With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly verse-writers, A heavy handed blow, I think, Would make your veins drip scented ink. [Footnote: _To Certain Poets_.] But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce, _Fame and the Poet_, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See _The Revolt against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint, We are compared to that sort of person, Who wanders about announcing his sex As if he had just discovered it. [Footnote: _The Condolence_.] The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora Leigh's cousin Romney to argue, Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life, You need the lower life to stand upon In order to reach up unto that higher; And none can stand a tip-toe in that place He cannot stand in with two stable feet. [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, May 6, 1845.] Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins, _Michael Angelo_ (1904).] Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention: In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration, for in reality the beggars have the advantage of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to the point. We must dig painfully through the outer layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the invalids are all spirit. [Footnote: From _Landscape Painters_, p. 184.]