While I stand in reverence before the fact of Humanity, the People, I
will confess, in writing my L. of G., the least consideration out of
all that has had to do with it has been the consideration of "the
public"--at any rate as it now exists. Strange as it may sound for
a democrat to say so, I am clear that no free and original and
lofty-soaring poem, or one ambitious of those achievements, can
possibly be fulfill'd by any writer who has largely in his thought _the
public_--or the question, What will establish'd literature--What will
the current authorities say about it?
As far as I have sought any, not the best laid out garden or parterre
has been my model--but Nature has been. I know that in a sense the
garden is nature too, but I had to choose--I could not give both.
Besides the gardens are well represented in poetry; while Nature (in
letter and in spirit, in the divine essence,) little if at all.
Certainly, (while I have not hit it by a long shot,) I have aim'd at the
most ambitious, the best--and sometimes feel to advance that aim (even
with all its arrogance) as the most redeeming part of my books. I have
never so much cared to feed the esthetic or intellectual palates--but if
I could arouse from its slumbers that eligibility in every soul for its
own true exercise! if I could only wield that lever!
Out from the well-tended concrete and the physical--and in them and from
them only--radiate the spiritual and heroic.
Undoubtedly many points belonging to this essay--perhaps of the
greatest necessity, fitness and importance to it--have been left out
or forgotten. But the amount of the whole matter--poems, preface and
everything--is merely to make one of those little punctures or eyelets
the actors possess in the theatre-curtains to look out upon "the
house"--one brief, honest, living glance.