and the suggestion, certainly not personal to Wilde, but chosen for its fitness to the poet of whom he is thinking—
"that Luxury
With barren merchandise piles up the gate
Where noble thoughts and deeds should enter by:
Else might we still be Milton's heritors."
If we were to take this view of the character of Wilde's imitations it would be an easy task to run through most of the book, showing how carefully he acknowledges his indebtedness to Arnold, to Swinburne, to Morris, much as a creative critic like Walter Pater courteously sets the name of Pico della Mirandola, or of Sir Thomas Browne, at the head of a piece of his own writing of which they have been less the occasion than the chosen keynote. But there is no need.
It is more important to the student of Wilde to notice that the book had a popular success, and a success in no way due to any praise from the contemporary critics who, naturally enough, were unable to consider Poems as the first book of a great man, could not review it in the light of his later writings, and attacked it wholeheartedly, perhaps because they were flattered by the ease with which they detected its openly-acknowledged borrowings. Five editions were sold immediately, and this not very trustworthy success increased or confirmed Wilde's confidence in himself. The readiness of the public to throw their opinion in the critics' teeth was partly due, I think, to precisely those qualities for which the book was attacked. Much of this unusual eagerness of ordinary people to buy poetry, a commodity that they seldom think worth money, may be attributed to the curiosity which Wilde had contrived to stimulate by carefully calculated eccentricity. But such curiosity would be more easily satisfied by the sight of the man than by the reading of his poems. It is hardly enough to explain the sale of five editions of a book of verse. I think we may look for another reason of the book's popularity in the fact that Wilde, so far from inventing a new poetry, happened to summarize in himself the poetry of his time. He made himself, as it were, the representative poet of his period, a middleman between the muses and the public. People who had heard of Rossetti and Swinburne, but never read them, were able to recover their self-respect by purchasing Wilde.
And this leads us back to the book. All the defects of this young man's verse became qualities that contributed to its popular success. It was imitative: it summed up a period of poetry. It was overweighted with allusion: nothing could be more poetical in the ears of readers not trained by an austere Bowyer to a distrust of Pierian springs, lutes, lyres, Pegasus, and Hippocrene.
"In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse. Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister pump, I suppose." (Coleridge on Bowyer, in the "Biographia Literaria.")
The presence in verse of certain names of places and persons has come to be taken as implicit evidence of poetry. Where Venus is, there must poetry be; Helicon, Narcissus, Endymion (after Keats), and a score of others have become a sort of poetical counters that careless eyes do not distinguish from the sterling coin. Wilde makes full use of them, and, perhaps, trusting to the capital letters to carry them through, frequently decorates his verse with names of similar character not yet so hackneyed as to be immediately recognized as poetry. This kind of allusion flatters the reader's learning. Sometimes he brings colour into his verse by the use of a reference that must be unintelligible to a large part of his audience, and seems quite irrelevant to those who take the trouble to follow it, and have not the good fortune to hit upon the correct clue. For example, in 'The New Helen':—