was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and does not
know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks about the
"manufacture" of "poetry."

You use the right term, madam, I said. The manufacture of that article
has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of industry.
One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary confidant of a wide
circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any idea of the enormous
output of verse which is characteristic of our time. There are many
curious facts connected with this phenomenon. Educated people--yes, and
many who are not educated--have discovered that rhymes are not the
private property of a few noted writers who, having squatted on that part
of the literary domain some twenty or forty or sixty years ago, have, as
it were, fenced it in with their touchy, barbed-wire reputations, and
have come to regard it and cause it to be regarded as their private
property. The discovery having been made that rhyme is not a paddock for
this or that race-horse, but a common, where every colt, pony, and donkey
can range at will; a vast irruption into that once-privileged inclosure
has taken place. The study of the great invasion is interesting.

Poetry is commonly thought to be the language of emotion. On the
contrary, most of what is so called proves the absence of all passionate
excitement. It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious, worrying hunt after
rhymes which can be made serviceable, after images which will be
effective, after phrases which are sonorous; all this under limitations
which restrict the natural movements of fancy and imagination. There is
a secondary excitement in overcoming the difficulties of rhythm and
rhyme, no doubt, but this is not the emotional heat excited by the
subject of the "poet's" treatment. True poetry, the best of it, is but
the ashes of a burnt-out passion. The flame was in the eye and in the