Anna Wickham, born in 1883, was an English poet whose writing unfolded during the explosive years of modernism, when free verse and imagism were challenging the tidy rhythms of Victorian poetry. After a turbulent early life that took her from London to Australia and back, she became part of London’s literary bohemia, though she was often treated as an outsider. That double position—inside modernism’s quarrel with tradition, yet outside its male-dominated inner circle—sharpens the edge of “The Egoist.” The title carried a deliberate charge in the 1910s: The Egoist was a modernist magazine championing unconventional voices, so to claim the word was to refuse a merely polite audience. For Wickham, egoism is not vanity. It is the right to trust one’s own perception over inherited convention.
The poem opens as a question rather than a manifesto. “Shall I write pretty poetry / Controlled by ordered sense in me / With an old choice of figure and of word, / So call my soul a nesting bird?” The phrase “pretty poetry” sounds slightly sing-song, and the “nesting bird” is exactly the sort of exhausted, sentimental image she wants to leave behind. She admits she could study the dead poets, make “a synthesis,” and learn their forms. But the turn is decisive: “I will use the figure that is real / For me, the figure that I feel.” The central idea emerges there: inherited craft has value, but only if it is remade through lived feeling. The words “real” and “feel” stand against “pretty,” “controlled,” and “old choice.” A few lines later she states it more axiomatically: “A poet rediscovers all creation.”
The poem’s structure performs its argument. It keeps a loose rhyme scheme, mostly in couplets, but it never settles into a steady metre. The first stanza moves in relatively short, song-like lines, pairing “poetry” with “me” and “word” with “bird.” By the third stanza, the speaker turns directly on “ear-perfect rhyme.” A clerk, she says, can list all language in his leisure time, but that mechanical catalogue has little to do with poetry. A faulty rhyme may be “a well-placed microtone,” a tiny musical interval below the semitone, and it can hold “a perfect imperfection of its own.” The word “microtone” changes the whole argument: imperfection becomes precision of another kind. Beauty is not a fixed ornament but “sensed relation,” discovered by instinct rather than by rule.
The final lines break the poem open. “It was as fit for one man’s thoughts to trot in iambs, as it is for me. / Who live not in the horse-age, but in the day of aeroplanes, to write my rhythms free.” The verb “trot” links iambic meter to a horse’s steady gait, while “aeroplanes” announce a new speed, a new century, and a new syntax. The pause after “me” briefly isolates the speaker before the line expands; the final clause then does what it demands by abandoning a regular stanza shape. The poem is significant partly as an early, confident defence of free verse. Yet it is also a feminist redefinition of poetic authority. Wickham claims the self not as selfishness but as the only honest source of art. Poetry that sounds correct but does not feel real becomes, in her terms, just another “nesting bird.”