The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

by Elizabeth Atkins

Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for an audience.
[Footnote: Saadi.]

Can it be that when the poet renounces fame, we must concur with Austin
Dobson's paraphrase of his meaning,

But most, because the grapes are sour,
Farewell, renown?
[Footnote: Farewell Renown.]

Perhaps the poet is saved from inconsistency by his touching confidence that in other times and places human nature is less stupid and unappreciative than it proves itself in his immediate audience. He reasons that in times past the public has shown sufficient insight to establish the reputation of the master poets, and that history will repeat itself. Several writers have stated explicitly that their quarrel with humanity is not to be carried beyond the present generation. Thus Arnold objects to his time because it is aesthetically dead. [Footnote: See Persistency of Poetry.] But elsewhere he objects because it shows signs of coming to life, [Footnote: See Bacchanalia.] so it is hard to determine how our grandfathers could have pleased him. Similarly unreasonable discontent has been expressed by later poets with our own time. [Footnote: See William Ernest Henley, The Gods are Dead; Edmund Gosse, On Certain Critics; Samuel Waddington, The Death of Song; John Payne, Double Ballad of the Singers of the Time(1906).] Only occasionally a poet rebukes his brethren for this carping attitude. Mrs. Browning protests, in Aurora Leigh,

'Tis ever thus
With times we live in,—evermore too great
To be apprehended near….
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years.
[Footnote: See Robert Browning, Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12,
1845.]

And Kipling is a notorious defender of the present generation, but these two stand almost alone. [Footnote: See also James Elroy Flecker, Oak and Olive; Max Ehrmann, Give Me Today.]

Several mythical explanations for the stupidity of the poet's own times have been offered in verse. Browning says that poetry is like wine; it must age before it grows sweet. [Footnote: Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume.] Emerson says the poet's generation is deafened by the thunder of his voice. [Footnote: Solution.] A minor writer says that poetry must be written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, The Way of the World (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, A Poet's Question.] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by Shelley, in the Defense of Poetry:

No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers.

Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words, as

Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind's forlornest uses.
[Footnote: Sonnets from the Portuguese.]