The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, by
Wallace Irwin
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Title: The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum
Author: Wallace Irwin
Release Date: December, 2003 [EBook #4756]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE LOVE
SONNETS OF A HOODLUM ***
This etext was produced by David A. Schwan, [email protected]
.
The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum
by Wallace Irwin
With an Introduction by
Gelett Burgess
Showing how Vanity is still on Deck,
& humble Virtue gets it in the
Neck!
"A Leaden Heart I wear since she forsook me."
The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum
Introduction
"Tell me, ye muses, what hath former ages
Now left succeeding times
to play upon,
And what remains unthought on by those sages

Where a new muse may try her pinion?"
So Complained Phineas Fletcher in his Purple Island as long ago as
1633. Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion
no higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has been
likened to an exquisite crystal goblet that holds one sublimely inspired
thought so perfectly that not another drop can be added without
overflow. Cast in the early Italian Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch and
Camoens, it was chased and ornamented during the Elizabethan period
by Shakespere, and filled with its most stimulating draughts of song
and love during the Victorian era by Rossetti, Browning and Meredith.
And now, in this first year of the new century, the historic cup is
refilled and tossed off in a radiant toast to Erato by Wallace Irwin.
The attribute of modernity is not given to every new age. The cogs in
the wheels of time slip back, at times. The classic revival may be
permeated with enthusiasm, but it is a second edition of an old work -

not a virile essay at expression of living thought. The later Renaissance
was but half modern in its spirit; the classic period of the eighteenth
century in England was half ancient in its mood. But the twentieth
century breaks with a new promise of emancipation to English
Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional
style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute.
This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its
rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a
verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is
strong enough to assault the very syntax of our Anglo-Saxon tongue.[*]
Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause
against the utilitarian economy of Prose. They both stand for lavish
luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of
thought. It is their boast to make two words bloom where one grew
before. Both garb themselves in Metaphor, and the only complaint of
the captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style,
Slang dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre
caprices, that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste.
But this odium given to Slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In
other days, before the language was crystallized into the idiom and
verbiage of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammeled. Indeed, a
cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the
rebellious fancies of our modern colloquial talk. Mr. Irwin's sonnets
may be taken as an indication of this revolt, and how nearly they
approach the incisive phrases of the seventeenth century may easily be
shown in a few exemplars. For instance, in Sonnet XX, "You're the real
tan bark!" we have a close parallel in Johnson's Volpone, or The Fox:
"Fellows of outside and mere bark!"
And this instance is an equally good illustration also of that curious
process which, in the English language,