Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/40

10. Later on, he surely finds his way to the higher gymnasium; he reads with wonder and assimilation the books of the poets. Thus not only his early methods, but his life-long expression, his vocabulary, his confines and liberties, will depend much upon early associations, and upon the qualities of the models which chance sets within his way. As to technical ability, what he seeks to acquire after the formative period relatively counts for little; his gain must come, and by a noble paradox, from learning to unlearn, from self-development; otherwise his utterance will never be a force. One poet's early song, for example, has closely echoed Keats; another's, Tennyson; afterward, each has given us a motive and a method of his own, yet he was first as much a pupil of an admirable teacher as those widely differing artists, Couture and Millet, were pupils of Delaroche. Still another began with the Italian poets, and this by a fortunate chance,—or rather, let us say, by that mysterious law which decrees that genius shall find its own natural sustenance. In time he developed his own artistic and highly original note, with a spirituality confirmed by that early pupilage.

I assume, then, that the poet's technical modes, even the general structure of a masterwork, come by intuition, environment, reading, experience; and that The natural method. too studious consideration of them may perchance retard him. I suspect that no instinctive poet bothers himself about such matters