ering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps
only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most
sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal
of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to
understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of
emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar
Lee Masters' _Monsieur D---- and the Psycho-Analyst_.]

Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their
passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his
biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably
passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet
being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life
afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly
assures us,

Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to
write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by
my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader.
[Footnote: See Arthur Symons, _The Romantic Movement_, p. 92 (from
Myers, _Life of Wordsworth_).]

Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who
shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of
temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in
_My Namesake_, says of himself,

Few guessed beneath his aspect grave
What passions strove in chains.

Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion,

But you are blind, and to the blind
The touch of ice and fire is one.

The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled _Our
Elder Poets_.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an
expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet
somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from
the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion.

Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine
of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity
for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned
themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life
writing them up. Childe Harold is

Grown aged in this world of woe,
In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder