From this date, Sept. 25, 1920, I will not be responsible for any bill contracted by my wife, Mrs. Bernardine Whynott. G. Whynott.
In all the world the two most fragile things are a lover’s vows and the gut in a tennis racket. Neither is guaranteed to last an hour.
It would help along the economic readjustment, suggests Dean Johnson, of New York University’s school of commerce, if we all set fire to our Liberty Bonds. We can’t go along with the Dean so far, but we have a hundred shares of copper stock that we will contribute to a community bonfire.
[p 253]
]The height of patriotism, confides P. H. T., is represented by Mr. Aleshire, president of the Chicago Board of Underwriters, who, billed to deliver a patriotic address in an Evanston theater, paid his way into the theater to hear himself talk.
IT MUST BE ABOUT TIME.
Sir: The Federal Reserve bank at New Orleans has received a letter from a patriot who wants to know where and when he shall pay the interest on his Liberty bond. Rocky.
“In fact, I’ve finished—would you say a sonnet?”—concludes H. G. H., to whom we recommend the remark of James Stephens: “Nobody is interested in the making of sonnets, not even poets.”
Referring to the persons who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman Douglas wrote: “I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of these bards.… And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single instant, at the altar of some generous ideal.”
[p 254]
]The trouble with minor poets is well set forth by Conrad Aiken in The Dial, who refers to the conclusions of M. Nicolas Kostyleff after a tentative study of the mechanism of poetic inspiration: “An important part in poetic creation, he maintains, is an automatic verbal discharge, along chains of association, set in motion by a chance occurrence.”