Poetaster

“ His scornful lips upon the instant sing,
⁠And all his pulses leap with ecstasies.
'Tis love the poet wants; he cannot live
Without caressing and without caress,
⁠Which all to charity his fellows give;
But I will wrap his soul in tenderness,
⁠And straightway from his lips will burst a song
⁠All loving hearts shall echo and prolong.
POET.
O Earth, and Sky, and Flowers, and Streams agushing,
⁠God made ye beautiful to make us blest:
O bright-winged Songsters through the blue air rushing ”

“ There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and others when I give myself wholly up to the Poet. Now that my winter’s work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn to the Poet’s company. I don’t know anybody more alive to life than he is. The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he says,—yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he can sing least.
Then a fit of despondency comes over him.—I feel ashamed, sometimes,—said he, the other day,—to think how far my worst songs fall below my best. ”

“ If not a poet, she led poets into gracious ways of speech. Her culture, her clear perceptions, her love of pageants even, her intolerance of all forms of dulness or slowness, her very vanities—were all of them stimulants to those who could put glowing thought into musical language. Her high ruff, her jewelled corsage, her flashing eye, her swift impulses, her perils, her triumphs, her [312] audacities, her maidenhood—all drew flatteries that heaped themselves in songs and sonnets. So live a woman and so live a Queen magnetized dulness into speech. ”

“ As it scourged the night with a hissing rain—
But the Poet wrote never a word.
Then came a burst of martial mirth,
And mighty cannon roared
Till they shook the beams of the steadfast earth—
’Twas not the voice of the Lord. [16]
In the Poet’s heart a memory rose
Of love’s first passionate thrill
That, kindling, grows as the red fire glows—
But the pen was idle, still;
When lo, a timid voice at the door,
And a child, with sweet delight,
Called “Father!” and “Father!” over and o’er—
The poem was written that night. ”

“ He is worthy, thus, of the name so often misapplied, of Poet—
i. e.
Maker. You see an original genius both in the beauties and the faults of the work. Its language, so simply strong and daring in its homeliness, its free and energetic motion, its fresh fearless touch, its fidelity to nature and to life, the quick succession and sharp brief poignancy of its pictures, its absence of elaboration, and carelessness about minute lights and shades—all combine to prove that the author has an eye, an imagination, and a purpose quite peculiar to himself. ”

“ Throughout this vast and pathetic array of Singers now silent, few have been honoured with the name Poet, and have not possessed a skill in words, a sympathy with beauty, a tenderness of feeling, or seriousness in reflection, which render their works, although never perhaps attaining that loftier and finer excellence here required,—better worth reading than much of what fills the scanty hours that most men spare for self-improvement, or for pleasure in any of its more elevated and permanent forms. ”

“ The same thing might be said of a poem in which all the reactions of Nature are translated through the complex medium of the senses as well as the soul. Her voice, her form, her lights and shades, the very spirit of her whole being breathes and sings in the lines of a Wordsworth or a Shelly. At this height, the painter and the poet are one; or the musician brings them together, is the link between them. For a poem may not only contain a picture, or a picture, a poem, but both are often vibrant with the rythmic harmony, even the melody of song. ”

“ Take for example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion, expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary and Romantic verse, and still coloring—perhaps now more strongly than ever—the stream of twentieth-century poetry. ”

“ IF you look at the poets as they move in their procession before your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his age—the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too, after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and flavour of the poetry. ”

“ But with the departure of the lyrical emotion the narrative impulse ends as well.
(b) While keeping within the limits of the lyric he traverses an immense range of emotion and experience. The feelings he describes are those of the Scottish peasant, but the genius of the poet makes them germane to every member of the human race; he discovers the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. Here we have the “passion and apathy, and glory and shame” that are the inspiration of the lyrical poet, and we have them in rich abundance. ”

“ They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows, and the honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden [Pg 121] with the sweetness of melody; and arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak truth. For a Poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him. ”

“ Purely lyrical pieces are from their nature short, and fall into several divisions, which are again subdivided into psalms and songs. Passion, genius, a teeming brain, a palpitating heart, and a soul on fire, are necessary to lyrical composition. The poetry that lives among the people, must indeed be simple—but the simplest feelings are the deepest, and when adequately expressed, are immortal. The song-writer and the psalmist are equally divine; and the rich and noble melodies which they send abroad from their resounding lyres, the world claims as an inheritance. ”

“ In the larger fields of epic and drama, the poet turns more directly to ourselves: he bids us approach, he confers with us, he interprets for our hearing some great truth of humanity, or some wise and searching judgment of life. But the lyric poet stands apart, careless of our presence, oblivious of our attention, pouring out his heart in a transport of purely personal joy or sorrow, singing because he must, and not because there are any to listen. ”

“ Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of soap and water. ”

“ Love of the Lyre.
O! I’ll be a poet! I must! I will!
To tune the Lyrical harp,
I’ll earnestly strive to attain the skill,
And naught shall my purpose warp.
“Pray why would you ever a poet be,
What charm is there in his trade?”—
His soul the bright home of the Beautiful,
The Good and the True is made! ”

“ Poeta.—A poet is that which by the Greeks is called κατ εξοχην, ο ποιητής, a maker, or a feigner: his art, an art of imitation or feigning; expressing the life of man in fit measure, numbers, and harmony, according to Aristotle; from the word ποιειν, which signifies to make or feign. Hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth. For the fable and fiction is, as it were, the form and soul of any poetical work or poem. ”

“ The folk-song appears before the true elaboration of a prosaically organized condition of actual conscious life. Lyric poetry of the truly artistic type, on the other hand, wrests itself away from the prosaic coordination which surrounds it, and creates from the poet's imagination, in its acquired independence, a new poetic world of inward observation and emotion, by means of which, for the first time, the true content and type of expression truly adequate to the human soul, as seen from within, becomes the object of vital art. ”

“ No jingle of sound can replace the delicacy of fancy, nobleness of sentiment and energy of thought that constitute what we may call the soul of poetry. Rhapsody is not the highest form of poetic achievement. In its noblest forms poetry is the medium through which great souls, like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, give to the world, with classic self-restraint, the fruitage of their highest thought and emotion. ”

“ Consequently if we take a survey of the various channels through which the genius of poetry has been accustomed to diffuse itself, it will be found, that, during this half century, every province had its cultivators; that poems epic and dramatic, historic and didactic, lyric and romantic, that satires, pastorals, and sonnets, songs, madrigals, and epigrams, together with a multitude of translations, brightened and embellished its progress. ”

“ Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed.
(Shelley: A Defence of Poetry.)
Poetry, in its matter and form, is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question of long standing in what the essence of poetry consists, or what it is that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose, another in verse. ”

“ Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, like a meerschaum, or a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;—the more porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,—its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can penetrate. ”

“ It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled “Observations in the Art of English Poesy”) to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. “Poesy,” he writes, “in all kind of speaking is the chief beginner and maintainer of eloquence, not only helping the ear with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also raising the mind to a more high and lofty [Pg xiv] conceit. ”

“ The extracts already given will enable the reader to form some idea of the old poet's general power—his music, his picturesque faculty, his colour, his satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to form any very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the most part occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve him from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although the writer is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, his personality is not made clear to us. ”

“ Granting, then, that we know our own personal limitations, and what particular sense our organisation lacks; granting also that we are reading our poet spontaneously, simply because the pleasure of poetry is the pleasure we happen to be seeking; granting, further, that we are sufficiently cultivated and experienced in literature to possess ready apprehension of a thought, a fair taste in expression, and an ear for cadence and melody, there is, I believe, but one certain way of telling whether a verse-writer is a poet [Pg 105] at all, and then whether as poet he is greater or less. ”

“ We pay lip service to beauty. We study poetry, but we deal chiefly with poets—with their being born and their dying, with the shell of them, whereas the poet is only valuable for what beauty he brings us. ”

“ That "the poet is born, not made," is more and more an undisputed fact in every literary age. But many a birthright of poetic power has been saved from sale for a mess of pottage by a wisely ordered meeting of the young bard, while his gift was still latent, with the masters of lyric expression.
Such an introduction is the object of this study, so far as it can embrace in its aim the ends of both forms of expression,—interpretation and composition. ”

“ But the rhetorical expansion of the older forms into an equable and deliberate narrative was counteracted by the still stronger affection for lyrical modes of speech, for impassioned, abrupt, and heightened utterance. No epic solidity or composure could be obtained in the fiery Northern verse; the poets could not bring themselves into the frame of mind required for long recitals; they had no patience for the intervals necessary, in epic as in dramatic poetry, between the critical moments. They would have everything equally full of energy, everything must be emphatic and telling. ”

“ Only when it takes wings does it become poetry. As the poet, touched by emotion, rises to enthusiasm and imaginative power or skill, his speech grows rhythmic, and thus puts on the attribute that distinguishes it from every other mode of artistic expression—the guild-mark which, rightly considered, establishes the nature of the thing itself.... ”