he unfolding ages, I must doubt
Whether they comprehended what they saw.]

Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare
commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way
granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting
Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the
poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are
typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she
makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects,

And ah, we poets, I misdoubt
Are little more than thou.
We speak a lesson taught, we know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.
[Footnote: _Sister Songs._]

One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this
inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as
a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much
attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the
romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John
Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the
mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: See _Song for Tasso_,
Shelley; _Tasso to Leonora_, James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_,
E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles, _The Harp and Despair
of Cowper_; Mrs. Browning, _Cowper's Grave_; Lord Houghton, _On Cowper's
Cottage at Olney_.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last
century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during
periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is
not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing
the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional
poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed
madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe, _The Patron_;
Shelley, _Rosalind and Helen_.] while the American, J. G. Holland,
represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a
hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland,
_Kathrina_. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benet,
_Mad Blake_; Amy Lowell, _Clear, With Light Variable Winds_; Cale Young
Rice, _The Mad Philosopher_; Edmund Blunden, _Clare's Ghost_.]

It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly
incompatible with the eightee