What I say has its main bearing on imaginative literature, especially poetry.

Poetry, largely consider’d, is an evolution, sending out improved and ever-expanded types—in one sense, the past, even the best of it, necessarily giving place, and dying out. The poetry of other lands lies in the past—what they have been. Pass’d! pass’d! for us, forever pass’d, that once so mighty world—embroider’d, dazzling, foreign world—now void, inanimate, phantom world, pass’d to its charnel vault.

In the verse of all those undoubtedly great writers, Shakespeare just as much as the rest, there is the air which to America is the air of death. Shakespeare sang the past, stands entirely for the mighty aesthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and democratic, the sceptres of the future. He is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism in literature—there is much in him ever offensive to democracy—the democratic requirements are insulted on every page.

America listens to no poems in which common humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging superiors. Its poetry must be spiritual and democratic. The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. They cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fix’d in the present, launch’d to the endless future. America is the region of the future, and the poetry of America lies in the future—what these states and their coming men and women are certainly to be.

It is certainly time for America to begin this readjustment in the scope and basic point of view of verse; for everything else has changed. Few appreciate the moral revolutions, our age, which have been profounder far than the material or inventive or war-produced ones. For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable.

Yet in the name of these states shall I scorn the antique?
The shadowy procession is not a meagre one, and the standard not a low one,
How little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!
At present, and doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us.

Of many debts incalculable, haply our New World’s chiefest debt is to old poems, a mass of foreign nutriment, giving identity to the stages arrived at by aggregate humanity, and the conclusions assumed in its progressive and varied civilizations.
Strictly speaking, all thoughts are old. How small were the best thoughts, poems, and conclusions, except for a certain invariable resemblance and uniform standard in the final thoughts, theology, poems, etc., of all nations, all civilizations, all centuries and times.
So we do not blame thee elder world, nor really separate ourselves from thee. (Would the son separate himself from the father?) We are to accept those and every other literary and poetic thing from beyond the seas, thankfully, as studies, exercises.

What we have to do today is not to create only, or found only,
But also to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
To receive them cheerfully, accepting all—
Not necessarily to mould ourselves or our literature upon them,
But, curiously prepared for by them, to work over and present again in our own growths, the children of the antique;
To utter the same old human critter,
A queer, queer race, of novel fashion,
And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,
Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearnings the same;
To attain fuller, more definite comparisons, warnings,
And the insight to ourselves, our own present, and our own far grander, different, future history, religion, social customs, etc.; 
To give them ensemble, and a modern American and democratic physiognomy,
Our own identity, average, limitless, free, in democratic, American, modern, and scientific conditions;
To bring the materials and outline the architecture of a more complete, more advanced, idiosyncratic, masterful, Western personality.

The stamp of entire and finish’d greatness to any nation, to the American republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do. America must extricate itself from even the greatest models of the past—not ours originally; ours, however, by inheritance—and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only.

Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work;
America, with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand and word, ascending,
Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent with their music,
Well pleased, accepting all, 
Thou enterest at thy entrance porch;
Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia, cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
The American poets are to enclose old and new.

It would be best not at all to bother with arguments against the foreign models, but just go on supplying American models. But it would seem as if our civilization was doing all it could to get away from all that signified of inherent nativities—of what at best belongs to us all! The Americans are poetry-loving people. They import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere. Yet with, I sometimes think, the richest masses of material ever afforded a nation—more variegated, and on a larger scale—the first sign of proportionate, native, imaginative soul, and first-class works to match, is so far wanting.

Democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence. The infant genius of American poetic expression lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur’d by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges. 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. A literary class in America always strikes me with a laugh or with nausea—it does not belong here. We should not have professional art in a republic. It seems anti to the people—a threat offered our dearest ideals. Really great poetry is always the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish’d and select few.

The expresser of the common themes—of the little songs of the masses—perhaps will always have some vogue among average readers. Such a man is always in order—could not be dispensed with—maintains a popular conventional pertinency. But the copious dribble, either of our little or well-known rhymesters—these endless and wordy chatterers, with many a squeak, (in metre choice,) from Boston, New York, Philadelphia—does not fulfil, in any respect, the needs and august occasions of this land.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing—worst of all, writing poetry. But most modern poems are but larger or smaller lumps of sugar, or slices of toothsome sweet cake—there is no man in them—no virility there. None of them possess or even respect the simple, elemental, first-hand, Homeric qualities which lie secure at the base of all real work—of all genuine expression.
Damn sweetness and light! We have already too much of it! It’d be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers were sent off somewhere with toolchests to do some honest work.

Our fundamental want today in the United States is of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known—not for embroiderers, (there will always be plenty of embroiderers, I welcome them also,) but for the fibre of things and for inherent men and women.

Of all races and eras these states with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets. Their presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. By great bards only can series of peoples and states be fused into the compact organism of one nation.
A new literature, perhaps a new metaphysics, certainly a new poetry, are to be the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American democracy. Democracy is to be aided, secured, indirectly, but surely, by the literatus, in his works shaping, for individual or aggregate democracy, a great passionate body, in and along with which goes a great masterful spirit.

I, now, for one, promulge, the perhaps distant but still delightful prospect, (for our children, if not in our own day,) of delivering America from the thin, moribund, and watery, but appallingly extensive nuisance of conventional poetry—by putting something really alive and substantial in its place—a native expression-spirit for these states, self-contain’d; different from others, more expansive, more rich and free; a sane, sweet, autochthonous national poetry.

In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these states—a great native literature headed with a poetry stronger and sweeter than any yet, to give something to our literature which will be our own, finding the entire fountains of its birth and growth in our country.

America needs her own poems in her own body and spirit different from all hitherto—freer, more muscular, comprehending more and unspeakably grander. America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and cosmical, as she is herself—truly having which, she will understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and, swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin’d and illuming, become a full-form’d world, and divine mother not only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through time.

If there can be any such thing as a cosmic, modern, and original song, America needs it, and is worthy of it. Our own song, free, joyous, and masterful. Our own music, raised on the soil, carrying with it all the subtle analogies of our own associations—broad with the broad continental scale of the New World and full of the varied products of its varied soils—composite—comprehensively religious—democratic. Indeed I sometimes think it alone is to define the Union, to give it artistic character, spirituality, dignity.

The expression of the American poet is to be transcendant and new. Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launch’d forth in the firmament that is, and is to be, America.
It almost seems as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the democratic masses never was.

The poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,)
We shall cease shamming and be what we really are.
American writers are to show far more freedom in the use of words,
Strong and sweet shall their tongues be,
Flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.
They shall report nature, laws, physiology, and happiness,
They shall fully enjoy materialism and the sight of products, 
They shall not be careful of riches and privilege, they shall be riches and privilege,
They shall illustrate democracy and the cosmos—they shall be cosmos.

The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors ,
Of them and of their works shall emerge divine conveyers, to convey gospels,
In the future of these states must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death,
Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be convey’d.

The conditions of the present—needs, dangers, prejudices, and the like—are the perfect conditions for wording the future with undissuadable words;
The time is at hand when inherent literature will be a main part of these states,
As general and real as steam-power, iron, corn, beef, fish,
To be evidenced by original authors and poets to come,
By American personalities, plenty of them, male and female, traversing the states,
To be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female,
To give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America—
Land of lands and bards to corroborate!

Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these states?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learn’d the politics, geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and  objects?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems and processes of democracy?

What is this you bring my America?
Is it uniform with my country? does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face?
Have real employments contributed to it?
What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities?
Is it not something that has been better told or done before? is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?
Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen, each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist, infidel, who has ever ask’d anything of America?
What mocking and scornful negligence?
The track strew’d with the dust of skeletons,
By the roadside others disdainfully toss’d.

The poets I would have must be permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief,
Breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision,
Affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage,
An engrossing power in the state, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions,
Radiating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners,
Accomplishing what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplish’d.

We then listen with accumulated eagerness for those mouths that can make the vaults of America ring here today—those who will not only touch our case, but embody it and all that belongs to it.  Come nigh them awhile and though they neither speak or advise you shall learn the faithful American lesson—a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the states, without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum.

I demand orbic bards, with unconditional, uncompromising sway,
Bards of the peaceful inventions,
Bards of the great idea, the voice and exposition of liberty,
To hold up the banner of inalienable rights.
Bards for my own land only I invoke,
Till they strike up marches henceforth triumphant and onward,
Counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America,
Dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, measureless corruption in politics, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die—
After all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class poets are for.

Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west!
Minstrels latent on the prairies!
You by my charm I invoke.
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Bards with songs as from burning coals, or the lightning’s fork’d stripes!
Bards towering like hills,
Bards tallying the ocean’s roar, and the swooping eagle’s scream!
O sweep on! sweep on!

The poet is a recruiter, he goes forth beating the drum—0, who will not join his troop?
An audience of Americans, would they not soon learn to like a hidden sense, a sense only just indicated,
As just to indicate what is meant and let the audience find it out for themselves?

America justifies itself, give it time,
If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there is no fear of mistake,
Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them.
The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it—if the one is true the other is true.

But I have thought that both in patriotism and song we have adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold the world. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? the whole race?
Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, a race of such poets will silently, surely arise—varied, yet one in soul—nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger prophets—to meet and penetrate woes, as shafts of light the darkness?

My dearest dream is for an internationality of poems and poets, binding the lands of the earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy. It must run through entire humanity twining all lands like a divine thread, stringing all beads, pebbles, or gold; and, like God’s dynamics and sunshine, illustrating all and having reference to all. Through the divinity of themselves shall the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things.

I have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity grows, is friendship. Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the modern may prove to be a signal growth of joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind.
I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose, new formulas—international poems. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth. Let us, audacious, start it.

NEXT: THE AMERICANS OF THE FUTURE

 

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