Anna Wickham was a London-born poet of the early twentieth century who wrote with unusual directness about marriage, motherhood, and the gap between domestic ideals and actual feeling. “The Individualist” emerges from a period when the family was publicly idealized, yet new arguments about state nurseries and social welfare were making the raising of children a contested political question. By giving the poem to a proud father, Wickham explores how personal affection and self-regard can share the same voice.
The speaker announces that fatherhood is not chance but choice: “When I get a child, / I get him with fixed intent; / I don't get him by accident.” The verb “get” recurs and sets a possessive tone. He says he wants a child because he is “content with life, / Satisfied with myself,” and because he loves his wife. The sequence matters. Before love for his wife, he places his own satisfaction. After the birth, the pride sharpens into scorn for other children and the claim that “There never was so fine a boy as mine.” The refrain quietly changes “Satisfied” to “Conceited,” exposing the self-love inside the parental devotion.
The possessive note grows stronger in the middle stanza. The father wants to “keep” his son and to “finish what I have begun,” as though the child were a project of his own will. He insists he does not want to give the boy to the State; he wants to share him with his mate. The word “share” sounds generous, but it also hints at ownership, and “mate” pushes the wife back toward an animal pairing. Even the real pleasure of feeding a child and watching him grow is described as “one of the keenest pleasures that I know,” a delight that reflects back on the speaker.
Wickham’s free verse is conversational, with line lengths that shift from blunt declarations to longer, explanatory sentences. End-rhyme appears in confident pairs—intent/accident, know/grow, State/mate—and gives each stanza the click of a self-satisfied conclusion. The repeated three-part refrain acts as a litany, turning the father’s reasons into something close to a creed. Imagery becomes most primal in the final stanza, where he aligns himself with “the old Brave” who “hunted from the cave” and with a lion that “Kills for the cub and lioness.” These images are meant to ennoble him, yet they undermine his claim to individuality: he justifies himself by instinct, not by uniqueness.
That tension is at the heart of the poem. The speaker calls himself an individualist, but his deepest explanations are borrowed from ancient patterns and animal drives. His energy and affection feel real, which is why the poem is not merely satire. But Wickham lets readers hear how easily fatherly pride can become a mirror. The child is loved, yet the father never stops praising his own will, his own feelings, his own role. The poem remains significant because it asks a difficult question about the family: how much of our love is giving, and how much is an act of self-love?