table during 1867 and 1868. But depression and drudgery tended to silence him, and might have done so if the music in him had succumbed with the poetry and if the poetry had not been revived by the stimulating friendships of two older men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Bayard Taylor.
Music gained a new hold on him during an enforced health trip to Texas in the winter of 1872–1873. He had reveled in the concerts he had heard in different visits to New York after the war, but in San Antonio he fell in with a group of musicians for whom he was a player as well as an auditor. Without any formal instruction in the flute he had achieved such a command of the instrument that it had become a second voice for him. In the autumn of ’73 he met and played for Hamerick, Director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and in December he went in triumph to his initial rehearsal as first flutist in the newly organized Peabody Symphony Orchestra. For the rest of his life music was his most reliable means of support and a source of pleasure that amounted to little less than dissipation. As a performer he was in great demand for extra local engagements, from which he seemed to gain quite as much enjoyment as he gave—for he played in a kind of ecstasy; he “felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary inspiration, to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship.” As an auditor, whether of his own music or that rendered by others, his appreciation was almost wholly sensuous, an experience of raptures, thrills, and swooning joys. “Divine lamentations, far-off blowings of great winds, flutterings of tree and flower leaves and airs troubled with wing-beats of birds or spirits; floatings hither and thither of strange incenses and odors and essences; warm floods of sunlight, cool gleams of moonlight, faint enchantments of twilight; delirious dances, noble marches, processional chants, hymns of joy and grief: Ah, midst all these I lived last night, in the first chair next to Theodore Thomas’ orchestra.” From such a comment one is prepared for frequent references to the more modern composers, few to Beethoven, and none at all to Bach and Brahms; and one is helped to understand also the mistakenly limited dictum—too often quoted—that “Music is love in search of a word.” Music was immensely important in Lanier’s emotional life; the kind that he most enjoyed, and the kind of enjoyment he derived from it, furnished the cue for an interpretation of much of his poetry—a cue which is the clearer when compared with what music meant to Browning.
The development of a Baltimore orchestra in 1873 was an expression of the reawakening of artistic life from Baltimore to the Gulf. By 1870 the call was repeatedly sounded for a new literature and a new criticism in the South. Short-lived magazines sprang up and were flooded with copy before their early deaths. Much was written that was ostentatiously sectional in tone, but much by men like Hayne and Cable and Page that approached the standard set by Joel Chandler Harris in his appeal for a literature which should be “intensely local in feeling, but utterly unprejudiced and unpartisan as to opinions, traditions, and sentiment. Whenever we have a genuine Southern literature, it will be American and cosmopolitan as well.” Equally in the interest of the South was Hayne’s demand for criticism which should put a quietus on the fatuous scribblers who had nothing to say and said it badly. “No foreign ridicule,” he wrote in the Southern Magazine in 1874, “can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic weakness and artistic platitudes as have hitherto been foisted on us by persons uncalled and unchosen of any of the muses.”
At the same time a generously enterprising spirit led several of the leading Northern editors to accept and even solicit contributions from the South. In 1873 Scribner’s Monthly projected and secured a widely advertised series of articles on “the great South.” Harper’s had a series of its own. The Atlantic, with Howells as editor, followed conservatively, and the Independent opened its columns to the poetry of the men whom it had condemned in most aggressive terms a dozen years earlier. More important to Lanier than any of these was Lippincott’s, in which “Corn,” “The Symphony,” and “The Psalm of the West,” with certain shorter poems, were published in 1875, 1876, and 1877—poems by which his wide reputation was established.
The encouragement given him by Hayne in the dark days of the law, when he had no time to write, was followed by a Northern friendship of even greater value to him when the Lippincott poems were brought to the kindly attention of Bayard Taylor. This busy and large-hearted man of letters seems to have been the literary friend of his whole generation. He was on terms of easy acquaintance with the most renowned of his day. He was a companion of publishers, editors, and journalists, and he showed a most generous interest in the fortunes of promising younger men. His literary status is summarized in his relation to the literary ceremonies of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. He wrote the Ode for the Fourth of July celebration after the honor had been declined by Bryant, Lowell, and Longfellow, and he had sufficient influence to gain for Lanier the distinction of writing the Cantata for the opening ceremonies. The exchange of letters between the two in connection with their efforts is unsurpassed as a record of detailed processes in poetic composition, criticism and rejoinder, and final revision.
Lanier’s conscious command of a poetic theory was a product of his habits of study and led to his appointment by President Daniel Coit Gilman as lecturer in English literature at Johns Hopkins University.[33] From youth Lanier had been an extensive reader of the early English classics, and in Baltimore he eagerly used the resources of the Peabody Library, which was maintained especially for research students. He was keenly interested in stimulating general intelligence in literature among the adult public and also in promoting exact and technical study by qualified scholars. In 1878 he plunged once more into study, planned lecture courses, projected a research program for himself, and early in the next year received the Hopkins appointment. He approached his work with the utmost zest and, as long as his strength lasted, lectured effectively and worked on the critical texts and treatises which the scholarship of his time was just beginning to supply. Now, however, when he had established working relations with the orchestra and the university, he sank under the strain of all the preceding struggle, and in 1881 he died before reaching his fortieth year.
Lanier’s abiding conviction put the poet on the same plane with the prophet and the seer. He was far from according with Poe’s total subordination of intellect and moral sense to the feeling for beauty. He seldom or never wrote a didactic poem, but he usually composed over a strong moralistic counterpoint. In “Corn” the poet
leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme.
In “The Bee” he will wage wars for the world. In “The Marshes of Glynn” he is
the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain.
The poet’s judgments are, therefore, certain to surpass those of his age, certain to reap a harvest of derision and abuse, and certain to approach the right because they are made in the light of eternity rather than in the ephemeral shadow of any passing day.
The tolling of the bell of time which resounds throughout Lanier’s poems does not deafen him to the harmonies or the discords of the moment. With all his consciousness of literary tradition he was far more alive to the present than many of his Southern contemporaries, who were not so genuinely literary as imitatively bookish. “Corn” tells the tale of the improvident cotton-grower who becomes “A gamester’s catspaw and a banker’s slave.” “The Symphony” is an arraignment of the industrial system.
If business is battle, name it so:
War-crimes less will shame it so,
And widows less will blame it so.
“Acknowledgment” (first sonnet) and “Remonstrance” were written of the troublous period which was wracked between doubts that merely disturbed and dogmas which were still advocated with all the subtleties of persecution that—in an enlightened age—will substitute ostracism for the stake and social boycott for excommunication.
In the modest volume of his collected work—for his writing was mainly done in his last eight years, and he was not a garrulous poet—there is a marked variety. “The Revenge of Hamish” is a clear reflection of his zest for heroic story. It is one of the notably successful attempts of his day to emulate the old ballad, and it is the better for restoring the spirit of balladry without imitating the manner. “How Love Looked for Hell,” without being imitative of anyone, is distinctly pre-Raphaelite in tone. Rossetti might have written it. In “The Stirrup-Cup” there is an Elizabethan note, and “Night and Day” and the “Marsh Song—at Sunset” are literary lyrics for the readers of “Othello” and “The Tempest.” These and their like give token of Lanier’s versatility, just as the “Song of the Chattahoochee” displays his command of certain obvious devices in diction and rhythm; but the poems most distinctive of Lanier and most generally quoted are the longer meditations already mentioned, and, in particular, “The Symphony” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” Of these the earlier is much quoted by social reformers for the vigor of its protests at the exploitation of labor; by musicians, because of the sustained metaphor—though it might better have been named “The Orchestra”; and by those who love a certain fulsomeness of sensuous appeal in verse. This last trait gains friends also for “The Marshes of Glynn,” though its supreme passage, the last forty lines, is free from the decorative elaborations which in the earlier portion distract the reader from the content they adorn.
In the development of artistic power the formative period is the most open to influence and the most likely to be formal and self-conscious. Early and full maturity bring the nicest balance between the thing said and the manner of saying it; and a later period often is marked by overcompression or over-elaboration, a neglect of form in favor of content. Lanier, who died on the approach to middle life, had just published “The Science of English Verse” and was studiously aware of poetic processes, from the ingenious conceits of the “Paradise of Dainty Devices” to the metrical experiments of Swinburne and his contemporaries. In the compound of factors which were blending into the matured Lanier there was still a good measure of Elizabethan ingenuity. He felt a pleasant thrill in riding a metaphor down the page. He played repeatedly, for example, with the concept of the passage of time. In the second sonnet of “Acknowledgment” this age is a comma, and all time a complex sentence (four lines); in “Clover” the course-of-things is a browsing ox (twenty-five lines); in “The Symphony” the leaves are dials on which time tells his hours (three lines); in the first of the “Sonnets on Columbus” prickly seconds and dull-blade minutes mark three hours of suspense (three lines); and in “The Stirrup-Cup” death is a cordial compounded by time from the reapings of poets long dead (twelve lines). These all are picturesquely suggestive, but they are rather imposed on the idea than derived from it. Other poets, to be sure, have erred in the same way and then perhaps redeemed themselves. Lanier, however, said nothing so fundamentally true and compact as Pope’s “Years following years steal something every day,” or Shakespeare’s “And that old common arbitrator, Time,” or his “whirligig of time.” There is a similar reaching for effect in the rhythmical quality of many well-known passages. The twelve-line description of the velvet flute-note in “The Symphony” is more deft and intricate than convincing. The figures stumble on each other’s heels, and the alliterations, assonances, and three- and five-fold rimes are intrusively gratuitous. In like manner the opening lines of “The Marshes of Glynn” illustrate the over-luxuriance of Lanier. He delighted in tropical exuberance; he rioted in his letters with less restraint than in his verse, and in one written to his wife in 1874 he confessed parenthetically: “In plain terms—sweet Heaven, how I do abhor these same plain terms—I have been playing ‘Stradella.’” When he wrote this Lanier was thirty-two. Before his death he had approached the point of liking the plain term better and employing it oftener.
“The Marshes of Glynn” is a personal utterance of Lanier in its form, in its sensuous opulence, in its social sympathies, and in its religion; but in these latter respects it is emphatically the utterance also of the period that produced Lanier. It was written in 1878, the year of Bryant’s death; it was written in the structural sequence of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in its applications it indicates the changes that had taken place in religious thought since Bryant’s youth. In the earlier poem the various language that Nature speaks is expounded in general terms, before “Thoughts of the last bitter hour” lead to the monody on death and the resolve so to live that death shall have no fears. The latter poem differentiates the tones of Nature, lingering first in the cloistral depths of the woods during the heat of a June day. In the cool and quiet the poet’s
... heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
And belief overmasters doubt.
So, toward sunset, he leaves the protected green colonnades and goes out unafraid to face the expanse of “a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.” Here Nature, who has consoled him in the forest, fills him with a great exhilaration.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.
From the marshes he learns a lesson of life rather than of death—the spiritual value of aspiration and the emancipating gift of a broad faith. “Thanatopsis” ends with a nobly stated but restraining admonition; “The Marshes” with a song of liberty:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold of the greatness of God.
This is written in the positive mood—and in the measure, too—of Browning’s “Saul.” Both poems record the throwing off of paralyzing restraint and the substitution of hope for dread that resulted from the religious struggles of the nineteenth century.
Lanier went far toward representing the South by the best of all methods, which is to write as a citizen of the world and not as a sectionalist. He was not at the height of his maturity, and he wrote at times with the exuberance and at times with the self-consciousness that he would in all likelihood have outgrown in the fullness of years. He was an aggressive thinker. Only the indifference of his generation to poetry can account for the fact that he was not persecuted for the courage of many utterances. And he was essentially the poet in artistry as well as in vision.