The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of ungenteel birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of their writing. To the polite society of their day--outsiders to a man. XL A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT DEAR SIR,-- Many thanks for the volume of your poems you have sent me. Though I had never seen any of your compositions before, they are already old friends--that is, I like them but I see through them. Yours cordially, Etc. XLI FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE As in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional crises which he himself wants to restate. The fake is often made worse by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is policeman. Most poets visit Tom Tiddler’s ground now and then, but the wise ones melt down the stolen coin and impress it with their own “character.” There is a great deal of difference between fake poetry and ordinary bad poetry. The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, addressing the good poets on behalf of the bad poets (though he was really on the other side):-- We are the homeless even as you, Who hope but never can begin. Our hearts are wounded through and through Like yours, but our hearts bleed within; We too make music but our tones Scape not the barrier of our bones.