CHAPTER THREE
The Ten “Greatest” Poets
I DARE NOT GO on till I face the question that every logician will have asked before our quest began: “What is your test of greatness in a poet?” It is a sorry dilemma. For if I select some objective test, proudly independent of my personal likings and tastes, we shall lose the zest of adventure and surprise that might come from a gay surrender to individual preference. And the only objective test is fame or influence, but this criterion, which seemed so plausible in choosing the greatest thinkers, breaks down in the presence of poets. Who could think of rating contemporary poets according to influence or repute? Who would name the kindly and melodious Longfellow as our greatest weaver of songs merely because greater numbers listen to him gladly than will accept the jaunty heresies and experiments of Whitman? No; let me not pretend to do more here than to reveal my prejudices, to record the men who, beyond all others, have brought me that strange mixture of music, emotion, imagery, and thought, which is poetry.
1. HOMER Many years ago, in Russia, I saw the origin of poetry. We had resolved to study the Russians in their homes and their natural environment, and we had settled down for a week on peasant fare and peasant boards in the isba of our guide’s family in Chernigov. On the first night of our stay the villagers looked at us with suspicion; some timid souls announced that we had come to steal their children. But on the second night they gathered outside our hut for an open-air frolic of music and dancing, and as we sat on benches or the uncut grass an old man, bearded and blind, sitting against a wall, chanted to the accompaniment of his balalaika the ancient legends of his race. It was a plaintive narrative, always ending on a minor tone that invited the leisurely continuance of the tale, like some great revolving wheel whose impetus of motion repeatedly suffices to give it another turn. And as I listened I thought I saw Homer singing to the Greeks the Fall of Troy.
In this simple and musical way, with rhythm aiding memory, man transmitted and ornamented his history before writing came. In the days of the gods, history was sublime enough for poetry; the story of human love and war, refulgent with heavenly interest from the participation of deities, lifted the accumulated narratives of many traveling bards into the epics that we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
“Homer” was probably one of the singers who chanted these commemorative songs; we give his name to all the poets who composed these tales, because we are at ease with unity, and dislike the fragmentariness of truth. Every nation’s literature begins with such epics, “vedas,” or “sagas”—Ramayanas, Mahabharatas, Nibelungenlieds, Beowulfs, or Chansons de Roland; they are as natural to a nation’s childhood as to an individual’s; they take the place of those patriotic histories in which one’s country is always right, wins every battle, and is especially beloved of God.
It seems unimportant and irrelevant that the tale as Homer tells it is not true, that his men and women—and even some of his deities—are apparently the creatures of his lordly imagination; it is so well invented, and so vivaciously recounted, that if the facts were different, so much the worse for the facts. Beauty has its rights as well as truth; and the Iliad is more important than the Trojan War. Granted that Helen was but a name or an inspiring diplomatic phrase, and that the real objective of the warring Greeks was not a lovely rake but a strategic port; nevertheless, seven Troys lie buried in the earth, while Helen is an immortal synonym of loveliness, potent still to launch a hundred thousand books upon that greatest of all oceans—ink.
Nor does it matter that these ancient epics are not complex in art or thought; they were addressed to the ear, not to the mind, and to the people, not to subtle lords; they had to be understood as soon as heard, and they had to be carried onward with vigorous action. Today we lead intricate and often introverted lives, in which action as the Greeks knew it is a rare exception, found chiefly in the press and gathered from afar; man is now an animal that stops and thinks. Therefore our literature is an analysis of motives and thought; it is in mental conflict that we find the profoundest wars and the darkest tragedies. But in Homer’s day life was action, and Homer was action’s prophet. His verse and style are almost dictated by action; through his turbulent hexameters the story runs like some broad and powerful stream; so that (when at last we have learned the genealogy of the heroes and the gods) we are caught and held by the poem as by some swift Niagara. And yet, in the midst of the battles, comes such quiet poetry as this, fair even in our lame rendition:
Thus made harangue to them Hector; and roaring the Trojans applauded;
Then from the yoke loos’d their war-steeds sweating, and each by his chariot
Tethered his horses with thongs.And then they brought from the city,
Hastily, oxen and goodly sheep, and wine honey-hearted….
Firewood they gathered withal; and then from the plain to the heavens
Rose on the winds the sweet savor.And these by the highways of battle
Hopeful sat through the night, and many their watch-fires burning.
Even as when, in the sky, the stars shine out round the night-orb,
Wondrous to see, and the winds are laid, and the peaks and the headlands
Tower to the view, and the glades come out, and the glorious heaven
Stretches itself to its widest, and sparkle the stars multitudinous,
Gladdening the heart of the toil-wearied shepherd—even as countless,
’Twixt the black ships and the river of Xanthus, glittered the watch-fires
Built by the horse-taming Trojans at Ilium…. Meanwhile the war-wearied horses, champing spelt and white barley,
Close by their chariots,waited the coming of gold-throned dawn.
(VIII, end.)
2. “DAVID” I name “the Psalmist” next. Who he was we do not know, except that he was not David. David was a fascinating brigand who made himself rich with robbery, usurped the throne of Saul, stole other men’s wives, broke every commandment, and is honored by posterity as the pious author of the Psalms. But these “Songs of Praise” were composed by many hands, and any hand but David’s; they were accumulated through centuries by the priests of the Temple at Jerusalem; and they were brought together only 150 years before Christ, nearly a millennium after David had ceased to be.
No matter who wrote them, or when; there they are, the profoundest lyrics in literature, so vivid with ecstasy that even those who doubt all dogmas feel in the blood a strange response to their music still. It is true that they complain too much; that they echo or anticipate Job’s wonder why the just should suffer so while the ruthless prosper; that they conceive the deity in a narrow and nationalistic sense; that they beg too pugnaciously for the punishment of enemies; that they coax Jehovah with fulsome praise, reproach him for negligence (X, 1; XLIV), and in general picture the God of the Jews and the Pilgrims as a Commander-in-Chief mighty and terrible in war (XII, 3; XVIII, 8, 34, 40; LXIV, 7 ).
And yet, amid these songs of battle, what tender lyrics of humility and sorrow:
As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower in the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Never was religious feeling so powerfully or so beautifully expressed; with language that remains, in English, a model of simplicity, clarity, and strength, and in Hebrew rings out in full organ tones of majesty; with phrases that are part of the currency of our speech (“out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,” “the apple of my eye,” “put not your trust in princes”); with passion and imagery as rich as even the Orient can give (the rising sun “is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race”). These are the finest songs ever written, and immeasurably the most influential; for two thousand years men have been moved by them as never even by songs of love; no wonder they were a solace to the Jews in suffering, and to the pioneers who made America. How like a mother’s lullaby, full of assurance and repose, is the most famous psalm of all:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they shall comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil;my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
3. EURIPIDES And now we are back in Greece, seated in the Theater of Dionysius, ready for Euripides. Row upon row of seats in stone semicircles, rising in widening sweep up the hill that bears on its peak the Parthenon. Restless on them sit thirty thousand Athenians; loose-togaed, passionate, talkative men, alive with feelings and ideas; the keenest audience that ever heard a poet or saw a play. Down toward the front, in chairs of carved and ornamented marble, are the officials of the city, and the priests of the tragic god. At the foot of the great amphitheater is a small slab-paved stage; behind it the actor’s booth, the skene or “scene.” Above it all, nothing but the sky and the unfailing sun. Far down, at the base of the hill, the blue Aegean smiles.
It is the year 415 B.C. Athens is deep in the Peloponnesian War, a war of Greek with Greek, shot through with all the ferocity of relatives. The reckless dramatist has chosen for his theme another war, the siege of Troy, and his friends (among whom is Socrates, who goes only to Euripides’ plays) have whispered that it will reverse Homer, and show the Trojan War from the viewpoint of the defeated and destroyed. Suddenly all is quiet: from the actor’s booth a figure appears, representing the God of the Sea, Poseidon; he stands uplifted by high shoes, speaks through a resounding mask, and intones the keynote of the play:
How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.
(Was it this prologue that Socrates, as story goes, applauded so long that the actor consented to repeat it?)
The Greeks have killed Hector, and taken Troy; and Talthy-bius comes to take Hector’s wife Andromache, his sister the proud prophetess Cassandra, and his mother Hecuba, the white-haired Queen, to serve as slaves and mistresses to the Greeks. Hecuba beats her head in grief, and mourns:
Beat, beat the crownless head,
Rend the cheek till the tears run red!
A lying man and a pitiless
Shall be lord of me….
Oh, I will think of things gone long ago,
And weave them to a song….
O thou whose wound was deepest,
Thou that my children keepest,
Priam, Priam, O age-worn king,
Gather me where thou sleepest.
(TRANSLATION OF GILBERT MURRAY.)
Andromache tries to comfort her with the thought of suicide:
O mother, having ears, hear thou this word
Fear-conquering, till thy heart as mine be stirred
Without joy.To die is only not to be….
And I—long since I drew my bow
Straight at the heart of good fame; and I know
My shaft hit; and for that I am the more
Fallen from peace.All that men praise us for,
I loved for Hector’s sake, and sought to win,
I knew that always, be there hurt therein
Or utter innocence, to roam abroad
Hath ill report for women; so I trod
Down the desire thereof, and walked my way
In my own garden.And light words and gay
Parley of women never passed my door.
The thoughts of mine own heart—I craved no more—
Spake with me, and I was happy. Constantly
I brought fair silence and a tranquil eye
For Hector’s greeting, and watched well the way
Of living,where to guide and where obey….
O my Hector, best beloved,
That being mine,wast all in all to me,
My prince,my wise one, O my majesty
Of valiance! No man’s touch had ever come
Near me,when thou from out my father’s home
Didst lead me and make me thine….And thou art dead,
And I war-flung to slavery and the bread
Of shame in Hellas, over bitter seas!
Hecuba reproves her, and suggests the hope that Hector’s child, Astyanax, may some day restore his fallen city. But at that moment Talthybius returns to say that the Council of the Greeks, for the security of Hellas, has decided that Astyanax must be flung to his death from the walls of Troy. Andromache, holding the child in her arms, bids it farewell:
Thou little thing
That curlest in my arms,what sweet scents cling
Around thy neck! Beloved, can it be
All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee
And fostered, all the weary nights wherethrough
I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew
Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time;
Not ever again. Put up thine arms, and climb
About my neck; now kiss me, lips to lips …
Oh, ye have found an anguish that outstrips
All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks!
Quick; take him, drag him, cast him from the wall
If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift!
God hath undone me, and I cannot lift
One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.
Menelaus enters, looking for Helen, and vowing to kill her on sight; but when she appears, proud and unafraid, still dia gunaikon (goddess among women), he is drunk at once with her beauty, forgets to murder her, and bids his slaves place her “in some chamber’d galley, where she may sail the seas.” Then Talthybius returns, bearing the dead body of Hector’s child. Hecuba swathes the mangled baby in burial robes, and speaks to it in lines realistic even in their sentiment:
Ah,what a death has found thee, little one!…
Ye tender arms, the same dear mould have ye
As his….And dear proud lips, so full of hope
And closed forever! What false words ye said
At day-break,when ye crept into my bed,
Called me kind names, and promised,
“Grandmother,When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair
And lead out all the captains to ride by
Thy tomb.” Why didst thou cheat me so? ’Tis I,
Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed
Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.
Dear God! the pattering welcomes of thy feet,
The nursing in my lap, and oh, the sweet
Falling asleep together! All is gone.
How should a poet carve the funeral stone
To tell thy story true? “There lieth here
A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear Slew him.” Aye,Greece will bless the tale it tells! …
O vain is man,
Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears;
While to and fro the chances of the years
Dance like an idiot in the wind!
(She wraps the child in the burial garments.)
Glory of Phrygian raiment,which my thought
Kept for thy bridal day with some far-sought
Queen of the East, folds thee for evermore….
And over the scene of desolation the tones of the Chorus float in melancholy song:
Beat, beat thine head;
Beat with the wailing chime
Of hands lifted in time;
Beat and bleed for the dead,Woe is me for the dead!
Here is all the power of Shakespeare, without his range and subtlety, but with a social passion that moves us as nothing in all modern drama can, except the dying Lear. This is a man strong enough to speak out, brave enough—in the very fever of war—to show its futile bestiality; brave enough to show the Greeks, to the Greeks, as barbarians in victory, and their enemies as heroes in defeat. “Euripides the human,” denouncer of slavery, critic and understanding defender of women, doubter of all certainties and lover of all men: no wonder the youth of Greece declaimed his lines in the streets, and captive Athenians won their freedom by reciting his plays from memory. “If I were certain that the dead have consciousness,” said the dramatist Philemon, “I would hang myself to see Euripides.” He had not the classic calm and objectivity of Sophocles, nor the stern sublimity of Aeschylus; he bore the same relation to these as the emotional Dostoievski to the impeccable Turgenev and the titanic Tolstoi. But it is in Dos-toievski that we find our secret hearts revealed, and our secret longing understood, and it is in Euripides that Greek drama, tired of Olympus, came down to earth and dealt revealingly with the affairs of men. “Have all the nations of the world since his time,” asked Goethe, “produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?” Just one.
4. LUCRETIUS Four centuries pass.We are in an old Italian villa, built by a rich nonentity named Memmius, far from the noise of Rome. Back of the house is a quiet court, walled in from the world and shaded against the burning sun. Here is a pretty picture: two lads sitting on a marble bench beside the pool, and between them their teacher, all animation and affection, reading to them some majestic and sonorous poem. Let us recline on the lawn and listen, for this is Lucretius, the greatest poet as well as the greatest philosopher of Rome, and what he reads is (says Professor Shotwell) “the most marvelous performance in all antique literature”—the De Rerum Natura, a poetical essay “On the Nature of Things.” He is reciting an apostrophe to Love as the source of all life and all creation:
Thou,OVenus, art sole mistress of the nature of things, and without thee nothing rises up into the divine realms of life, nothing grows to be lovely or glad….Through all the mountains and the seas, and the rushing rivers, and the leafy nests of the birds, and the plains of the bending grass, thou strikest all breasts with fond love, and drivest each after its kind to continue its race through hot desire…. For so soon as the spring shines upon the day, the wild herd bound over the happy pastures, and swim the rapid streams, each imprisoned by thy charms, and following thee with desire.
(TRANSLATION BY MUNRO.)
He is a strange man, this Lucretius, obviously nervous and unstable; story has it that a love-philtre has poisoned him, and left him subject to fits of melancholy and insanity. He is all sensitivity, all pride, wounded by every prick of circumstance; a man born for peace, and forced to live in the midst of Caesar’s alarms; a man with the make-up of a mystic and a saint, hardening himself into a materialist and a skeptic; a lonely soul, driven into solitude by his shyness, and yet pining for companionship and affection. He is a dark pessimist, who sees everywhere two self-canceling movements—growth and decay, reproduction and destruction,Venus and Mars, life and death. All forms begin and have their end; only atoms, space, and law remain; birth is a prelude to corruption, and even this massive universe will thaw and flow back into formlessness:
No single thing abides, but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and their suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
Thou too,O Earth—thine empires, lands and seas—
Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too
Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.
Nothing abides.Thy seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
(PARAPHRASE BY MALLOCK.)
It is a sad philosophy, hardly calculated to give men courage in the face of fate; no wonder story tells how Lucretius killed himself (55 B.C.) at the age of forty-one.What ennobles this verse for us is the sincerity of the poet, and the rugged power of the poetry. The Latin of his lines is rude yet; a generation must pass before the language of the Romans will be polished into rhythm and refinement by Cicero’s vain (and Virgil’s careful) pen; but the liquid fluency of the great orator, and the feminine grace of Augustus’ favorite, yield to these masculine hexameters, these picturesque unwonted adjectives, these stately verbs and resounding substantives. As we listen we are transported into the Garden of Epicu-rus, and hear the distant laughter of Democritus, who knew what Lucretius did not know: that gaiety is wiser than wisdom.
5. LI-PO One day, at the height of his reign, the Chinese Emperor Ming Huang received ambassadors from Korea, who brought to him important messages in a dialect which none of his ministers could understand. “What!” exclaimed the emperor, “among so many magistrates, so many scholars and warriors, cannot there be found a single one who knows enough to relieve us of vexation in this affair? If in three days no one is able to decipher this letter, every one of your appointments shall be sus-pended.” For a day the ministers consulted and fretted, fearing for their offices and their heads, then Minister Ho Chi-chang approached the throne and said: “Your subject presumes to announce to your Majesty that there is a poet of great merit called Li at his house, who is perfectly acquainted with more than one science; command him to read this letter, for there is nothing of which he is not capable.”
The emperor ordered Li to present himself at court immediately, but Li refused to come—saying that he could not possibly be worthy of the task, since his essay had been rejected by the Mandarins at the last examination. The emperor soothed him by conferring upon him the title and robes of a doctor of the first rank. Li came, found his examiners among the ministers, forced them to take off his boots, and then translated the documents, which announced that Korea proposed to make war for the recovery of its freedom. Having read the message, he dictated a learned and terrifying answer, which the emperor signed, almost believing Ho, that Li was an angel descended from heaven. The Koreans sent tribute and apologies, and the emperor gave part of the tribute to Li. Li gave it to the innkeeper, for he loved wine.
Li Tai-po, the Keats of China, had discovered the world in A.D. 701. “For twenty springs,” he lived “among the clouds, loving leisure and enamored of the hills.” He grew in health and strength, and became practiced in the ways of love.
Wine of the grapes,
Goblets of gold—
And a pretty maid ofWu.
She comes on pony-back; she is fifteen;
Blue-painted eyebrows—
Shoes of pink brocade—
Inarticulate speech—
But she sings bewitchingly well.
So, feasting at the table
Inlaid with tortoise shell,
She gets drunk in my lap.
Ah, child,what caresses
Behind lily-embroidered curtains!
And then the aftermath:
Fair one,when you were here, I filled the house with flowers.
Fair one, now you are gone, only an empty couch is left.
On the couch the embroidered quilt is rolled up; I cannot sleep.
It is three years since you went. The perfume you left behind haunts me still.
The perfume strays about me forever; but where are you, Beloved?
I sigh—the yellow leaves fall from the branch.
I weep—the dew twinkles white on the green mosses.
He married, but made so little gold that his wife abandoned him, taking the children with her. Li-po consoled himself with the grape and traveled from city to city, earning crumbs of bread with sheaves of song. Hearing praise of the wine of Niauching, he made at once for that city, over three hundred miles of Chinese—i.e., impassable—roads. Everybody loved him, for he spoke with the same pride and friendliness to both paupers and kings. At the capital the emperor befriended him, but could not command him. Says his fellow poet Tu Fu:
As for Li-po, give him a jugful,
He will write one hundred poems.
He dozes in a wine-shop
On a city street of Chang-an;
And though his Sovereign calls,
He will not board the Imperial barge.
“Please your Majesty,” says he,
“I am a god of wine.”
He accepted the philosophy of Liu Ling, who desired to be followed always by two servants, one with inexhaustible wine, the other with a spade to bury him wherever he might fall; for, said Liu, “the affairs of this world are no more than duck-weed in the river.” So they soon seemed to Li, for when Ming Huang lost his throne for love the poet lost a patron, and fled from Chang-an to wander again over the countryside.
Why do I live among the green mountains?
I laugh and answer not,my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
The peach-trees are in flower, and the water flows on.
His last years were bitter, for he had never stopped to make money, and in the chaos of revolution and war he found no king to keep from that starvation which is the natural reward of poetry. In the end, after imprisonment, condemnation to death, pardon, and every experiment in suffering, he found his way to his childhood home, only to die three years afterward. Legend, unsatisfied with a common end for so extraordinary a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.
Shall we have one more of his songs?
My ship is built of spice-wood and has a rudder of mulan;
Musicians sit at the two ends with jeweled bamboo flutes and pipes of gold.
What a pleasure it is, with a cask of sweet wine and singing girls beside me,
To drift on the water hither and thither with the waves!
I am happier than the fairy of the air,who rode on his yellow crane,
And free as the merman who followed the sea-gulls aimlessly.
Now with the strokes of my inspired pen I shake the Five Mountains.
My poem is done, I laugh, and my delight is vaster than the sea.
Oh, deathless poetry! The songs of Chu-ping are ever glorious as the sun and moon.
While the palaces and towers of the Chu kings have vanished from the hills.
6. DANTE Europe was passing through her Dark Ages when China, in the T’ang and Sung dynasties, “undoubtedly stood at the very forefront of civilization,” as “the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best-governed empire on the face of the globe” (Murdoch). How slowly Europe recovered from her long nightmare of Roman degeneration and barbarian invasion!
But at last new cities grew, new wealth, and new poetry; from France to Persia, and from Nijni Novgorod to Lisbon, reawakened trade brought forth the flowers of literature and art. In Naishapur Omar the Tent-maker sang his Rubaiyat of disillusioned joy; in Paris Villon subtracted heads from bodies and added verse to verse; and in Florence, Dante met Beatrice, and was never the same again.
See him, aged nine, at a party, trying to hide in the midst of a multitude, conscious of every limb on his body and of every eye and mind in the room, wincing at the thought that such a man is stronger, and such a girl too beautiful to notice him. Suddenly Beatrice Portinari is before him-only a girl of eight, but at once he is in love with her, to the full depth of his adolescent soul, with a love too young to think of the flesh, and yet mature enough to be flooded with devotion. “At that instant I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the least pulses, and, trembling, said these words: ‘Behold a God stronger than I, who, coming, shall rule over me.’” So he writes years later, in an idealized account, for nothing in memory is ever so sweet as first love. And he goes on:
My soul was wholly given over to the thought of this most gentle lady;whereby in brief time I fell into so frail and feeble a condition, that my appearance was grievous to many of my friends…. And many sought to know from me that which I wished to conceal. But I, perceiving their questioning, answered that it was Love that had brought me to this pass. I spoke of Love because I bore on my face so many signs that this could not be concealed. But when they asked me,“For whom has Love thus wasted thee?” I, smiling, looked at them and said nothing.
But Beatrice married another, and died at twenty-four, so that it was possible for Dante to love her to the end. To make this love doubly sure he married Gemma dei Donati, and had by her four children and many quarrels. He could never quite forget the face of the girl who had died before time could efface her beauty, or realized desire could dull the edge of imagery.
He plunged into politics, was defeated and exiled, and all his goods were confiscated by the state. After fifteen years of poverty and wandering, he received intimation that he might be reinstated in all his rights of citizenship and property if he would pay a fine to Florence and undergo the humiliating ceremony of “oblation” at the altar as a released prisoner. He refused with the pride of a poet. Thereupon the gentle Florentines—being Christians to a man—decreed that wherever caught, he should be burned alive. He was not caught, but spiritually he was burned alive: he could describe hell later because he went through every realm of it on earth, and if he painted Paradise less vividly, it was for lack of personal experience. He passed from city to city, hunted and friendless, time and again near to starvation.
Perhaps the poem which he now began to write saved him from madness and suicide. Nothing so cleanses the dross out of a man as the creation of beauty or the pursuit of truth, and if the two are merged in one with him, as they were with Dante, he must be purified. This bitter world was unbearable except, as Nietzsche would phrase it, to the eye that considered it a dramatic and aesthetic spectacle; to look at it as a scene to be pictured would take some of its sting away. So Dante resolved to write: he would tell, in terrible allegory, how he had gone through hell, how he had been made clean by the purgatory of suffering, and how he had won a heaven of happiness at last, under the guidance of wisdom and love. And so, aged forty-five, he set his hand to The Divine Comedy, the greatest poem of modern times.
“In the midway of this our life,” he tells us, he stumbled through a dark forest, and then, led by Virgil, found himself before the gates of hell, reading their dour inscription: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the Italian (“Lasciate ogni sper-anza, voi ch’entrate!”), it sounds like a racking of limbs, a tearing of flesh, and a gnashing of teeth on edge. He tells how he saw all the philosophers gathered in hell, and heard Francesca da Rimini recount her love and death with Paolo; and how from these scenes of torment he passed with Virgil to Purgatory, and then, with Beatrice to guide him, into heaven. It would not have been medieval had it not been an allegory: our human life is always a hell, says the poet, until wisdom (Virgil) purges us of evil desire, and love (Beatrice) lifts us to happiness and peace.
Dante himself never knew such peace, but remained to the end an exile, dark of countenance and soul, as Giotto painted him. People remarked that he was never known to smile, and they spoke of him, in awe, as the man who had returned from hell. Broken and worn, and prematurely old, he died at Ravenna in 1321, only fifty-six years of age. Seventy-five years later Florence begged for the ashes of him whom, alive, she would have burned at the stake, but Ravenna refused. His tomb still stands as one of the great monuments of that half-Byzantine city. There, five hundred years after Dante, another exile—Byron—knelt, and understood.
7. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE “Dante,” said Voltaire, “was a madman, and his work is a monstrosity. He has many commentators, and therefore cannot be understood. His reputation will go on increasing, for no one ever reads him.” And he writes: “Shakespeare, who flourished in the time of Lope de Vega … is a barbarian” who composed “monstrous farces called tragedies.” The English of the eighteenth century agreed with the Frenchman. “Shakespeare,” said Lord Shaftesbury, “is a coarse and savage mind.” In 1707 one Nahum Tate wrote a drama called Othello, saying that he had “borrowed the idea of the play from a nameless author.” Alexander Pope, being asked why Shakespeare had written such plays, answered, “One must eat.” Such is fame. A man should never read his reviewers, nor be too curious about the verdict of posterity.
All the world knows Will Shakespeare’s story: how he married in haste and repented without leisure, how he fled to London, became an actor, revamped old plays with his own light and fire, and “did” the town with wild Kit Marlowe, believing that “all things are with more spirit chased than enjoyed” how he fenced with wit against Chapman and Rare Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern; how he declared war against the rising Puritans, and challenged them merrily—“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”—how he read Plutarch, Froissart and Holinshed and learned history, how he read Montaigne and learned philosophy; how at last through learning, suffering, and failure he became William the Conqueror to all the dramatists of his time, and has ruled the English-speaking world ever since.
His rich and riotous energy was the source of his genius and his faults; it brought him the depth and passion of his plays, and it brought him twins and an early death. He could not even go home to Stratford without doing mischief on the way; for always he stopped at Mrs. Davenant’s inn at Oxford (Street-ford and Ox-ford were fording places on the stagecoach route to Ire-land), and finally left behind him there a young William Davenant, who became a minor poet, and never complained of his paternity. Once the boy was running to the inn when a wit stopped him with the query, whither he was bound? “To see my godfather,William Shakespeare,” replied the lad. “My boy,” said the wit, “do not take God’s name in vain.”
Invited to present plays at court, he basked for a time in the sunshine of fair ladies and brave men, and fell madly in love with Mary Fitton, or some other “Dark Lady” of some other name. Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet disappeared from his plays, and stately Portia entered. His soul bubbled over with romance and comedy, and his spirit frolicked in creating Viola and Rosalind and Ariel. But love is never quite content; in its secret heart is a poisonous anxiety, a premonition of alienation and decay. “Love,” says Rosalind, “is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves a dark-house and a whip as madmen do.” “By heaven!” says Biron, “I do love, and it hath taught me melancholy.”
For this was the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and the nadir of his life, that his dearest friend, “W. H.,” to whom he had addressed sonnets of limitless love, came now and stole from him the Dark Lady of his new passion. He raged, and added to the Sonnets songs of madness and doubt; he sank into a hell of suffering, gnawed his heart out with brooding grief, and laid it bare for all to see in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,Timon, and Lear. But his torture deepened him; now he passed from easy comedies and simple characters to complex personalities moving through intricate tragedies to black inevitable destinies. He became through despair the greatest poet of all.
What we like in him most is the madness and richness of his speech. His style is as his life was, full of energy, riot, color, and excess; “nothing succeeds like excess.” It is all hurried and breathless, this style; Shakespeare wrote in haste, and never found leisure to repent. He never erased a line or read a proof; the notion that his plays would some day be read rather than performed did not enter his head. Thoughtless of the future, he wrote with unrestrained passion. Words, images, phrases and ideas rush from him in an inexhaustible and astounding flood; one wonders from what turbulent springs they pour. He has “a mint of phrases in his brain,” and his fine frenzy is of imagination all compact.
No man had ever mastered language, or used it with such lordly abandon. Anglo-Saxon words, French words, Latin words, alehouse words, medical words, legal words; tripping monosyllabic lines and sonorous sesquipedalian speech; pretty ladylike euphuisms and rough idiomatic obscenities: only an Elizabethan could have dared to write such English. We have better manners now, and less power.Yes, the plots are impossible, as Tolstoi said; the puns are puerile, the errors of scholarship are un-Baconianly legion, and the philosophy is one of surrender and despair—it does not matter. What matters is that on every page is a godlike energy of soul, and for that we will forgive a man anything. Life is beyond criticism, and Shakespeare is more alive than life.
8. JOHN KEATS Let us pause for a moment, and count the great whom we have passed by unsung. First Sappho, flinging her lyric love from a Lesbian promontory; then Aeschylus and Sophocles, winning the Dionysian prize so many times oftener than Euripides; subtle Catullus, courtly Horace, lively Ovid, and mellifluous Virgil; Petrarch and Tasso, Omar-Fitzgerald, Chaucer and Villon. But this is small offense by the side of the sins we must yet commit; even Milton and Goethe are to be called but not chosen; even Blake and Burns, Byron and Tennyson, Hugo and Verlaine, Heine and Poe. Heine the imp of verse, and Poe the better half of poetry; to leave them out seems unforgivable. Tennyson, whose every song was beautiful, and Byron, whose very life was a lyric tragedy; who are the greater ones for whom these must make way? Worse yet, not to take Milton in, who wrote like princes, potentates, and powers, and made English to thunder and blare like the Hebrew of Isaiah. Worst of all, to leave Goethe aside, the very soul of Germany, who wrote in his youth like Heine, in his maturity like Euripides, and in his old age like a Gothic cathedral—confused and endlessly surprising; what good German, or good European, will put up with this? Never mind; let us sin bravely, and name not the philosopher Goethe, but the poet, John Keats.
Stricken down with consumption in 1819, Keats, after weeks in bed, wrote to Fanny Brawne: “Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.‘If I should die,’ said I to myself,‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’” “If I had had time”—this is the tragedy of all great men. Keats never wrote anything of importance after that; nevertheless, his friends are remembered because of him, and he has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.We shall say no more about him, but refresh ourselves with himself. He sings to the nightingale:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
And this to Melancholy:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die;
And Joy,whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;
Ay, in the very temple of Delight,
Veil’d Melancholy was her sovran shrine;
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
He went from England to Italy, seeking the sun, but the storms of the sea racked his body, and the dust of the South did him no good. Time and again he spit up cupfuls of blood. He asked that letters from Fanny Brawne be kept from him; he could not bear to read them. He ceased to write to her or his friends; he had only to die. He tried to swallow poison, but Severn took it away from him. “The idea of death,” said Severn, “seems his only comfort. He talks of it with delight. The thought of recovery is beyond everything dreadful to him.” In the final days “his mind grew to great quietness and peace.” He dictated his epitaph: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” Repeatedly he asked the doctor: “When will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?” As the last struggle came he said: “Severn—lift me up, for I am dying. I shall die easy. Don’t be frightened. Thank God it has come.” It was February 23, 1821, and he was twenty-five years old. “If I had had time”!
9. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY When Shelley heard that Keats had died, by tubercle bacilli and the Quarterly Review, he sank into a long seclusion, and poured his wrath and grief into the greatest of English elegies, Adonais. He must have felt, with his feminine sensitivity to every wind of fate, how closely bound was his own destiny with that of Keats-how soon he, too, would fall defeated in the eternal war of poetry and fact.
For Shelley, as Sir Henry Maine would have put it, had based his life and thought on the “State of Nature,” on Rousseau’s dream of a Golden Age in which all men had been, or would be, equal, and he was almost physiologically hostile to that “Historical Method” which balances ideals with realities, and aspirations with history. He could not read history; it seemed to him an abominable record of miseries and crimes; in every age that he studied he sought out not the actual conduct and vicissitudes of men, but their poetry and their religion, their ideal feelings and desires; he knew Aeschylus better than he knew Thucydides; and he forgot that in Aeschylus Prometheus was bound. What could be more certain than his suffering?
He was as sensitive as his “Sensitive Plant,” subject like it to quick decay while rougher fibers flourished and survived. He described himself through Julian as “Me, who am as a nerve o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of this earth.” No one would have thought, seeing this delicate lad, never quite adult, that he had set all England fuming with his heresies. Trelawney, meeting him for the first time, wrote:“Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world?” McCready, the painter, said that he could not portray Shelley’s face, because it was “too beautiful,” and too elusively so; the man’s soul was elsewhere.
No one was ever more completely or exclusively a poet. He is to poets what Spenser was before Shelley came—the very embodiment of all that poetry means. “Poetry,” he wrote, in his famous “Defense,”—“poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world…. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and Michelangelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its beliefs.”
On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Williams left the Casa Magni in which they were staying on the island of Lerici, and sailed in Shelley’s boat, the Ariel, across the Bay of Spezzia to Leghorn, to meet the impoverished Leigh Hunt and his abounding family, whom Shelley had recklessly invited to Italy as his guests. The little sailboat accomplished the trip to Leghorn safely, but as they were all about to return, the skies announced a storm. Hunt decided to remain behind with his brood, and to come the next day, but Shelley insisted on returning to Lerici; Mary Shelley and Mrs.Williams had been left there alone, and would be worried if their men did not appear. As the two youths set out from the harbor the sailors on the ships they passed warned them to comeback. But they sailed on.
When they failed to reach Casa Magni that night Mary Shelley knew that fate had taken her poet from her. She broke out in wild despair, and engaged a vessel early the next morning to take her to Leghorn. There she found Hunt and Byron, but no Williams or Shelley. Byron went energetically to work and had the coast searched for mile after mile. It was not till after eight days that they found the body of Williams, lying bloated and almost unrecognizable on the sands; and not for another two days did they find Shelley—all that remained of him, the flesh torn away from his bones by vultures, the face gone beyond recognition; they knew him only from the Sophocles in one pocket and the Keats in another.
The law of Tuscany required that bodies thrown up by the sea must be burnt to avoid pestilence. So Byron and Hunt and Trelawney built a pyre, and when the body was half consumed, Trelawney snatched the heart out of the flames. The widow had the heart buried near Keats in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, under a slab bearing the simple words, Cor cordium—“heart of hearts.” When she died, twenty-nine years later, it was found that her copy of Adonais contained (in a silken covering) the ashes of her dead lover, at that page which speaks of immortality, and the hope that springs forever in defeated men.
10. WALT WHITMAN
Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia;
Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy, and Achilles’ wrath, and
Aeneas’, Odysseus’wanderings;
Placard “Removed” and “To let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus;
Repeat at Jerusalem-place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate, and on Mount Moriah;
The same on the walls of your Gothic European Cathedrals, and German, French, and Spanish castles;
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere—a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you….
I heard that you asked for something to prove this puzzle, the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy;
Therefore I send you my poems, that you behold in them what you wanted.
It was a great revolution in the history of literature when a man appeared who saw the elements of poetry, the scenes of the human drama, in the very life about him; who found a way to put into song the spirit of the pioneer, and who saw that there was more poetry out under the stars than in all the salons of an unnatural life. Almost for the first time a poet was to find themes worthy of noble verse in the lives of common men; he would lift the people up into literature and be a Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man in poetry; he would incarnate not some dead ideal of Arthur or some forgotten myth of forgotten gods, but his own rough country, his own dubious democracy, his own turbulent and growing time. What Homer had been to Greece,Virgil to Rome, Dante to Italy, Shakespeare to England, he was to be for America, because he dared to see in her, with all her faults, her material of song. He made for her new life a new form of verse, as loose and irregular, as flowing and strong as himself. And so truly did he see and sing that at last he became not only the poet of democracy and America, but, by the greatness of his soul and the universality of his vision, the poet of the modern world.
“The originality of Leaves of Grass,” says a French critic, “is perhaps the most absolute which has ever been manifest in literature.” Originality first in words: here are no delicate nuances of language, no Shelleyan cloudiness of metaphysical speech, but masculine adjectives and nouns, plain blunt words, daringly raised from the streets and the fields to poetry. (“I had great trouble in leaving out the stock poetical touches, but succeeded at last.”) And then originality of form: no rhymes, except in occasional failures like “Captain, My Captain” and no regular meter or rhythm, but only such free and varying rhythms as breathing might show, or the wind, or the sea.Above all, originality of matter: the simple approach of an admiring child to the old and unhackneyed wonders of nature (“the noiseless splash of the sun-rise,” “the mad pushes of waves upon the land”); the vivid identification of himself with every soul in every experience (“My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs; they fetch my man’s body up, dripping and drowned”); the brave sincerity of an open mind, rejecting and loving all creeds; the frank and lusty sense of the flesh, the tang and fragrance of the open road; the defense and understanding of woman:
The old face of the mother of many children!
Whist! I am fully content….
Behold a woman!
She looks out from her Quaker cap-her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky.
She sits in an armchair, under the shaded porch of the farmhouse,
The sun just shines on her old white head.
Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen;
Her grandsons raised the flax, and her granddaughters spun it with the distaff and the wheel.
The melodious character of the earth,
The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go, and does not wish to go,
The justified mother of men—
the profound synthesis of individualism and democracy; the cosmic sweep of his imagination and his sympathy, accepting all peoples and saluting the world: these were vivifying shocks to all traditions, all prejudices, all spirits caught in ancient grooves and molds; and the very protests they aroused proved their power and their necessity. All America denounced him except one man, who redeemed them with a letter that is the seal of his nobility. On July 21, 1855, Emerson wrote to Whitman:
Dear Sir,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy…. I give you joy of your free and brave thought…. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illu-sion; for the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty…. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt very much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
—R.W. Emerson
Whitman is gone—but how lately! He lived when we were children; even in our time, then, there can be giants, and even America, so crass and young, can produce a poet unique and among the best. Some months ago I stood in his Camden home, where paralysis kept him an invalid for many years; and I mourned to see about me all these reminders that genius, too, must die. But then I took up his book, and read once more the lines that have always haunted me, lines that are here left as the parting word, to haunt other memories endlessly:
I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere,waiting for you.