THE poet’s quarrelsome lesser personalities to which I have referred are divided into camps by the distinction of sex. But in a poet the dominant spirit is male and though usually a feminist in sympathy, cannot afford to favour the women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies my distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, extravagant clothes and inverted tendencies. Apollo never to my knowledge appears in Greek art as a Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such problems far better than we do. I know it is usual to defend these extravagances of dress by glorifying the Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that Edmund Spenser himself wore “short hair, little bands and little cuffs.”

If there is no definite sexual inversion to account for breaking out in fancy dress, a poet who is any good at all ought not to feel the need of advertising his profession in this way. As I understand the poet’s nature, though he tries to dress as conventionally as possible, he will always prove too strong for his clothes and look completely ridiculous or very magnificent according to the occasion.

This matter of dress may seem unimportant, but people are still so shy of acknowledging the poet in his lifetime as a gifted human being who may have something important to say, that any dressing up or unnecessary strutting does a great deal of harm.

I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up tendency, like the allied tendency to unkemptness, is only another of the many forms in which the capricious child spirit which rules our most emotional dreams is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, constructive man-spirit of waking life, without which the poet is lost beyond recovery. Shelley was a great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper boats on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infantile preference he had schooled his mind to hard thinking on the philosophical and political questions of the day and had made friends among men of intellect and sophistication.

It is from considerations rather similar to these that I have given this book a plain heading and restrained my fancy from elaborating a gay seventeenth-century title or sub-title:—“A Broad-side from Parnassus,” “The Mustard Tart,” “Pebbles to Crack Your Teeth,” or “Have at you, Professor Gargoyle!” But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down my determination to write soberly, on almost every page. And ... no, the question of the psychology of poetesses is too big for these covers and too thorny in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided more evidence on the difference between the symbolism of women’s dreams and men’s, there will be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can only be offered as a strong impression that the dreams of normally-sexed women are, by comparison with those of normally-sexed men, almost always of the same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry and their humour.