Nineteenth and
twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of
their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic
character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most
idealistic verse.
However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and
philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of
abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course.
Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing
than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take
his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to
appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our
"muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies.
Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of
widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical
love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it
seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_.
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