The Poets Poet | Page 9

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 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