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And so he did "Lady Clara Vere de Vere." And in Lady Clara comes "Kind Hearts = Coronets + K" ("K" being some positive number)—I had found it!

The answer to all those who ask why great poets (and especially our great poets, and especially our modern great poets) write rubbish is as old as the Higher Criticism. It is because a poet is only a man used by the gods. It is not the man himself who is the poet. He is only the reed. Those Good Poets who don't publish their Bad Verse along with their Poetry are only those who happen to be good critics and at the same time very keen on their reputation as verse-writers. All good Poets have written execrable verse, but as to who writes Poetry I will tell you: it is a god.

A lot might be written, by the way (but I will not write it), on the different kinds of bad verse put out by Good Poets. The "Kind hearts and Coronets" monstrosity is quite, quite different from Wordsworth's prose, or Corneille's dotage. Some might say that each great poet had his own kind of bad verse. It is not so. Their bad verse is not good enough to be individual. They do it in commonplace groups; and I suppose each falls into the group natural to him when the god is not blowing through the reed; or when it proves a broken reed. Thus Hugo left un-godded becomes mere rhetoric and Milton, a stately painter at the best, a tiresome tractarian at the worst—as in the theological bits of "Paradise Regained." Horace (I think—I won't look it up) said that a poet was such that however bad a line might be, you felt the poet in it. If Horace said that, or if any one said that, it isn't true. But talking of truth, "kind hearts are more than coronets" is quite true, and I can imagine that truth being put into fine verse—even into poetry, if and when the god should feel inclined ... and here I pause to praise you, Phœbus Apollo, my protector, my leader, my Capitan; but you have a way of quitting; you leave them in the Scæan Gate....