Washington, D. C.,
September 28,
1906.
Dear George,
Both your letters at hand.
* * *
Be a "magazine poet" all you can—that is the shortest road to recognition, and all our greater poets have travelled it. You need not compromise with your conscience, however, by writing "magazine poetry." You couldn't.
What's your objection to * * *? I don't observe that it is greatly worse than others of its class. But a fellow who has for nigh upon twenty years written for yellow newspapers can't be expected to say much that's edifying on that subject. So I dare say I'm wrong in my advice about the kind of swine for your pearls. There are probably more than the two kinds of pigs—live ones and dead ones.
Yes, I'm a colonel—in Pennsylvania Avenue. In the neighborhood of my tenement I'm a Mister. At my club I'm a major—which is my real title by an act of Congress. I suppressed it in California, but couldn't here, where I run with the military gang.
You need not blackguard your poem, "A Visitor," though I could wish you had not chosen blank verse. That form seems to me suitable (in serious verse) only to lofty, not lowly, themes. Anyhow, I always expect something pretty high when I begin an unknown poem in blank. Moreover, it is not your best "medium." Your splendid poem, "Music," does not wholly commend itself to me for that reason. May I say that it is a little sing-songy—the lines monotonously alike in their caesural pauses and some of their other features?
By the way, I'd like to see what you could do in more unsimple meters than the ones that you handle so well. The wish came to me the other day in reading Lanier's "The Marshes of Glynn" and some of his other work. Lanier did not often equal his master, Swinburne, in getting the most out of the method, but he did well in the poem mentioned. Maybe you could manage the dangerous thing. It would be worth doing and is, therefore, worth trying.