Both your letters at hand.
* * * * *
Be a "magazine poet" all you can--that is the shortest road to
recognition, and all our greater poets have travelled it. You need not
compromise with your conscience, however, by writing "magazine
poetry." You couldn't.
What's your objection to * * *? I don't observe that it is greatly
worse than others of its class. But a fellow who has for nigh upon
twenty years written for yellow newspapers can't be expected to say
much that's edifying on that subject. So I dare say I'm wrong in my
advice about the _kind_ of swine for your pearls. There are probably
more than the two kinds of pigs--live ones and dead ones.
Yes, I'm a colonel--in Pennsylvania Avenue. In the neighborhood of my
tenement I'm a Mister. At my club I'm a major--which is my real title
by an act of Congress. I suppressed it in California, but couldn't
here, where I run with the military gang.
You need not blackguard your poem, "A Visitor," though I could wish
you had not chosen blank verse. That form seems to me suitable (in
serious verse) only to lofty, not lowly, themes. Anyhow, I always
expect something pretty high when I begin an unknown poem in blank.
Moreover, it is not your best "medium." Your splendid poem, "Music,"
does not wholly commend itself to me for that reason. May I say that
it is a little sing-songy--the lines monotonously alike in their
caesural pauses and some of their other features?
By the way, I'd like to see what you could do in more unsimple meters
than the ones that you handle so well. The wish came to me the other
day in reading Lanier's "The Marshes of Glynn" and some of his other
work. Lanier did not often equal his master, Swinburne, in getting the
most out of the method, but he did well in the poem mentioned. Maybe
you could manage the dangerous thing. It would be worth doing and is,
therefore, worth trying.
Thank you for the Moody book, which I will return. He pleaseth me
greatly and I could already fill pages with analyses of him for the
reasons therefore. But for you to say that he has _you_
"skinned"--that is magnanimity. An excellent thing in poets, I grant
you, and a rare one. There is something about him and his book in the
current "Atlantic," by May Sinclair, who, I dare say, has never heard
of _you_. Unlike you, she thinks his dramatic work the best of what he
does. I've not seen that. To be the best it must be mighty good.
Yes, poor White's poetry is all you say--and worse, but, faith! he
"had it in him." What struck me was his candid apotheosis of piracy on
the high seas. I'd hate the fellow who hadn't some sneaking sympathy
with that--as Goethe confessed to some sympathy with every vice.
Nobody'll ever hear of White, but (pray observe, ambitious bard!) he
isn't caring. How wise are the dead!
* * * * *
My friend Howes, of Galveston, has, I think, nearly finished compiling
his book of essaylets from my stuff. Neale has definitely decided to
bring out "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter." He has the plates of
my two luckless Putnam books, and is figuring on my "complete works,"
to be published by subscription. I doubt if he will undertake it right
away.
_Au reste_, I'm in good health and am growing old not altogether
disgracefully.
Sincerely yours,
AMBROSE BIERCE.
[The Army and Navy Club, Washington,
October 30, 1906.]