]
If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires,
that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a
prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the
phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the
one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are
not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing
with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association
of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of
superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can
foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The
Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
_Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many
poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy.
[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_,
_Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_;
Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry
Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J.
Pages:
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417