The poet scornfully characterizes present writers,
We are they who dream no dreams,
Singers of a rising day,
Who undaunted,
Where the sword of reason gleams,
Follow hard, to hew away
The woods enchanted.
[Footnote: E. Flecker, _Donde Estan_.]
One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He
declares,
Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes,
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek for shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree?
[Footnote: _To Science_.]
If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the
philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's
hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which
must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the
poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed,
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely,
and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying,
the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
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