non-lover

Updated: May 29, 2025

My thoughts do twine and bud About thee, as wild vines about a tree Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see Except the straggling green that hides the wood. The non-lover may also recall to our minds the notorious egotism and self-sufficiency of the poet, which seem incompatible with the humility and insatiable yearning of the lover. He exults in the declaration of Keats,

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

Borne aloft by his admiration for this passage, the non-lover may himself essay to be sublime. He may picture to us the frozen heights on which genius resides, where the air is too rare for earthly affection. He may declare that Keats' Grecian Urn is a symbol of all art, which must be All breathing human passion far above.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

As the non-lover of classic Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of the present time says much for himself. In the first place, our non-lover may assure us, the nature of love is such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

Unless there is some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of his pursuit.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

On the contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like the non-lover of the Phaedrus, to charm the literary public by the novelty of a different profession.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

It will not be long, indeed, before he has so covered the object of his affection with the leafage of his fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all. The non-lover may remind us that even so ardent an advocate of love as Mrs.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

Like passages of Holy Writ, lines from Browning have been used as the text for whatever harangue a new theorist sees fit to give us. In Youth and Art, the non-lover will point out the characteristic attitude of young people who are "married to their art," and consequently have no capacity for other affection.

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years