Poetry is the voice of the solitary man.  The poet is always a solitary; and yet he speaks to others—­he would win their attention.  Thus it follows that every poem is a social act done by a solitary man.  And being an alien from the strange land of the solitary, he cannot be expected to admonish or to sermonize, or uplift, as it is called; and so take part in the cabals and intrigues in other lands of which he knows nothing, being himself a stranger from a strange land, the land of the solitary.  People listen to him as they would to any other traveller come from distant countries, and all he asks for is courtesy even as he himself is courteous.

Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity—­and, indeed, their only chance of being permitted to live—­and to make friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and preachers.  And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech perishes from their lips.  The traveller’s tales are of all the most precious, because he comes from a land—­the poet’s solitude—­which no other feet have trodden and which no other feet will tread.

So, briefly and awkwardly, he justifies himself, being given (as Mrs. Quickly apologized) to “allicholy and musing.”  Oh, it is not easy!  As Gilbert Chesterton said, in a noble poem: 

The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

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1100 WORDS

The managing editor, the city editor, the production manager, the foreman of the composing room, and the leading editorial writer having all said to us with a great deal of sternness, “Your copy for Saturday has got to be upstairs by such and such a time, because we are going to make up the page at so and so A.M.,” we got rather nervous.

If we may say so, we did not like the way they said it.  They spoke—­and we are thinking particularly of the production manager—­with a kind of paternal severity that was deeply distressing to our spirit.  They are all, in off hours, men of delightfully easy disposition.  They are men with whom it would be a pleasure and a privilege to be cast away on a desert island or in a crowded subway train.  It is only just to say that they are men whom we admire greatly.  When we meet them in the elevator, or see them at Frank’s having lunch, how full of jolly intercourse they are.  But in the conduct of their passionate and perilous business, that is, of getting the paper out on time, a holy anguish shines upon their brows.  The stern daughter of the voice of God has whispered to them, and they pass on the whisper to us through a mega-phone.