Some Soldier Poets

Excerpt from Some Soldier Poets

These essays are occasional. They are incomplete and tentative, as must be every reply to a fortuitous demand. I have not chosen my themes by any deep affinity or because I had a native bent for studying them, but because they were thrust before me and some Of my thoughts ?ocked out to meet each. I sketched characters based on analysis of work, not on information about authors, yet have since learned that some of these literary portraits seemed good likenesses to the friends of the man portrayed, and the friends of other poets have desired to see their literary Characters sketched by me. Young poets are Old-fashioned, like Nature herself; they have usually not yet acquired the professional desire to be in advance of the public. Nothing seems hackneyed to genius, and youth is perhaps half genius. What a work is not is always more Obvious than what it is, as critics are never weary of proving. I have tried to build with positive qualities, and to Obtain relief by laying on shadows lightly, as the best topographical draughtsmen did their pearly washes of diluted Indian ink.