To give judgment on real poems, one needs an account of the poet himself. The world studies the book, but poems of the first class, (poems of the depth, as distinguished from those of the surface,) are to be sternly tallied with the poets themselves—the living original—and tried by them and their lives. Poems and materials of poems shall come from their lives; all poems, or any other expressions of literature, that do not tally with their writer’s actual life and knowledge, are lies. 

The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul. That which is not in you cannot appear in your writing. There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe, by which you can have in your writing qualities that you do not honestly entertain in yourself.
The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of humanity and nature—the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects.

Character makes words; words follow character; voices follow character,
What are verses beyond the flowing character you could have?
Or beyond beautiful manners and behavior?
The perfect poet must be unimpeachable in manner as well as matter.

Sanity and ensemble characterize the great master,
Latent, in a great user of words, must be all passions, crimes, trades, animals, stars, God, sex, the past, might, space, and the like.
His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
He has about him the flavor of woods, grass, fences, roads,
He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with northern transparent ice,
Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,
Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the fish-hawk, mockingbird, night-heron, and eagle.

Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality—these are parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his mother’s womb and from her birth out of her mother’s.
Pride and sympathy—the inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close with both and they are vital in his style and thoughts.

The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet,
Soul of love and tongue of fire!
He is no irresolute or suspicious lover—he is sure,
All else seems to burn up under his fierce affection for persons. 
His love above all love has leisure and expanse—he leaves room ahead of himself,
Right and left he flings his arms, drawing men and women with undeniable love to his close embrace,
The person he favors by day or sleeps with at night is blessed.

In the sight of the daybreak or a scene of the winter woods or the presence of children playing or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman, he is rapport with all expected from heaven or from the highest. The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of the sea than he is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty.

The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt.
He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune. He shows how independent one may be of fortune—how triumphant over fate.

The master is complete in himself; nothing can jar him,
Suffering and darkness cannot, death and fear cannot,
To him complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth—
He saw them buried.
What baulks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy,
His very aches are ecstasy,
His laugh real music, that you couldn’t get from fiddles or pianos,
And when he laughs heartily, impossible not to think of the sunshine.

The great poet is the free channel of himself; the touch of him tells in action,
Whom he takes, he takes with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattained.
Now he has passed that way see after him!
There is not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy or cunning or exclusiveness,
Or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell,
And no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin— 
Part of the test of a great literatus shall be the absence in him of the idea of the covert, the lurid, the maleficent, the devil, hell, natural depravity, and the like.

The greatest poet, unclosed to good and evil, does not moralize or make applications of morals,
Accepts evil as well as good, ignorance as well as erudition.
He absorbs the identity of others and the experiences of others,
But he presses them all through the powerful press of himself,
The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see themselves in the ways of him, he strangely transmutes them,
They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown.

In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable,
Liberty never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets.
They are the voice and exposition of liberty,
They out of ages are worthy the grand idea,
To them it is confided and they must sustain it.

The bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies despots,
The turn of his neck, the sound of his feet, the motions of his wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other.
Where others see a slave, a pariah, an emptier of privies,
The poet beholds what, when the days of the soul are accomplished, shall be peer of God.

The master sees greatness and health in being part of the mass,
Accepts foreign-born materials as well as home-born,
Where others are scornfully silent at some steerage passenger from a foreign land,
The poet says, My brother! good day!
And to the great king, How are you, friend?
And both understand him and know that his speech is right.

Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere,
He walks with perfect ease among a congress of kings,
And one king says to another, Here is our equal, a prince whom we knew not before, appearing and new.

The poet’s welcome is universal,
The flow of beauty is not more welcome or universal than he is.
Nothing for anyone but what is for him,
Having room for far and near, near and far are for him,
The ships in the offing, the perpetual shows and marches on land, are for him if they are for anybody.

Toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten all,
Him all wait for, him all yield up to,
Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves as amid light,
Him they immerse and he immerses them.
Whatever the season or place, he may go freshly and gently and safely by day or by night,
None refuse, all attend, looking always toward the poet,
He has the pass-key of hearts,
To him the response of the prying of hands on the knobs.

Whoever he looks at in the traveler’s coffee-house claims him,
The mechanics take him for a mechanic, and the artists for an artist,
And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them,
No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has follow’d it,
No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and sisters there.

He drinks up quickly all terms, all languages and meanings,
To his curbless and bottomless powers, they be like ponds of rain water to the migrating herds of buffalo,
See! he has only passed this way, and they are drained dry.

Yet is no poet dear to a people unless he be of them and of the spirit of them,
Standing among them, built of the common stock,
A growth of the soil, the water, the climate, the age, the government, the religion, the leading characteristics.
His spirit responds to his country’s spirit,
His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit,
Incarnating this land, incarnating its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes, 
Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,
Hanging on its neck with incomparable love,
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
Attracting it body and soul to himself.
It is not that he gives his country great poems;
It is that he gives his country the spirit which makes the greatest poems and the greatest material for poems.

The presence of the greatest poet conquers,
Obedience does not master him, he masters it.
The great poet submits only to himself,
He does not stop for any regulation,
He is the president of regulation—
The soul of the poet is president of itself always.
Many trouble themselves about conforming to laws,
A great poet is followed by laws—they conform to him;
He cannot limit himself by any laws less than those universal ones of the great masters,
Which include all times, and all men and women, and the living and the dead.

The poet seems to say to the rest of the world, Shall we skylark with God?
Come, God and I are now here, what will you have of us?
Ask and maybe we will give it to you.

Doubtless, only the greatest user of words himself fully enjoys and understands himself,
As he emits himself, facts are showered over with light,
High up out of reach he stands, turning a concentrated light,
He exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond.

He finally ascends, and finishes all,
He glows a moment on the extremest verge,
He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown;
By that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years.

NEXT:  THE GREAT POET’S VOICE

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