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 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: