thus, we have been too timid. We have been
too much afraid of encouraging weaklings by mistake. We have been, in
fact, more afraid of encouraging a single mediocre poet than of
neglecting a score of Shelleys. But we should remember that even if
the weak are encouraged with the strong, no harm is done.

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 free