The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If
he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic
tides--if he be not himself the age transfigur'd, and if to him is
not open'd the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and
locations and processes, and animate and inanimate forms, and which is
the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and
infiniteness in the swimming shapes of to-day, and is held by the
ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from
what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of
this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful children of
the wave--let him merge in the general run, and wait his development.
Still the final test of poems, or any character or work, remains. The
prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges performer
or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through them?
Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction
of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Have the marches of
tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing detours to the
right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved long and long
after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him? and the
young woman think often of him? and do the middleaged and the old
think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as
a man, and a man as much as a woman.
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