Seated in a rocking-chair in the upper story of an old high-ceilinged house in San Francisco’s “Western Addition,” a mild-looking, bespectacled woman of thirty-four was reading to a boy of eight. He followed her with an absorbed gaze as, bending her near-sighted eyes close to the book, she let her tongue roll over the lines of The Children’s Hour, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and other poems more popular in a former generation than today. Years later the lines of some of those poems—“Between the dark and the daylight,” “Grave Alice and laughing Allegra,” etc.—were to remain in the boy’s mind.

“These are all by a man named Longfellow,” said the woman, turning to the child with a smile. “He was a great poet and died a long time ago.”

The name impressed the boy—he thought of someone very tall and thin, a sort of walking two-legged pole.

“Did all great poets die a long time ago, Mamma?” asked the boy.

The woman smiled again.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think we have any Longfellow today.”

At this she sighed, ever so slightly.

Instantly a resolution formed itself in the boy’s mind. Looking up with the blissful confidence possible only to the very young, he clenched his small fists and promised, “You wait, Mamma! You wait! When I grow up, I’ll be a poet—just like Longfellow!”

The years were to pass, and the boy’s ambition to become Longfellow the Second was to be forgotten amid more exciting desires: for example, the aspiration to be the motorman of a streetcar, or, better still, a locomotive engineer. And the woman, who had only five years remaining of her busy life, was not to see the day when her eldest son was to put pen to his first crude verses. But in after years the thought was often to come to him that the poems he wrote, though hardly such as Longfellow would have produced, would have brought her an immense satisfaction.

Poetry was to mean little to the boy (whose identity the reader will have guessed) during his remaining years of childhood. You might, in fact, have judged that it never would mean anything, if you had known how he felt about certain verses he was forced to memorize at school. Of these, the only ones I still remember are those often-quoted lines of Scott,

How I detested this passage! It was enough to give me a permanent bias against Scott, and an anti-poetic impulse that might have been lifelong. Doubtless, never having been so much as a hundred miles from my birthplace, I was not ideally fitted to appreciate the sentiments of a man just returning “from a foreign strand.” Besides, perhaps my earliest bit of unconscious literary criticism was not wholly misguided—either that, or the blind spot of childhood is still with me, as I remain unable to warm to these lines.

A few years later, when I was thirteen and had the assignment of writing a ballad in High School, you would have been sure that I was a pre-destined non-poet. How I struggled with this magnum opus! all the more so as I knew no more of the principles of meter than of the laws of spherical geometry. That might not be deemed a disadvantage nowadays, when ignorance enacts its role beneath the banners of freedom, and when the writer daunted by form need but strike a pose, and proclaim the merits of formlessness. But since, in those pristine days, a ballad was expected to sound more like a ballad than like a news report, I found myself face to face with a problem, as did all my fellow students. I have no reason to suppose that I was any less unsuccessful than any of the others.

How was it then that, a mere two years later, I was making spontaneous efforts at poetry? Had this not been the beginning of a lifelong habit—a bad habit, many will say—you might consider it but that adolescent poetic burgeoning which marks so many youths of both sexes before life calls them into more sober fields. Looking back, I should say that adolescence awakens the impulses and potentialities of the deeper self; summons out of hiding profound spiritual forces that have no place in childhood. To me it is inconceivable that the reading at my mother’s knee, though encouraging an interest in poetry, could have created that interest as it was later to develop; many another child, I feel safe in assuming, has listened to similar readings, and grown up to be a good stockbroker, grain merchant, or realtor.

Even after all the years, it is easy for me to trace the source of my first attempted poem. The death of my mother, a few months after I reached thirteen, had brought me shockingly close to life’s everlasting problems; had made it inevitable that I should wonder as to the end and aim of existence—a problem that did not seem answered by religion as it had been taught to me. Then one day I read some lines by Robert Ingersoll—ringing, oratorical lines whose exact wording I no longer recall, though the general meaning is that man is a traveler between two great darknesses. And the result was that I burst forth into verse which was little more than a paraphrase of Ingersoll, though not for a moment did it occur to me that it was not original. Understanding no more of the laws of blank verse than I had known of ballad writing two years before, I set out boldly to wield one of the greatest and most difficult of the English meters. While the completed product has (fortunately) been lost, my memory retains the opening lines:

Not exactly an unusual thought, nor a distinguished expression of that thought! But like most writers, even of the most execrable trash, I had the illusion that my work was good—an illusion no doubt necessary to keep up one’s spirits if more and perhaps less incompetent work is to be produced. In any case, more work was indeed forthcoming, much more—and I wish I could be so confident as to believe most of it less incompetent. But for several years, I am sure, the greater part of it was on exactly the same level of banality and unaccomplishment. Yes, even those lines which I doted upon in my teen-aged zeal, and assumed to be on so high a poetic plane!—

I could not have known that a time would come when I would blush even to repeat this doggerel. I quote the lines now only because of the marvelous fact—and it does seem marvelous—that I should ever have thought them good. If tastes and perceptions change with age, the ways in which they change are sometimes a little saddening—saddening, at least, when we observe how mistaken the clear, pure fervor of youth may be. I am happy, in any case, to report that you would search in vain for the rest of the masterpiece about the “sunny isle of wishes”—the two quoted lines are the only two that somehow, perversely, have clung to my memory, and the written copies have gone to a deserved limbo.

Ah, long and hard, and with many turns and windings, and dips no less than rises, and devotions and heartbreaks beyond my imagining, was to be the path that led toward poetry! But this I could not have foreseen nor imagined in my sanguine, halcyon youth.

At this time I did not know any poet; and it did not occur to me that I ever could know anyone so far above the plodding, commonplace world—one of those divine creatures whom I imagined as having been born old and gray-bearded, with a great shock of grizzled, unkempt hair, blazing eyes, and perhaps long, trailing, patriarchal robes. But there came a day when I would meet a poet in the flesh. And what a disillusionment! Why, he seemed not to be beyond his twenties! And he had no beard—in fact, not even a mustache; he talked and looked like any ordinary man! And he had some unromantic name like Harold Spring—or Springer, I forget exactly which. The place of our meeting was not one of the palisades of Parnassus, but my father’s insurance office, which he had entered not with the purpose of spreading his wings, but of selling his book. In this he evidently succeeded, through what arts of salesmanship I cannot imagine, since I cannot remember my father ever investing in another book of verse, though he did have many books of other kinds. I know that the slim volume was in our possession for some time, and that I eagerly perused it, but all I can recall of the contents is that there was one poem with a rousing anapestic rhythm, in which the author, looking for a rhyme for “golden,” ingeniously enlarged “days of old” into “days of olden”—a combination that especially struck me, as I had never seen it before, just as I have never encountered it since.

“Mr. Spring,” remarked my father—or maybe it was “Springer”—“says that he is unappreciated today, but monuments will be raised to him a hundred years after he dies.” Ah, the perennial hope of so many!—I did not then realize the pathos of it; I was confident that the day would come when the name of Spring—or Springer—would be honored beside those of Keats and Tennyson.

Keats and Tennyson and Coleridge and some others, but Shelley more than any of the rest, had spun their magic about me before I was out of High School. I use the term “magic” advisedly; no other word so fully conveys the enchantment I felt, the feeling of being uplifted, illuminated, and transported to some world which was not that of our common earth of streets and houses, but was more real, more vivid, more radiant. Not only the thought and the imagery but the ring and rhythms of the lines, the mellifluousness and sonorousness of the words bewitched me. I would repeat over and over to myself passages from The Cloud, or some melodious stanza like this from To Night:

With Shelley, I would have said that “I pant for the music which is divine.” But sound effects and sorcery do not begin to express the awards I looked for in poetry; I also sought, sought with a passionate intensity, for something that may be called consolation. “Consolation for what?” you will ask. That, however, is something not to be answered as definitely as the question, “What is a brick wall?” I do not know if the experience is a general one, but I do know that for years during my adolescence I was obsessed with strange nostalgic longings, a vague sadness as for something irrecoverably lost long before, a sense of doom and of pain and parting in some far shadowy past. These feelings were with me particularly in the loneliness that fell upon me when, just before my seventeenth birthday, I went to live with an aunt and uncle in Oakland while attending the University at Berkeley. Then I would linger with relish over lines such as

and,

and,

In these serener later days, poetry of this sort has lost much of its attraction for me; it strikes me as somewhat morbid. Moreover, there was nothing in my life so tragic as to justify concentration upon bleakness, sorrow, and longing. But I mention my feelings as a psychological fact; perhaps they were merely part of the melancholy so frequently associated with youth. Sometimes, however, I have liked to speculate—though this can never, of course, be more than speculation—that what I felt was a vague upsurging of recollection: recollection of some former life of sorrow and separation, which came dimly back to me through the mists of distance before the swift current of years had drowned it.

My special consolation, when I was lonely or depressed, was a huge anthology found in few homes nowadays: Bryant’s A Library of Poetry and Song, an inheritance from my mother, a compilation which, issued in 1870, and divided into sections such as “Poems of the Affections,” “Poems of Sorrow and Adversity,” “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Peace and War,” contained hundreds of selections from the standard poets along with not a few by once popular but now little-remembered writers such as Felicia Hemans and Jean Ingelow.

Over the pages of this book I would linger for hours, making new friends and resuming acquaintance with old ones, in whom I found a companionship of thought and mood which, especially during the difficult period just after I left home, I did not meet anywhere in the human world about me.