The Poet's Poet Part 2

[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-a.s.sertion 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: _l.u.s.tra_.] A typical a.s.sertion 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-a.s.surance 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 a.s.sert, 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, Ta.s.so, 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. Sh.e.l.ley'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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, a.s.serting

Henceforth I shall be G.o.d, for consciousness Is G.o.d. I suffer. I am G.o.d.

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 modestly disclaimed equality with G.o.d.

See William Rose Benet, _Imagination,_ and Joyce Kilmer, _Trees._ The kinship of poets and the Almighty is the theme of _The Lonely Poet_ (1919), by John Hall Wheelock.]

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."

[Footnote: _Waring._] Chatterton, according to Rossetti, was "kin to Milton through his Satan's pride." [Footnote: Sonnet, _To Chatterton._] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares,

You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in h.e.l.l, And keep the lowest circle to yourself.

[Footnote: 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 Their fate for that of any potentate.

[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.]

Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an att.i.tude; 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.

[Footnote: _Nero_.]

Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] 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." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, _Collect_.] 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 Ta.s.so_ express the pacifist sentiment,

No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die.

It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this att.i.tude harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse.

The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of Tennyson's characters take the same att.i.tude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in _Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet:

He, from above descending, stooped to touch The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though It scarce deserved his verse.

[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._]

After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young Rice:

I have felt the ineffable sting Of life, though I be art's valet.

I have painted the cloud and the clod, Who should have possessed the earth.

[Footnote: _Limitations_.]

It depressed Alan Seeger:

I, who, conceived beneath another star, Had been a prince and played with life, Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far From the fair things my faith has merited.

[Footnote: _Liebestod_.]

It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive:

Great G.o.d! if we be d.a.m.ned to be not men but only dreams, Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at, And know we be its rulers, though but dreams.

[Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.]

Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide.

The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that his genius is judged by a public that is vastly inferior to him. This galling thought usually drives him into an att.i.tude of indifference or of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pa.s.s upon his worth.[Footnote: See _To Darwin_.] But the average poet of the last century and a half goes a step beyond this att.i.tude, and appears to feel that there is something contemptible about popularity. Literary arrogance seems far from characteristic of Burns, yet he tells us how, in a mood of discouragement,

I backward mused on wasted time, How I had spent my youthful prime, And done naething But stringin' blithers up in rhyme For fools to sing.

[Footnote: _The Vision._]

Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most thoroughgoing expression of this contempt for the public. The sentiment in _Childe Harold_ is one that Byron never tires of harping on: I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed To its idolatries a patient knee.

And this att.i.tude of Byron's has been adopted by all his disciples, who delight in picturing his scorn:

With terror now he froze the cowering blood, And now dissolved the heart in tenderness, Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself, But back into his soul retired alone, Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously On hearts and pa.s.sions prostrate at his feet.

[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._]