The Poets Poet

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet's Poet, by Elizabeth Atkins
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Title: The Poet's Poet
Author: Elizabeth Atkins
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7928]
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Language: English
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THE POET'S POET
Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in
English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years
By
ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D.
Instructor in English, University of Minnesota
TO
HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER
PREFACE
Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps
received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the
majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the last
man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no
means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the
part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of
æsthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer
of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the
poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic
philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only
incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself,
whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider.
The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance
of individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's
Prelude, Browning's Sordello, and the like, could scarcely give more
than a re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes
and essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review

the main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty
years. We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic
conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing
theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an
essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and
mission.
It is true that there is scarcely an idea relative to the poet which is not
somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempt has
been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of each
question. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism is
inescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is the lover
of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of the spiritual
in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange that practically every
utterance which we may consider,--even such as deal with the most
superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty or his
health,--falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly as the
poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to be the more
important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has been the most
interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whose nature the
poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall wholly harmonize is
the ideal whom practically all modern English poets are attempting to
present.
Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree.
In the Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something
grotesque in placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's.
Yet, since it is true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles
influenced Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it
seems that in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition,
where the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the
views of a large group are frequently highly significant, not only as
testifying to the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that
great and small in the poetic world have the