igures,--Lucan, [Footnote: See _Nero_, Robert Bridges.]
Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, _Giovanna of Naples_, and _Andrea of
Hungary_.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio,
Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See
_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must
admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the
poet-politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to
celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a
protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look
to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as
following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all,
for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing
Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist
is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the
citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations.
[Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama,
Richard Garnett.]

If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he
may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will
vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He
is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer,

When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's
work,
You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.
There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the
Turk,
And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword
in his hand.
It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died,
And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was
strong,
And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride,
Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song.
[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.]

It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge,
Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet
lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the
poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim.
From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer
may find plenty of names to substantiate his c