e: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut
him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a
poet.

It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands
of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the
stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all.
Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length
in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation
of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds
them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from
tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact,
excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been
alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last
century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the
melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman
does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive
disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.]
and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that
it was

Projected from the bilious Childe.
[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.]

But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with
emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid.

To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_
describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position
we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers,
assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was
the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended.
[Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his
favorite poet as

A man who measured six feet four:
Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest,
Compact his frame, his muscles of the best.
[Footnote: _A Portrait_.]

With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has
again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been
noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly
verse-writers,

A heavy handed blow, I think,
Would make your veins drip scented ink.
[Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.]

But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share
of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the
Poet_, by Lord Duns