Life — May 28, 1896 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

*LIFE: LIFE’S TIPS TO SUMMER READERS. SLIM VOLUMES OF NEW VERSE. BY EDWARD S. MARTIN. NEWSPAPER paragrapher in remarking the other day on the career of a poetess who had written ten thousand poems, observed that the qual- ity of her output was not remarkable, but that she had not a lazy hair in her head. A poet without some lazy hairs in his head is imperfectly qualified for his busiv ness. His appreciation of the incidents of human life should be catholic and comprehen- sive, and should include a proper estimate of the joy of doing nothing. Especially a poet “Sm should be lazy enough to stop reasonably often and think, for poetry that is not freighted with a due proportion of thought cannot rank as first-rate even though it is meritorious in other respects. The difficulty in writing ten thousand poems would be to get thoughts enough to ballast them. Time and diligence could do the rest—assort the rhymes, measure the feet, and put the capital letters in the right places ; but industry itself, though ever so ear- nestly exercised, might fail to snare thoughts enough that were worth a poetic setting. It is not unusual to hear complaint of laziness in poets. It has been urged that Browning was too lazy to express him- self in a workmanlike manner, but his poetry has survived the charge, because, however shiftless its author may at times have been about the order of his words, he never failed to gear ideas to them. Lowell was charged with laziness, but though the charge had a basis, his laziness did not so much affect what he wrote as hinder him from writing more, and laziness of that sort is always condoned by readers. The laziness that is fatal to poetry is that which leads the poets to make verses with nothing in them, like oyster patties without the oysters, or tarts bare of jam. The laziness that most affects contemporary poetry is the laziness of readers. There are very many more readers in this country now than there ever have been in any country before, but a very large majority of them are unwilling to read anything that will cost them any effort. They will read the newspapers, which requires about as much intellectual energy as gossiping on the street corner, and they will read easy stories with plenty of action in them and not much thought. But as for really putting their minds on anything in the shape of literature for the sake of the mere intellectual pleasure they may get out of it—they won't do it. If they put their minds on anything, it must be something that will Two Books You Will Read. JUST PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO. THE PUPPET-BOOTH, By HENRY B. FULLER, Author of “With the Procession,” “The Chevalier of Pensicri-Vani,” ete. A book of twelve highly imaginative plays of a kind absolutely new to American literature. 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