It is often detrimental to the proper understanding of a poet when his most strenuous years of intellectual exploration happen to be the least well documented, and particularly so when that poet, in despair over the lack of recognition accorded him by his contemporaries, makes his appeal over their heads directly to the judgement of posterity; and yet even if Paul Ernst, “like Sir Candy Rackrent in the tale”, had survived his own wake and overheard the judgement of posterity, or even if he had suspected that the succeeding generation of critics, trained in the arts of psychological dissection, would take exaggerated interest in his mental processes rather than in his ultimate poetic assertions, it is doubtful whether he would have willed it otherwise. For indeed one of the more conspicuous results of the greatest crisis in his own life and thought —between, let us say, 1897 and 1900—was a strong aversion to the application of any kind of psychological analysis to matters of literature.