Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself;
It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically,
"Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?"
[Footnote: Song of Myself.]
Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, In Memoriam, "For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, To my Readers; Mrs. Browning, The Soul's Expression; Jean Ingelow, A Lily and a Lute; Coventry Patmore, Dead Language; Swinburne, The Lute and the Lyre, Plus Intra; Francis Thompson, Daphne; Joaquin Miller, Ina; Richard Gilder, Art and Life; Alice Meynell, Singers to Come; Edward Dowden, Unuttered; Max Ehrmann, Tell Me; Alfred Noyes, The Sculptor; William Rose Benét, Thwarted Utterance; Robert Silliman Hillyer, Even as Love Grows More; Daniel Henderson, Lover and Lyre; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, To Imagination; John Hall Wheelock, Rossetti; Sara Teasdale, The Net; Lawrence Binyon, If I Could Sing the Song of Her.]
Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is significant that the singers who are most aware of their inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the problem for us. She avers,
I found the phrase to every thought
I ever had, but one;
And that defies me,—as a hand
Did try to chalk the sun.
To races nurtured in the dark;—
How would your own begin?
Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?
"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: Essay on Imagination.]
Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his public.
Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less aristocratic side of the controversy. His Advice to a Poet follows, throughout, the tenor of the first stanza:
My counsel to the budding bard
Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard."
Your "gentle public," my good friend,
Won't read what they can't comprehend.
This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the Raven is enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse?