If on the one hand he criticised Whitman
for lack of form, on the other he blamed Swinburne for lack of substance.
Seemingly a follower of Poe, he yet would have incurred
the displeasure of that poet for adopting the "heresy of the didactic".
He had an exalted sense of what poetry means in the redemption of mankind.
He had little patience with the cry, "Art for art's sake," or with
the justification so often made for the immorality of the artist's life.
Milton himself did not believe more ardently that a poet's life
ought to be a true poem. In the poems "Individuality", "Clover",
"Life and Song", and the "Psalm of the West", Lanier expresses
his view of the responsibility of the artist. In the first he says: --
Awful is Art because 't is free;
The artist trembles o'er his plan
Where men his Self must see.
In the "English Novel" he says: "For, indeed, we may say
that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty
are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin,
and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty;
that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy
in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing,
burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet
the great artist."
Lanier believed that he was, or would be, a great poet. While for a time he
considered music as his special field of work and "poetry as a mere tangent,"
after 1875 his aspiration took the direction of poetry.
Pages:
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319