I have always been best pleased with what seems most to disregard literariness, delicacy, refinement, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis—all of them things which threaten to overwhelm us.

I have been most successful with young people, the just-comers, and least successful with the full done and overdone literary masters of ceremony. The author class is a priest class with esoteric doctrines. I do not easily mix with it—I refuse to condone it.  Literature to these gentlemen is a parlor in which no person is to be welcomed unless he come attired in dress coat and observing the approved decorums.

I do not value literature as a profession. It is a means to an end; I never attribute any other significance to it. I am not literary; it is as a man that I should wish to be accepted, if at all. It is perhaps only because I was brought up a printer and worked during my early years as a newspaper and magazine writer that I have put my expression in typographical form and made a regular book of it. 

My worst struggle was against the literariness of the age. I hate literature. Literature, with all its proud haughtiness, must come down. Literary men like portions, beauties, what they would call gems—do not see more. But literature can’t express everything. There is an effervescence—an atmosphere that can’t be caught. 

The trouble with most poems is that they are nothing but poems,
All poetry, all literary, not in any way human.
Literary men learn so little from life—
Don’t most men who write write without knowing life,
Write all over the surface of the earth, never dig a foot into the ground?
What is authorship in itself if you cart it away from the main stream of life?
It is starved, starved,
It is a dead limb off the tree,
It is the unquickened seed in the ground. 

The highest art is not to express art, but to communicate life,
To me that means oh! so much—to come straight from life.
In most of us I think writing gets to be a disease,
We scribble, scribble, scribble—eternally scribble,
And while we scribble we neglect life;
God looks on—it turns his stomach.

I expect the day to come when literariness, polish, grammaticalism, all that, will be scattered to the winds—routed and damned, by some daring spirit, some bold, bold personality, full of defiance, straight in communication with the elemental forces.
Literature is only valuable in the measure of the passion—the blood and muscle—with which it is invested, which lies concealed and active in it. The highest place would seem to demand first of all passion, warmth—not artistic power, deftness of technique, primarily, but human passion.

First to me comes the people, and their typical shape and their attitudes, then the divine minor, literature. If a fellow is to write poetry the secret is—get in touch with humanity—know what the people are thinking about—retire to the very deepest sources of life—back, back, till there is no further point to retire to.

I like to get all my relations with people personal, human. I hate to think I can possibly excite any professional feeling in another. I find nothing in literature that is valuable simply for its professional quality. The point is, not to prove your possession of a style, but to move the people along the line of their nobler impulses. The style will readily enough accommodate itself.
Literature is big only in one way—when used as an aid in the growth of the humanities—a furthering of the cause of the masses—a means whereby men may be revealed to each other as brothers.

Has it never occurred to anyone that the real tests applicable to a book lie entirely outside of literary tests? Every poem of anything must enclose and express the spirituality and joyousness of that thing. This is the last, profoundest measure and test.

No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism. They must be seen with reference to eligibility to express world-meanings rather than literary prettiness. As, within the purposes of the cosmos, there is a moral purpose certainly underlying all—so in the product of the greatest literatus.

 “Leaves of Grass” is the product of that sense of cosmical beauty, of which even literature is but a fraction, and of the largest universal law and play of things—the play of law in the outside world and the play of passion and spirit in the human soul—to give full utterance to power, often inexplicable, in the universe and in man.

In literature we shall roam lost without redemption, except we seek ensemble through it.

NEXT: HINTS, SUGGESTIONS, INDIRECTION

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