For American literature
we want mighty authors, _not_ even Carlyle- and Heine-like, born and
brought up in (and more or less essentially partaking and giving out)
that vast abnormal ward or hysterical sick-chamber which in many
respects Europe, with all its glories, would seem to be. The greatest
feature in current poetry (perhaps in literature anyhow) is the
almost total lack of first-class power, and simple, natural health,
flourishing and produced at first hand, typifying our own era. Modern
verse generally lacks quite altogether the modern, and is oftener
possess'd in spirit with the past and feudal, dressed may-be in late
fashions. For novels and plays often the plots and surfaces are
contemporary--but the spirit, even the fun, is morbid and effete.
There is an essential difference between the Old and New. The poems of
Asia and Europe are rooted in the long past. They celebrate man and
his intellections and relativenesses as they have been. But America,
in as high a strain as ever, is to sing them all as they are and are
to be. (I know, of course, that the past is probably a main factor in
what we are and know and must be.) At present the States are absorb'd
in business, money-making, politics, agriculture, the development of
mines, intercommunications, and other material attents--which all
shove forward and appear at their height--as, consistently with modern
civilization, they must be and should be. Then even these are but
the inevitable precedents and providers for home-born, transcendent,
democratic literature--to be shown in superior, more heroic, more
spiritual, more emotional, personalities and songs.
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