And so, dear Perfect Reader, a Merry Christmas to you and a New Year
of books worthy your devotion! When you revive from that book that
holds you in spell, and find this little note on the cold hearth, I
hope you may be pleased.
[Illustration]
THE AUTOGENESIS OF A POET
The mind trudges patiently behind the senses. Day by day a thousand
oddities and charms outline themselves tenderly upon consciousness,
but it may be long before understanding comes with brush and colour
to fill in the tracery. One learns nothing until he rediscovers it
for himself. Every now and then, in reading, I have come across
something which has given me the wild surmise of pioneering mingled
with the faint magic of familiarity--for instance, some of the
famous dicta of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley about poetry. I
realized, then, that a teacher had told me these things in my
freshman year at college--fifteen years ago. I jotted them down at
that time, but they were mere catchwords. It had taken me fifteen
years of vigorous living to overhaul those catchwords and fill them
with a meaning of my own. The two teachers who first gave me some
suspicion of what lies in the kingdom of poetry--who gave "so sweet
a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into
it"--are both dead. May I mention their names?--Francis B. Gummere
and Albert Elmer Hancock, both of Haverford College.
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