The Poets Poet | Page 8

in the middle of the last century are often found exhorting one another to humility, quite after the prayer-meeting tradition. Bitter is their denunciation of the poet's arrogance:
A man that's proud--vile groveller in the dust,?Dependent on the mercy of his God?For every breath.?[Footnote: B. Saunders, To Chatterton.]
Again they declare that the poet should be
Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain,?[Footnote: Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy.]
telling him,
Think not of thine own self,?[Footnote: Richard Gilder, To the Poet.]
adding,
Always, O bard, humility is power.?[Footnote: Henry Timrod, Poet If on a Lasting Fame.]
One is reminded of Mrs. Heep's repeated adjuration, "Be 'umble, Ury," and the likeness is not lessened when we find them ingratiatingly sidling themselves into public favor. We hear them timidly inquiring of their inspiration,
Shall not the violet bloom??[Footnote: Mrs. Evans, Apologetic.]
and pleading with their critics,
Lightly, kindly deal,?My buds were culled amid bright dews?In morn of earliest youth.?[Footnote: Lydia M. Reno, Preface to Early Buds.]
At times they resort to the mixed metaphor to express their innocuous unimportance, declaring,
A feeble hand essays?To swell the tide of song,?[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, Invocation.]
and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness:
Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts,?Win in each heart and memory a home.?[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, Dedication.]
But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, _In a Dull Uncertain Brain_; Whittier, To my Namesake_; Sidney Lanier, _Ark of the Future; Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Last Reader_; Bayard Taylor, _L'Envoi; Robert Louis Stevenson, To Dr. Hake_; Francis Thompson, To My Godchild_.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of himself:
I am nae poet, in a sense,?But just a rhymer like, by chance,?And hae to learning nae pretense,?Yet what the matter??Whene'er my muse does on me glance,?I jingle at her.?[Footnote: Epistle to Lapraik.]
Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who casually disposes of the poet's immortality:
Let but the verse befit a hero's fame;?Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name.?[Footnote: Introduction to Don Roderick.]
Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's conceit, assuring him:
Ye are not great because creation drew?Large revelations round your earliest sense,?Nor bright because God's glory shines for you.?[Footnote: Mountaineer and Poet.]
But in her other poetry, notably in Aurora Leigh_ and A Vision of Poets,_ she amply avows her sense of the pre?minence of the singer, as well as of his song.
While it is easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a friend, "You will observe at the end of this, 'How a solitary life engenders pride and egotism!' True--I know it does: but this pride and egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could, so I will indulge it." [Footnote: Letter to John Taylor, August 23, 1819.] No matter how modest one may be about his work after it is completed, a sense of its worth must be with one at the time of composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and preserving it.
Unless the writer schools himself to keep this conviction out of his verse, it is likely to flower in self-confident poetry of the classic type, so characteristic of the Elizabethan age. This has such a long tradition behind it that it seems almost stereotyped, wherever it appears in our period, especially when it is promising immortality to a beloved one. We scarcely heed such verses as the lines by Landor,
Well I remember how you smiled?To see me write your name upon?The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child,?You think you're writing upon stone!"?I have since written what no tide?Shall ever wash away, what men?Unborn