The scholar, for
instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he
has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have
dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even
bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to
maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is
often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging
aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to
loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him?
The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be
confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of
his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James
Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_ (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr.
Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, _The Poet and the Fisher_,
and _Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship_;
Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman,
_Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P.
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