of his communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the revelation is given to him,―ancient and modern writers alike describe the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the singer, One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; The next he writes his soul's memorial.1 So Shelley describes the experience: Meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration.2 The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, enabling them, like Lucy, to be Rolled round in earth's diurnal course Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer cannot escape Plato's conclusion, There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.1 And again, There is a . . . kind of madness which is a possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other numbers. . . . But he who, not being inspired, and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.2 Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as to say, Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot was Ion, § 534. 2 Phædrus, & 245. Poetics, XVII, Like Lear's-for he had felt the sting The kingdom of his mind to those Who for it deemed him mad.1 In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, James Thomson, B. V.,3 Helen Hunt Jackson,* Alice Cary, and George Edward Woodberry, concur in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The tone of his poem, Tasso and Leonora, is very gloomy. The Italian poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith 1 Cale Young Rice, Meredith. in the ideal realms where eternal beauty dwells. He muses, Yes-as Love is truer far Than all other things; so are Life and Death, the World and Time But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders, For were life no flitting dream, Were things truly what they seem, Less phantasmal than the clay I must be mad, mad,-how mad! However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been applied to the works of all poets.1 See Kathrina, by J. G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares, As for the old seers Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life Whether they comprehended what they saw. Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects, And ah, we poets, I misdoubt Are little more than thou. We speak a lesson taught, we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows.1 One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much attention from their brothers.2 Of these, Tasso and Cowper have appeared most often in the verse of the last century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic 1 Sister Songs. 3 4 'At the beginning of the romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the mad poet familiar. 'See Song for Tasso, Shelley; Tasso to Leonora, James Thomson, B. V., Tasso to Leonora, E. F. Hoffman. See Bowles, The Harp and Despair of Cowper; Mrs. Browning, Cowper's Grave; Lord Houghton, On Cowper's Cottage at Olney. |