And they shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things,
[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose
inevitably calls up William Morris:

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale, not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.]

Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He
would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's
minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about
ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead
for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein,
_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other
justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of
man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea
that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought
of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the
breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to