Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of tyranny." [Footnote: Republic.] Few enemies of poets nowadays would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry, asserted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's potentates. [Footnote: See The Four Ages of Poetry.] Once, it must be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim,
If thou hast ever done amiss
It was, O Southey, but in this,
That, to redeem the lost estate
Of the poor Muse, a man so great
Abased his laurels where some Georges stood
Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood.
Was ever genius but thyself
Friend or befriended of a Guelf?
But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization of the modern poet as liberty-lover.
Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of poet-laureate.
The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue." Gray, in The Progress of Poesy, draws the same conclusion as Shelley:
Her track, where'er the goddess roves,
Glory pursue, and generous shame,
The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame.
Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. [Footnote: See Gray, The Bard; Burns, The Vision; Scott, The Bard's Incantation; Moore, The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, Dear Harp of My Country; Wordsworth, The Brownies' Cell, Here Pause; Tennyson, Epilogue, The Poet; Swinburne, Victor Hugo, The Centenary of Landor, To Catullus, The Statue of Victor Hugo, To Walt Whitman in America; Browning, Sordello; Barry Cornwall, Miriam; Shelley, To Wordsworth, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Prometheus Unbound; S. T. Coleridge, Ode to France; Keats, Epistle to His Brother George; Philip Freneau, To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants; J. D. Percival, The Harper; J. R. Lowell, Ode, L'Envoi, Sonnet XVII, Incident in a Railway Car, To the Memory of Hood; Whittier, Proem, Eliot, Introduction to The Tent on the Beach; Longfellow, Michael Angelo; Whitman, Starting from Paumaak, By Blue Ontario's Shore, For You, O Democracy; W. H. Burleigh, The Poet; W. C. Bryant, The Poet; Bayard Taylor, A Friend's Greeting to Whittier; Richard Realf, Of Liberty and Charity; Henry van Dyke, Victor Hugo, To R. W. Gilder; Simon Kerl, Burns; G. L. Raymond, Dante, _A Life in Song; Charles Kent, Lamartine in February; Robert Underwood Johnson, To the Spirit of Byron, Shakespeare; Francis Carlin, The Dublin Poets, MacSweeney the Rhymer, The Poetical Saints; Daniel Henderson, Joyce Kilmer, Alan Seeger, Walt Whitman; Rhys Carpenter, To Rupert Brooke; William Ellery Leonard, As I Listened by the Lilacs; Eden Phillpotts Swinburne, The Grave of Landor.] It is to be expected that in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming,
Where's the poet? Show him, show him,
Muses mine, that I may know him!
'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king
Or poorest of the beggar clan.
[Footnote: The Poet.]
Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be false to poetry, and he answers his detractors,
Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise,
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope
Of his pure song.