SOME SUGGESTIONS ABOUT BAD POETRY
Bad poetry has its geniuses like good poetry, and presents a field almost as vast. It demands from the reader nearly as much discernment, and a good deal more analysis, and the study of it is more than an amusing pastime, for it can, by the way, throw not a few sidelights upon good poetry. To find out what good poetry is not, is next best to finding out what it is.
But the subject demands a volume, and a slight article on so big a theme is bound to be unfair. It is compelled to generalize. However hard the writer tries to choose typical quotations, the reader may take exception to them as unjust, and produce others to contradict them. A paper of this nature is, indeed, little more than a collection of headings, insufficiently illustrated; and some would need long chapters to do them justice. The bad lines, for instance, of good poets suggest a long vista of study, though here we can do no more than touch upon them by the way. They belong to quite a different province from the bad poetry of inferior pens, with which we shall chiefly try to deal. And this bad poetry brings its own difficulties. For its vices are of the undistinguished order and examples of them can only be found, as a rule, among unimportant writers many of them once known, now forgotten. Whereas the examples of their counterparts, of the elements that go to make good poetry, are best seen in the work of great men, by the side of which the pigmy verses look unduly absurd. If, therefore, there are any who object to the unequal calibre of the poems here juxtaposed, they must remember that we are contrasting,
