"The more a man gives his life to poetry, the less poetry he writes," was Thompson's own experience.
This harping upon himself is notable. His preoccupation is poetry--and the poet. It is not a matter of selfishness but of difference. _New Poems_ meets with many objections on this score, for sharp distinctions within the species are always resented. The presence of the man is resented, and the presence of the poet, or prophet, is resented. But that he has his own place in creation he knows well enough. Isaiah knew it; and when one of his kind says--
This dread Theology alone Is mine, Most native and my own; And ever with victorious toil When I have made Of the deific peaks dim escalade, My soul with anguish and recoil Doth like a city in an earthquake rock,
he is proclaiming a family egoism that can no more be "pooh-poohed" than a racial pigment or tribal distinction, the stature of the pygmies or the stripe of the zebra. The tribal segregation of the spirit is distrusted, however, because it defies scientific classification. It is known as madness, saintliness, obscurity, affectation, "nerves," mania, fanaticism, conceit, according to its symptoms in a Blake, or a Jacopone da Todi; all its kinds are labelled, but it is never brought to exact order. The variousness of degree in the poetic character is a necessity of the case. The poet makes the difference because he makes his own world, his own scope, his own experience. If he is one of a tribe, he is always the head of it--a chief, like every other, with a tent as large as the sky, as large as the horizon which his own intellectual stature may command.
The poet is conscious of his status as the "maker"--the maker who presumes upon the common advantage of being made in the likeness of God, and gives point to the likeness. It is plainly stated by F. T. in "Carmen Genesis" and in an unpublished note written in support of the poem:--
Poet! still, still thou dost rehearse, In the great _fiat_ of thy Verse, Creation's primal plot; And what thy Maker in the whole Worked, little maker, in thy soul Thou work'st, and men know not.
Thine intellect, a luminous voice, Compulsive moved above the noise Of thy still fluctuous sense; And Song, a water-child like Earth, Stands with feet sea-washed, a wild birth Amid their subsidence.