There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern
poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact,
going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth
century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song
into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than
most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the
intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern
conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing
himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise
chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute
poetry.
Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or
to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming
"into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his
communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that
it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the
revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe
the experience thus.
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