Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1889 — Poets: English and American. [ARTICLE]

Poets: English and American.

Though Chaucer is still read by linguists and students, he is no longer a living force in English literature, writes S. W. Foss. Spenser produced one long poem that* has survived in literature. We doubt if a single professor of literature in aij American college can be found who has read “The Faery Queen, through without skipping. Spenser is much more generally eulogized than read. Shakspeare is pre-eminent in the solitary isolation of his genius. The flower of the human intellect burst into fullest bloom in the brain of Wm. Shakspeare. Milton was one of the immortals; but it is doubtful if he has said more unforgetable things than Emerson. Dryden is not a gigantic enough figure to pedestal in a world’s pantheon. Pope was an elegant, finished artistic writer, a master of a mechanical meter, a prince of epigrammatists, polished and cold as an icicle. But it is a matter of dispute among the critics of the present day whether, in the highest sense of the term, he was a poet at all, Gray was an industrious writer, but cannot be ranked among the great spontaneous, native, original geniuses of mankind. Burns was a real poet, and with the true instinct of a poet’s nature appealed directly to the hearts of men. His words were understood by the heart before they filtered through the intellect, and hence they possess ah immortal significance. Wordsworth produced much unwinnowed wheat, pretty well concealed in chaff. He did some truly great work; but many of his poems are still read from a sense of literary duty. Coleridge, the fragmentary, lazy, purposeless, was a man of infinite literary promise, but of very meager and unsatisfactory accomplishment. Byron is no longer a literary force. He was brilliant, dazzling, meteoric; but the world no longer regards him as a great poet. Shelley was a great poet for certain kinds of imaginative minds. But he was far from universal in his genius. Emerson did not permit him in his “Parnassus.”

Keats had the making of a great poet in him, but he died before the full maturity of his powers. Such are the flowers of English poesy that have bloomed during the last six hundred years. Ralph Waldo Emerson is as certainly booked for immortality as any of these vaunted thirteen, except Shakspeare. He will surely be .remembered as long as Milton. It seems almost sacrilege to compare him with such comparatively second-rate men as Dryden and Pope. How substantial seems the granite of his fame beside the yeasty froth of Byron. Poe has certainly done as good work as Coleridge, and both worked in the same vein. Longfellow should certainly be ranked as high as Gray, and it would seem that the cool judgment of the future must place him on a higher pedestal than Pope. In our one hundred years of existence we have produced poets that compare favorably with England’s six-hun-dred-year crop, with the single exception of Shakspeare. And the American Shakspeare will arrive on the scene in the fullness of time.