MODERN POETRY
THIS business of being a poet has never blended into the general mechanism of any Western age save—perhaps—the Hellenic. The poet's air of quietly aloof reverie and his pursuit of an abstract will-o'-the-wisp known as beauty—these things have always excluded him from the rough, back-slapping intercourse of men hardened by trade, warfare, and manual labour. Life has regarded him as an eccentric child and has whipped or pampered him according to its whim. Among the primitive tribes of Europe he was the weakling left behind with the women-folk while his sturdier brothers tilled the soil or slew each other with naïve vehemence. In the Middle Ages he was a wandering troubadour playing under ladies' windows and in the halls of feudal lords for a handful of silver—a childlike vagabond tolerated by drunken men and sensitive, repressed women. And up to a very recent period he has been the protégé of a bourgeoisie which expected him to lull it to sleep with musical alliterations and dainty heart-lacerations, with reverent tears over old and honoured moral falsities, with a flowery eloquence which painted the lily three times over and then placed it in a perfumed urn, with a careful avoidance of terse introspection and the semblances of actual life. Fantasy in his work was welcomed only when it held an undisturbing Mother-Goose obviousness or a meek, moral varnish.
If he observed the aforementioned rules, he was well supplied with food, clothing, money, and the acclaim of the leisure class—all those things Which rape the youth of a man and shape it into the bland sterility of premature middle age. If he failed to observe the rules just quoted, life benignly strangled him. And yet he has ever existed because of the very forces and beings seeking to belittle and destroy him.
If every poet could pass through a life in which all of his principal desires germinated into nervous action, very little poetry would be written—it would be lived instead. Written poetry exists because certain elements are forever trying to mutilate and suppress
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