the artistry
with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even
while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote:
Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is
Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the
Golden Shoe_; Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe_.] Here and there, the
poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last
century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare, _The
Peasant Poet_; Mrs. Browning, _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_; Robert
Buchanan, _Poet Andrew_; T. E. Browne, _Tommy Big Eyes_; Whittier,
_Eliot_; J. G. Saxe, _Murillo and his Slave_.] And at present, with the
penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight
revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are
popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness
than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John
Davidson, _A Ballad in Blank Verse_; Vachel Lindsay, _The North Star
Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son_; John Masefield, _Dauber_; Francis
Carlin, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_ (1918).] Still, for the most part, the
present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of
indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than
caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would
probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning,

What if men have found
Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll
Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul?
[Footnote: Henry van Dyke, _Sonnet_.]

If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict
the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most
minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the
poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body?
since singers tell

us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,
Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.
[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.]

as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to
frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses
it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look
for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not
troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the
phenomenon, the