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Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in
English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years
By
Instructor in English, University of Minnesota
Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhapsreceived less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of themajority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is thelast man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by nomeans certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on thepart of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive ofæsthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observerof literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, thepoet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonicphilosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed onlyincidentally 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 ofindividual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's Prelude,Browning's Sordello, and the like, could scarcely give more than are-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes andessays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review themain body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years.We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncraticconceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passingtheories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of anessential 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 isnot somewhere contradicted in the verse of this period, and the attempthas been made to be wholly impartial in presenting all sides of eachquestion. Indeed, the subject may seem to be one in which dualism isinescapable. The poet is, in one sense, a hybrid creature; he is thelover of the sensual and of the spiritual, for he is the revealer of thespiritual in the sensual. Consequently it is not strange thatpractically every utterance which we may consider,—even such as dealwith the most superficial aspects of the poet, as his physical beauty orhis health,—falls naturally into one of two divisions, accordingly asthe poet feels the sensual or the spiritual aspect of his nature to bethe more important Yet the fact remains that the quest of unity has beenthe most interesting feature of this investigation. The man in whosenature the poet's two apparently contradictory desires shall whollyharmonize is the ideal whom practically all modern English poets areattempting to present.
Minor poets have been considered, perhaps to an unwarranted degree. Inthe Victorian period, for instance, there may seem something grotesquein placing Tupper's judgments on verse beside Browning's. Yet, since itis true that so slight a poet as William Lisles Bowles influencedColeridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems thatin a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, wherethe views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of alarge gro