eBooks Base 2000

]
but perhaps the worth of the poetry is not affected by the stubbornness
of its recipient. Sara Teasdale very delicately names her anthology of
love poems by women, _The Answering Voice_, but half the poems reveal
the singer speaking first, while a number of them show her expressing an
open-minded attitude toward any possible applicant for her hand among
her readers. But it is not merely for its efficacy as a matrimonial
agency that poets are indebted to love.
Since the nineteenth century is primarily the age of the love story,
personal experience of love has been invaluable to the poet in a third
way. The taste of the time has demanded that the poet sing of the tender
theme almost exclusively, whether in dramatic, lyric or narrative,
whether in historical or fictional verse. This is, of course, one reason
that, wherever the figure of a bard appears in verse, he is almost
always portrayed as a lover. Not to illustrate exhaustively, three of
the most widely read poems with poet heroes, of the beginning, middle
and end of the century respectively, _i.


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