Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/17

 of his waking state to remove. The professional poet, by long practice and quick recognition of the preliminary symptoms, grows adept in inducing in himself this trance-like condition, and learns how to invite it and how to yield himself to it—how, in a word, to “go under.” Also long practice has given him the skill needed to cut and polish the diamond thus produced.

But one-poem men are either born poets tortured by a life-long mental conflict to which only once in their whole lives are they able completely to yield themselves, or they are not naturally poets at all, but men who, just once, are driven by some force beyond themselves to express in verse a sudden intolerable clamor in the brain. And of course since they are not skilled craftsmen, their diamonds usually show many flaws.

This theory is well enough as applied to those rare flashes of genius which are recognized as great poetry, but it fails to explain one-poem men, because very few of them ever wrote great poetry. It is not altogether astonishing that a masterpiece should live; but, by some curious quirk, a mere jingle which possesses no possible claim to inspiration, often proves more immortal than an epic. “Bo-Peep” outlives “Paradise Regained,” and grave and scholarly men, after a lifetime of labor in their chosen fields, have been astounded and chagrined to find that their