The Poets Poet | Page 9

shall read, o'er ocean wide,?And find Ianthe's name again,
or Francis Thompson's sonnet sequence, Ad Amicam, which expresses the author's purpose to
Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time,?Telling him that he is too insolent?Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme,?Whereof to one because thou life hast given,?The other yet shall give a life to thee,?Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven,?And compassed weaker immortality,
or Yeats' lines Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved, wherein he takes pride in the reflection:
Weigh this song with the great and their pride;?I made it out of a mouthful of air;?Their children's children shall say they have lied.
But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony,
Yet to me I feel?That an internal brightness is vouchsafed?That must not die,?[Footnote: Home at Grasmere.]
or in Walt Whitman's injunction:
Recorders ages hence,?Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive?Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me.?[Footnote: See also, Long Long Hence.]
Nowadays, in fact, even minor poets for the most part frankly avow the importance of their works. We find George Edward Woodberry in the clutches of the old-fashioned habit of apology, to be sure, [Footnote: See My Country.]--perhaps this is one reason the radicals are so opposed to him; but in the ranks of the radicals themselves we find very few retaining any doubt of themselves. [Footnote: Exceptions are Jessie Rittenhouse, Patrius_; Lawrence Houseman, _Mendicant Rhymes; Robert Silliman Hillyer, Poor Faltering Rhymes.] Self-assertion is especially characteristic of their self-appointed leader, Ezra Pound, in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote: Lustra.] A typical assertion is that in Salutation the Second,
How many will come after me,?Singing as well as I sing, none better.
There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile immortality" [Footnote: Refuge.] or James Stephens' exultation in A Tune Upon a Reed,
Not a piper can succeed?When I lean against a tree,?Blowing gently on a reed,
and in The Rivals, where he boasts over a bird,
I was singing all the time,?Just as prettily as he,?About the dew upon the lawn,?And the wind upon the lea;?So I didn't listen to him?As he sang upon a tree.
If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the fashion of A Song of Myself:
I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin,?Hoping to cease not till death.
Whitman is conscious of--perhaps even exaggerates--the novelty of his task,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited?itself (the great pride of man in himself)?Chanter of personality.
While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's characterization of Byron in Julian and Maddalo,
The sense that he was greater than his kind?Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind?By gazing on its own exceeding light,
has been followed by many expressions of the same thought, at first wholly sympathetic, lately, it must be confessed, somewhat ironical.
Consciousness of partnership with God in composition naturally lifts the poet, in his own estimation, at least, to a super-human level. The myth of Apollo disguised as a shepherd strikes him as being a happy expression of his divinity. [Footnote: See James Russell Lowell, _The Shepherd of King Admetus._] Thus Emerson calls singers
Blessed gods in servile masks.?[Footnote: Saadi.]
The hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ soars to a monotheistic conception of his powers, asserting
Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness?Is God. I suffer. I am God.
Another poet-hero is characterized:
He would reach the source of light,?And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might.?[Footnote: Harvey Rice, The Visionary (1864).
In recent years a few poets have