The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair,
The lean, athletic body, deftly planned
To carry that swift soul of fire and air;
The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand
Heroic shoulders!
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, At the Sign of the Golden Shoe.]
It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.">[ Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, Rupert Brooke.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage.
We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by no means universal;—that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's Lines on a Squinting Poetess, and Praed's The Talented Man. In the latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy,
He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,
Is all that these eyes can adore.
He's lame,—but Lord Byron was lame, Love,
And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.
Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
[Footnote: Spoon River Anthology.]
for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.
Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and assures us,
Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
[Footnote: Out from Behind This Mask.]
but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing features?