The Poets Poet | Page 5

subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to confute
his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the most
unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is
continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the
stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical
and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no
identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.]
The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a
luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself,
to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of
Shakespeare as compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of
the
self-obliterating splendor of his genius:

In poetry there is but one supreme,
Though there are many angels
round his throne,
Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid.

[Footnote: On Shakespeare.]
But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure,
the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience.
What right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter
proper to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the
legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that we
are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure
obscure our view?
Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon
one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old
dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic
mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of
immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet
should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things,
which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in this
world.
Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way
through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the
opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side,
justifying their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain
that the poet should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror
up to life, he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we
maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone
of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have
no competitors to dispute his place as chief character.
At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic
poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental entity, is
soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality cannot
follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual world,
why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by his own

individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet cannot, in
the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals nakedly. They
are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable from their filmy
veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the other Platonic ideas
by precisely this attribute, that it must be embodied. What else is the
meaning of the statement in the Phaedrus, "This is the privilege of
beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the ideas) she is also the most
palpable to sight?" [Footnote: § 251.] Now, whatever one's stand on the
question of nature versus humanity in art, one must admit that
embodying ideals means, in the long run, personifying them. The poet,
despising the sordid and unwieldy natures of men, may try, as
Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization of his ideas in nature,
but it is really his own personality, scattered to the four winds, that he
is offering us in the guise of nature, as the habiliments of his thought.
Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge:
In our life alone does nature live,
Ours is her wedding garment, ours
her shrowd.
[Footnote: Ode to Dejection.]
The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was;
his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the
philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own
toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret of
nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's
personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his
conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us,
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked
upon, that object he became.
Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the