Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Phil McLaury, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team THE POET'S POET Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years By ELIZABETH ATKINS, PH.D. Instructor in English, University of Minnesota TO HARTLEY AND NELLY ALEXANDER PREFACE Utterances of poets regarding their character and mission have perhaps received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of aesthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, whom he urged to make just such lyrical defense as we are to consider. The method here employed is not to present exhaustively the substance of individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's _Prelude,_ Browning's _Sordello,_ and the like, could scarcely give more than a re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an essential unity in many poets' views on their own character and mission.