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The Man of Letters as a Man of Business by William Dean Howells
page 33 of 41 (80%)
longer to abound as it once did. I do not know whether the
editor discourages them, knowing his readers' frame, or whether
they do not offer themselves, but I seldom find them in the
magazines. I certainly do not believe that if anyone were now to
write essays such as Mr. Warner's "Backlog Studies," an editor
would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them. Nobody
seems to write the sort that Colonel Higginson formerly
contributed to the periodicals, or such as Emerson wrote.
Without a great name behind it, I am afraid that a volume of
essays would find few buyers, even after the essays had made a
public in the magazines. There are, of course, instances to the
contrary, but they are not so many or so striking as to make me
think that the essay could not be offered as a good opening for
business talent.

I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better
paid in the magazines than it is now. I must say, too, that I
think the quality of the minor poetry of our day is better than
that of twenty-five or thirty years ago. I could name half a
score of young poets whose work from time to time gives me great
pleasure, by the reality of its feeling, and the delicate
perfection of its art, but I will not name them, for fear of
passing over half a score of others equally meritorious. We have
certainly no reason to be discouraged, whatever reason the poets
themselves have to be so, and I do not think that even in the
short story our younger writers are doing better work than they
are doing in the slighter forms of verse. Yet the notion of
inviting business talent into this field would be as preposterous
as that of asking it to devote itself to the essay. What book of
verse by a recent poet, if we except some such peculiarly gifted
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