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 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.2 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,3— 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. 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." 5 A typical assertion is that in Salutation the Second, How many will come after me, Singing as well as I sing, none better. Home at Grasmere. See also, Long Long Hence. See My Country. Exceptions are Jessie Rittenhouse, Patrius; Lawrence Houseman, Mendicant Rhymes; Robert Silliman Hillyer, Poor Faltering Rhymes. Lustra. 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" or James Stephens' exultation in A Tune Upon a Reed, Not a piper can succeed When I lean against a tree, and in The Rivals, where he boasts over a bird, I was singing all the time, About the dew upon the lawn, 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: 1 Refuge. 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, Eschylus, 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 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 com position 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. Thus Emerson calls singers Blessed gods in servile masks.2 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 Another poet-hero is characterized: He would reach the source of light, And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might.3 On the other hand, recent poets' hatred of orthodox religion has led them to idealize the Evil One, and regard him as no unworthy rival as regards pride. One of Browning's poets is "prouder than the devil." Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin to Milton through his Satan's pride." Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares, You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell, See James Russell Lowell, The Shepherd of King Admetus. 'Saadi. Harvey Rice, The Visionary (1864). In recent years a few poets have modestly disclaimed equality with God. See William Rose Benét, Imagination, and Joyce Kilmer, Trees. The kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of The Lonely Poet (1919), by John Hall Wheelock. Waring. Sonnet, To Chatterton. Josephine Preston Peabody, Marlowe (1911). There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer takes the trouble to declare, Artists truly great Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to say, Think not, although my aim is art, I cannot toy with empire easily." 4 Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, betraying a disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." In these days, when the idlest man of the street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of The Lament of Tasso express the pacifist sentiment, No!-still too proud to be vindictive, I Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die. 'Longfellow, Michael Angelo. 'Nero. See Helen Hunt Jackson, The King's Singer; E. L. Sprague, A Shakespeare Ode; Eugene Field, Poet and King. Walt Whitman, Collect. |