The Poets Poet | Page 7

inclined to grant that a person has
poetic temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window,
transforming all that is seen through it, if by any chance something is
seen through it.
If the modern poet sees the world colored red or green or violet by his
personality, it is well for the interests of truth, we must admit, that he
make it clear to us that his nature is the transforming medium, but how
comes it that he fixes his attention so exclusively upon the colors of
things, for which his own nature is responsible, and ignores the forms
of things, which are not affected by him? How comes it that the colored
lights thrown on nature by the stained windows of his soul are so
important to him that he feels justified in painting for us, notnature, but
stained-glass windows?
In part this is, as has often been said, a result of the individualizing
trend of modern art. The broad general outlines of things have been
"done" by earlier artists, and there is no chance for later artists to vary
them, but the play of light and shade offers infinite possibilities of
variation. If one poet shows us the world highly colored by his
personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their attention
caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw upon it.
The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will be
interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious,"
Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet
otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.]
This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of
course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more
plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One
wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his
inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of
creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration is
surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that this
accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in his
work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the

lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I
know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the
musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an
assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure.
Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend
of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme,
chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group,
Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently
portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that the
mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be
paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to
ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all other
arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is mastered
in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to forget
that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, language, with
men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, accordingly, to be
dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" for his inspiration.
At least this mystery surrounding his creations has much to do with
removing the artist from the comparative freedom from
self-consciousness that we ascribe to the general run of men. In
addition it removes him from the comparative humility of other
thinkers, who are wont to think of their discoveries as following
inevitably upon their data, so that they themselves deserve credit only
as they are persistent and painstaking in following the clues. The
genesis of Sir Isaac Newton's discovery has been compared to poetical
inspiration; yet even in this case the difference is apparent, and Newton
did not identify himself with the universe he conceived, as the poet is in
the habit of doing.
Not being able to account for his inspirations, the poet seems to be
driven inevitably either into excessive humility, since he feels that his
words are not his own, or into inordinate pride, since he feels that he is
able to see and express without volition truths that other men cannot
glimpse with the utmost effort. He may disclaim all credit for his
performance, in the words of a nineteenth-century verse-writer:

This is the end of the book
Written by God.
I am the earth he took,

I am the rod,
The iron and wood which he struck
With his
sounding rod.
[Footnote: L. E. Mitchell, Written at the End of a
Book.]
a statement that