The writing of poetry was never to him a serious occupation. He composed with abandon when the mood was on him, he seldom revised, and he cared little for the finished product save as it might please his friends. One finds many evidences in his work that he learned his art from Burns, whom he considered the greatest poet the world had ever produced. He had saturated himself too with the English balladists and the genuine old poets of the early periods. The poetry of his own time angered him. In "The Hysteriad" (_Scribner's_, 16:759) he satirizes with bitterness the contemporary product. "A poem of the period," he said, "or a periodical poem, is a thing that is altogether emotional, and is not intended to convey any idea in particular." To him poetry meant something not esoteric and idealized, but something that lay very close to the life of every day, something redolent of humanity, like Burns's songs. He maintained that his own inspiration had come not at all from other poets, but from actual contact with the material that he made use of. His own words concerning the composition of his first poem have a peculiar value. They are a part of the history of the period: You know I am something of a banjoist. Well, one evening I was sitting in our back yard in old Mississippi "twanging" on the banjo, when I heard the missis--our colored domestic, an old darkey of the Aunt Dinah pattern--singing one of the outlandish camp-meeting hymns of which the race is so fond. She was an extremely "'ligious" character and, although seized with the impulse to do so, I hesitated to take up the tune and finish it. I did so, however, in the dialect I have adopted, and which I then thought and still think is in strict conformity to their use of it, I proceeded, as one inspired, to compose verse after verse of the most absurd, extravagant, and, to her, irreverent rime ever before invented, all the while accompanying it on the banjo and imitating the fashion of the plantation negro.... I was then about sixteen and as I had soon after a like inclination to versify, was myself pleased with the performance, and it was accepted by a publisher, I have continued to work the vein indefinitely.[129]