The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the _Prelude_.] and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: See _The Scholar_.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See _The Master of the Dance_. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the poet's mind. [Footnote: See _The Poet's Mind_.] So Richard Gilder maintains of the singer, He was too wise Either to fear, or follow, or despise Whom men call science--for he knew full well All she had told, or still might live to tell Was known to him before her very birth. [Footnote: _The Poet's Fame_. In the same spirit is _Invitation_, by J. E. Flecker.] The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus: Yours is the living pall, The aloof and frozen place of listeners And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine The fount of life itself, the burning fount Pierian. I pity you. [Footnote: _Sappho and Phaon_, a drama.] Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young: How proud the poet's billow swells! The God! the God! his boast: A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! Dead bards stench every coast. [Footnote: _Resignation_.] There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She muses over the title of poet: The name Is royal, and to sign it like a queen Is what I dare not--though some royal blood Would seem to tingle in me now and then With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes And manias usual to the race. Howbeit I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; The thing's too common. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true Because myself was true in writing them.]