One who after writing prose all his life suddenly essays to launch a
volume of verse, must know something of the feeling with which an
old-time sailor after coasting only his native shores found himself
setting sail into an unknown sea.
The author of this little volume knows quite as well as the most
experienced mariner the temerity of sailing an untried main in so frail
a bark. But he is willing, if the Fates so decree, to go down with the
unnumbered sail of that great fleet which have throughout the ages
faced the wide ocean of oblivion, merely for the thrill of being for a
brief space on its vast waters.
Since Horace, secure in the double endowment of genius and of an
Emperor's favor, wrote scornfully how hated of gods and men was
middling verse, no one has ever doubted the fact--perhaps, not even one
of all the myriads who have dared to brave that bitter scorn. The
explanation then for the production of so much of the despised matter
must be that there is for the minor poet also a music that the outer
world does not catch--an inner day which the outer world does not see.
It is this music, this light which, for the most part, is for the
lesser poet his only reward. That he has heard, however brokenly, and
at however vast a distance, snatches of those strains which thrilled
the souls of Marlowe and Milton and Keats and Shelley, even though he
may never reproduce one of them, is moreover a sufficiently high reward.