eBooks Base 2000

He would find, for example, Moore's
_Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the
latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy,
He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,
Is all that these eyes can adore.
He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love,
And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.
Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line
with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So,
likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the
brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.]
for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!"
of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.
Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and
assures us,
Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.


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