It is said that the best champagne is made from grapes grown upon land that has been cultivated for ages. A similar statement might be made in regard to lyric poetry. The greatest lyric poets of the world, they who represent it at its purest and best, Heine, Hafiz, Tu Fu, and Anacreon, represent the oldest races of Asia. Each is rich with the memory of a past that is glorious in achievement as history tells us, and remains among great traditions today. Not one was of the Christian race. In their veins there was either the blood of oriental Asia, or, as in the case of Anacreon, its tradition, having been born in Teos, one of the voluptuous Ionian cities of Asia Minor. Time was needed for ripening and perfecting of the races that bore them, because great poets are not born of unripe races. Their blood must be tempered by time. Slow centuries intervened between them.
Anacreon lived somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred years before Christ; Hafiz about thirteen hundred years after Christ. The exact date is uncertain. It is known, however, that in the year 1389, according to our reckoning of time, he was living in his beloved Shiraz, where he died and that at that time he was very old. Tu Fu lived in Eighth Century China, under Emperors of Tang. And Heine lived well on into the nineteenth century of our own day.
The age of each was made turbulent and restless by great conquerors. Each knew the domination of warriors whose armies shook the earth. Anacreon knew the devastating wars of Cyrus the Great; Hafiz, the brutal Tamerlane who was the scourge of God, and who made towers of human heads to rival in height the tower of Babel; Tu Fu saw Turkish rebels destroy Ch’ang-an, one of earth’s loveliest dream-cities; and Heine was born on the very day that Napoleon was made First Consul of France.
The best source of information concerning them is their words, although the outward facts of Heine’s life are told accurately enough by history, and a literature has grown up about his art. Few definite facts remain of Anacreon or Hafiz. Old Chinese writers tell us of Tu Fu with eloquence, with emotion. We do know, however, that each saw the splendid historical panorama of a world in transition unroll before his eyes; and that each saw the dominant forces in action that resulted in making the world of today. None has been circumscribed by the age in which he lived because his appeal has been universal, to humanity, whose heart beats responsively under chlamys of caftan. The lyrics of Tu Fu are as fresh and readable as if they had been written yesterday.
Perhaps the preservation of the elder writers is somewhat worthy of remark when we consider the periods in which they lived and the centuries that have intervened, since lyric poets have not been beloved of their contemporaries, nor indeed of conventional scholars of the ages, because of unrestraint of utterance, and their untamable fire. Their souls are revolutionary. They do not follow the established order. Too frequently they utter the naked thought. Someone has said that degeneracy and prudery go together. The history of creative ages seems to prove it.
In addition, lyric poets have always loved life for its own sake, unenlivened of faith and unsanctified of the spirit. Their sense and appreciation of the present has been so real, vivid, that there was left neither room nor desire to ask for anything beyond. Upon earth, in their brains, they were given the vision of a heaven.
Anacreon was the blithe Greek; Heine the bitter Hebrew; and Hafiz the fiery-hearted Persian. Tu Fu was the sensitive, sumptuous souled, supercivilized oriental, haunted with the richness of a past that was too great. Anacreon was the Greek whom thought of death could not terrify, who was ready to meet it with a smile. To him the beautiful present was so satisfying, sufficient, that it was anodyne of ill. And he loved the beautiful present blithely, without regret or anger that it could not last. He gave his heart to it and was happy. He asked no more.
To be sure he has no fiery strain of passion. This, critics have counted to his discredit. And he gave us the light side of Greek nature. His enthusiasms were no more permanent than his roses. But they were as lovely, and inimitable. He was an intellectual sensualist.
He praised love, wine, for the Tyrant of Samos. Despite it all he was a great artist in surity of modeling and lightness of touch. A graceful fancy was his, a courtier’s polished wit. He has kept the favor of the ages. The world has loved him. What Anacreon sang in wanton splendor long ago, time has not destroyed, says Horace.
Nec ... quid olim lusit Anacreon delevit ætas. And both Plato and Ovid have praised him.