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.]
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 hell,
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 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.
[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 Tasso 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 attitude 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 attitude.[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: