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 _roue_?
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.
BRITISH LITERATURE
To avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend the study of
this literature, but wish our sources of supply and comparison
vastly enlarged. American students may well derive from all former
lands--from forenoon Greece and Rome, down to the perturb'd mediaeval
times, the Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect--all the
older literatures, and all the newer ones--from witty and warlike
France, and markedly, and in many ways, and at many different periods,
from the enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race--bearing
ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond
measure to the mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its
nations living--the offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not
by any means of the British isles exclusively, but of the continent,
and all continents.
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