Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1889 — Cruelty to a Poet. [ARTICLE]

Cruelty to a Poet.

The suit for divorce instituted by Mr. Earl Marble, of San Franci*o, against bis wife, of Boston, on the ground of mental cruelty, will be watched with thrillful interest by all who hol'd literature dear. In his complaint Mr. Marble lets forth that # he is a poet. His lyrics have adorned the Century Magazine and made the pages of the Atlantic Monthly musical and romantic. While pursuing his rhythmic avocation, he avers, it was Mrs. Marble’s iconoclastic habit to stride up and down his study, interrupt his flow of thoughts with expostulations pitched in a shrill and earpiercing key, and on bitter cold nights she would invade his shivering dreams, drag the blankets from the bed and compel him both to listen to what she had to say and to dance away tne sad, dark hours in a blue and loathsome chill. All this, he delares, has perturbed his fancy, made his imagination bilious, and impaired his sense of euphony to a degree little short of absolute ruin, and he therefore prays fo!r relief. This is doubtless a most just cause. The producers of magazine songs should be entitled to protection while incubating, and the truly loving and appreciative wife of a poet would comb his hair with a piano-stool while he is soulfully trying to make “Bismarck rhyme with “concatenation” or make hideous his night of sleepless toil when he is endeavoring to compress nineteen great and globular thoughts of spring into a triolet for which he only expects to receive $3. The public must have poetry, and marriage must not be allowed to hamper its flow. New laws should at once be passed exempting poets from the family tie, and no fears that the change could possibly make magazine verse worse than it has been and is could for a moment be honestly entertained. —New York World.