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,