_Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he.
[Footnote: _House._]

Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less
the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this
our contention?

It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are
practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of
themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that arch-egoist, Byron,
concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself--oh, that accursed
selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in
scribbling at all." [Footnote: Letters and Journals, ed, Rowland E.
Prothero, November 26, 1813.] Surely we may complain that it is rather
hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself
at the reader's head.

It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration
that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself
be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to
confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the
most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he
is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon,
the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical
and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no
identity." [Footnote: Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.]
The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a
luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not himself,
to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as
compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the