any, advertises the adulation by feminine readers
resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began
his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt
against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself
unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint,

We are compared to that sort of person,
Who wanders about announcing his sex
As if he had just discovered it.
[Footnote: _The Condolence_.]

The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in
poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora
Leigh's cousin Romney to argue,

Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life,
You need the lower life to stand upon
In order to reach up unto that higher;
And none can stand a tip-toe in that place
He cannot stand in with two stable feet.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning,
May 6, 1845.]

Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific
account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the
result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael
Angelo_ (1904).]

Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is
illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists,
outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of
essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention:

In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These
semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration,
for in reality the beggars have the advantage
of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed
to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to
the point. We must dig painfully through the outer
layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the
invalids are all spirit.
[Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.]

That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last
century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their
ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if
anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello
turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So
nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max
Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art, _Degeneration_, was
a