The Poets Poet | Page 6

phenomenon, in a sonnet
called The Love of Narcissus:
Like him who met his own eyes in the river,
The poet trembles at his
own long gaze
That meets him through the changing nights and days

From out great Nature; all her waters quiver
With his fair image
facing him forever:
The music that he listens to betrays
His own

heart to his ears: by trackless ways
His wild thoughts tend to him in
long endeavor.
His dreams are far among the silent hills;
His vague
voice calls him from the darkened plain;
With winds at night vague
recognition thrills
His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
He
knows again his mirth in mountain rills,
His weary tears that touch
him in the rain.
Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the
poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in
poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into
realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent
mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's,
when we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold
representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses
his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist
gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint
against "your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a
pebble of a theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that
were a great feat." [Footnote: Poem Outlines.]
In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse
may point to the Canterbury Tales, and show us Chaucer ambling
along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of
distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our
view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet is
the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern poet
would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all the
ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the
destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached.
We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of
Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that
criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the
personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines,
Great poet, 'twas thy art,
To know thyself, and in thyself to be

Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of

the heart
Can make of man.
[Footnote: Shakespeare.]
If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent
objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own
personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one
character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his
presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his
representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent
criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of his
unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question.
"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January
13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken
into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I
never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and
end,--'R.B.', a poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3,
1845.] And Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical
English poet than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's
duty to show us his own nature, to be "greatly himself always, which is
the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert
Browning, September 9, 1845.]
"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes enfants_,"
says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of Verlaine, "_c'est
d'être absolument soi-même_." Of course if one concedes that the poet
is the only thing in life worth bothering about, the two statements
become practically identical. It may be true that the poet's universal
sympathies make him the most complex type that civilization has
produced, and consequently the most economical figure to present as a
sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler way of
harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's word
"life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is nature seen
through a temperament."
Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, Mimeseis, did mean "seeing
through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he
would have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament."
Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind

were like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things.
Modern poets, on the other hand, are