The State Library of New South Wales published a photograph of this letter on facebook under the title 'Could this be the most brutal rejection letter of all time?'
It's certainly not the kind of letter you'd like to open and read.
But the covering letter from Mr. Meyer is lost, so we can't know if the writer of the rejection letter was reacting to something equally blunt, and we don't know which poem he sent in, but having bought a copy of the book out of curiosity, here's a specimen of Mr. Meyer's verse which is by no means untypical of those in the book.
F.C.Meyer
Lone Pine Tree
I was sitting under a tree
And feeling grand and free;
On the top, a lonely hill,
I laid then down, quite still.
Tired, weak, made me the walk-
I wished to have a talk
About the creation all around
And beauties all which had me bound.
I was sleeping in the shade
And dreaming of a crime so sad.
Somebody cried: Arrest him quickly!
I rose at one then feeling weakly.
Finished was that naughty dream
Where brains were all a meaning stream;
Kookaburras were fooling with me
And laughed; how did you like the Lone Pine Tree.
By the standards of the 1920s, and by most modern standards, this is bad writing. But rather than kick the dead man’s ghost, it’s interesting as a representative of a fashion in poetry.
Why did someone who was literate, and must have read some published poetry, think this was worth publishing? Why was he so convinced by their quality, that despite that brutal rejection, he went on to pay for the publication of his poems.
It’s a common phenomenon. There’s little money in poetry, and outside the tiny circle of readers and writers, very little public interest. Why then do so many people want to see their bad poems published? And why can’t they evaluate the quality of their own writing?
Everyone should write verse of some sort. It's a way of organising thought, or exploring a situation, or verbalising emotion. Written in a notebook and discovered after the author was dead, no one would criticise this poem. To do so would be unfair. It would be tantamount to criticising the heartfelt poem written for a loved one’s funeral.
The writer had an experience, he knew what it was, he wanted to record it. If it did what he needed it to do, then it is a 'successful poem' for him.
But offering it for for publication, he was making a claim that what he had written was worthy of a poetry-reading stranger's attention and money. He is also making the claim that these poems are available for scrutiny and criticism.
It’s clear from the way the poem is written that the author didn’t care about communicating with his potential reader. He recalls an experience without making any attempt to give the reader enough information to either understand the experience or care about it. The writer dreamt about a crime in a ‘naughty dream’, but can’t be bothered to explain what the crime was or in what way the dream was ‘naughty’.
And I don’t understand how anyone with an interest in or knowledge of poetry could think this is a good poem.
He hasn’t worked at it. Shade and sad do not rhyme. It isn’t that he hasn’t been ruthless enough at the self -editing stage, there can’t have been a self-editing stage.
Forget poetry, anyone who speaks English would recognise that ‘Tired weak made me the walk’ is bad English and it’s only justification is that it provides the rhyme on walk. 'Where brains were all a meaning stream' is not only bad English but incomprehensible.
For reasons unknown, the writer doesn’t want to tell people about his experiences, he wants to tell his friends he is a poet. He has written ‘poems’. They have been published, And that seems all that matters. Meyers was so determined to have his work in print that he covered the costs of publication, undeterred by that rejection letter.
The internet is awash with people suffering from the same disease, now able to publish their verse online. The metaphorical submission trays of editors across the globe are piled with similar verse. Badly written, cliched, derivative, self-absorbed, bizarre acts of non-communication.
Why do so many people with little or no interest in poetry and poems or demonstrable talent in writing verse want to be claim the title ‘poet’?
It's an interesting phenomenon.
That letter is blunt, and unusually rude. But the rejection is understandable.
