and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet,
In cities he was low and mean;
The mountain waters washed him clean.
[Footnote: The Poet.]
But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse,
She can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore.
[Footnote: L'Envoi.]
A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, The Rossettis, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See The City of Dreadful Night.] this is not the same thing as the romantic poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment.
Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: See On London Stones.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious about his city poets. [Footnote: See Fleet Street Eclogues.] But as landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. [Footnote: See Paris.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems; Edgar Lee Masters, The Loop; William Griffith, City Pastorals; Charles H. Towne, The City.] are beginning to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called A Winter Night reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the most bucolic shepherd among his flocks.
To poets' minds the only unæsthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry inspired by it, the reader of the Spoon River Anthology is still disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment.
So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, but usually, as in the Old English poem, The Wanderer, he has been unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See The Lay of the Last Minstrel.] But Byron set the fashion among poets of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: Epistle to Augusta.] and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's autobiographical novels, Rest Harrow and Open Country, and William H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. [Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, Denby the Rhymer (1918); Henry Herbert Knibbs, Songs of the Trail (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, concurred in the view, declaring,
Down the free roads of human happiness
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart.
[Footnote: Sonnet to Sidney.]
"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's Complaint to His Empty Purse, onward, English poetry has borne the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for their destitution,—Homer, Cervantes, Camöens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,—all these have their want exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse.