busy among the verses and stories that
the people make for themselves, but I had been busy a very little while
before I knew that what we call popular poetry never came from the people
at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and Macaulay in his
_Lays_, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets of the middle class,
of people who have unlearned the unwritten tradition which binds the
unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves, to the beginning of
time and to the foundation of the world, and who have not learned the
written tradition which has been established upon the unwritten. I became
certain that Burns, whose greatness has been used to justify the
littleness of others, was in part a poet of the middle class, because
though the farmers he sprang from and lived among had been able to create
a little tradition of their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech,
they had been divided by religious and political changes from the images
and emotions which had once carried their memories backward thousands of
years. Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other
popular poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the
imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is in
Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells
his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to
understand it. No words of his borrow their beauty from those that used
them before, and one can get all that there is in story and idea without
seeing them, as if moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with
kings and queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting, or
else with holy letters and images of so great antiquity that nobody can
tell the god or goddess they would commend to an unfading memory. Poetry
that is not popular poetry presupposes, indeed, more than it says, though
we, who cannot know what it is to be disinherited, only understand how
much more, when we read it in its most typical expressions, in the
_Epipsychidion_ of Shelley, or in Spenser's description of the gardens of
Adonis, or when we meet the misunderstandings of others. Go down into the
street and read to your baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is
not popular poetry. I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his
oven, deny that Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he
wrote 'Warming his five wits, the white owl in the