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There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the
hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth
were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were
not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too
tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness.
[Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] Coleridge and Southey went so
far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the
Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry.
[Footnote: See the _Defense of Poetry_: "In the infancy of society
every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in _Gertrude of
Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs,
So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth,
That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran
(And song is but the eloquence of truth).
The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory,
declaring of poetry,
Its seat is deeper in the savage breast
Than in the man of cities.


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