It scarce deserved his verse.
[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._]

After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of
late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young
Rice:

I have felt the ineffable sting
Of life, though I be art's valet.
I have painted the cloud and the clod,
Who should have possessed the earth.
[Footnote: _Limitations_.]

It depressed Alan Seeger:

I, who, conceived beneath another star,
Had been a prince and played with life,
Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far
From the fair things my faith has merited.
[Footnote: _Liebestod_.]

It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive:

Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams,
Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at,
And know we be its rulers, though but dreams.
[Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.]

Perhaps, indeed, judging from contemporary tendencies, this study is
made too early to reflect the poet's egoism at its full tide.