The true American  holds in reserve, forever, a stern power, which though it lie asleep for scores and fifties of years because no occasion compels it, must never be given up altogether. It is the iron arm of rebellion. To supersede they who are in power, when it is the pleasure of these states, full provision is made, and I say the time has arrived to use it with a strong hand.

Let those who sleep be waked! let everyone answer! let none evade!
With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots, we all duly awake—
The future of the states I harbinge glad and sublime.

The people will do some new things for America—hardly this year—the soil is not yet sufficiently prepared—but some year, finally they revolt—are up in arms—raise hell. Then look out! Then the hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate itself, to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar—in the transactions between employers and employ’d persons, in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy—and revolutionizing them.
If that is revolution I am a revolutionist. But the word hardly applies. I don’t expect an upset—I expect a growth, evolution. I announce as a glory of these states, that they respectfully listen to propositions, reforms, fresh views and doctrines, from successions of men and women, each age with its own growth.

The true nationality of the states, the genuine Union, when we come to a mortal crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects—but the fervid and tremendous idea, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power.

Our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic-development products, and in a certain highly deceptive, superficial, popular intellectuality, is so far an almost complete failure in its social aspects, in any superb, general-personal character, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results.

America is at present without definite heroic identity in form and purpose or organization, which can only come by native schools of great ideas—religion, poets, literature—and will surely come.
The true revolutions are of the interior life, and of the arts, of which the vulgar material and political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments by an orchestra.

A modern image-making creation is indispensable to fuse and surmount the modern political and scientific creations, and to define and express America, comprehending and effusing for the men and women of the states, what is universal, native, common to all.

Dead poets, philosophers, priests, artists, long since on other shores,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable,
Think nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves.

In religion and poetry the old Asiatic land dominates to this day,
And will until the world shall rise to peaks still higher than the Hebrew Bible, the Ionian Iliad, and the great epics of India.
There is something in those sayings and doings that effuses directly from the soul,
They do not send it out at second hand, but fresh and alive.

Yet regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I take my place with my own day here.
We see London, Paris, Italy—second-hand here, where they do not belong,
We are now floating on dead water in literature, politics, theology, even science,
Resting on our oars, criticising, resuming,
Chattering a good deal, simply an absorber, an automatic listener,
With no eye, ear, arm, heart, our own.

But the American is too smart, acute, sensible, to be totally entrapped;
Someday he will shake the whole burden off.
Our road is our own, to recast poems, churches, art,
Recast, maybe discard them, end them,
Maybe their work is done, who knows?

America means not at all a second edition, an adaptation of Europe—not content with a new theory and practice of politics only—but above its politics, and more important than they, inaugurating new and infinitely more generous and comprehensive theories of sociology, literature, religion, and comradeship.

Sail, sail thy best, ship of democracy,
The essence of the bygone time contain’d in thee,
Its poems, churches, arts, unwitting to themselves, destined with reference to thee,
Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee,
And royal feudal Europe sails with thee,
The antecedent nations sink or swim with thee—
Thou but the apples, long, long, long a-growing,
The fruit of all the old ripening today in thee.

Brain of the New World, what a task is thine,
To formulate the modern out of thyself,
Mind-formulas fitted for thee, real and sane and large as thee,
Mounting higher, diving deeper than we knew.

All the tendency seems to be to a surrender to the sense of the presence of materials, riches. But it will not be enough to say that no nation ever achiev’d materialistic, political and money-making successes, with general physical comfort, as fully as the United States of America are today achieving them. I know very well that those are the indispensable foundations—the sine qua non of moral and heroic fruitions to come. But if those pre-successes were all—if they ended at that—if nothing more were yielded than so far appears, a gross materialistic prosperity only—America, tried by subtlest tests, were a failure—has not advanced the standard of humanity a bit further than other nations. Or, in plain terms, has but inherited and enjoy’d the results of ordinary claims and preceding ages.

So in a time when we are beset everywhere by what is called progress—the spirit of progress, civilization, railroads, machinery—it may be well to have men to strike the alarm, to warn us not to go too far. Think not our chant, our show, merely for products gross or lucre, to become a conqueror nation, or to achieve the glory of mere military, or diplomatic, or commercial superiority. The disposition to keep some background in goods, money, it has its place, but no first place—no superior place.

The meanings and maturer purposes of these states are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million. The United States have secured the requisite bases, and must now proceed to build upon them; not to disdain goods, yet not to be ruled by them—not to dawdle forever in parlors, with luxury, show. We must find surer foundations.

The only foundation and sine qua non of popular improvement and democracy are worldly and material success established first, spreading and interweaving everywhere—these but the means, the implements. Then only, but surely for the masses, will come spiritual cultivation—moral wealth and civilization—until which the proudest material civilization must remain in vain.

Out of the peerless grandeur of the modern,
A freer, vast, electric world to be constructed here,
As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice—
First the duties of today, the lessons of the concrete,
Wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty,
Whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps,
The great esthetic, moral, scientific future,
The true New World, the world of orbic science, morals, literatures to come,
The solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars.

Soon it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, etc., imperatively necessitate something beyond—namely, the sane, eternal, moral and spiritual-aesthetic elements. Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the state cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements; they will finally make the blood and the brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes.
We cannot have even that realization on any less terms than the price we are now paying for it. The extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are parts of amelioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand.

But the real and permanent grandeur of these states must be their religion,
A great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one.
I say that there is today little, perhaps no, religion—it is a matter of dress only—
Really, what has America to do with all this mummery of prayer and rituals and the rant of exhorters and priests?
The future religion of America must arise, outstripping all others, fit for live men,
No mean, fossil, second-hand, or atheistic religion will do.

The main test is:
What reference has it to the people?
Free children of the states, aspiring to know and do greater things,
Sweeping on with the rest—with this universe, this globe, its mysterious miracles,
Inaugurating a New World, mental and spiritual, as much as any,
Rising glittering amid new combinations,
More copious, more turbulent than earth’s preceding times.

I say that a religion which raises its house aloof, an exile, from those vast ranges of life in the great cities—which, to them, enters not, nor comprehends them, nor they it—is no religion for these athletic and living states.

Religion needs rare combinations—sublime faculties, ecstatic, with inherent vision,
The aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers, fit for us,
National expressers, musicians, singers, artists, unborn yet, but certain.

There can be no salvation for these states without innovators, without free tongues, and ears willing to hear the tongues. Of the traits of the brotherhood of writers, musicians, inventors, and artists—equals and mixers with the rest, springing from all trades and employments, from sailors and landsmen, from the city and the country—nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms, making the vaunted past but a support to their feet and so treading it under their feet. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others—you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself.

A picture of America as an immortal mother,
A grand, sane, towering, seated mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of time,
Surrounded by all her children, young and old,
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons.
She is neither youthful nor aged,
She is beautiful beyond the beauty of virginity—
Make her picture, painters! And you, her statue, sculptors!
Try, age after age, till you achieve it!
(I don’t think the American genius has so far run into effective sculptural work.)

While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for thee, dear mother,
It is for thee in thy moral wealth and civilization,
For the soul in thee, electric, spiritual!
Thee in thy all-supplying, all-enclosing worship,
Thee in no single bible, saviour, merely,
Thy bibles incessant within thyself, equal to any, divine as any,
Thy saviours countless, latent within thyself,
Thy resplendent coming literati, thy full-lung’d orators, thy sacerdotal bards, cosmic savants—
A sublime and serious religious democracy sternly taking command.

Democracy has been hurried on through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative worthy of it anywhere upon the earth.
The true growth-characteristics of the democracy of the New World are henceforth to radiate in superior literary, artistic, and religious expressions, far more than in its republican forms—all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless.

O for mightier broods of orators, artists, and singers!
You must become a force in the state, and a real and great force,
Just as real and great as the president and congress—greater than they,
To make a superb American intellect and character in any or all the states,
A mighty breed of male and female, represented no longer in their legislatures and executives,
But represented better by their successions of poets, orators, musicians, philosophers.

I have dream’d out, hinted already—a little or a larger band—a band of brave and true, unprecedented yet—arm’d and equipt at every point—the members separated, it may be, by different dates and states, or south, or north, or east, or west—a year, a century here, and other centuries there—but always one, compact in soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, inspired achievers in all art—a new, undying order, dynasty, from age to age transmitted—to produce such a public that great performances will not be received with noisy applause but as matters of course—poets, musicians, serene brotherhood of philosophers, whom the rest of the world shall not deny, because their greatness shall accept the rest of the world as much as any, and incorporate it and send back all that it has sent to them with interest more than a thousand fold.

I see them already, there they stand—
Music, poems, dictionaries, biographies, essays—
How complete, how interfused, each easy in its place, no one supersedes the rest.
They seem to me like nature at last,
They seem to me like the sky with clouds, like trees with rustling leaves,
Like stretching waters with ships sailing on in the distance,
They seem to me at last as good as animals and as the rocks, earth, and weeds;
America has given rise to them, and I have also.

O centuries, centuries yet ahead! Here must arise the great poets and orators that all new centuries continually wait for. It seems to me called for to inaugurate a revolution in American oratory, to lead America—to quell America with a great tongue. A great leading representative man, with perfect power, perfect confidence in his power, persevering, ranging up and down the states; the athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners—such a man or woman, above all things, would give it a fair start.

But in the civilization of today it is undeniable that, over all the arts, literature dominates. The highest of art’s forms, namely, the literary form, serves beyond all. The great literature penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes at will.

Where in American literature is the first show of America?
Where, on her own soil, do we see, in any faithful, highest, proud expression, America herself?
I sometimes question whether she has a corner in her own house.
Who of all these swarms of writers and speakers courageously steps up to celebrate the savage and free genius of these states?
I know not one. Days, years, pass by. They yet sleep.
(The story writers do not as a rule attract me. They do not deal in elements; they deal only in pieces of things, in fragments broken off, in detached episodes.)

What is to be done is to withdraw from precedents, and be directed to men and women. What we want above all—what we finally must and will insist upon in the future—actual men and women—living, breathing, hoping, aspiring books—books that so grow out of personality, magnificence of undivided endowment, as themselves to become such persons, stand justly in their names.

Yet all current nourishments to literature serve,
Of authors and editors, there are thousands, each one building his or her step to the stairs by which giants shall mount,
Sure as materialism, sure as the soul,
Shall arise in this land the literature that shall be eligible to embody not a few phases of life only, but all known and conceivable phases of life,
And comprehend all men and women and all climates and states.
Literature this of the largest friendship, and the vitalest pride,
And the truest freedom and practical equality,
Literature the roomiest and least cramped because it shall arise from the broadest geography,
The most diverse because it shall absorb the greatest diversity,
Literature of all living things and of the past and future.

NEXT: AMERICAN POETRY

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