IT is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson.

Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, poetry was all but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards priestly conventions.

Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat, Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem at best.

These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted from the New York Nation apropos of a trans-Atlantic poet whose works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the ’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;—