, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The
Sculptor_; William Rose Benet, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman
Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and
Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock,
_Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing
the Song of Her_.]

Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are
coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which
refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly
unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep
for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is
likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his
hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an
impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is
significant that the singers who are most aware of their
inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no
thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are
obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson,
herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the
problem for us. She avers,

I found the phrase to every thought
I ever had, but one;
And that defies me,--as a hand
Did try to chalk the sun.

To races nurtured in the dark;--
How would your own begin?
Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?

"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the
poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of
his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their
darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of
Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the
apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.]

Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most
often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the
question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a
divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth
century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of
adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too
frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He
may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not