The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 10 | Page 3

more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we

hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great
poem produced in a civilized age....
"Of all people, children are the most imaginative. They abandon
themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is
strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of
reality.... In a rude state of society, men are children with a greater
variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a state of society that we may
expect to find the poetical temperament in its highest perfection. He
who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet,
must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web
of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has
perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very
talents will be a hinderance to him. His difficulties will be proportioned
to his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among his
contemporaries; and that proficiency will in general be proportioned to
the vigor and activity of his mind....
"If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever triumphed over greater
difficulties than Milton. He received a learned education. He was a
profound and elegant classical scholar; he had studied all the mysteries
of Rabbinical literature; he was intimately acquainted with every
language of modern Europe from which either pleasure or information
was then to be derived. He was perhaps the only great poet of later
times who has been distinguished by the excellence of his Latin verse."
And yet Macaulay goes on to say:
"The public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most
remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the numbers, and
the excellence of that style which no rival has been able to equal, and
no parodist to degrade, which displays in their highest perfection the
idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to which every ancient and
every modern language has contributed something of grace, of energy,
or of music."
But how would it have been possible for Milton to have enriched his
poetry with all these elements in a primaeval age, when many of them
did not exist? Indeed, Milton's own words show how he regarded the
task of writing the "Paradise Lost," to which he had consecrated his
energies, In a pamphlet issued in 1641 he wrote:
"Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that

for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment
of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the
heat of youth or the vapors of wine, like that which flows at waste from
the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher-fury of a riming parasite,
nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren
daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich
with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the
hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he
pleases. To this must be added industriously select reading, steady
observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs--till
which in some measure be compassed at mine own peril and cost, I
refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loth to
hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them."
The poem was published in 1667, so that for at least twenty-six years
the poet was utilizing all the available resources of civilization and
scholarship to make himself "more fit."
But we may cite against Macaulay's theory also a brief passage in the
essay on Burns by Thomas Carlyle--surely a prose-poet, if ever there
was one. Treating of the achievement of Burns in spite of his crude
surroundings, ignorance, and lack of most that distinguishes civilization
from that childlike simplicity of primaeval life which Macaulay regards
as the more favorable to developing poetical temperament, Carlyle says
of the ploughman-poet:
"Let it not be objected that he did little. He did much, if we consider
where and how. If the work performed was small, we must remember
that he had his very materials to discover; for the metal he worked in
lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his had guessed its
existence; and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had to
construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest
obscurity, without help, without instructions, without model; or with
models only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in
the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine,