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Book, page 81 / 276 bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public, You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me After you've starved me and driven me dead. Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread. [Footnote: _The Young Poet_.] Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's _Ina_, the author himself appears, raving, A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool! Would you know what it means to be a poet? It is to want a friend, to want a home, A country, money,--aye, to want a meal. [Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.] But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. Browning boasts, The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes, But culls his Faustus from philosophers And not from poets. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See _Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are
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