After dinner wrote one or two letters including longish one of literary advice to Karl Walter. Read some Æschylus’ “Eumenides.”
WILLIAM SHARP
From a photograph taken by the Hon. Alex. Nelson Hood, 1903
This is the letter in question:
Taormina,
Jan., 1903.
My dear Walter,
... In some respects your rendering of your sonnet is towards improvement. But it has one immediate and therefore fatal flaw. Since the days of Sophocles it has been recognized as a cardinal and imperative law, that a great emotion (or incident, or idea, or collective act) must not be linked to an effective image, an incongruous metaphor. Perhaps the first and last word about passion (in a certain sense only, of course, for to immortal things there is no mortal narrowing or limiting in expression) has been said more than two thousand years ago by Sappho and to-day by George Meredith. “The apple on the topmost bough” ... all that lovely fragment of delicate imperishable beauty remains unique. And I know nothing nobler than Meredith’s “Passion is noble strength on fire.” ... But turn to a poet you probably know well, and study the imagery in some of the Passion-sonnets in “The House of Life” of Rossetti—of Passion