A characteristic example of this
attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he
attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells
his brother poets:
I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried
To work his will, the hand that moved my pen
Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask
Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps
With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come,
Oracular glories, visionary gleams,
And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.
[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.]
The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's
appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead
wife shall inspire his poetry.
One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have
nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as
this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their
special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works
which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what
is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in
some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to
Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good
genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him.
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