Bust"--from their more complex companions, which were almost
altogether in blank verse, and, in general, markedly personified a
typical man in his environment, a Cleon or Fra Lippo, a Rudel or a
Blougram. These boldly sculptured figures he set apart from the
others as the fit components of the more closely related group which
ever since has constituted the division now known as "Men and
Women."

Possibly the poet took some pleasure in thus bringing to confusion
those critics who, beginning first to take any notice of his work
after the issue of these volumes of 1855, discovered therein poems
they praised chiefly by means of contrasting them with foregoing
work they found unnoticeable and later work they declared
inscrutable. Their bland discrimination, at any rate, in favor of
"Men and Women" became henceforth inapplicable, since the poet not
only cast out from the division they elected to honor the little
lyrical pieces that caught their eye, but also brought to the front,
from his earlier neglected work of the same kind as the monologues
retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and
Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, moreover, that even yet assumes to
ring the old changes of discrimination against everything but "Men
and Women," is made not merely inapplicable by this re-arrangement,
but uninformed, a meaningless echo of a borrowed opinion which has
had the very ground from under it shifted.

The self-criticism of which this re-arrangement gives a hint is more
valuable.

All the shorter poems accumulated up to this period, various as they
are in theme and metrical form, are uniform in the fashioning of