Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/268

 ON THE MAKING OF LITTLE POETS

Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be "discovered" by somebody else. Otherwise they would live and die in the shadow of decent obscurity, unheard, unseen, unknown. And it is seriously open to question whether their so living and dying would not be an advantage to society in the abating of a certain measure of boredom. Looking back upon the motley crowd of Little Poets who had their day of "discovery" and "boom" at the very period when the thunderous voice of the Muse at her grandest was shaking the air through the inspired lips of Byron, Shelley and Keats, and noting to what dusty oblivion their little names and lesser works are now relegated without regret, it is difficult to understand why they were ever dragged from the respectable retirement of common-place mediocrity by their critic-contemporaries. Byron was scorned, Shelley neglected, and Keats killed by these same critics;—neither of the three were "discovered" or "made." Their creation was not of man, but of their own innate God-given genius, and, according to the usual fate attending such divine things, the fastidious human dilettante of their day would have none of them. He set up his own verse-making Mumbo