It is my belief that almost any genuine poet who is now kept in the whirl by economic reasons and thus debarred from the free practice of his calling would gladly relinquish even a large salary and reduce his life to simple terms to gain the inestimable privilege of devoting himself wholly to his art before the golden bowl is broken. Many of those who are in intimate touch with the poets of America to-day could show any philanthropist how to do his land and the world more actual, visible, immediate good by devoting a thousand dollars to poetry, than by allowing an hundred times that sum to slip into the ordinary well-worn grooves of philanthropy.
Some years ago a questionnaire was submitted to various literary men by a poetry-lover who hoped to induce a wealthy friend to subsidize poets of promise in case these literary leaders approved the plan. While the younger writers warmly favored the idea, a few of the older ones discouraged it. These were, in all cases, men who had made a financial success in more lucrative branches of literature than poetry; and it was natural for the veterans, who had brawnily struggled through the burden and heat of the day, to look with the unsympathetic eye of the sturdy upon those frailer ones of the rising generation who perhaps might, without assistance, be eliminated in the rough-and-tumble of the literary market-place. Of course it was but human for the veterans to insist that any real genius among their youthful competitors "would out," and that any assistance would but make life too soft for the youngsters, and go to swell the growing "menace" of bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors of natural selection. No doubt the generation of writers older than Wordsworth quite innocently uttered these very same sentiments in voices of deep authority when it was proposed to offer this young person a chance to compose in peace. No. One fears that the attitude of these veterans was not wholly judicial. But then, why should any haphazard group of creative artists be expected to be judicial, anyway? One might as reasonably go to the Louvre for classes in conic sections, or to the Garden of the Gods for instruction in Rabbinical theology.
Few supporters of the general plan, on the other hand, were wholly in favor of all the measures proposed for carrying it out. Some of the most telling criticisms went to show that while poets of undoubted ability ought to be helped, the method of their selection offers a grave difficulty. H. G. Wells, who heartily approved the main idea, brought out the fact that it would never do to leave the choice to a jury, as no jury would ever have voted for half of the great poets who have perished miserably. Juries are much too conventionally minded. For they are public functionaries; or, if not that, at least they feel self-consciously as if they were going to be held publicly responsible, and are apt to bring extremely conventional, and perhaps priggish, standards to bear upon their choice. "They invariably become timid and narrow," wrote Mr. Wells, "and seek refuge in practical, academic, and moral tests that invariably exclude the real men of genius."
Prizes and competitions were considered equally ill-advised methods of selection. It is significant that these methods are now being rapidly dropped in the fields of sculpture and architecture. For the mere thought of a competition is a thing essentially antagonistic to the creative impulse; and talent is likely to acquit itself better than genius in such a struggle. The idea of a poetic competition is a relic of a pioneer mode of thought. Mr. Wells concluded that the decision should be made by the individual. But I cannot agree with him that that same individual should be the donor of the fellowship. It seems to me that this would-be savior of our American poetry should select the best judge of poets and poetry that he can discover and be guided by his advice.
On general principles, there are several things that this judge should not be. He should not be a professor of English, because of the professor's usual bias toward the academic. Besides, these fellowships ought not in any way to be associated with institutions of learning—places which are apt to fetter poets and surround them with an atmosphere hostile to the creative impulse. Neither should this momentous decision be left to editors or publishers, because they are usually suffering from literary indigestion caused by skimming too many manuscripts too fast, and because, at any rate, they ordinarily pay little attention to poetry and hold it commercially "in one grand despise." Nor should the normal type of poet be chosen as judge to decide this question. For the poet is apt to have a narrow, one-sided view of the field. He has probably developed his own distinctive style and personality at the expense of artistic catholicity and kindly breadth of critical judgment. The creative and the critical faculties are usually as distinct and as mutually exclusive spheres as that of the impassioned, partisan lawyer and the cool, impartial judge.
To whom, then, should the decision be left? It should, in my opinion, be left to a real judge—to some broad, keen critic of poetry with a clear, unbiased contemporary view of the whole domain of the art. It matters not whether he is professional or amateur, so he is untouched by academicism and has not done so much reading or writing as to impair his mental digestion and his clarity of vision. Care, of course, would have to be used in safeguarding the critic-judge against undue pressure in favor of this candidate or that; and in safeguarding the incumbent of the fellowship from yet more insidious influences. For the apparently liberated poet would merely have exchanged prisons if he learned that the founder of the fellowship wished to dictate what sort of poetry he should write.
The idea of poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps may sound. It is no mere empirical theory. Americans ought to be proud to know that, in a modest way, it has recently been tried here, and is proving a success. I am told that already two masters of poetry have been presented to us as free workers in their art by two Boston philanthropists, and have been enabled to accomplish some of their best work through such fellowships as are here advocated. This fact should put cities like New York, Pittsburg, and Chicago on their mettle. For they must realize that Boston, with her quiet, slow-moving, Old-World pace, has not done to poetry a tithe of the harm that her more energetic neighbors have, and should therefore not be suffered to bear the entire brunt of the expiation.
Men say that money cannot buy a joyful heart. But next to writing a great poem, I can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than to know that a thousand of my dollars had enabled an imprisoned genius to shake from his shoes the dust of a city office and go for a year to "God's outdoors," there to free his system of some of the beauty that had chokingly accumulated there until it had grown an almost intolerable pain. What joy to know that my fellowship had given men the modern New World "Hyperion," or "Prelude," or "Ring and the Book"! And even if that whole year resulted in nothing more than a "Skylark," or a "Rabbi Ben Ezra," or a "Crossing the Bar"—could one possibly consider such a result in the same thought-wave with dollars and cents?
But this thousand dollars might do something even better than help produce counterparts of famous poems created in other times and lands. It might actually secure the inestimable boon of a year's leisure, a procession of peaceful vistas, and a brimming cup for one of that "new brood" of "poets to come" which Walt Whitman so confidently counted upon to 'justify him and answer what he was for.' This handful of gold might make it possible for one of these new poets to come into his own, and ours, at once, and in his own person accomplish that fusion, so devoutly to be wished, of those diverse factors of the greatest poetry which have existed among us thus far only in awful isolation—the possession of this one and that of our chief singers.
How fervently we poetry-lovers wish that one of the captains of industry would feel impelled to put his hand into his pocket—if only into his watch-pocket—or adorn his last testament with a modest codicil! It would be such poetic justice if one of those who have prospered through the very speeding-up process which has so seriously crippled our poetry, should devote to its service a small tithe of what he has won from poetry's loss—and thus hasten our renaissance of singers, and bring a new dawn, 'brighter than before known,' out of the dusk of the poets.