IV
AMONG THE POETS
“THEY LEARN IN SUFFERING WHAT THEY TEACH IN SONG”
Horace was a man of feeble health; Milton was blind; Pope deformed. George Herbert, to whom we owe so many of our most beautiful hymns and anthems, was consumptive. John Donne had an enormous influence on English literature, although, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, his influence was mostly malign. He was praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then completely forgotten for a century. His versification is often harsh, but “behind that fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, and imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden, daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them.” Izaak Walton was his admiring friend and first biographer. Donne was constantly ill during the years of his greatest creative activity, yet this is what he once said, speaking of his illnesses: “The advantage you and my other friends have by my frequent fevers is that I am so much the oftener at the gate of heaven; and, by the solitude and close imprisonment they reduce me to, I am so much the oftener at my prayers, in which you and my other dear friends are not forgotten.”
It was owing to ill-health that Coleridge first took opium under the guise of a patent medicine.
William Cowper early showed a tendency to melancholia, but it was not until he was almost thirty that the prospects of having to appear at the bar of the House of Lords, preliminary to taking up the position of clerk—a mere formality—drove him completely insane. He attempted suicide and was sent to an asylum where he spent eighteen months. At the age of forty-two he had another attack from which it took him almost three years to recover completely. Nevertheless we find him three years later making his first appearance as an author with “Olney Hymns,” written in conjunction with a friend. This was followed by a collection of poems, which was badly received, one critic declaring that “Mr. Cowper was certainly a good, pious man, but without one spark of poetic fire.” It was not until 1785 when he was already fifty-four years old and had been twice declared insane that he published the book that was to make him famous. It is entitled: “The Task, Tircinium or a Review of Schools, and the History of John Gilpin.” Cowper is among the poets who are epoch-makers. “He brought a new spirit into English verse. With him begins the ‘enthusiasm for humanity,’ that was afterwards to become so marked in the poetry of Burns, Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron.”
Keats suffered from consumption and it is interesting to note that the progress of his disease coincided with the expansion of his genius.
Chatterton is the most astounding and precocious figure in the whole history of letters. He was only seventeen years and nine months old when starvation drove him to commit suicide, “but the best of his numerous productions, both in prose and verse, require no allowance to be made for the immaturity of their author.” Chatterton’s audience has never been a large one for the reason that with a few exceptions all his poems are written in Fifteenth Century English. Among the discriminating, however, he holds a very high place. His genius and tragic death are commemorated by Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence,” by Coleridge in “A Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” by D. G. Rossetti in “Five English Poets,” and Keats dedicated “Endymion” to his memory.
I have hesitated as to whether I had a right to include Chatterton among my examples, because I can find no record of his having suffered from actual disease. On the other hand he was so abnormal that I feel that I have no right to ignore him. From his earliest years he was subject to fits of abstraction during which he would sit for hours in seeming stupor from which it was almost impossible to wake him. For a time he was even considered deficient in intellect.
Thomas Hood was a chronic invalid; his most famous poem, “The Bridge of Sighs,” was written on his death-bed. Byron and Swinburne were also physically handicapped.
W. E. Henley was not only a poet but a trenchant critic and a successful editor. A physical infirmity forced him at the age of twenty-five to become an inmate of an Edinburgh hospital. While there he wrote a number of poems in irregular rhythm describing, with poignant force, his experiences as a patient. Sent to the Cornhill Magazine, they at once aroused the interest of Leslie Stephen, the editor, and induced him to visit the young poet and to take Robert Louis Stevenson with him. This meeting in the hospital and the friendship which ensued between Stevenson and Henley were famous in the literary gossip of the last century. Henley’s reputation will rest on his poetry, and the best of his poems will retain a permanent place in English literature. As a literary editor he displayed a gift for discovering men of promise, and “Views and Reviews” is a “volume of notable criticism.”
Sidney Lanier, one of the most original and talented of American poets, was consumptive, and Francis Thompson, author of “The Hound of Heaven,” wrote his flaming verse under acute pain.