Famous Single Poems
life, but a single sheet, the one on which he wrote the eight lines beginning, “The night has a thousand eyes,” is worth all the rest. “The Burial of Sir John Moore” lives on, but everything else which Charles Wolfe wrote has long since lapsed into obscurity. Two lovely quatrains, “A Death-Bed,” worthy to rank with the immortal two in which Landor laments Rose Aylmer, are all that survive from the pen of James Aldrich.
From the citation of such examples, which might be prolonged indefinitely, one is tempted to proceed to a consideration of how infrequently even the greatest poets write great poetry, or to an enumeration of the poets who wrote none at all—this last to console certain one-poem men who bitterly resent being called such. But this, however instructive and amusing, would be to wander outside the purpose of these papers and must be left to another time.
Robert Graves, in his little book, On English Poetry, evolves an ingenious theory about one-poem men. He believes that true poetry is the result of a sort of brain-storm, in which the poet, in a state of self-hypnosis, produces something quite beyond the capacities of his normal waking state—a diamond in the rough, as it were, with a heart of flame, but full of surface faults which require the patient craftsmanship
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