Anna Wickham’s speaker refuses to write pretty, orderly poetry just because tradition expects it. She can study dead poets and learn their forms, and she could even have a clerk list every perfect rhyme, but she wants her poetry to come from what she actually feels. A faulty rhyme, she argues, can have its own subtle, imperfect music, and a poet’s instinct matters more than technical neatness. The old iambic rhythms suited a slower, horse-drawn age; living in an era of aeroplanes, she claims the right to write in free, unforced rhythms. The mood is confident, a little rebellious, and deeply personal — not angry, but firmly placing lived feeling and modern experience above inherited convention.
The Egoist — Summary
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?
Of the dead poets I can make a synthesis, And learn poetic form that in them is; But I will use the figure that is real For me, the figure that I feel.
And now of this matter of ear-perfect rhyme, My clerk can list all language in his leisure time; A faulty rhyme may be a well-placed microtone, And hold a perfect imperfection of its own.
A poet rediscovers all creation; His instinct gives him beauty, which is sensed relation. 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.