census of the views of poets.

After hearkening to the general suffrage of poets on the question of the
poet's character, we must bring a serious charge against them if a
deafening clamor of contradiction reverberates in our ears. In such a
case their claim that they are seers, or masters of harmony, can be
worth little. The unbiased listener is likely to assure us that
clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets'
speaking amounts to, but we shall be slow to acknowledge as much. Have
we been merely the dupe of pretty phrasing when we felt ourselves
insured against discord by the testimony of Keats? Hear him:

How many bards gild the lapses of time!
* * * * *
... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude,
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.

However incompatible the characteristics of the poets celebrated by
Wordsworth and by Swinburne, by Christina Rossetti and by Walt Whitman
may have seemed in immediate juxtaposition, we have trusted that we need
only retire to a position where "distance of recognizance bereaves"
their individual voices, in order to detect in their mingled notes
"pleasing music, and not wild uproar."

The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our
multitudinous verse-writers may point out that we should have had more
right to expect concord if we had shown some discernment in sifting true
poets from false. Those who have least claim to the title of poet have