[Footnote: _French Profiles_, p. 344.]
Furthermore, even though everyone may agree that a lurking sense of
hostile criticism is back of the poet's self-absorption, another ground
for skepticism may lie in our assumption that Plato is the central
figure in the opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy
of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the
student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt
their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal
and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in
classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher
North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces
of cipher foolishness, abstractions which we named the puritan, the
philosopher, the philistine. Possibly by so doing we have given the
impression that poets are beating the air against an abstraction when
they are in reality delivering thumping blows upon the body of a
personal enemy. And if these generalizations appear indefensible, still
more misleading, it may be urged, is an attempt to represent that the
poet, when he takes issue with this and that opponent, is answering a
challenge hidden away from the unstudious in the tenth book of Plato's
_Republic_.
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