[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the
discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous";
[Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only
teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are
some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth:
Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a
Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_
Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_
Rossetti, _Sonnet, Shelley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_
Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow,
_The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_;
Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_;
Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on
_Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the
Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren
Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_;
Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A
Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_;
Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of
the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The
Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.]

Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher
and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook
human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same
pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one
another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to
the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of
the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher?