The Poet's Poet Part 10

The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's autobiographical novels, _Rest Harrow_ and _Open Country_, and William H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal.

[Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, _Denby the Rhymer_ (1918); Henry Herbert Knibbs, _Songs of the Trail_ (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, concurred in the view, declaring,

Down the free roads of human happiness I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart.

[Footnote: _Sonnet to Sidney_.]

"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income?

What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's _Complaint to His Empty Purse_, onward, English poetry has borne the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled with names from the past that offer our poets a n.o.ble precedent for their dest.i.tution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camoens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse.

The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's _Bohemia_ reveals the fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, the cost _per caput_ will be _nil_. Not only so, but the poet is likely to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt from a poet's statement,

Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay!

One would I sell and daffodils buy To feed my soul.

[Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.]

What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually asking.

What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines _Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_

Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.

Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public,

You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me After you've starved me and driven me dead.

Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread.

[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.]

Through the thin veneer of the fict.i.tious poet in Joaquin Miller's _Ina_, the author himself appears, raving,

A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool!

Would you know what it means to be a poet?

It is to want a friend, to want a home, A country, money,--aye, to want a meal.

[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.]

But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs.

Browning boasts,

The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, But culls his Faustus from philosophers And not from poets.

[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See _Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are comparatively safe from a poet's strike.

Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this subject, for once, a cheerful att.i.tude, telling his visionary boy,

Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers; What is a world of vanities To a world as fair as ours?

In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle to Davie, Fellow Poet_:

To lie in kilns and barns at e'en When bones are crazed, and blind is thin Is doubtless great distress, Yet then content would make us blest.

Sh.e.l.ley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_,

Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste The scene it would adorn.

Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant att.i.tude toward poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G.

Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G.

Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet, _In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish it. Indeed he often has a superst.i.tious fear of wealth, lest it take away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy.

With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries,

Starving, still I smile, Laugh at want and wrong, He is fed and clothed To whom G.o.d giveth song.

[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, _A Crowned Poet_.]

It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect,

One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye, The cave of Poverty and Poetry.

Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness, [Footnote: _Dunciad_.]

is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates on the poet,

The Muse gave special charge His learning should be deep and large,-- * * * * *

His flesh should feel, his eyes should read Every maxim of dreadful need.

By want and pain G.o.d screeneth him Till his appointed hour.

[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is appalling. What can account for it?

In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of const.i.tution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him,

For I had the share of life that might have filled a century, Before its fourth in time had pa.s.sed me by.

[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.]

A fict.i.tious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects,

... For my thirty years, Dashed with sun and splashed with tears, Wan with revel, red with wine, Other wiser happier men Take the full three score and ten.

[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily Bronte, of whom it is written:

They live not long of thy pure fire composed; Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.

[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Bronte_.]

Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness.

Sh.e.l.ley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death

Far from the trembling throng Whose souls are never to the tempest given.

[Footnote: _Adonais_.]

With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming sh.e.l.ls to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less wild-winged."