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 s