Introduction to Robert Browning [8]
are the world's standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.
"Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers, 'Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott."
John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled `The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas", whom he does not name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence."
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was "Strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation", and who "Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated, -- Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created."
John Keats, in his poem entitled `Sleep and Poetry', has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues: -- "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, And thought it Pegasus." (Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.) "Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd It's gathering waves -- ye felt it not. The blue Bar'd its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of, -- were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphem'd the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it, -- no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau!"
It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles's strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, "Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton's? Is it Dryden's? Is it any one's except Pope's and Goldsmith's, of which ALL is good?"
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow which, as I have said, set in about the middle of the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all, more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion, the French revolution, which stirred men's souls to their deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties, and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas "on man, on nature, and on human life", which have since so vitalized English poetry. *
-- * "The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times, reacted upon
"Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers, 'Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott."
John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled `The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas", whom he does not name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence."
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was "Strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation", and who "Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated, -- Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created."
John Keats, in his poem entitled `Sleep and Poetry', has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues: -- "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, And thought it Pegasus." (Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.) "Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd It's gathering waves -- ye felt it not. The blue Bar'd its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of, -- were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphem'd the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it, -- no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau!"
It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles's strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, "Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton's? Is it Dryden's? Is it any one's except Pope's and Goldsmith's, of which ALL is good?"
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow which, as I have said, set in about the middle of the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all, more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion, the French revolution, which stirred men's souls to their deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties, and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas "on man, on nature, and on human life", which have since so vitalized English poetry. *
-- * "The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times, reacted upon