Letters to Living Authors (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 Excerpt: ...criticism, and romance. I dare say you would yourself be readiest to acknowledge that, if you had not been first favourably known as a prose writer, your poetry would hardly have gained you recognition. You have publicly attributed your success to your dire industry; and it is in reading your poetry rather than your prose that we see how just is your estimate of your own endowments. 'An infinite capacity for taking trouble' does not always fitly take theplace of inspiration. In your A Child's Garden of Verses there are many neat, sweet, and happy little things suited to the tender age of childhood, but nothing, or very little, that would prove nutritious at a maturer period of life. I do not mean to imply that the book is aught but what it should be. It is excellent of its kind, only that kind is.hardly high enough to justify one in giving you the title of poet. In Underwoods you take a more ambitious flight, and as ambition, while carrying a man triumphantly over many obstacles, exhibits his weakness no less than his strength, so in this book the limitations of yourgenius are sharply emphasised. Throughout the volume the mighty impress of Burns, to quote a phrase from Mr. Lowell, is distinctly visible. Like Shakespeare, Burns is so exceedingly natural that we are often betrayed into the self-delusion of imagining that what he has done with such apparent ease we also can do. The number of dramatists that the Stratford poacher has made is probably beyond computation, and Scotland is overrun with minor poets who would never have sung a note but for the Ayrshire ploughboy. You are, of course, a man of too wide a culture to limit yourself to a single model, nor would your sense of fitness ever permit you to go wholly on the lines of one who must ever remain, mo...