Last night MacBean introduced me to Saxon Dane the Poet. Truly, he is more like a blacksmith than a Bard–a big bearded man whose black eyes brood somberly or flash with sudden fire. We talked of Walt Whitman, and then of others.
“The trouble with poetry,” he said, “is that it is too exalted. It has a phraseology of its own; it selects themes that are quite outside of ordinary experience. As a medium of expression it fails to reach the great mass of the people.”
Then he added: “To hell with the great mass of the people! What have they got to do with it? Write to please yourself, as if not a single reader existed. The moment a man begins to be conscious of an audience he is artistically damned. You’re not a Poet, I hope?”
I meekly assured him I was a mere maker of verse.
“Well,” said he, “better good verse than middling poetry. And maybe even the humblest of rhymes has its uses. Happiness is happiness, whether it be inspired by a Rossetti sonnet or a ballad by G. R. Sims. Let each one who has something to say, say it in the best way he can, and abide the result.… After all,” he went on, “what does it matter? We are living in a pygmy day. With Tennyson and Browning the line of great poets passed away, perhaps for ever. The world to-day is full of little minstrels, who echo one another and who pipe away tunefully enough. But with one exception they do not matter.”
I dared to ask who was his one exception. He answered, “Myself, of course.”
Here’s a bit of light verse which it amused me to write to-day, as I sat in the sun on the terrace of the Closerie de Lilas:
