madness is not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed madness to their poet-heroes,1 while the American, J. G. Holland, represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a hereditary strain of suicidal insanity.2

It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries,

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat.

What chance did he have of recognition?

This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines,

Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense) And once betrayed me into common sense.*

And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon dry reason alone:

1 See Crabbe, The Patron; Shelley, Rosalind and Helen. 'See J. G. Holland, Kathrina. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benét, Mad Blake; Amy Lowell, Clear, With Light Variable Winds; Cale Young Rice, The Mad Philosopher; Edmund Blunden, Clare's Ghost.

'See fragment CI.

'Dunciad.

A set o' dull, conceited hashes
Confuse their brains in college classes!
They gang in sticks and come out asses,
Plain truth to speak,

And syne they think to climb Parnassus.
By dint of Greek.1

3

The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century classicists and such poets as Wordsworth 2 and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats and Vachel Lindsay have written poetry showing the persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the poet's mind.5 So Richard Gilder maintains of the singer,

He was too wise

Either to fear, or follow, or despise

Whom men call science-for he knew full well
All she had told, or still might live to tell
Was known to him before her very birth."

The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that his inspiration gives him mystical

Epistle to Lapraik.

See the Prelude.

3 See The Scholar.

4

See The Master of the Dance. The hero is a dunce in school.

See The Poet's Mind.

The Poet's Fame. In the same spirit is Invitation, by J. E. Flecker.

experience of the things which the scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus: Yours is the living pall,

The aloof and frozen place of listeners

And lookers-on at life. But mine-ah! mine
The fount of life itself, the burning fount
Pierian. I pity you.1

Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the average nondescript versewriter claims that his intuitions are infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young:

How proud the poet's billow swells!

The God! the God! his boast:

A boast how vain! what wrecks abound!
Dead bards stench every coast.2

There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She muses over the title of poet:

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen

The name

Is what I dare not-though some royal blood
Would seem to tingle in me now and then

1Sappho and Phaon, a drama.

2

Resignation.

With sense of power and ache,-with imposthumes And manias usual to the race.

Howbeit

I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad

And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;
The thing's too common.1

Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether they be of God. What is his proof?

Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers,

I hung my verses in the wind.

Time and tide their faults may find.

All were winnowed through and through:
Five lines lasted sound and true;

Five were smelted in pot

Than the south more fierce and hot.2

The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he inquired, "Does 1 Aurora Leigh. See also the lines in the same poem, For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true Because myself was true in writing them.

'The Test.

1

a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it does." To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence.

The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something more.' But the poet is more apt to account for his belief in his visions by Tertullian's motto, Credo quod absurdum.

"2

If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he ever consciously falsifies or modifies the The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "A Memorable Fancy." See the essay on Imagination.

2