_One party says_--We arrange our lives--even the best and boldest men
and women that exist, just as much as the most limited--with reference
to what society conventionally rules and makes right. We retire to our
rooms for freedom; to undress, bathe, unloose everything in freedom.
These, and much else, would not be proper in society.
_Other party answers_--Such is the rule of society. Not always so, and
considerable exceptions still exist. However, it must be called the
general rule, sanction'd by immemorial usage, and will probably always
remain so.
_First party_--Why not, then, respect it in your poems?
_Answer_--One reason, and to me a profound one, is that the soul of a
man or woman demands, enjoys compensation in the highest directions for
this very restraint of himself or herself, level'd to the average, or
rather mean, low, however eternally practical, requirements of society's
intercourse. To balance this indispensable abnegation, the free minds
of poets relieve themselves, and strengthen and enrich mankind with free
flights in all the directions not tolerated by ordinary society.
_First party_--But must not outrage or give offence to it.
_Answer_--No, not in the deepest sense--and do not, and cannot. The
vast averages of time and the race _en masse_ settle these things. Only
understand that the conventional standards and laws proper enough for
ordinary society apply neither to the action of the soul, nor its poets.
In fact the latter know no laws but the laws of themselves, planted in
them by God, and are themselves the last standards of the law, and its
final exponents--responsible to Him directly, and not at all to mere
etiquette. Often the best service that can be done to the race, is
to lift the veil, at least for a time, from these rules and
fossil-etiquettes.
NEW POETRY--_California, Canada, Texas_.--In my opinion the time has
arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and
poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character
regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee,
dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue
to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for
persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect
taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and
anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_, (while subtly and necessarily
always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in
the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any
more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. While
admitting that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming versification
have in their time play'd great and fitting parts--that the pensive
complaint, the ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many
of them, been inimitably render'd in rhyming verse--that there have
been very illustrious poets whose shapes the mantle of such verse
has beautifully and appropriately envelopt--and though the mantle
has fallen, with perhaps added beauty, on some of our own age--it is,
not-withstanding, certain to me, that the day of such conventional rhyme
is ended. In America, at any rate, and as a medium of highest esthetic
practical or spiritual expression, present or future, it palpably
fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the Prairies, of California,
Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado, dismissing the literary,
as well as social etiquette of over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully
enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend the size of the whole people,
with the free play, emotions, pride, passions, experiences, that belong
to them, body and soul--to the general globe, and all its relations in
astronomy, as the savans portray them to us--to the modern, the busy
Nineteenth century, (as grandly poetic as any, only different,)
with steamships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder
presses--to the thought of the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood
and sisterhood of the entire earth--to the dignity and heroism of the
practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or
on shipboard, or on lakes and rivers--resumes that other medium of
expression, more flexible, more eligible--soars to the freer, vast,
diviner heaven of prose.
Of poems of the third or fourth class, (perhaps even some of the
second,) it makes little or no difference who writes them--they are good
enough for what they are; nor is it necessary that they should be
actual emanations from the personality and life of the writers. The very
reverse sometimes gives piquancy. 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, and tried by them and their
lives. Who wants a glorification of courage and manly defiance from
a coward or a sneak?--a ballad of benevolence or chastity from some
rhyming hunks, or lascivious, glib _roué_?
In these States, beyond all precedent, poetry will have to do with
actual facts, with the concrete States, and--for we have not much more
than begun--with the definitive getting into shape of the Union. Indeed
I sometimes think _it_ alone is to define the Union, (namely, to give
it artistic character, spirituality, dignity.) What American humanity is
most in danger of is an overwhelming prosperity, "business" worldliness,
materialism: what is most lacking, east, west, north, south, is a fervid
and glowing Nationality and patriotism, cohering all the parts into one.
Who may fend that danger, and fill that lack in the future, but a class
of loftiest poets?
If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur,
it is certain they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal
number of people elsewhere--probably more than all the rest of the world
combined.
Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations--many
rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.