Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense)
And once betrayed me into common sense.
[Footnote: Dunciad.]
And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon dry reason alone:
A set o' dull, conceited hashes
Confuse their brains in college classes!
They gang in sticks and come out asses,
Plain truth to speak,
And syne they think to climb Parnassus
By dint of Greek.[Footnote: Epistle to Lapraik.]
The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the Prelude.] and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: See The Scholar.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See The Master of the Dance. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the poet's mind. [Footnote: See The Poet's Mind.] So Richard Gilder maintains of the singer,
He was too wise
Either to fear, or follow, or despise
Whom men call science—for he knew full well
All she had told, or still might live to tell
Was known to him before her very birth.
[Footnote: The Poet's Fame. In the same spirit is Invitation, by J.
E. Flecker.]
The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus:
Yours is the living pall,
The aloof and frozen place of listeners
And lookers-on at life. But mine—ah! Mine
The fount of life itself, the burning fount
Pierian. I pity you.
[Footnote: Sappho and Phaon, a drama.]
Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young:
How proud the poet's billow swells!
The God! the God! his boast:
A boast how vain! what wrecks abound!
Dead bards stench every coast.
[Footnote: Resignation.]
There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She muses over the title of poet: