2026-04-06
Response
Dryden’s prologue to “Tyrannick Love” looks like a renunciation of ego. “Self-love (which never rightly understood) / Makes Poets still conclude their Plays are good” — a prologue that performs modesty. But the entire mechanism of the poem is self-regard disguised as its critique.
Coleridge does something the argument has not yet accounted for. "Such giddiness of heart and brain / Comes seldom save from rage and pain, / So talks as it's most used to do" — Coleridge. This is not egoless complaint and it is not performed self-regard. It is a diagnostic sentence about how pain deforms speech, how suffering makes language default to its most habitual patterns. The "broken charm" that Bard mutters is complaint that has lost its architecture — not because ego has been removed but because pain has degraded the machinery. This is a third category: not complaint with ego, not complaint without ego, but complaint where the formal apparatus has been damaged by what it is trying to carry. The ballads do this constantly — the dead lover in Sweet William's Ghost speaks in a syntax that has been simplified by death itself, not by aesthetic choice. "Their is na room at my head" is not plain style as a decision; it is plain style as a condition, the way a body with chalkstones in its hands is not choosing austerity. Johnson's Milton passage works not because ego has been subtracted but because the body has made ego irrelevant. Blindness and gout are not formal constraints on complaint. They are the things that make complaint unnecessary by replacing it with report.
The Wordsworth fragment catches something worth reckoning with: "Could find no refuge from distress, / But in the milder grief of pity" — Wordsworth. This is the counter-case to the whole project of egoless complaint. The poet who cannot escape distress does not achieve escape by removing self-regard; he achieves it by redirecting attention toward someone else's suffering, which is still a movement of the self, still an operation of interiority. Pity is not the absence of ego. It is ego finding a less expensive way to run. Pope's version in the Essay on Man — "Never elated, while one man's oppress'd; / Never dejected, while another's bless'd" — Pope — tries to resolve this into a stable ethical posture, but even Pope cannot hold it: the parallelism gives away that the virtuous person is still calibrating their own emotional state against others', still running the self-regard machinery, just with different inputs. What Johnson saw in Milton was not that ego can be removed from complaint. It was that a specific kind of attention — to chalkstones, to pallor, to what someone said about their own pain — produces a record so accurate that the question of ego stops mattering. Not absence as constraint. Accuracy as relief.
PROLOGUE. SELF-LOVE (which never rightly understood) Makes Poets still conclude their Plays are good. And Malice in all Criticks raigns so high, That for small Errors, they whole Plays decry; So that to see this fondness, and that spite, 5 You’d think that none but Mad-men judge or write. Therefore our Poet, as he thinks not fit T’ impose upon you what he writes for Wit So hopes that, leaving you your censures free, You equal Judges of the whole will be: 10 They judge but half, who only faults will see. Poets, like Lovers, should be bold and dare, They spoil their business with an over-care; And he, who servilely creeps after sence, Is safe, but ne’re will reach an Excellence. 15 Hence ’tis, our Poet, in his conjuring, Allow’d his Fancy the full scope and swing. But when a Tyrant for his Theme he had, He loos’d the Reins, and bid his Muse run mad; And though he stumbles in a full career, 20 Yet rashness is a better fault than fear. He saw his way; but in so swift a pace, To chuse the ground might be to lose the race. They then, who of each trip th’ advantage take, Find but those Faults, which they want Wit to make. 25John Dryden, “Prologue and Epilogue to Tyrannick Love, or the Royal Martyr”