But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as Herrick has made immortal by his Lines to Ben Jonson.[Footnote: The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, however. See Ben Jonson, Essay on Donne.] A good deal of nineteenth century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, Browning's At the Mermaid, Watts-Dunton's Christmas at the Mermaid, E. A. Robinson's Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, Josephine Preston Peabody's Marlowe, and Alfred Noyes' Tales of the Mermaid Inn all present fondly imagined accounts of the gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish among poets of the last century,—at least they were overhung by no glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See A Fable for Critics.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, The New Timon and the Poet; Bulwer Lytton, The New Timon; Swinburne, Essay on Whitman. For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, To Alice Meynell (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, The Poets with the Sounding Gong (1912); Robert Graves, The Voice of Beauty Drowned (1920).]
Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:
Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say,
And cast them into shape some other day;
Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,
And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.
The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in Julian and Maddalo, was of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited…. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. (Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's Thyrsis, Tennyson's In Memoriam, and more recently, George Edward Woodberry's North Shore Watch, indicate that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for their celebration in verse, from classic times onward.
Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In To a Skylark, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." Employing the opposite figure in the Defense of Poetry, he says, "The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude." Of the poet in Alastor we are told,
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.
Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in Stanzas Written in Dejection, and also in Adonais. In the latter poem he says of himself,
He came the last, neglected and apart,
and describes himself as
companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell.