Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our own." [Footnote: Defense of Poetry.]
What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last century, his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. All poets are idealists.
There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It is expressed in the opening of Shelley's Alastor, and informs the whole of the Ode to the West Wind. It pervades Wordsworth, for if he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute poetry.
Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming "into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the revelation is given to him,—ancient and modern writers alike describe the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the singer,
One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall;
The next he writes his soul's memorial.
[Footnote: A Visit to Burns' Country.]
So Shelley describes the experience:
Meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration.
[Footnote: Alastor.]
The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, enabling them, like Lucy, to be
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer cannot escape Plato's conclusion,