And whosoever writes good poetry, Looks just to art. He does not write for you Or me,—for London or for Edinburgh; He will not suffer the best critic known To step into his sunshine of free thought And self-absorbed conception, and exact An inch-long swerving of the holy lines. If virtue done for popularity Defiles like vice, can art for praise or hire Still keep its splendor, and remain pure art? Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes, He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits, And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passed From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand, Until the unborn snatch it, crying out In pity on their fathers’ being so dull, And that’s success too. I will write no plays. Because the drama, less sublime in this, Makes lower appeals, defends more menially, Adopts the standard of the public taste To chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch The fashions of the day to please the day; Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands, Commending chiefly its docility And humour in stage-tricks; or else indeed Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog, Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked, Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist (Being wronged by some five hundred nobodies Because their grosser brains most naturally Misjudge the fineness of his subtle wit) Shows teeth an almond’s breadth, protests the length Of a modest phrase,—‘My gentle countrymen, There’s something in it, haply, of your fault,’— Why then, besides five hundred nobodies, He’ll have five thousand, and five thousand more, Against him,—the whole public,—all the hoofs Of King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,— And obviously deserve it. He appealed To these,—and why say more if they condemn, Than if they praised him?—Weep, my Æschylus, But low and far, upon Sicilian shores! For since ’twas Athens (so I read the myth) Who gave commission to that fatal weight, The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on thee And crush thee,—better cover thy bald head; She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan bee Before thy loud’st protesting.—For the rest, The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage: I could not, in so little, accept success, Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm, For manifester gains; let those who prize, Pursue them: _I_ stand off. And yet, forbid, That any irreverent fancy or conceit Should litter in the Drama’s throne-room, where The rulers of our art, in whose full veins Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength And do their kingly work,—conceive, command, And, from the imagination’s crucial heat, Catch up their men and women all a-flame For action, all alive, and forced to prove