of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_,
_MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce
Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert
Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden
Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that
in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view,
though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose
themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming,

Where's the poet? Show him, show him,
Muses mine, that I may know him!
'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king
Or poorest of the beggar clan.
[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers,
but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be
false to poetry, and he answers his detractors,

Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise,
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope
Of his pure song.

In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent
champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for
ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom:

Poets (hear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high,