to ask ourselves why so many of our
more recent poets have died young. Was it the hand of God, or the
effort to do the work of two in a hostile environment, that struck
down before their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, Edward Rowland
Sill, Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, William
Vaughn Moody, and the like? These were poets whom we bound to the
strenuous city, or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much of
their vitality. An old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius
"will out." This is true, but only in a sadder sense than the stupidly
proverbial one. As a matter of fact, the light of genius is all too
easily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of
America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as
an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy
plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have
yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an
indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually
demands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really
excellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and
produce the finest possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormous
solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that
trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his
best work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize
that the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in
even the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as the
sparks to fly upward." They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of
geniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that their
own real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have too little
adversity to contend with, but lest he have too much.

We have heard not a little about the conservation of land, ore, wood,
and water. The poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort of
conservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college.
I mean the conservation of energy. Our poetry will never emerge from
the dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to
overtake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it--or
until we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable part
of every year to the country--the place where the poet belongs.

It is true that the masters of the other arts