Now, for some reason it is fashionable just now to account Class 1 the
more respectable; a judgment to which, considering that Virgil and
Shakespeare belong to Class 2, I refuse my assent. It is fashionable
to construct an imaginary figure out of the characteristics of Class
1, and set him up as the Typical Poet. The poet at whose nativity
Tennyson assists in the above verses of course belongs to Class 1. A
babe so richly dowered can hardly help his matter overcrowding his
style; at least, to start with.

But this is not all. A poet who starts with this tremendous equipment
can hardly help being something too much for the generation in which
he is born. Consequently, the Typical Poet is misunderstood by his
contemporaries, and probably persecuted. In his own age his is a voice
crying in the wilderness; in the wilderness he speeds the "viewless
arrows of his thought"; which fly far, and take root as they strike
earth, and blossom; and so Truth multiplies, and in the end (most
likely after his death) the Typical Poet comes by his own.

Such is the popular conception of the Typical Poet, and I observe
that it fascinates even educated people. I have in mind the recent
unveiling of Mr. Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial at University College,
Oxford. Those who assisted at that ceremony were for the most part men
and women of high culture. Excesses such as affable Members of
Parliament commit when distributing school prizes or opening free
public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and
almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after
speaker assumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy--that a Poet is
necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly
liable to persecution at the hands of his contemporaries.