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Updated: June 25, 2025
What are the chief characteristics of each of the above authors? Do these minor versifiers fill a want not fully supplied by the great poets? Interest in the Present. One result of the growing scientific spirit has been an increasing interest in contemporary problems and literature.
It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: Sicut amori lupanar. And in the end they plumped heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them: they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word for it.
We may obtain some imperfect notion of the Mirror for Magistrates if we imagine a composite poem planned by Sir Walter Scott, and contributed to by Wordsworth and Southey, being still issued, generation after generation, with additions by the youngest versifiers of to-day.
The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans. Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship.
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, imitating Suckling's "Session of the Poets," brings all the versifiers of the time into the canvas, and after humorously dispatching one after another, not sparing himself, closes,
Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement of our numbers, and says that Gower also can show smooth numbers and easy rhymes. The refinement of our numbers means something far more than this. A nation may have versifiers with smooth numbers and easy rhymes, and yet may have no real poetry at all.
That in his day of plenary inspiration, Milton, who disdained Dryden as "a rhymist but no poet," and has recorded his own impatience with the "drawling versifiers," should have undertaken to grind down the noble antistrophic lyrics of the Hebrew bard into ballad rhymes for the use of Puritan worship, would have been impossible.
America has never lacked for versifiers, and Bryant's success encouraged a greater throng than ever to "lisp in numbers"; but few of them grew beyond the lisping stage, and it was not until the middle of the century that any emerged from this throng to take their stand definitely beside the author of "Thanatopsis."
In the state archives, kept in the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished verse, some by well-known hands, and others, quite as good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers, men who could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had left.
Above the newspaper versifiers float the minor poets, and above these soar the greater poets; and the characteristics of the whole hierarchy are the same as those of the humblest acolyte, intelligence, conservatism, conventional morality.
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