tion of the survival of that paradox,
the commercially shrewd poet, or of the poet who by some happy
accident of birth or marriage has been given an income, or of that
prodigy of versatility who, in our present stage of civilization,
besides being mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's calling, is
also physically fit to bear the strain of doing two men's work; or,
perhaps we had better say, three men's--for simply being a good poet
is about as nerve-consuming an occupation as any two ordinary men
could support in common--and the third would have to run to fires for
the first two.

It is natural to the character of the American business man to declare
that the professional poet has no reason for existence _qua_ poet
unless he can make his art support him. But let the business man bear
in mind that if he had the power to enforce such a condition, he would
be practically annihilating the art. For it is literally true that, if
plays were excluded, it would take not even a five-foot shelf to
contain all the first-rate poetry which was ever written by poets in a
state of poetic self-support. "Could a man live by it," the author of
"The Deserted Village" once wrote to Henry Goldsmith, "it were not
unpleasant employment to be a poet." Alas, the fatal condition! For
the art itself has almost never fed and clothed its devotee--at least
until his best creative days are done and he has become a "grand old
man." More often the poet has attained not even this reward.
Wordsworth's lines on Chatterton have a wider application:

"What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow--
Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find
Whose footsteps mark the music of mankind!
'T was his to lend a life: 't was Man's to borrow:
'T was his to make, but not to share, the morrow."

Those who insist upon judging the art of poetry on the hard American
"cash basis" ought to be prepared, for the sake of consistency, to
apply the same criterion as well to colleges, public schools, symphony
orchestras, institutions for scientific research, missions,
settlements, libraries, and all other unlucrative educational
enterprises. With inexorable logic they should be prepared to insist
that people really do not desire or need knowledge or any sort of
uplift because they are not prepared to pay its full cost. It is
precisely this sort of logic which would treat the Son of Man if He
should appear among us, to a bench in Bryant Park, an