ON THE MAKING OF LITTLE POETS
Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets
have to be "discovered" by somebody else. Otherwise
they would live and die in the shadow of
decent obscurity, unheard, unseen, unknown. And
it is seriously open to question whether their so
living and dying would not be an advantage to
society in the abating of a certain measure of
boredom. Looking back upon the motley crowd
of Little Poets who had their day of "discovery"
and "boom" at the very period when the thunderous
voice of the Muse at her grandest was shaking
the air through the inspired lips of Byron, Shelley
and Keats, and noting to what dusty oblivion
their little names and lesser works are now relegated
without regret, it is difficult to understand why
they were ever dragged from the respectable retirement
of common-place mediocrity by their
critic-contemporaries. Byron was scorned, Shelley
neglected, and Keats killed by these same critics;—neither
of the three were "discovered" or "made."
Their creation was not of man, but of their own
innate God-given genius, and, according to the
usual fate attending such divine things, the fastidious
human dilettante of their day would have none of
them. He set up his own verse-making Mumbo-
