Smith's
devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am told, that
he neglected to let passengers on and off - nay, it is even held by some
critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it said to
his undying honor that his Employers never suffered from such
carelessness, for it was the custom of our Poet to demand double fares
from the old, the feeble and the mentally deficient.
Even as the illimitable ichor of star-dust, the mysterious Demiurge of
the Universe, keeps the suns and planets to their orbitary revolutions,
so must environment mark the Fas and Nefas of Genius. Plato's Idea of
the Archetypal Man was due, perhaps, as much to the serene weather
conditions of Academe as to the marvelous mentality of Plato. What had
Job eaten for breakfast that he should have given utterance to his
magnificent Lamentation? Was he the discoverer of Human Sorrow or the
pioneer of Human Dyspepsia?
It is not altogether radical on my part, then, for me to assert that
many of the stylistic peculiarities found in these Sonnets are
attributable to the locale of their inspiration the rear platform of a
Sixth Avenue car. One can plainly hear the jar and jounce of the
elliptical wheels, the cry, "Step lively!" the six o'clock stampede, the
lament of the strap-hanging multitude in such lines as these:
"Three days with sad skidoo have came and went,
Yet Pansy cometh nix to ride with me.
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