The conceit courses through the classical poetry of
Greece from the time of Pindar, and through that of Italy from the
time of Ennius. No great Renaissance writer of modern Italy, of
sixteenth-century France, or of Elizabethan England, tired of arguing
that the poet's deathless memorial is that carved by his own pen.
Shakespeare himself clothed the conceit in glowing harmonies in his
sonnets. Ben Jonson, in his elegy on the dramatist, adapted the
time-honoured figure when he hailed his dead friend's achievement as
"a monument without a tomb."
"The truest poetry is the most feigning," and, when one recalls the
true significance and influence of great sculptured monuments through
the history of the civilised world, Milton's poetic argument can only
be accepted in what Sir Thomas Browne called "a soft and flexible
sense"; it cannot "be called unto the rigid test of reason." To treat
Milton's eulogy as the final word in the discussion of the subject
whether or no Shakespeare should have a national monument, is to come
into conflict with Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Ruskin, Dickens, and
all the greatest men of letters of the nineteenth century, who
answered the question in the affirmative.
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