Of the sham-shaggy, who
have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
for better things.
[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]
The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
gift of the right word,--for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
make a poet,--he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in
consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the
accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for a
long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for
the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. At
present, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps no
country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or
the more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our
own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to
every breath of foreign influence.
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