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The greatest love-poetry has not been written by men who have found easy happiness in love. Donne's poems are the poems of a frustrated lover. Keats's greatest poetry was the fruit of unfulfilled love. Thus genius turns poverty into riches. Few men of genius are enviable save in their genius. Beethoven, a frustrate lover and ultimately a deaf musician, is a type of genius at its most sublime.
At present he is not the youngest anything, except, according to himself 'the youngest failure in advertising, but a book of nakedly youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy moments he wishes had never been written, although the San Francisco Warbler called it as 'tensely vital as the Shropshire Lad, brought him several column reviews and very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one and since then many people of his own age and one or two editors have considered him "worth watching."
It is as if the passion in his verse were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement and beautiful. The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. The Wind Among the Reeds is a book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry.
Was there no poetry in these Puritans because they wrote no poetry? We do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and the charge; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet home-drama, love-poetry of the heart and the hearth, and the beauties of everyday human life.
Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in common.
Harper's is a very fine work, and not the least of its merits is its exposition of the difficulties which confront the attempt to deny unity of plot and plan to the Biblical song. Harper also expresses a sound view as to the connection between love-poetry and mysticism. "Sensuality and mysticism are twin moods of the mind."
The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person.
"My much-prized art, on which I relied and which brought me fame, has now reduced me to this. I am poor and old, the slave of others. To the dogs I must go, unless I die quickly." A proper conclusion to this chapter may be borrowed from the peroration of Varchi's discourse upon the philosophical love-poetry of Michelangelo. It runs as follows:
Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history. And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even been introduced.
But it was weary work: and yet, too, strangely interesting, as at times there came scraps of old Scotch love-poetry, contrasting sadly with the grim withered lips that uttered them hints to me of some sorrow long since suffered, but never healed. I had never heard him allude to such an event before but once, on the first day of our acquaintance.
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