the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to
contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon
poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, with any
number of other personal experiences that have thrilled the poet to
composition.

The scope of love's influence is widened when one reflects upon its
efficacy as a prize held up before the poet, spurring him on to express
himself. In this aspect poetry is often a form of spiritual display
comparable to the gay plumage upon the birds at mating season. In the
case of women poets, verse often affords an essentially refined and
lady-like manner of expressing one's sentiments toward a possible
suitor. The convention so charmingly expressed in William Morris' lines,
_Rhyme Slayeth Shame_, seems to be especially grateful to them. At
times the ruse fails, as a writer has recently admitted:

All sing it now, all praise its artless art,
But ne'er the one for whom the song was made,
[Footnote: Edith Thomas, _Vos non Nobis_.]

but perhaps the worth of the poetry is not affected by the stubbornness
of its recipient. Sara Teasdale very delicately names her anthology of
love poems by women, _The Answering Voice_, but half the poems reveal
the singer speaking first, while a number of them show her expressing an
open-minded attitude toward any possible applicant for her hand among
her readers. But it is not merely for its efficacy as a matrimonial
agency that poets are indebted to love.

Since the nineteenth century is primarily the age of the love story,
personal experience of love has been invaluable to the poet in a third
way. The taste of the time has demanded that the poet sing of the tender
theme almost exclusively, whether in dramatic, lyric or narrative,
whether in historical or fictional verse. This is, of course, one reason
that, wherever the figure of a bard appears in verse, he is almost
always portrayed as a lover. Not to illustrate exhaustively, three of
the most widely read poems with poet heroes, of the beginning, middle
and end of the century respectively, _i. e._, Moore's _Lalla
Rookh_, Mrs. Browning's _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, and
Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, all depend for plot
interest upon their hero's implication in a love affair. The authors'
love affairs were invaluable, no doubt, since a poet is not be expected
to treat adequately a passion which he has not experienced himself. It
is tr