Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/68

Rh fountain-head, read the books themselves, don't read what someone else has written about them—or if you do, at least make such reading a secondary matter. If your chosen field is the short story, spend your time in reading the recognised masterpieces of Poe and Maupassant, Kipling and O. Henry, in preference to the best text-book ever written on short-story structure. If your life work is lyric poetry, then by all means read lyrics, memorise lyrics, the best you can find and the more the better. You may get some help from critical studies, but you will get vastly more from the knowledge which you slowly and laboriously dig out for yourself. When someone once wrote to Matthew Arnold on behalf of a young woman who thought that she possessed the poetic gift and wished to know if there was such a thing as a dictionary of rhymes, he replied: "There is a Rhyming Dictionary and there is a book