He did not have time, however, to act on this encouragement.
He wrote now and then a dialect poem which was printed
in the Georgia dailies and attracted attention by its humor and its insight
into contemporary life, and occasionally an exquisite lyric like "Nirvana".
In the main he had to say: --
"I have not put pen to paper in a literary way in a long time.
How I thirst to do so, -- how I long to sing a thousand various songs
that oppress me, unsung, -- is inexpressible. Yet the mere work
that brings me bread gives me no time. I know not, after all, if this is
a sorrowful thing. Nobody likes my poems except two or three friends, --
who are themselves poets, and can supply themselves!" And yet he writes,
"It gives me great encouragement that you think I might succeed
in the literary life; for I take it that you are in earnest in saying so,
believing that you love Art with too genuine affection to trifle with her
by bringing to her service, through mere politeness, an unworthy worker."*
--
* `Letters', passim.
--
Hayne was impressed with Lanier's intimate knowledge of Elizabethan
and older English literature, as displayed in his letters of this period.
He says: --
"He had steeped his imagination from boyhood in the writings of the earlier
English annalists and poets, -- Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory,
Gower, Chaucer, and the whole bead-roll of such ancient English worthies.
I was of course a little surprised during our earlier epistolary communion
to perceive, not only his unusually thorough knowledge of Chaucer,
for example, whose couplets flowed as trippingly from his pen
as if `The Canterbury Tales' and `The Romaunt of the Rose'
were his daily mental food, but to find him quoting as naturally and easily
from `Piers Plowman' and scores of the half-obsolete ballads
of the English and Scottish borders.
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