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The Popular Conception Of A Poet
by
Of Virgil and Shakespeare.
Virgil and Shakespeare were neither martyrs nor preachers despised in their generation. I have said that as poets they also belong to Class 2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution, yet began with matter that overweighted their style–with deep stuttered thoughts–in fine, with a Message to their Time? I think that view can hardly be maintained. We have the Eclogues before the Æneid; and The Comedy of Errors before As You Like It. Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the greatest names, or of the greatest: and they belong to Class 2.
Of Milton.
Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than Milton’s. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance? And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of
“Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn….”
–and so on. No, to be short, it was not. At the age of twenty-four, or thereabouts, he deliberately proposed to himself to be a great poet. To this end he practised and studied, and travelled unweariedly until his thirty-first year. Then he tried to make up his mind what to write about. He took some sheets of paper–they are to be seen at this day in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge–and set down no less than ninety-nine subjects for his proposed magnum opus, before he could decide upon Paradise Lost. To be sure, when the magnum opus was written it fetched £5 only. But even this does not prove that Milton was before his age. Perhaps he was behind it. Paradise Lost appeared in 1667: in 1657 it might have fetched considerably more than £5.
If the Typical Poet have few points in common with Shakespeare or Milton, I fear that the Typical Poet begins to be in a bad way.
Of Coleridge.
Shall we try Coleridge? He had “great thoughts”–thousands of them. On the other hand, he never had the slightest difficulty in uttering them, in prose. His great achievements in verse–his Genevieve, his Christabel, his Kubla Khan, his Ancient Mariner–are achievements of expression. When they appeal from the senses to the intellect their appeal is usually quite simple.
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small.”
No, I am afraid Coleridge is not the Typical Poet.
On the whole I suspect the Typical Poet to be a hasty generalization from Shelley.