[Pg 13] A Poet of the People Walt Mason's Prose Rhymes are read daily by approximately ten million readers. A newspaper service sells these rhymes to two hundred newspapers with a combined daily circulation of nearly five million, and assuming that five people read each newspaper—which is the number agreed upon by publicity experts—it may be called a fair guess to say that two out of every five readers of newspapers read Mr. Mason's poems. So the ten million daily readers is a reasonably accurate estimate. No other American verse-maker has such a daily audience. Walt Mason is, therefore, the Poet Laureate of the American Democracy. He is the voice of the people. Put to a vote, Walt would be elected to the Laureate's job, if he got a vote for each reader. And, generally speaking, men would vote as they read. The reason Walt Mason has such a large number of readers is because he says what the average man is thinking so that the average man can understand it. The philosophy of Walt Mason is the philosophy of America. Briefly it is this: The fiddler must be paid; if you don't care to pay, don't dance. In the meantime—grin and bear it, because you've got to bear it, and you might as well grin. But don't try to lie out of it. The Lord hates a cheerful liar. [Pg 14] [Pg 14] This is what the American likes to hear. For that is the American idea about the way the world is put together. So he reads Walt Mason night and morning and smiles and takes his knife and cuts out the piece and carries it in his vest pocket, or her handbag. It will interest the ten million readers of Walt Mason's rhymes to know that they are written in Emporia, Kansas, in the office of the Emporia Gazette, after Mr. Mason has done a day's work as editorial writer and telegraph editor of an afternoon paper. The rhymes are written on a typewriter as rapidly as he would write if he were turning out prose. Day after day, year after year, the fountain flows. There is no poison in it. And sometimes real poetry comes welling up from this Pierian spring at 517 Merchant street, Emporia, Kansas, U. S. A. In the meantime we do not claim its medicinal properties
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