The Inventions of the Idiot

ng-house

t?" asked the Bibliomaniac one Sunday

the Idiot. "Just flo

pleased if she is flour

diot. "She's a queer Muse, that one of mine. She has all the airs and g

you would upon your type-w

ut out of ten inspirations I had last week not one of them is fit for publication anywhere but in a magazine or a puzzle column. I don't know what is the matter with her, but when I sit down to d

rious most of the ti

ive her warning. If she doesn't brace up and take more interest in her work I'm going to get another Muse, t

body else," suggested the Poet.

day has gone by when a one-muse poet achieves greatness. I'm going to employ a half-dozen and try to corner the poetry market. Queer that in all these years that men have been writing poetry no

ac. "The poet controls only his own work, and if h

a Bank for Poets, in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put it in the b

y failed to dispose of

eller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand it back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was comic, and proceed t

ough I should have used a synonym of

iscover America," said the Idiot. "Everything that doesn't

e," said the School-master; "bu

one asks me that foolish question that is asked so often, 'What is the good word?' I always reply 'Slathered,' and the what's-the-good-word f

re is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite ap

oling of our issues we could corner the market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen, quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page, ou

hor the twenty-five dollar

or two dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seve

couldn't sell?" as

e of sinking money in a magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw out sonnets, ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten Sonnets.

oan department, eh?

dispute the profit. You could find plenty of poets who woul

loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a considera

borrow a poem, I'd like to k

f thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a

inding a rhyme to bor

, Alice,' 'I'm going to war so gory, Alice,' 'I fear you are a Tory, Alice' (this f

ictionary I'll buy a copy,"

ybody and everybody. We can deal in Fame! A man that couldn't write his own name so that anybody could read it could come to us and say: 'Gentlemen, I've got everything but brains. I want to be an author and 'mongst the authors stand. I am told it is delightful to see one's book in print. I haven't a book, but I've got a dollar or two, and if you'll put o

w a roseate picture,"

he Idiot, "and the pa

ed and sixty-seven ballads, four hundred and twenty-three couplets, eighty-nine rondeaus

that encouragement from you I feel warrante