Yes, your poem recalled my "Invocation" as I read it; but it is better, and not too much like—hardly like at all except in the "political" part. Both, in that, are characterized, I think, by decent restraint. How * * * would, at those places, have ranted and chewed soap!—a superior quality of soap, I confess. A. B.
[3] "Memorial Day"
1825 Nineteenth St.,
N. W.,
Washington, D. C.,
June 30, 1901.
My dear Sterling,
I am glad my few words of commendation were not unpleasing to you. I meant them all and more. You ought to have praise, seeing that it is all you got. The "Post," like most other newspapers, "don't pay for poetry." What a damning confession! It means that the public is as insensible to poetry as a pig to—well, to poetry. To any sane mind such a poem as yours is worth more than all the other contents of a newspaper for a year.
I've not found time to consider your "bit of blank" yet—at least not as carefully as it probably merits.
My relations with the present editor of the Examiner are not unfriendly, I hope, but they are too slight to justify me in suggesting anything to him, or even drawing his attention to anything. I hoped you would be sufficiently "enterprising" to get your poem into the paper if you cared to have it there. I wrote Dr. Doyle about you. He is a dear fellow and you should know each other. As to Scheffauer, he is another. If you want him to see your poem why not send it to him? But the last I heard he was very ill. I'm rather anxious to hear more about him.
It was natural to enclose the stamps, but I won't have it so—so there! as the women say.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.