In response to yesterday's post about Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," I received a few notes that either tease me about false poetic modesty or encourage me to set aside my poetic humility. Yet while I am grateful, very grateful, to have friends and acquaintances who appreciate my writing, I do feel compelled to argue that modesty and humility aren't necessarily signs of melancholy or self-defeat. Nor is my statement about being a person who "tries to write poems" an unsubtle request for flattery.

If my long apprenticeship to the western canon has taught me nothing else, it's shown me something about greatness--its varieties and permutations, its accidents and triumphs. I may not adore Melville's Moby-Dick with the fervor that I love Dickens's Great Expectations, but each novel has proven its mettle--has shown me that the authors indeed deserve their place on the high shelf. The clutter, the distractions, the wanderings of Melville's novel are in truth inseparable from the Pequod's journey: the book itself mirrors the plot. And my recent revisit with Dickens's early novel Oliver Twist reminds me how far he had advanced in Great Expectations: here, he was able to synthesize his powers of description, of character development, of melodrama, of symbolism, of social commentary, of comedy, of tragedy with a virtuosity that rivals Shakespeare's.

In his "Defence," Shelley writes: "Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be empanelled by time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." We, the living, are still striving: we are still trying to write the poems we long to write, are driven to write. We have no laurels to rest upon.

As you can see, humility and arrogance stroll hand in hand here. What hubris to imagine that Shelley means that he and I are peers! But then again, why else did he write, if not for me? I--a 21st-century female in a snowy New England cottage--even I, like Shelley, like Dickens, like Melville, belong "to all time." And if these are the peers who judge my work, then surely they judge it as raw and incomplete. As it is; as it is.

But I keep trying to write the poems.