THE ethical problem is further complicated for poets by the tussle in their nature between the spontaneous and the critical biases. The principle of loyalty on which the present non-religious system of English manners depends is strained in them to breaking point by the tendency to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas for which mature consideration entirely alters the values, or with people who change by the same process from mere acquaintances to intimate friends and back in a flash. Which should explain many apparently discreditable passages in, for instance, the life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, and should justify Walt Whitman’s outspoken “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of ungenteel birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of their writing. To the polite society of their day—outsiders to a man.