Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, Joaquin Miller, I Shall Remember, and Vale; Francis Ledwidge, The Visitation of Peace.]
Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the Canterbury Tales, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in the Canterbury Pilgrims, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." [Footnote: By Blue Ontario's Shore.] Emerson tries to get on common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to some extent,[Footnote: See The Enchanter.] and it is consistent with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as Emerson:
There cannot be confusion of sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.
[Footnote: Pandeen.]
But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, "Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. W. Holmes, To Longfellow; P. H. Hayne, To Henry W. Longfellow; T. B. Read, A Leaf from the Past; E. C. Stedman, J. G. H.; P. L. Dunbar, James Whitcombe Riley; J. W. Riley, Rhymes of Ironquill.] for their promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches.
There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is essential to the poet. In the Prelude he relates how, from early childhood,
I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of solitude.
Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse:
These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk
Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night.
[Footnote: Personal Talk.]
So he describes the poet's character:
He is retired as noontide dew
Or fountain in a noonday grove.
[Footnote: The Poet's Epitaph.]