The Popularity of Poetry
By
Edmund Gosse
THE POPULARITY OF POETRY.
IS the commercial standard of literary success to be extended to poetry? This is a question that is raised by the peculiar conditions which have developed during the last two years, and it is one which it is important to attempt to solve. If poetry is to be judged by the extent to which it is sold, and especially in relation to the sales of prose fiction, then it must be admitted at once to be in a very sad quandary indeed. If, on the other hand, the status of poetry is to be discovered by a consideration of the degree to which it is talked about and written about, then no branch of contemporary literature would seem to be more flourishing. It is desirable to attempt to define what literary popularity is, and then to see how far the poets of to-day enjoy a share of it.
In its original meaning “popularity” signifies a courting of the popular favor; it is only in its modern and secondary use that the word takes the sense of a gaining of that good-will. Our old writers employed the word with a certain flavor of obsequiousness hanging about it. Among the Elizabethans to be “popular” was to have resigned something of the dignity of independent judgment. We have lost all that in these democratic days, and he is held the most honorable man who has contrived to please the largest number of individual voters, and that book the most successful which has appealed to the largest number of readers. Yet, even with us, literary popularity has not quite come to be synonymous with largeness of sales. We are not so mechanically statistical, even in the matter of our novels, and there are writers whose works sell in vast masses, who enjoy a kind of blind, contemptuous success, and who yet are scarcely to be called “popular.” There are writers, too, of comic or sentimental verse, who are never mentioned among the poets, whose sales, nevertheless, by far exceed those of Mr. Swinburne. I remember how once, in the sacred Lodge of Trinity, and to the face of its fastidious master, the late Lord Houghton contended that the most prominent living poet of England was the writer of a song called “The Old Obadiah and the Young Obadiah.”
At the moment when this whimsical theory was put forth, England possessed a poet of unsurpassed popularity. The case of Tennyson was a singular and, for future generations, a disturbing one. As we look down the history of our country, we may be surprised to see how few of our greatest bards have enjoyed wide popular favor in their life-time. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton, neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge, neither Shelley nor Keats, had any experience of general public acceptance. Dryden and Ben Jonson were illustrious,—they were scarcely popular. Among our really ambitious writers in verse, Cowley and Pope, Burns and Byron, and in his latest years Robert Browning, have alone enjoyed great popularity at all approaching that of Tennyson; and of these Burns is the most remarkable in this respect. Tennyson and Burns, a couple strangely assorted,—these are the two great names in poetry which have achieved, by purely poetic qualities, a lasting approbation from the people of Great Britain.
In the case of Burns, as in that of Béranger in France, the charm of the pure, natural lyric, uttered in the quintessence of its naïveté may be allowed to account for much of the popular acceptation. The universality of Tennyson is a more difficult problem, and one on which criticism has expended much speculation. The main thing at this moment is to admit and to note that popularity, and to see whether it is likely to be continued to later writers. In the first place, it is highly important to recognize that in the history of our poetry, now extending over at least six centuries, it has by no means been the rule that what was ultimately to be found incomparable received any special attention at the time of its production. Some poets have been mildly admired for a portion of their writings which we now regret that they should have produced, and have not been admired at all for their masterpieces. There is evidence to show that the exquisite lyrics of Herrick were not valued during his lifetime for any of the qualities which we now universally discern in them. Moore was greatly preferred to Shelley, not merely until the death of Shelley, but until long after the death of Moore. Much poetry becomes good, because public taste develops in the direction in which it was written; still more ceases to please, because the order of its thoughts and images is no longer in fashion. Criticism likes to conceive that its dicta are final, and talks familiarly about “immortality.” But, as a matter of fact, there are certain even of the old masters who are still on their probation, and a great social crisis might dethrone half Parnassus.