sly portrayed peers as
livingly the face of the poet portraying him. And this one--the
admonishing poet--is set there with his "sudden rose," as if to
indicate with that symbol of poetic magic what kind of spell was
sought to be exercised by their maker to conjure up in his house of
song the figures that people its niches. Could a poem be imagined
more cunningly devised to reveal a typical poetic personality, and a
typical theory of poetic method, through its way of revealing
another? What poet could have composed it but one who himself
employed the dramatic method of causing the abstract to be
realizable through the concrete image of it, instead of the contrary
mode of seeking to divest the objective of its concrete form in
order to lay bare its abstract essence? This opposite theory of the
poetic function is precisely the Boehme mode, against which the
veiled dramatic poet, who is speaking in favor of the Halberstadtian
magic, admonishes his brother, while he himself in practical
substantiation of his theory of poetics brings bodily in sight the
boy-face above the winged harp, vivified and beautiful himself,
although his poem is but a shapeless mist.

Not directly, then, but indirectly, as the dramatic poet ever
reveals himself, does the sophisticated face of the subtle poet of
"Men and Women" appear as the source of power behind both of the
poets of this poem, prepossessing the reader of the verity and
beauty of the theory of poetic art therein exemplified. Such an
interpretation of "Transcendentalism," and such a conception of it
as a key to the art of the volume it opens, chimes in harmoniously
with the note sounded in the next following poem, "How it Strikes a
Contemporary." Here again a typical poet is personified, not,
however, by means of his own poetic way of seeing, but of the
prosaic way in which he is seen by a contemporary, the whole, of
course, being poetically seen and presented by the
over-poet. Browning himself, and in such a manifold way that the
reader is enabled to conceive as vividly of the talker and his
mental atmosphere and social background--the people and habitudes of
the good old town of Valladolid--as of the betalked-of Corregidor
himself; while by the totality of these concrete images an
impression is conveyed of the dramatic mode of poetic expression
which is far more convincing than any explicit theoretic statement
of it could be, because so humanly animated.

"Artemis Prologizes"