In Cleon, the man of composite art and culture, the last ripe
fruitage of Greek development, is personified and brought into
contact, at the moment of the dawn of Christianity in Europe, with
the ardent impulse the Christian ideal of spiritual life supplied to
human civilization. How close the wise and broad Greek culture came
to being all-sufficing, capable of effecting almost enough of
impetus for the aspiring progress of the world, and yet how much it
lacked a warmer element essential to be engrafted upon its lofty
beauty, the reader, upon whose imaginative vision the personality of
Cleon rises, can scarcely help but feel.

The aesthetic and religious or philosophical interests vitally
conceived and blended, which link together so many of the main poems
of "Men and Women," close with "Cleon." Rudel, the troubadour,
presenting, in the self-abandonment of his offering of love to the
Lady of Tripoli, an impersonation of the chivalric love
characteristic of the Provencal life of the twelfth century,
intervenes, appropriately, last of all, between the preceding poems
and the epilogue, which devotes heart and brain of the poet himself,
with the creatures of his hand, to his "Moon of Poets."

As these poetic creations now stand, they all seem, upon
examination, to incarnate the full-bodied life of distinctive types
of men, centred amid their relations with other men within a
specific social environment, and fulfilling the possibilities for
such unique, dramatic syntheses as were revealed but partially or in
embryo here and there among the other shorter poems of this period
of the poet's growth.

In one important particular the re-arrangement of the "Men and