the thick, pure cream of
abounding vitality will do. The exhausted artist has but three
courses open to him: either to stimulate himself into a counterfeit,
and suicidally brief, exuberance; or to relapse into mediocrity; or to
gain a healthy fullness of life.

In the previous chapter it was shown why poetry demands more
imperatively than any other art, that the appreciator shall bring to
it a margin of vitality. For a like reason poetry makes this same
inordinate demand upon its maker. It insists that he shall keep
himself even more keenly alive than the maker of music or sculpture,
painting or architecture. This is the reason why, in the present era
of overstrain, the poet's art has been so swift to succumb and so slow
to recuperate.

The poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able to
readjust his body to the pace of modern urban life, so that he may
live among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations and
still keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into his
poems. Under these new and strenuous conditions, very little real
poetry has been written in our cities. American poets, despite their
genuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amid
its turmoil, have almost invariably done the best of their actually
creative work during the random moments that could be snatched in wood
and meadow, by weedy marsh or rocky headland. To his friends it was
touching to see with what wistfulness Richard Watson Gilder used to
seek his farm at Tyringham for a day or two of poetry after a
fortnight of furious office life. Even Walt Whitman--poet of cities
that he was--had to retire "precipitate" from his beloved Manahatta in
order fitly to celebrate her perfections. In fact, Stedman was perhaps
the only one of our more important singers at the close of the century
who could do his best work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to the
poet: "Thou shalt lie close hid with Nature, and canst not be afforded
to the Capitol or the Exchange." But it is pleasant to recall how
even that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in the
peace of the country.

One reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women--and
especially of unmarried women--among our poetic leaders is, I think,
to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the
means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital,
unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by