ary journal! They are not proud enough in
their personal individuality to send the critics to the devil and go
their way with a large contempt. They set themselves to propitiate
the critics by the wit of technical novelty and to propitiate their
fellow craftsmen by avoiding the inspiration of the past.

They do not write poetry for the pleasure of writing it. They write
poetry in order that they may be called poets. They aim at originality
instead of sweeping boldly ahead and being content to be
themselves as God made them.

I am strongly of opinion that much of the admiration lavished on
these versifiers is not due to our enjoyment of the poetry which they
write--not, I mean, of the sheer poetic elements in it--but to our
interest in the queer words they dig up out of the archives of
philological bric-a-brac, to our astonishment at their erotic
extravagances, to our satisfaction at being reminded of all the
superior shibboleths of artistic slang, the use of which and the
understanding of which prove us to be true initiates in the "creative
world" and no poor forlorn snakes of outworn tradition.

Our modern poets cannot get our modern artists out of their heads.
The insidious talk of these sly artists confuses the simplicity of their
natural minds. They are dominated by art; whereas the real sister of
the muse of poetry is not "art" at all, but music.

They do not see, these people, that the very carelessness of a great
poet like Byron is the inevitable concomitant of his genius; I would
go so far as to call his carelessness the mother of his genius and its
guardian angel.

I cannot help thinking, too, that if the artistic self-consciousness of
our generation spoils its free human pleasure in great poetry, the
theories of the academic historians of literature do all they can to
make us leave the poetry of the past in its deep grave. It seems to me
that of all futile and uninteresting things what is called "the study of
literature" is the very worst.

To meddle with such a preposterous matter at all damns a person, in
my thinking, as a supreme fool. And yet this is, par excellence, the
sort of tediousness in which devotees of culture complacently
wallow. As if it mattered where Byron slips in "the great
Renaissance of Wonder"; or where Rossetti drifts by, in the
portentous "Pre-Raphaelite Movement"!

It is strange to me how boys and girls, brought up upon this "study
of literature," can ever endure to see the lo