I note what you say of * * * and know that he did not use to like me, though I doubt if he ever had any antipathy to you. Six or eight years ago I tackled him on a particularly mean fling that he had made at me while I was absent from California. (I think I had not met him before.) I told him, rather coarsely, what I thought of the matter. He candidly confessed himself in the wrong, expressed regret and has ever since, so far as I know, been just and even generous to me. I think him sincere now, and enclose a letter which seems to show it. You may return it if you will—I send it mainly because it concerns your poem. The trouble—our trouble—with * * * is that he has voluntarily entered into slavery to the traditions and theories of the magazine trade, which, like those of all trades, are the product of small men. The big man makes his success by ignoring them. Your estimate of * * * I'm not disposed to quarrel with, but do think him pretty square.
* * *
Bless you, don't take the trouble to go through the Iliad and Odyssey to pick out the poetical parts. I grant you they are brief and infrequent—I mean in the translation. I hold, with Poe, that there are no long poems—only bursts of poetry in long spinnings of metrical prose. But even the "recitativo" of the translated Grecian poets has a charm to one that it may not have to another. I doubt if anyone who has always loved "the glory that was Greece"—who has been always in love with its jocund deities, and so forth, can say accurately just how much of his joy in Homer (for example) is due to love of poetry, and how much to a renewal of mental youth and young illusions. Some part of the delight that we get from verse defies analysis and classification. Only a man without a memory (and memories) could say just what pleased him in poetry and be sure that it was the poetry only. For example, I never read the opening lines of the Pope Iliad—and I don't need the book for much of the first few hundred, I guess—without seeming to be on a sunny green hill on a cold windy day, with the bluest of skies above me and billows of pasture below, running to a clean-cut horizon. There's nothing in the text warranting that illusion, which is nevertheless to me a part of the Iliad; a most charming part, too. It all comes of my having first read the thing under such conditions at the age of about ten. I remember that; but how many times I must be powerfully affected by the poets without remembering why. If a fellow could cut out all that extrinsic interest he would be a fool to do so. But he would be a better critic.
You ought to be happy in the contemplation of a natural, wholesome life at Carmel Bay—the "prospect pleases," surely. But I fear, I fear. Maybe you can get a newspaper connection that will bring you in a small income without compelling you to do violence to your literary conscience. I doubt if you can get your living out of the ground. But I shall watch the experiment with sympathetic interest, for it "appeals" to me. I'm a trifle jaded with age and the urban life, and maybe if you can succeed in that other sort of thing I could.
* * *
As to * * * the Superb. Isn't Sag Harbor somewhere near Saybrook, Connecticut, at the mouth of the river of that name? I'm going there for a month with Percival Pollard. Shall leave here about the first of July. If Sag Harbor is easily accessible from there, and * * * would care to see me, I'll go and call on her. * * * But maybe I'd fall in love with her and, being now (alas) eligible, just marry her alive!—or be turned down by her, to the unspeakable wrecking of my peace! I'm only a youth—63 on the 24th of this month—and it would be too bad if I got started wrong in life. But really I don't know about the good taste of being jocular about * * *. I'm sure she must be a serious enough maiden, with the sun of a declining race yellow on her hair. Eva Crawford thinks her most lovable—and Eva has a clear, considering eye upon you all.
* * *
I'm going to send up my canoe to Saybrook and challenge the rollers of the Sound. Don't you fear—I'm an expert canoeist from boyhood. * * *
Sincerely, Ambrose Bierce.
