Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

“ The chapel of the Minor Poet may be too small to admit the crowd; it may be thronged when three or four are gathered together. None the less, it has its use and place. It is, I believe, a mistake, to suppose, as Tolstoy contends, that no Art is legitimate save that which has for its object the happiness of the greatest number. Yet I admit that the poet who consciously addresses a few is, by definition, the Minor Poet, the man of a smaller race, the younger brother, who, whatever his merits, shall not obtain the full inheritance.
"Shall Life be an Ode? Or shall Life be a Drama?" ”

“ Mine, of course, have the fatal defect of having crystallised too soon; they lack the patient polish of succeeding generations. But that it is, most obviously, not in my power to remedy. The only way would be for my readers to learn them by heart, half-forget them, and re-write them, omitting the non-essential. It is a necessary process; but I can only offer them in their unripeness, reminding my readers that the beautiful rispetti of the Tuscan hills, the ballads of Scotland and Piedmont, have all at one moment lacked the admirable patina which age and time alone confer. ”

“ I may have to wait as long till I repay my debt to some other student who perchance, beside a bookstall of Cape Town or Honolulu, may fish my poems from the fourpenny box, or light on them in some anthology. But I count on his appreciation.
Depend upon it, after the very greatest names in poetry (who are to all of us a second religion) the minor poets have the happiest lot. Each of us worships in the temples of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, MoliJre ; but each of us also has some private niche, some inconsiderable intimate shrine, for the poet no one praises, who is all the more our own. ”