Ben Bolt
anonymously to prevent it being treated as a joke. De Wolf Hopper might make an admirable Othello, but he would be greeted with shrieks of laughter. The audience would go into hysterics when he smothered Desdemona, and yell for “Casey at the Bat.” Such is the force of habit.
The poet is in peculiar peril. Perhaps in an unguarded moment he contributes some jingles to a comic weekly, or writes a sentimental song to oblige a friend, little suspecting the awful fate he is inviting. For it is quite within the range of possibility that those jingles or that song may dog his footsteps the remainder of his life and harry him into his grave.
There are many examples in American literature of promising novelists straying away along the primrose paths of crime or of sex, but the most horrible example of the poet overshadowed by an early bit of doggerel is undoubtedly Thomas Dunn English.
Now English was in no sense a great writer, nor even an important one, but he was industrious and he believed in his work. He produced a dozen novels, fifty plays and perhaps a thousand poems. Some of the poems are of considerable merit—as witness “The Charge by the Ford.” And yet, practically all his life, he was identified in the public mind only with a single song.
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