What is a Great Poet? by Edmund Gosse — Read

The answer to the question, "Has America produced a Poet? " which was published in the _Forum_, called forth a surprising amount of attention from the press in England as well as in America. It was quite impossible, and I did not expect, that such an expression of personal opinion would pass without being challenged. In America, particularly, it could not but disturb some traditions and wound some prejudices. But in the present instance, as always before, it has been my particular fortune to find that where criticism -- by which I mean, not censure, but analysis -- is candid and sincere, it meets in America with sincere and candid readers. In parenthesis, I may add, that when literary criticism of this kind is ill received in America, the fault usually lies with that unhappy system of newspaper reverberation by which "scraps" or "items," removed from their context and slightly altered at each fresh removal, go the round of the press, and are presently commented upon by journalists who have never seen what the critic originally wrote. In reading some of the principal articles which my essay called forth, I find one point dwelt upon, in various ways, in almost all of them. I find a fresh query started as to the standard which we are to take as a measurement for imaginative writers; and it seems to me that it may be interesting to carry our original inquiry a step further back, and to ask, What is a great poet?

If we are to limit the number of the most illustrious and commanding names, as I attempted to do, it is plain that we must also confine the historical range of our inquiry. Some of my reviewers objected to my selection being made among English poets only, and several of them attempted lists which included the poets of Europe or of the world. Yet, without exception, those critics displayed their national bias by the large proportion of Anglo-Saxon worthies whom they could not bring themselves to exclude from their dozen. Shakespeare must be there, and Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Shelley; already a third of the majestic company is English. One reviewer, who had been lately studying the Anthology, could not persuade himself to omit several of those dying dolphins of Byzantine song that drew the shallop of Agathias up into the Golden Horn; and this when the whole tale of bards was not to exceed fifteen at most. One reviewer went to Iceland for a name, and another to Persia -- charming excursions both of them, but calculated to exhaust our resources prematurely. The least reflection will remind us that the complexity and excessive fulness of modern interests have invaded literature also, and the history of literature; to select from all time a dozen greatest names is a task of doubtful propriety, and certainly not to be lightly undertaken. It was all very well, in the morning of time, for the ancient critics to regulate their body-guards of Apollo by the numbers of the Muses or the Graces. Nothing could be pleasanter than that tale of the great lyrical poets of the world which we find so often repeated in slightly varying form: