I had already met most of the poets of my geion. I had said, soon after the publication of The Wanderings of Usheen, to the editor of a series of shilling reprints, who had set me to pile tales of the Irish fairies, I am growing jealous of other poets, and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each others triumph. He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Er Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and inal poems that have often moved me greatly though I think of no one else who has read them. He was seven ht years older than myself and through his work as editor knew everybody who would pile a book for seven ht pounds. Between us we fouhe Rhymers Club which for some years was to meet every night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an a eating house irand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Er Dowson, Victor Plarr, Er Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallie. W. Rolleston, Selwyn Image and two men of an eion, Edwin Ellis and John Todhunter, came stantly for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home less stantly, while William Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came o never joined; and sometimes, if we met in a private house, which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to the Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. Olive Schreiner, he said oo me, is staying in the East End because that is the only place where people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in the West End because nothing in life is me but the mask.
We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, We had sud such ideas, sud such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us sud such aims, as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters; and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said the same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had goo the art school instead of a uy.
Yet even if I had goo a uy, and learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English culture, all that great erudition which, once accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a radition. Lag suffit reisedpret I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well?born, and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ary; and that there was no help for it, seeing that my try was not born at all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were, like some race of birds pelled to spend the time, needed for the making of the , in argument as to the venienoss and twig and li. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the one vi shared by all the younger men, but principally by Johnson and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, position to all