[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]
this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with
recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily
Bronte, of whom it is written:
They live not long of thy pure fire composed;
Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Bronte_.]
Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness.
Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death
Far from the trembling throng
Whose souls are never to the tempest given.
[Footnote: _Adonais_.]
With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis
Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home
to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong
for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are
screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream
about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his
article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne
speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has
written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is
nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense
must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less
wild-winged.
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