INTRODUCTION
These essays are occasional. They are incomplete and tentative, as must be every reply to a fortuitous demand. I have not chosen my themes by any deep affinity or because I had a native bent for studying them, but because they were thrust before me and some of my thoughts flocked out to meet each.
I sketched characters based on analysis of work, not on information about authors, yet have since learned that some of these literary portraits seemed good likenesses to the friends of the man portrayed, and the friends of other poets have desired to see their literary characters sketched by me.
Young poets are old-fashioned, like Nature herself; they have usually not yet acquired the professional desire to be in advance of the public. Nothing seems hackneyed to genius, and youth is perhaps half genius.
What a work is not is always more obvious than what it is, as critics are never weary of proving. I have tried to build with positive qualities, and to obtain relief by laying on shadows lightly, as the best topographical draughtsmen did their pearly washes of diluted Indian ink.
What is poetry? Why are so many young people tempted to try their hands at it? Wrong answers to these questions are naturally more numerous and fashionable than right answers. But we can never see poetry in relation to national life until we get hold of right answers. Poetry is a creation or discovery in the use of words that wakes or strengthens emotion in us, thus enlarging consciousness. The poet is not full of emotions and perceptions that need expressing, as a vat is full of grapes, though no doubt human nature—complete, ideal—is latent in him. He is, like all young creatures, playful. He plays with language, attracted by its beauties and
