No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes the other kind insipid. Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, and before long they disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in public libraries.
Weak fiction goes the same way.
But a good deal of very bad prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it is positively nothing. He led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Perhaps it is better for the weak to imitate than to try to be original.