Famous Single Poems
If it had been a good song, this would not have been so galling—Lovelace would, no doubt, be happy to know that he has come down through the ages as the author of “To Althea from Prison.” But “Ben Bolt” is unutterable bosh, and English knew it was bosh. He had written it at the very outset of his literary career, being in need presumably of the ten dollar bill which the editor of the New York Mirror was in the habit of handing out for poems of this sort.
In other words, he produced a pot-boiler and sold it in a good market—a thing which almost any needy young author would be glad to do if he could, and which has been done by many who were neither young nor needy, without incurring any special reprobation. One recalls that the Jove-like Sir Edwin Arnold once upon a time wrote some verses to be used in advertising Bovril (in consideration of an extra price), and that George du Maurier’s most widely circulated drawing is the one which adorns the Apollinaris bottle! Indeed, many of the world’s great masterpieces have been pot-boilers, written solely because their authors were in desperate need of money, and had to work or starve. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who ought to know, went so far as to assert that it was only under such circumstances a poet could hope to be visited by the Muse:
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