e written in one's life-blood, so that it necessarily kills one
before it is appreciated. [Footnote: William Reed Dunroy, _The Way of
the World_ (1897).] Another suggests that a subtle electric change is
worked in one's poems by death. [Footnote: Richard Gilder, _A Poet's
Question._] But the only reasonable explanation of the failure of the
poet's own generation to appreciate him seems to be that offered by
Shelley, in the _Defense of Poetry:_

No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the
jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to
all time, must be composed of his peers.

Of course the contempt of the average poet for his contemporaries is not
the sort of thing to endear him to them. Their self-respect almost
forces them to ignore the poet's talents. And unfortunately, in addition
to taking a top-lofty attitude, the poet has, until recently, gone much
farther, and while despising the public has tried to improve it. Most
nineteenth century poetry might be described in Mrs. Browning's words,
as

Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind's forlornest uses.
[Footnote: _Sonnets from the Portuguese._]

And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose.
Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as
Browning did,

My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste
On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste!
A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick--
I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath,
Henceforward with nettle-broth.
[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume._]

Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are
hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly
to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry
hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a
stick.

The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating.
They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does
not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree,
and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his
fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious
circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the
belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result
his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for