The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_ (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, _The Poet and the Fisher_, and _Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship_; Wordsworth, _Expostulation and Reply_; Emerson, _Apology_; Whitman, _Song of Myself_; Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Poet's Forge_; P. H. Hayne, _An Idle Poet Dreaming_; Henry Timrod, _They Dub Thee Idler_; Washington Allston, _Sylphs of the Seasons_; C. W. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Alan Seeger, _Oneata_; J. G. Neihardt, _The Poet's Town_.] Sometimes he gives them the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet. When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_, and _The Real and the Ideal_.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few scattered figures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.] Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio, Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See _Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet-politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. [Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama, Richard Garnett.] If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer,