We want the progressive poet, and not the eternal harper on the commonplace.
Nor are these views inconsistent with the assertion that poetry should not be the handmaid of religion and morality. If it must be a handmaid, then let it be the handmaid of a universal religion, which finds its roots in thought and sane feeling; of a morality of love and justice that is still too ideal to be grasped by the age. No worthy poet to-day would write a poem merely to teach us simple precepts of morality. In a rude age, an emotional treatment of the most commonplace ethical maxims was great poetry because these were in advance of the age. To us such a production is stale. Hence the "great" poem of one age may become nauseating to a later epoch.
Poetry is a progressive art. The emotion playing about the old ballads and legends is not as compelling as that found in the great modern novels and plays. Our great later poets and thinkers are more advanced and do not
worship superstition and defend false beliefs, or celebrate revenge and war, as the old primeval poets do. When we think of the ideal poet, it is not the champion of the middle class like Longfellow and Tennyson, or one full of the early martial spirit and drawing fighting heroes like the author of Beowulf, or the Nibelungen Lied. Nor do we think of the poet who incorporates the religious errors and legends of his time and imitates ancient epics, nor of one who portrays a preceding and bygone age. We, or at least a few of us, like to think of him as a man drawing people in the grip of passions and battling for advanced ideas. We like to think of men like Shakespeare and Ibsen, Isaiah and Job, Balzac and Cervantes, Molière and Goethe, Byron and Shelley, Burns and Heine, Whitman and Swinburne, Carducci and Nietzsche, Carlyle and Ruskin, Dostoievsky and Dickens, Hugo and Rolland. We like to think chiefly of men who were largely personal in their appeal, and depicted their own sufferings, and described grief brought about by the social construction of society which they criticized. Such poets are no dalliers with anaemic feelings. They felt what they sang and were not afraid to give sway to their emotions and ideas. They are not didacticists nor moralists, but emotional thinkers. They do not think that they ought to deny the claims of the intellect and the moral vision. I do not say that other kinds of emotional writers are not great poets. I merely cite what I think is a high order of poetry. I do not deny that poets may avoid any moral mission and just sing private emotions, whether in prose or verse. The Troubadours, and the Roman Elegists, De Musset and Verlaine, Hafiz and Keats, are among the very greatest poets, even though they are not prophets.
Much of our so-called democratic poetry is not democratic at all. Poetry does not become democratic because some poets dwell on the privileges the working people of to-day have in contrast with those working people had generations ago, or because writers have discovered that even common people experience most of the emotions of the upper class. Literature cannot be democratic, while poets write for the few who use them as tools for their own interests, to defend a system which is courteously called competition instead of exploitation. Much of our democratic literature is either capitalistic or bourgeois literature that gives a slight condescending nod to the proletariat. Many wealthy and cultured authors have taken up the cause of the laborer just as they would that of caged animals. They have suggested improvements in the treatment of captives, but not complete freedom. Fortunately we have had works like Galsworthy's Strife, Hauptmann's Weavers, Verhaeren's Dawn, Sinclair's Jungle, Zola's Germinal, Gissing's Nether World.
Poetry will tend to become international, and instead of seeking to encourage national prejudices, will seek to eradicate them. Race prejudice is one of the deepest rooted prejudices which inferior poets often encourage. The old idea that the man of another country is a barbarian and that the alien is an enemy within our gates, a tolerated, unwelcome guest, must be eradicated. Can any one contemplate without disgust plays and photoplays that depict Chinese, Japanese, Negroes and Jews as criminals, simply because of their creed or color? Is it true that virtue resides in the breast of the Aryan race only? The eighteenth century idea of the brotherhood of man is not extinct and the future will use poetry to spread this idea. Poetry should not foster hatred of
people because they are followers of different customs.
It can hardly be doubted that the poetry of the future will deal more with the emotions as experienced by the proletariat class. The feelings to which many of our greatest poets have given vent in recent years have been those of the middle and capitalistic class, just as bards in the past voiced the emotions of the feudalist lords, and religious and military leaders. The connection between economics and literature or poetry is not as remote as it seems. Bernard Shaw has made use of his knowledge of the subject in constructing his plays. The work of Gorki, Hauptmann and Zola has taken into consideration the feelings that the average working people go through in their struggle for existence. Yet the works of these writers are art or poetry, and not tracts. Literature written to encourage the working men in their abject and ill-paid condition will not be countenanced by the future. The songs of the poet with lily white hands who writes about the dignity of toil and subservience to the employer will disappear. The emotions connected with the struggle for a living and with a desire for a more equitable distribution of wealth, will be the subject of our poetry.
Much of the old poetry should be discouraged for it is debased and undemocratic. Take the themes of the epics of India, Persia, Ireland, England, Greece, Finland, Rome, Italy, Spain, Germany and Iceland, all of which are lauded as among the greatest literary productions of the world. Wars are the subjects, fighters are the heroes. The lust for fighting is encouraged instead of being decried. While all of these epics contain beautiful passages and poems of glowing and even unsurpassed beauty, they keep man back in the primitive stage, and countenance a state of barbarism that he should outgrow.
It may after all be fortunate that the earliest poetry of nations is seldom read, for most of it is of very little intellectual value, celebrating the wars and religions of the writers. Occasionally there are secular poems of modern and universal interest among them. But for the most part, fighting absorbs the writers and all their interests are in bloodshed, revenge, cruelty. There are many causes fostering the hatreds and errors of our day, without our using these old works to spread them. We find there silly codes of honor, idiotic conceptions of justice, amazing viewpoints of morality. We want the emotions celebrated in these old works to die out and not to be perpetuated.