Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his public. Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, throughout, the tenor of the first stanza: My counsel to the budding bard Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard." Your "gentle public," my good friend, Won't read what they can't comprehend. This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse? There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries, O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed My soul has to herself decreed. [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother George, April, 1817.] Bryant warns the poet, Deem not the framing of a deathless lay The pastime of a drowsy summer day; But gather all thy powers And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave. [Footnote: _The Poet_.] It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet, Touch the crude line with fear But in the moments of impassioned thought. [Footnote: _The Poet_.]