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Book, page 61 / 276 distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a poet. It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.] and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that it was Projected from the bilious Childe. [Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.] But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid. To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. [Footnote: _Kathrina_.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his favorite poet as A man who measured six feet four: Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest,
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