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,

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 fundamentall