But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this
very thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and
foil. The poets want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since
beauty is the chief attraction, why not have this part alone, pure
and unadulterated,--why not pluck the plumage from the bird, the
flower from its stalk, the moss from the rock, the shell from the
shore, the honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief what
pleases us? Hence, with rare exceptions, one feels, on opening the
latest book of poems, like exclaiming, Well, here is the beautiful
at last divested of everything else,--of truth, of power, of
utility,-- and one may add of beauty, too. It charms as color, or
flowers, or jewels, or perfume charms--and that is the end of it.
It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report
nature, that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and
effect has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the
depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as
its integrity in this respect is preserved. In nature we are
prepared for any opulence of color or of vegetation, or freak of
form, or display of any kind, because of the preponderance of the
common, ever-present feature of the earth. The foil is always at
hand. In like manner in the master poems we are never surfeited
with mere beauty.
Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of
rudeness, darkness, and strength,--and disengages her from absolute
nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,-- what gulfs and
abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,--
yet the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of
beauty! So the orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the
earth itself, and are beautiful because they are something else
first.
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