have not fared any too
well at our hands; but they do not need help as badly by far as the
poets need it. What with commissions and sales, scholarships,
fellowships, and substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors and
architects and even the musicians have, broadly speaking, been able to
learn and practise their art in that peace and security which is
well-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productive
mastery. They have usually been able to spend more of the year in the
country than the poet. And even when bound as fast as he to the city,
they have not been forced to choose between burning the candle at
both ends or abandoning their art.

But for some recondite reason--perhaps because this art cannot be
taught at all--it has always been an accepted American conviction that
poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue
by highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and
faculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout
with the wolf on the threshold--a most practical, philistine wolf,
moreover, which never heard of rhyme or rhythm, and whose whole
acquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiarity
with frayed masculine and feminine endings.

As a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably
been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard
affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go
out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave
little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on
crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of
our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. And the resulting state of things
has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets
spend their days in correcting encyclopaedia proof, or clerking, or
running, notebook in hand, to fires--inheres in the eternal fitness of
things.

Bergson says in "Creative Evolution," that "an intelligence which
reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over
and above practically useful efforts." Does it not follow that when we
make the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort of
running to fires, we prevent him from enjoying the very advantage
which made man a reflective being, to say nothing of a poet?

Perhaps we have never yet realized that this attitude of ours would
turn poetic success into a ques