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 partnership with God 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 gods 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, asserting
Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness
Is God. I suffer. I am God.
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).