were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who
declared, "After I had read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary,_
I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart."
[Footnote: James Gillman, _Life of Coleridge_, p. 23.]

A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at
the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing
materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their
admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in
his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that
materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the
curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the
reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If
idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which
poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the
_fin de siecle_ school bears close resemblance to cut flowers,
already drooping.

It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets,
Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these
men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence,
the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible
explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for
poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic
views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To
Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that
one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world.
"I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about
which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life."
[Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.]