Did I return your Jinks verses? I know I read them and meant to send them back, but my correspondence and my papers are in such hopeless disorder that I'm all at sea on these matters. For aught I know I may have elaborately "answered" the letter that I think myself to be answering now. I liked the verses very temperately, not madly.
Of course you are right about the magazine editors not knowing poetry when they see it. But who does? I have not known more than a half-dozen persons in America that did, and none of them edited a magazine.
No, I did not write the "Urus-Agricola-Acetes stuff," though it was written _for_ me and, I believe, at my suggestion. The author was "Jimmy" Bowman, of whose death I wrote a sonnet which is in Black Beetles. He and I used to have a lot of fun devising literary mischiefs, fighting sham battles with each other and so forth. He was a clever chap and a good judge of whiskey.
Yes, in The Cynic's Dictionary I did "jump from A to M." I had previously done the stuff in various papers as far as M, then lost the beginning. So in resuming I re-did that part (quite differently, of course) in order to have the thing complete if I should want to make a book of it. I guess the Examiner isn't running much of it, nor much of anything of mine.
I like your love of Keats and the early Coleridge.
[The N. Y. American Office, Washington, D. C., October 12, 1904.]
The "bad eminence" of turning down Sterling's great poem is one that you will have to share with some of your esteemed fellow magazinists--for examples, the editors of the Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, The Century, and now the Metropolitan, all of the élite. All of these gentlemen, I believe, profess, as you do not, to know literature when they see it, and to deal in it.
Well I profess to deal in it in a small way, and if Sterling will let me I propose some day to ask judgment between them and me.
Even _you_ ask for literature--if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipzig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my stories!