I sometimes
wonder whether the best philosophy and poetry, or something like the
best, after all these centuries, perhaps waits to be rous'd out yet,
or suggested, by the perfect physiological human voice.
SHAKSPERE FOR AMERICA
Let me send you a supplementary word to that "view" of Shakspere
attributed to me, publish'd in your July number,[47] and so
courteously worded by the reviewer (thanks! dear friend.) But you have
left out what, perhaps, is the main point, as follows:
"Even the one who at present reigns unquestion'd--of Shakspere--for
all he stands for so much in modern literature, he stands entirely for
the mighty esthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and
democratic, the sceptres of the future." (See pp. 55-58 in "November
Boughs," and also some of my further notions on Shakspere.)
The Old World (Europe and Asia) is the region of the poetry of
concrete and real things,--the past, the esthetic, palaces, etiquette,
the literature of war and love, the mythological gods, and the myths
anyhow. But the New World (America) is the region of the future, and
its poetry must be spiritual and democratic. Evolution is not the rule
in Nature, in Politics, and Inventions only, but in Verse. I know our
age is greatly materialistic, but it is greatly spiritual, too, and
the future will be, too. Even what we moderns have come to mean by
_spirituality_ (while including what the Hebraic utterers, and mainly
perhaps all the Greek and other old typical poets, and also the
later ones, meant) has so expanded and color'd and vivified the
comprehension of the term, that it is quite a different one from the
past.
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