The poet is tired. Great art, however, is not the product of exhaustion, but of exuberance. It will have none of the skimmed milk of mere existence. Nothing less than the thick, pure cream of abounding vitality will do. The exhausted artist has but three courses open to him: either to stimulate himself into a counterfeit, and suicidally brief, exuberance; or to relapse into mediocrity; or to gain a healthy fullness of life.
In the previous chapter it was shown why poetry demands more imperatively than any other art, that the appreciator shall bring to it a margin of vitality. For a like reason poetry makes this same inordinate demand upon its maker. It insists that he shall keep himself even more keenly alive than the maker of music or sculpture, painting or architecture. This is the reason why, in the present era of overstrain, the poet's art has been so swift to succumb and so slow to recuperate.
The poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able to readjust his body to the pace of modern urban life, so that he may live among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations and still keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into his poems. Under these new and strenuous conditions, very little real poetry has been written in our cities. American poets, despite their genuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amid its turmoil, have almost invariably done the best of their actually creative work during the random moments that could be snatched in wood and meadow, by weedy marsh or rocky headland. To his friends it was touching to see with what wistfulness Richard Watson Gilder used to seek his farm at Tyringham for a day or two of poetry after a fortnight of furious office life. Even Walt Whitman—poet of cities that he was—had to retire "precipitate" from his beloved Manahatta in order fitly to celebrate her perfections. In fact, Stedman was perhaps the only one of our more important singers at the close of the century who could do his best work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to the poet: "Thou shalt lie close hid with Nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange." But it is pleasant to recall how even that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in the peace of the country.
One reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women—and especially of unmarried women—among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do with the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the twentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness into which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced. Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it that the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a bull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of a dray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to make up in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city does not consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with his probably inadequate physique, chafes against the hack-work and yields to the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him. Then, after yielding, he chafes again, and more bitterly, at his faint, imperfect expression of these dreams, recognizing in despair that he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuous life about him. So he burns the torch of life at both ends, and the superhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle. Then suddenly the light fails altogether.
Those poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to do even a small amount of steady, fine-grained work in the city. The rest are as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarred from learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil. In her autobiography Miss Jane Addams speaks some luminous words about the state of society which forces finely organized artistic talent into the wearing struggle for mere existence. She refers to it as "one of the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this most precious human faculty, this consummate possession of all civilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost."
I wonder if we have ever stopped to ask ourselves why so many of our more recent poets have died young. Was it the hand of God, or the effort to do the work of two in a hostile environment, that struck down before their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, Edward Rowland Sill, Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, William Vaughn Moody, and the like? These were poets whom we bound to the strenuous city, or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much of their vitality. An old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius "will out." This is true, but only in a sadder sense than the stupidly proverbial one. As a matter of fact, the light of genius is all too easily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually demands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really excellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and produce the finest possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormous solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his best work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize that the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in even the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as the sparks to fly upward." They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of geniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that their own real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have too little adversity to contend with, but lest he have too much.
We have heard not a little about the conservation of land, ore, wood, and water. The poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort of conservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college. I mean the conservation of energy. Our poetry will never emerge from the dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to overtake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it—or until we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable part of every year to the country—the place where the poet belongs.
It is true that the masters of the other arts have not fared any too well at our hands; but they do not need help as badly by far as the poets need it. What with commissions and sales, scholarships, fellowships, and substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors and architects and even the musicians have, broadly speaking, been able to learn and practise their art in that peace and security which is well-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productive mastery. They have usually been able to spend more of the year in the country than the poet. And even when bound as fast as he to the city, they have not been forced to choose between burning the candle at both ends or abandoning their art.
But for some recondite reason—perhaps because this art cannot be taught at all—it has always been an accepted American conviction that poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue by highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and faculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout with the wolf on the threshold—a most practical, philistine wolf, moreover, which never heard of rhyme or rhythm, and whose whole acquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiarity with frayed masculine and feminine endings.
As a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. And the resulting state of things has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets spend their days in correcting encyclopædia proof, or clerking, or running, notebook in hand, to fires—inheres in the eternal fitness of things.