No, I don't agree with you about Homer, nor "stand for" your implied view that narrative poetry is not "pure poetry." Poetry seems to me to speak with a thousand voices—"a various language." The miners have a saying: "Gold is where you find it." So is poetry; I'm expecting to find it some fine day in the price list of a grocery store. I fancy you could put it there.
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As to Goethe, the more you read him, the better you will love Heine.
Thank you for "A Wine of Wizardry"—amended. It seems to me that the fake dictum of "Merlin-sage" (I don't quite perceive the necessity of the hyphen) is better than the hackneyed Scriptural quotation. It is odd, but my recollection is that it was the "sick enchantress" who cried "unto Betelgeuse a mystic word." Was it not so in the copy that I first had, or do I think so merely because the cry of one is more lone and awful than the cry of a number?
I am still of the belief that the poem should have at least a few breaks in it, for I find myself as well as the public more or less—I, doubtless, less than the public—indisposed to tackle solid columns of either verse or prose. I told you this poem "took away one's breath,"—give a fellow, can't you, a chance to recover it now and again.
"Space to breathe, how short soever."
Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done, on earth as it is in San Francisco. Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
Washington, D. C.,
May 11,
1904.
Dear George,