Sir: The Federal Reserve bank at New Orleans has received a letter from
a patriot who wants to know where and when he shall pay the interest on
his Liberty bond.
Rocky.
* * *
"In fact, I've finished--would you say a sonnet?"--concludes H. G. H.,
to whom we recommend the remark of James Stephens: "Nobody is interested
in the making of sonnets, not even poets."
* * *
Referring to the persons who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman
Douglas wrote: "I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of
these bards.... And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who
perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a
gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude
fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening
discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single
instant, at the altar of some generous ideal."
* * *
The trouble with minor poets is well set forth by Conrad Aiken in The
Dial, who refers to the conclusions of M. Nicolas Kostyleff after a
tentative study of the mechanism of poetic inspiration: "An important
part in poetic creation, he maintains, is an automatic verbal discharge,
along chains of association, set in motion by a chance occurrence."
* * *