Complete Prose Works
business, nor farms, nor capital, nor learning, may suffice for the
ideal of man--nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice
either. A live nation can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best
authority the cheapest--namely, from its own soul. This is the sum of
the profitable uses of individuals or states, and of present action and
grandeur, and of the subjects of poets. (As if it were necessary to
trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the
beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the
mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the
opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired
in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the
antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages!) The pride of
the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities, and all
returns of commerce and agriculture, and all the magnitude of geography
or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the sight and realization of
full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and simple. The
American poets are to enclose old and new, for America is the race of
races. The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and
new. It is to be indirect, and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its
quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other
nations be chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and
that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here
the theme is creative, and has vista. Whatever stagnates in the flat
of custom or obedience or legislation, the great poet never stagnates.
Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach
he stands, turning a concentrated light--he turns the pivot with
his finger--he baffles the swiftest runners as he stands, and easily
overtakes and envelopes them. The time straying toward infidelity and
confections and persiflage he withholds by steady faith. Faith is the
antiseptic of the soul--it pervades the common people and preserves
them--they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There
is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate
person, that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive
genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be
just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist.
The power to destroy or remould is freely used by the greatest poet, but
seldom the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose
superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he is not
what is wanted. The presence of the great poet conquers--not parleying,
or struggling, or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed that way, see
after him! There is not left any vestige of despair, or misanthropy, or
cunning, or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or color, or
delusion of hell or the necessity of hell--and no man thenceforward
shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin. The greatest poet
hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that
was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the
universe. He is a seer--he is individual--he is complete in himself--the
others are as good as he, only he sees it, and they do not. He is
not one of the chorus--he does not stop for any regulation--he is the
president of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest, he does
to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other
senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but
its own, and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A
single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man, and all
the instruments and books of the earth, and all reasoning. What
is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or
vague--after you have once just open'd the space of a peach-pit, and
given audience to far and near, and to the sunset, and had all things
enter with electric swiftness, softly and duly, without confusion or
jostling or jam?
The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and
the orbs, the forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes--but
folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity
which always attach to dumb real objects--they expect him to indicate
the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the
beauty well enough--probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of
hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and
fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons,
drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old
varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence
of the poetic in out-door people. They can never be assisted by poets
to perceive--some may, but they never can. The poetic quality is not
marshal'd in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor
in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these
and much else, and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops
seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it
conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme
and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws,
and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a
bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges,
and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The
fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or
recitations, are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes
from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are
in conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough--the fact will prevail
through the universe; but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will
not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is
lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the
stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the
people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or
number of men--go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the
young, and with the mothers of families--re-examine all you have been
told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults
your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the
richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its
lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion
and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded
work. He shall know that the ground is already plough'd and manured;
others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the
creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches--and
shall master all attachment.
The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest
poet. He consumes an eternal passion, and is indifferent which chance
happens, and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune, and
persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks
others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy.
Other proportions of the reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his
proportions. All expected from heaven or from the highest, he is rapport
with in the sight of the daybreak, or the scenes of the winter woods,
or the presence of children playing, or with his arm round the neck of a
man or woman. His love above all love has leisure and expanse--he leaves
room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover--he is
sure--he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills
are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him--suffering and darkness
cannot--death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy
are corpses buried and rotten in the earth--he saw them buried. The
sea is not surer of the shore, or the shore of the sea, than he is the
fruition of his love, and of all perfection and beauty.
The fruition of beauty is no chance of miss or hit--it is as inevitable
as life--it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight
proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another
hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of
the harmony of things with man. These understand the law of perfection
in masses and floods--that it is profuse and impartial--that there is
not a minute of the light or dark, nor an acre of the earth and sea,
without it--nor any direction of the sky, nor any trade or employment,
nor any turn of events. This is the reason that about the proper
expression of beauty there is precision and balance. One part does not
need to be thrust above another. The best singer is not the one who has
the most lithe and powerful organ. The pleasure of poems is not in them
that take the handsomest measure and sound.
Without effort, and without exposing in the least how it is done, the
greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and
scenes and persons, some more and some less, to bear on your individual
character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the
laws that pursue and follow Time. What is the purpose must surely be
there, and the clue of it must be there--and the faintest indication is
the indication of the best, and then becomes the clearest indication.
Past and present and future are not disjoin'd but join'd. The greatest
poet forms the consistence of what is to be, from what has been and is.
He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their
feet. He says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize
you. He learns the lesson--he places himself where the future becomes
present. The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character
and scenes and passions--he finally ascends, and finishes all--he
exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for, or
what is beyond--he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most
wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown; by that flash of the
moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified
afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralize or make
applications of morals--he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless
pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons or deductions
but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride, and
the one balances the other, and neither can stretch too far while it
stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep
with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both, and they
are vital in his style and thoughts.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of
letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity--nothing can
make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the
heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects
their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But
to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of
the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of
trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph
of art. If you have look'd on him who has achiev'd it you have look'd
on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You
shall not contemplate the flight of the gray gull over the bay, or the
mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers