The Poet's Poet by Elizabeth Atkins - A complete eBook in pages (121 / 276)

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The Poet's Poet by Elizabeth Atkins
Book, page 121 / 276

character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most
idealistic verse.

However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and
philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of
abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course.
Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing
than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take
his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to
appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our
"muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies.

Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of
widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical
love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it
seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See
Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.]

Bulwer Lytton's _Milton_ was, if one may believe the press notices,
the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of
aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the
intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long
lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too
physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this
vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he
abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after
death. Bulwer Lytton cites the _Phaedrus_ of Plato as the basis of
his allegory, reminding us,

   The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend
   From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be),
   Dim broken memories of the state before,
   Form what we call our reason...
   ... Is not Love,
   Of all those memories which to parent skies
   Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above,
   In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:)
   Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest?

Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George

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