Howbeit
I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad
And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;
The thing's too common.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem,
For me, I wrote
False poems, like the rest, and thought them true
Because myself was true in writing them.]
Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration?
Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of
posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this.
Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether
they be of God. What is his proof?
Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers,
I hung my verses in the wind.
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through:
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the south more fierce and hot.
[Footnote: _The Test_.]
The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's
passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by
time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once
troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a
certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he
inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which
Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it
does.
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