That, O poets! is
not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses
henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps
the most illustrious culmination of the modern may thus prove to be
a signal growth of joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness,
identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after
its distinctive kind. Let us, audacious, start it. Let the diplomats,
as ever, still deeply plan, seeking advantages, proposing treaties
between governments, and to bind them, on paper: what I seek is
different, simpler. I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose,
new formulas--international poems. I have thought that the invisible
root out of which the poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity
grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both in patriotism and song
(even amid their grandest shows past) we have adhered too long to
petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold the world.
Not only is the human and artificial world we have establish'd in the
West a radical departure from anything hitherto known--not only men
and politics, and all that goes with them--but Nature itself, in the
main sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type,
of course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For
Nature consists not only in itself, objectively, but at least just
as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age,
looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it--faithfully sends
back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual--takes,
and readily gives again, the physiognomy of any nation or
literature--falls like a great elastic veil on a face, or like the
molding plaster on a statue.
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