But for real crises, great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they
might as well have never been born.
Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of
male odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas,
second-hand reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments,
in rooms stifling with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a
new-published, healthy, bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long
ago, there were verses in each of three fresh monthlies, from leading
authors, and in every one the whole central _motif_ (perfectly
serious) was the melancholiness of a marriageable young woman who
didn't get a rich husband, but a poor one!
Besides its tonic and _al fresco_ physiology, relieving such as this,
the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important
respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock-fables and
superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and
even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the
new principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world.
Liberty, with Law by her side, will one day be paramount--will at any
rate be the central idea. Then only--for all the splendor and beauty
of what has been, or the polish of what is--then only will the true
poets appear, and the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of
today, not the glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past,
nor any fight between Deity on one side and somebody else on the
other--not Milton, not even Shakspere's plays, grand as they are.
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