It can not be too strongly insisted upon that the poor and mediocre verse which has always been produced by every age is practically innocuous. It hurts only the publishers who are constantly being importuned to print the stuff, and the distinguished men and women who are burdened with presentation copies or requests for criticism. These unfortunates all happen to be capable of emitting loud and authoritative cries of distress about the menace of bad poets. But we should discount these cries one hundred per cent. For nobody else is hurt by the bad poets, because nobody else pays the slightest attention to them. Time and their own "inherent perishableness" soon remove all traces of the poetasters. It were better to help hundreds of them than to risk the loss of one new Shelley. And do we realize how many Shelleys we may actually have lost already? I think it possible that we may have had more than one such potential singer to whom we never allowed any leisure or sympathy or margin of vitality to turn into poetry. Perhaps there is more grim truth than humor in Mark Twain's vision of heaven where Captain Stormfield saw a poet as great as Shakespeare who hailed, I think, from Tennessee. The reason why the world had never heard of him was that his neighbors in Tennessee had regarded him as eccentric and had ridden him out of town on a rail and assisted his departure to a more congenial clime above.
We complain that we have had no poet to rank with England's greatest. I fear that it would have been useless for us to have had such a person. We probably would not have known what to do with him.
I realize that mine is not the popular side of this question and that an occasional poet with an income may be found who will even argue against giving incomes to other poets. Mr. Aldrich, for instance, wrote, after coming into his inheritance:
"A man should live in a garret aloof,
And have few friends, and go poorly clad,
With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof,
To keep the goddess constant and glad."
But a friend of Mr. Aldrich's, one of his poetic peers, has assured me that it was not the poet's freedom from financial cares at all, but premature age, instead, that made his goddess of poesy fickle after the advent of the pitifully belated fortune. Mr. Stedman spoke a far truer word on this subject. "Poets," he said, "in spite of the proverb, sing best when fed by wage or inheritance." "'Tis the convinced belief of mankind," wrote Francis Thompson with a sardonic smile, "that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if the Almighty had constructed him like certain rudimentarily vocal dolls." "No artist," declares Arnold Bennett, "was ever assisted in his career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by economic inferiority." And Bliss Carman speaks out loud and bold: "The best poets who have come to maturity have always had some means of livelihood at their command. The idea that any sort of artist or workman is all the better for being doomed to a life of penurious worry, is such a silly old fallacy, one wonders it could have persisted so long." The wolf may be splendid at suckling journalism and various other less inspired sorts of writing, but she is a ferocious old stepmother to poetry.
There are some who snatch eagerly at any argument in support of the existing order, and who triumphantly point out the number of good poems that have been written under "seemingly" adverse conditions. But they do not stop to consider how much better these poems might have been made under "seemingly" favorable conditions. Percy Mackaye is right in declaring that the few singers left to English poetry after our "wholesale driving-out and killing-out of poets ... are of two sorts: those with incomes and those without. Among the former are found most of the excellent names in English poetry, a fact which is hardly a compliment to our civilization."
Would that one of those excellent philanthropists who has grown so accustomed to giving a million to libraries and universities that the act has become slightly mechanical—might realize that he has, with all his generosity, made no provision as yet for helping one of the most indispensable of all educational institutions—the poet. Would that he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive from the universities—places whose conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luring them on with the glitter of cash prizes. One shudders to think of all the fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctant young dry-as-dusts while they are preparing to pack still tighter the already overcrowded ranks of "professors of English literature"—whose profession, as Gerald Stanley Lee justly remarks, is founded on the striking principle that a very great book can be taught by a very little man. This is a department of human effort which, as now usually conducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry. Why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of the class of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should we think of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to be penniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested, instead, in a few more professors of Victorian literature?
Why should not a few thousands out of the millions we spend on education be used to found fellowships of creative poetry? These would not be given at first to those who wish to learn to write poetry; for the first thousands would be far too precious for use in any such wild-cat speculations. They would be devoted, rather, to poets of proved quality, who have already, somehow, learned their art, and who ask no more wondrous boon from life than fresh air and time to regain and keep that necessary margin of vitality which must go to the making of genuine poetry.
I would not have the incumbent of such a fellowship, however, deprived suddenly of all outer incentives for effort. The abrupt transition from constant worry and war among his members to an absolutely unclouded life of pure vocation-following might be almost too violent a shock, and unsettle him and injure his productivity for a time.
The award of such a fellowship must not, of course, involve the least hint of charity or coercion. It should be offered and accepted as an honor, not as a donation. The yearly income should, in my opinion, be small. It should be such a sum as would almost, but not quite, support the incumbent very simply in the country, and still allow for books and an occasional trip to town. In some cases an income of a thousand dollars, supplemented by the little that poetry earns and possibly by a random article or story in the magazines, would enable a poet to lead a life of the largest effectiveness.