The Poets Poet | Page 8

provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such
amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is
really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious
states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist
"experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is
considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, not
to one's self, but to the Almighty.
The minor American poets 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 preëminence 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