Browning, Louise Guiney, Rupert Brooke, or Lizette Reese?
(These were the names he mentioned.)
This moves us to ask, how can you tell? It takes time for any poem
to grow and ripen and find its place in the language. It will be for
those of a hundred or more years hence to say what are the great
poems of our present day. If a sonnet has the true vitality in it,
it will gather association and richness about it as it traces its
slender golden path through the minds of readers. It settles itself
comfortably into the literary landscape, incorporates itself subtly
into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the
blood of the language. It comes down to us in the accent of those
who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the
permanent rightness of its phrasing and our knowledge of the
pleasure it has given to thousands of others. The more it is quoted,
the better it seems.
All this is a slow process and an inscrutable. No one has ever given
us a continuous history of any particular poem, tracing its history
and adventures after its first publication--the places it has been
quoted, the hearts it has rejoiced. It could only be done by an
infinity of toil and a prodigal largesse to clipping bureaus. It
would be a fascinating study, showing how some poems have fought for
their lives against the evaporation of Time, and how they have come
through, sometimes, because they were carried and cherished in one
or two appreciative hearts.
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