Pope said that a middling poet was no poet at all. Middling things in
art or in any field of human endeavor do not arouse our enthusiasm,
and it is enthusiasm that fans the fires of life. There are all
degrees of excellence, but in poetry one is always looking for the
best. Pope himself holds a place in English literature which he could
not hold had he been only a middling poet. He is not a poet of the
highest order certainly, but a poet of the third or fourth order--the
poet of the reason, the understanding, but not of the creative
imagination. It is wit and not soul that keeps Pope alive.
Nearly every age and land has plenty of middling poets. Probably there
were never more of them in the land than there are to-day. Scores of
volumes of middling verse are issued from the press every week. The
magazines all have middling verse; only at rare intervals do they have
something more. The May "Atlantic," for instance, had a poem by a (to
me) comparatively new writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, that one would
hardly stigmatize as middling poetry. Let the reader judge for
himself. It is called "Spring in the Study." I quote only the second
part:
"What is this sudden gayety that shakes the grayest boughs?
A voice is calling fieldward--'T is time to start the ploughs!
To set the furrows rolling, while all the old crows nod;
And deep as life, the kernel, to cut the golden sod.
The pen--let nations have it;--we'll plough a while for God.
"When half the things that must be done are greater than our art,
And half the things that must be done are smaller than our heart,
And poorest gifts are dear to burn on altars unrevealed,
Like music comes the summons, the challenge from the weald!
'They tread immortal measures who make a mellow field!'
"The planet's rather pleasant, alluring in its way;
But let the ploughs be idle and none of us can stay.
Here's where there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk,
A-traveling with the plough beam, beneath the sailing hawk,
Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk."
Lafcadio Hearn spoke with deep truth when he said that "the measure of
a poet is the largeness of thought which he can bring to any subject,
however trifling." Certainly Mrs. Dargan brings this largeness of
thought to her subject. Has the significance of the plough ever before
been so brought out? She makes one feel that there should be a plough
among the constellations. What are the chairs and harps and dippers in
comparison?
The poetry of mere talent is always middling poetry--"poems distilled
from other poems," as Whitman says. The work of a genius is of a
different order. Most current verse is merely sweetened prose put up
in verse form. It serves its purpose; the mass of readers like it.
Nearly all educated persons can turn it off with little effort. I have
done my share of it myself--rhymed natural history, but not poetry.
"Waiting" is my nearest approach to a true poem.
Wordsworth quotes Aristotle as saying that poetry is the most
philosophical of all writing, and Wordsworth agrees with him. There
certainly can be no great poetry without a great philosopher behind
it--a man who has thought and felt profoundly upon nature and upon
life, as Wordsworth himself surely had. The true poet, like the
philosopher, is a searcher after truth, and a searcher at the very
heart of things--not cold, objective truth, but truth which is its own
testimony, and which is carried alive into the heart by passion. He
seeks more than beauty, he seeks the perennial source of beauty. The
poet leads man to nature as a mother leads her child there--to instill
a love of it into his heart. If a poet adds neither to my knowledge
nor to my love, of what use is he? For instance, Poe does not make me
know more or love more, but he delights me by his consummate art.
Bryant's long poem "The Ages" has little value, mainly because it is
charged with no philosophy, and no imaginative emotion. His "Lines to
a Waterfowl" will last because of the simple, profound human emotion
they awaken. The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that he tacks
on the end, which strikes a note entirely foreign to the true spirit
of the poem. You cannot by tacking a moral to a poem give it the
philosophical breadth to which I have referred. "Thanatopsis" has a
solemn and majestic music, but not the unique excellence of the
waterfowl poem. Yet it may be generally said of Bryant that he has a
broad human outlook on life and is free from the subtleties and
ingenious refinements of many of our younger poets.
I know of only three poets in this century who bring a large measure
of thought and emotion to their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody,
to John Russell McCarthy (author of "Out-of-Doors" and "Gods and
Devils"), and to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous "Rain
Song," a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever
lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as
lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy
is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget
that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his
"Gates of Silence" are probably far less well known. Let me quote a
few of them:
"The races rise and fall,
The nations come and go,
Time tenderly doth cover all
With violets and snow.
"The mortal tide moves on
To some immortal shore,
Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn,
Into the evermore.
* * * * *
"All the tomes of all the tribes,
All the songs of all the scribes,
All that priest and prophet say,
What is it? and what are they?
"Fancies futile, feeble, vain,
Idle dream-drift of the brain,--
As of old the mystery
Doth encompass you and me.
* * * * *
"Old and yet young, the jocund Earth
Doth speed among the spheres,
Her children of imperial birth
Are all the golden years.
"The happy orb sweeps on,
Led by some vague unrest,
Some mystic hint of joys unborn
Springing within her breast."
What takes one in "The Gates of Silence," which, of course, means the
gates of death, are the large, sweeping views. The poet strides
through time and space like a Colossus and
"flings
Out of his spendthrift hands
The whirling worlds like pebbles,
The meshèd stars like sands."
Loveman's stanzas have not the flexibility and freedom of those of
Moody and McCarthy, but they bring in full measure the largeness of
thought which a true poem requires.
Some of Moody's poems rank with the best in the literature of his time.
He was deeply moved by the part we played in the Spanish-American War.
It was a war of shame and plunder from the point of view of many of the
noblest and most patriotic men of the country. We freed Cuba from the
Spanish yoke and left her free; but we seized the Philippines and
subdued the native population by killing a vast number of them--more
than half of them, some say. Commercial exploitation inspired our
policy. How eloquently Senator Hoar of Massachusetts inveighed against
our course! We promised the Filipinos their freedom--a promise we have
not yet fulfilled.
Moody's most notable poems are "Gloucester Moors," "An Ode in Time of
Hesitation" (inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the work of
Saint-Gaudens), "The Brute," "The Daguerreotype," and "On a Soldier
Fallen in the Philippines." In this last poem throb and surge the
mingled emotions of pride and shame which the best minds in the
country felt at the time--shame at our mercenary course, and pride in
the fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made some pretense of
indemnifying Spain by paying her twenty million dollars, which was
much like the course of a boy who throws another boy down and
forcibly takes his jack-knife from him, then gives him a few coppers
to salve his wounds. I remember giving Moody's poem to Charles Eliot
Norton (one of those who opposed the war), shortly after it appeared.
He read it aloud with marked emotion. Let me quote two of its stanzas:
"Toll! Let the great bells toll
Till the clashing air is dim.
Did we wrong this parted soul?
We will make it up to him.
Toll! Let him never guess
What work we set him to.
Laurel, laurel, yes;
He did what we bade him do.
Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own
heart's-blood.
"A flag for the soldier's bier
Who dies that his land may live;
O, banners, banners here,
That he doubt not nor misgive!
That he heed not from the tomb
The evil days draw near
When the nation, robed in gloom,
With its faithless past shall strive.
Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island
mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
the dark."
When I say that every true poet must have a philosophy, I do not mean
that he must be what is commonly called a philosophical poet; from
such we steer clear. The philosophy in a poem must be like the iron in
the blood. It is the iron that gives color and vigor to the blood.
Reduce it and we become an anæmic and feeble race. Much of the popular
poetry is anæmic in this respect. There is no virile thought in it.
All of which amounts to saying that there is always a great nature
back of a great poem.
The various forms of verse are skillfully used by an increasing number
of educated persons, but the number of true poets is not increasing.
Quite the contrary, I fear. The spirit of the times in which we live
does not favor meditation and absorption in the basic things out of
which great poetry arises. "The world is too much with us." Yet we
need not be too much discouraged. England has produced Masefield, and
we have produced John Russell McCarthy, who has written the best
nature poetry since Emerson. The genius of a race does not repeat. We
shall never again produce poets of the type of those that are gone,
and we should not want to. All we may hope for is to produce poets as
original and characteristic and genuine as those of the past--poets
who as truly express the spirit of their time, as the greater poets
did of theirs--not Emerson and Whitman over again, but a wide
departure from their types.
Speaking of Whitman, may we not affirm that it is his tremendous and
impassioned philosophy suffusing his work, as the blood suffuses the
body, that keeps "Leaves of Grass" forever fresh? We do not go to
Whitman for pretty flowers of poesy, although they are there, but we
go to him for his attitude toward life and the universe, we go to
stimulate and fortify our souls--in short, for his cosmic philosophy
incarnated in a man.
What largeness of thought Tennyson brings to all his themes! There is
plenty of iron in his blood, though it be the blood of generations of
culture, and of an overripe civilization. We cannot say as much of
Swinburne's poetry or prose. I do not think either will live. Bigness
of words, and fluency, and copiousness of verse cannot make up for the
want of a sane and rational philosophy. Arnold's poems always have
real and tangible subject matter. His "Dover Beach" is a great stroke
of poetic genius. Let me return to Poe: what largeness of thought did
he bring to his subjects? Emerson spoke of him as "the jingle man,"
and Poe, in turn, spoke of Emerson with undisguised contempt. Poe's
picture indicates a neurotic person. There is power in his eyes, but
the shape of his head is abnormal, and a profound melancholy seems to
rest on his very soul. What a conjurer he was with words and meters
and measures! No substance at all in his "Raven," only shadows--a
wonderful dance of shadows, all tricks of a verbal wizard. "The
Bells," a really powerful poem, is his masterpiece, unique in English
literature; but it has no intellectual content. Its appeal is to the
eye and ear alone. It has a verbal splendor and a mastery over measure
and rhythm far beyond anything in Shelley, or in any other poet of his
time. It is art glorified; it is full of poetic energy. No wonder
foreign critics see in Poe something far beyond that found in any
other American, or in any British poet!
Poe set to work to write "The Raven" as deliberately as a mechanic
goes to work to make a machine, or an architect to build a house. It
was all a matter of calculation with him. He did not believe in long
poems, hence decided at the outset that his poem should not be more
than one hundred lines in length. Then he asked himself, what is the
legitimate end and aim of a poem? and answered emphatically, Beauty.
The next point to settle was, what impression must be made to produce
that effect? He decided that "melancholy is the most legitimate of all
poetic tones." Why joy or gladness, like that of the birds, is not
equally legitimate, he does not explain. Then, to give artistic
piquancy to the whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon
which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been
so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should
be given by the refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have
brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be in
keeping with the melancholy at which he was aiming, and this he found
in the word _nevermore_. He next invented a pretext for the frequent
but varying use of _nevermore_. This word could not be spoken in the
right tone by a human being; it must come from an unreasoning
creature, hence the introduction of the raven, an ill-omened bird, in
harmony with the main tone of the poem. He then considered what was
the most melancholy subject of mankind, and found it was death, and
that that melancholy theme was most poetical when allied to beauty.
Hence the death of a beautiful woman was unquestionably the most
poetic topic in the world. It was equally beyond doubt that the lips
best suited for such topic were those of a bereaved lover. Thus he
worked himself up, or rather back, to the climax of the poem, for he
wrote the last stanza, in which the climax occurs, first. His own
analysis of the poem is like a chemist's analysis of some new compound
he has produced; it is full of technical terms and subtle
distinctions. Probably no other famous poem was turned out in just
that studied and deliberate architectural way--no pretense of
inspiration, or of "eyes in fine frenzy rolling": just skilled
craftsmanship--only this and nothing more.
Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism of life is, in a large and
flexible sense, true. The poet does not criticize life as the
conscious critic does, but as we unconsciously do in our most exalted
moments. Arnold, I believe, did not appreciate Whitman, but one
function of the poet upon which Whitman lays emphasis, is criticism of
his country and times.
"What is this you bring, my America?
Is it uniform with my country?
Is it not something that has been better done or told before?
Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?--is the good old cause
in it?
Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
literates of enemies, lands?
Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
strength, gait, face?
Have real employments contributed to it?
Original makers, not mere amanuenses?"
Speaking of criticism, it occurs to me how important it is that a
poet, or any other writer, should be a critic of himself. Wordsworth,
who was a really great poet, was great only at rare intervals. His
habitual mood was dull and prosy. His sin was that he kept on writing
during those moods, grinding out sonnets by the hundred--one hundred
and thirty-two ecclesiastical sonnets, and over half as many on
liberty, all very dull and wooden. His mill kept on grinding whether
it had any grist of the gods to grind or not. He told Emerson he was
never in haste to publish, but he seems to have been in haste to
write, and wrote on all occasions, producing much dull and trivial
work. We speak of a man's work as being heavy. Let us apply the test
literally to Wordsworth and weigh his verse. The complete edition of
his poems, edited by Henry Reed and published in Philadelphia in 1851,
weighs fifty-five ounces; the selection which Matthew Arnold made from
his complete works, and which is supposed to contain all that is worth
preserving, weighs ten ounces. The difference represents the dead
wood. That Wordsworth was a poor judge of his own work is seen in the
remark he made to Emerson that he did not regard his "Tintern Abbey"
as highly as some of the sonnets and parts of "The Excursion." I
believe the Abbey poem is the one by which he will longest be
remembered. "The Excursion" is a long, dull sermon. Its didacticism
lies so heavily upon it that it has nearly crushed its poetry--like a
stone on a flower.
All poetry is true, but all truth is not poetry. When Burns treats a
natural-history theme, as in his verses on the mouse and the daisy,
and even on the louse, how much more there is in them than mere
natural history! With what a broad and tender philosophy he clothes
them! how he identifies himself with the mouse and regards himself as
its fellow mortal! So have Emerson's "Titmouse" and "Humble-Bee" a
better excuse for being than their natural history. So have McCarthy's
"For a Bunny" and "The Snake," and "To a Worm."