What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this subject are Shelley, A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty; Mrs. Browning, Pan Is Dead; Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy; Madison Cawein, Prototypes.] If Poe's rejection of
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,
in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a somber tapestry.
It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, "fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See The Minstrel.] and Bowles [Footnote: See The Visionary Boy.] both warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry. Even Landor reflected,
A marsh, where only flat leaves lie,
And showing but the broken sky
Too surely is the sweetest lay
That wins the ear and wastes the day
Where youthful Fancy pouts alone
And lets not wisdom touch her zone.
[Footnote: See To Wordsworth.]
But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such distinctions.
If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of things—their number, solidarity, edibleness—instead of beauty, for his test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works.
The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: Poem Outlines.] says Sidney Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." [Footnote: The Prelude.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream—he awoke and found it truth." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.]
If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are … the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are not." [Footnote: A Defense of Poetry.] In our period, verse dealing with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, The Bard; Scott, The Lady of the Lake, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Thomas the Rhymer; Campbell, Lochiel's Warning.] But we have many poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. [Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to Songs of Experience, Hear the Voice of the Bard; Crabbe, The Candidate; Landor, Dante; Barry Cornwall, The Prophet; Alexander Smith, A Life Drama; Coventry Patmore, Prophets Who Cannot Sing; J. R. Lowell, Massaccio, Sonnet XVIII; Owen Meredith, The Prophet; W. H. Burleigh, Shelley; O. W. Holmes, Shakespeare; T. H. Olivers, The Poet, Dante; Alfred Austin, The Poet's Corner; Swinburne, The Statue of Victor Hugo; Herbert Trench, Stanzas on Poetry.] Holmes' view is typical:
We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,—
Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark
While others only note that day is gone;
For them the Lord of light the curtain rent
That veils the firmament.
[Footnote: Shakespeare.]