Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman,
_Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P. H. Hayne,
_An Idle Poet Dreaming_; Henry Timrod, _They Dub Thee Idler_; Washington
Allston, _Sylphs of the Seasons_; C. W. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Alan Seeger,
_Oneata_; J. G. Neihardt, _The Poet's Town_.] Sometimes he gives them
the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But
occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries
to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his
bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet.

When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers
laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to
make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional
fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and
Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_, and _The Real
and the Ideal_.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few
scattered figures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.]
Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of
Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio,
Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See
_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must
admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet-
politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to
celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a
protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look
to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as
following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all,
for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing
Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist
is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the