What is a Great Poet?
The answer to the question, "Has America produced a Poet?" which was published in the Forum, called forth a surprising amount of attention from the press in England as well as in America. It was quite impossible, and I did not expect, that such an expression of personal opinion would pass without being challenged. In America, particularly, it could not but disturb some traditions and wound some prejudices. But in the present instance, as always before, it has been my particular fortune to find that where criticism—by which I mean, not censure, but analysis—is candid and sincere, it meets in America with sincere and candid readers. In parenthesis, I may add, that when literary criticism of this kind is ill received in America, the fault usually lies with that unhappy system of newspaper reverberation by which "scraps" or "items," removed from their context and slightly altered at each fresh removal, go the round of the press, and are presently commented upon by journalists who have never seen what the critic originally wrote. In reading some of the principal articles which my essay called forth, I find one point dwelt upon, in various ways, in almost all of them. I find a fresh query started as to the standard which we are to take as a measurement for imaginative writers; and it seems to me that it may be interesting to carry our original inquiry a step further back, and to ask, What is a great poet?
If we are to limit the number of the most illustrious and commanding names, as I attempted to do, it is plain that we must also confine the historical range of our inquiry. Some of my reviewers objected to my selection being made among English poets only, and several of them attempted lists which included the poets of Europe or of the world. Yet, without exception, those critics displayed their national bias by the large proportion of Anglo-Saxon worthies whom they could not bring themselves to exclude from their dozen. Shakespeare must be there, and Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Shelley; already a third of the majestic company is English. One reviewer, who had been lately studying the Anthology, could not persuade himself to omit several of those dying dolphins of Byzantine song that drew the shallop of Agathias up into the Golden Horn; and this when the whole tale of bards was not to exceed fifteen at most. One reviewer went to Iceland for a name, and another to Persia—charming excursions both of them, but calculated to exhaust our resources prematurely. The least reflection will remind us that the complexity and excessive fulness of modern interests have invaded literature also, and the history of literature; to select from all time a dozen greatest names is a task of doubtful propriety, and certainly not to be lightly undertaken. It was all very well, in the morning of time, for the ancient critics to regulate their body-guards of Apollo by the numbers of the Muses or the Graces. Nothing could be pleasanter than that tale of the great lyrical poets of the world which we find so often repeated in slightly varying form:
"The mighty voice of Pindar has thundered out of Thebes. The lyre of Simonides modulates a song of delicate melody. What brilliancy in Ibycus and Stesichorus! What sweetness in Alcman! From the mouth of Bacchylides there breathe delicious accents. Persuasion exhales from the lips of Anacreon. In the Æolian voice of Alcæus we hear once more the Lesbian swan; and as for Sappho, that ninth great lyric poet, is not her place, rather, tenth among the Muses?"
If we are contributing lists of a dozen great poets, here are three-fourths of the company already summoned; yet splendid as are these names, and doubtless of irreproachable genius, the roll is, for modern purposes, awkwardly overweighted. Even if for those whose works Time has overwhelmed, we substitute the Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, whom he has spared, the list is still impracticable and one-sided. Yet who shall say that these were not great poets in every possible sense of the word? From each of several modern European nations, from Italy and from France at least, a magnificent list of twelve could be selected, not one of whom their compatriots could afford to lose. Nay, even Sweden or Holland would present us with a list of twelve which should seem indisputably great to a Dutchman or a Swede. It is not possible to spread the net so wide as to catch whales from all the ancient and all the modern languages at once. Let us restrain our ambition and see what criterion we have for measuring those of our own tongue and race.
Passing in review, then, the whole five centuries which divide us from the youth of Chaucer, we would seek to discover what qualities have raised a limited number of the poetical writers of those successive ages of English thought to a station permanently and splendidly exalted. Among the almost innumerable genuine poets of those five hundred years, are there ten or twelve who are manifestly greater than the rest, and if so, in what does their greatness consist?
We are not here occupied with the old threadbare question, "What is a poet"? but we may reply to it so far as to insist that when we are speaking and thinking in English the term excludes all writers, however pathetic and fanciful, who do not employ the metrical form. In many modern languages the word poet, dichter, includes novelists and all other authors of prose fiction. I once learned this to my cost, for having published a short summary of the writings of the living "poets" of a certain continental country, one of the leading (if not the leading) novelist of that country, exclusively a writer in prose, indignantly upbraided me for the obviously personal slight I had shown him in leaving him entirely unmentioned. In English we possess and should carefully maintain the advantage which accrues from having a word so distinct in its meaning; and we may recollect that there is no trick in literary criticism more lax and silly than that of talking about "prose poetry" (a contradiction in terms), or about such men as Carlyle, Mr. Ruskin, or Jefferies as "poets." The greatness we are discussing to-day is a quality wholly confined to those who have made it their chief duty to speak to us in verse.
On these lines, perhaps, the main elements of poetical greatness will be found to be originality in the treatment of themes, perennial charm, exquisite finish in execution, and distinction of individual manner. The great poet, in other words, will be seen, through the perspectives of history, to have been fresher, stronger, more skilful, and more personal than his unsuccessful or less successful rival. When the latter begins to recede into obscurity it will be because prejudices that blinded criticism are being removed, and because the candidate for immortality is being found to be lacking in one or all of these peculiar qualities. And here, of course, comes in the disputed question of the existence of genius. I confess that that controversy seems to me to rest on a mere metaphysical quibble. Robert McTavish is a plough-boy, and ends at the plough's tail. Robert Burns is a plough-boy, and ends by being set up, like Berenice's hair, as a glory and a portent in the intellectual zenith of all time. Are they the same to start with? Is it merely a question of taking pains, of a happy accident—of luck, in short? A fiddlestick's end for such a theory! Just as well might we say that a young vine that is to produce, in its season, a bottle of corton, is the same as a similar stick that will issue in a wretched draught of vin bleu. That which, from its very cotyledons, has distinguished the corton plant from its base brother, that is genius.