"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the
poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of
his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their
darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of
Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the
apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.]

Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most
often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the
question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a
divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth
century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of
adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too
frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He
may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not
attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his
thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his
public.

Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less
aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows,
throughout, the tenor of the first stanza:

My counsel to the budding bard
Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard."
Your "gentle public," my good friend,
Won't read what they can't comprehend.

This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and