y their finger on the more recondite nuances of "creative work,"
without so much as ever having heard of "imagism."

I have spent whole evenings in passionate readings of "Childe
Harold" and the "Poems to Thyrza" with gentle Quaker ladies and
demure old maids descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, and I have
always left such Apollonian prayer-meetings with a mind purged
from the cant of cleverness; washed and refreshed in the authentic
springs of the Muses.

So few lords--when you come to think of it--write poetry at all, that
it is interesting to note the effect of aristocratic blood upon the style
of a writer.

Personally I think its chief effect is to produce a certain
magnanimous indifference to the meticulous niceties of the art. We
say "drunk as a lord"; well--it is something to see what a person will
do, who is descended from Robert Bruce's Douglas, when it is a
question of this more heavenly intoxication. Aristocratic blood
shows itself in poetry by a kind of unscrupulous contempt for
gravity. It refuses to take seriously the art which it practises.

It plays the part of the grand amateur. It is free from bourgeois
earnestness. It is this, I suppose, which is so irritating to the
professional critic. If you can write poetry, so to speak, with your
left hand, in intervals of war and love and adventure, between
rescuing girls from sacks destined for the waters of the Bosphorus
and swimming the length of the Venetian Grand Canal and
recruiting people to fight for Hellenic freedom, you are doing
something that ought not to be allowed. If other men of action, if
other sportsmen and pleasure-seekers and travellers and wandering
free-lances were able to sit down in any cosmopolitan cafe in Cairo
or Stamboul and knock off immortal verses in the style of Byron
--verses with no "philosophy" for us to expound, no technique for us
to analyse, no "message" for us to interpret, no aesthetic subtleties
for us to unravel, no mystical orientation for us to track out, what is
there left for a poor sedentary critic to do? Our occupation is gone.
We must either enjoy romance for its own sake in a frank, honest,
simple manner; confessing that Byron was "some poet" and letting it
go at that; or we must explain to the world, as many of us do, that
Byron was a thoroughly bad writer. A third way of dealing with this
unconscionable boy, who scoffed at Wordsworth and Southey and
insisted that Pope was a great genius, is the way some poo