wherein he takes pride in the reflection:

Weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air;
Their children's children shall say they have lied.

But a more vibrantly personal note breaks out from time to time in the
most original verse of the last century, as in Wordsworth's testimony,

Yet to me I feel
That an internal brightness is vouchsafed
That must not die,
[Footnote: _Home at Grasmere_.]

or in Walt Whitman's injunction:

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,