poetry as an
antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that,
according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English
writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American
poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do
with the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the
twentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their
potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on
their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the
large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness
into which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced.
Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for
publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it
that the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a
bull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of a
dray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to make
up in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city does
not consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with his
probably inadequate physique, chafes against the hack-work and yields
to the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him.
Then, after yielding, he chafes again, and more bitterly, at his
faint, imperfect expression of these dreams, recognizing in despair
that he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuous
life about him. So he burns the torch of life at both ends, and the
superhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle.
Then suddenly the light fails altogether.

Those poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to do
even a small amount of steady, fine-grained work in the city. The rest
are as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarred
from learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil. In
her autobiography Miss Jane Addams speaks some luminous words about
the state of society which forces finely organized artistic talent
into the wearing struggle for mere existence. She refers to it as "one
of the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this
most precious human faculty, this consummate possession of all
civilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be
treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost."

I wonder if we have ever stopped