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Nothing to Wear

mental reaction that the poem was the precipitant.

Curiously enough, Mr. Butler himself believed that he was inspired to write, not this portion of the poem, but the very portion which has least inspiration in it. Here is what he says:

The idea of giving a moral turn to the subject did not occur to me until I had made considerable progress in my work on the poem, which occupied odd moments of leisure in a very busy winter, and I remember that it was while I was walking one evening that the thought expressed in the closing lines of “Nothing to Wear” came to me, a sudden, and, I must believe, a genuine inspiration.

But it was not the mind of the poet, it was the mind of the lawyer which devised the closing lines, and the lawyer is also betrayed in other places by a stilted phrase or a legal reference. Mr. Butler continues:

Having finished the poem, and after reading it to my wife, I took it to my friend, Evert A. Duyckinck, whom I found in his accustomed place in the basement of his house, No. 20 Clinton Place, surrounded by the books which afterwards, under his will, went to the Lenox Library. I read him the poem, to which he listened with lively interest; but, much to my disappointment, he did not appreciate as keenly as I had hoped what I believed and

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