Lying by one rainy day in Missouri to rest after quite a long
exploration--first trying a big volume I found there of "Milton, Young,
Gray, Beattie and Collins," but giving it up for a bad job--enjoying
however for awhile, as often before, the reading of Walter Scott's
poems, "Lay of the Last Minstrel," "Marmion," and so on--I stopp'd and
laid down the book, and ponder'd the thought of a poetry that should in
due time express and supply the teeming region I was in the midst
of, and have briefly touch'd upon. One's mind needs but a moment's
deliberation anywhere in the United States to see clearly enough that
all the prevalent book and library poets, either as imported from
Great Britain, or follow'd and _doppel-gang'd_ here, are foreign to our
States, copiously as they are read by us all. But to fully understand
not only how absolutely in opposition to our times and lands, and how
little and cramp'd, and what anachronisms and absurdities many of their
pages are, for American purposes, one must dwell or travel awhile in
Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, and get rapport with their people and
country.
Will the day ever come--no matter how long deferr'd--when those
models and lay-figures from the British islands--and even the precious
traditions of the classics--will be reminiscences, studies only? The
pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange
mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and
of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky
mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers--will they ever
appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art? (I
sometimes think that even the ambition of my friend Joaquin Miller to
put them in, and illustrate them, places him ahead of the whole crowd.)
Not long ago I was down New York bay, on a steamer, watching the sunset
over the dark green heights of Navesink, and viewing all that inimitable
spread of shore, shipping and sea, around Sandy Hook. But an intervening
week or two, and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of the Spanish
peaks. In the more than two thousand miles between, though of infinite
and paradoxical variety, a curious and absolute fusion is doubtless
steadily annealing, compacting, identifying all. But subtler and wider
and more solid, (to produce such compaction,) than the laws of the
States, or the common ground of Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the
grim welding of our national wars, or the steel ties of railroads,
or all the kneading and fusing processes of our material and business
history, past or present, would in my opinion be a great throbbing,
vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature, in
constructing which the Plains, the Prairies, and the Mississippi river,
with the demesnes of its varied and ample valley, should be the concrete
background, and America's humanity, passions, struggles, hopes, there
and now--an _eclaircissement_ as it is and is to be, on the stage of
the New World, of all Time's hitherto drama of war, romance and
evolution--should furnish the lambent fire, the ideal.