The world of democracy belongs to poetry, not merely the democracy of the realistic novel which was willing to concede that even the poor man like the old kings and the nobility had love tragedies. Poetry will deal not with that philanthropy, which often means the master throwing crumbs to quiet the growling servant. No, it will be based on feelings that emanate from a sincere desire to promote human justice. There is no doubt that some day our system of society which permits a man to roll up billions which he squanders, while it does not allow another enough to keep himself and his family in comfort, will disappear, and poetry will express the emotions prevalent under the new order.
Much of the poetry of the past has sung the praises of wage slavery. The poetry of the future will sing as Amos did of old the beauty of social and economic equality. To-day the hero of the poem is the successful business man, or the submissive contented working man, just as in the past the soldier and the monk were the heroes. To-morrow it will be the man who fights for economic justice for himself or the masses. Our standards
of economic justice are changing and this change will effect poetry. The poet who sings in defense of the capitalist or our economic system has little in common with him who is the spokesman of the common people.
Poetry springs from the people and must take into consideration their emotions in connection with their economic problems. Very little of the poetry of the past has done this. Consider the literature of the middle ages and note how seldom the troubles of the serfs and villains were expressed by the poets. There were slight efforts made in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the Romance of the Rose and in Langland's Piers Plowman, respectively, to give some expression to the feelings of the masses.
Modern poetry tends to deal emotionally with social problems. The poet who calls attention to the suffering of the poor, or the persecutions of reformers, or shows the ills in family life brought about by our marriage system, or announces a social message, is not a propagandist when he writes something that evokes our emotions. When Untermeyer published his book on poetry he was much criticized for the prominence he gave to James Oppenheim and Arthur Giovanitti, who are excellent poets. It is to be regretted that Untermeyer did not include also a chapter on Horace Traubel. Untermeyer may insist too much on the social mission of poetry, but he is nearer to an exalted conception of poetry than those who weld words to metre and have neither ideas nor substance in their writing.
Emerson said, "There is no subject that does not belong to him (the poet),—politics, economics, manufactures and stock brokerage; as much as sunsets and
souls; only these things, placed in their order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic."
An English clergyman, F. W. Robertson, in his two lectures on the "Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes," delivered in 1852, and posthumously collected in Lectures and Essays, gave vent to many remarkable ideas on the subject of poetry. The following passage was written three years before the Leaves of Grass, and sums up Whitman's ideas, and is worthy of quotation to-day for its timeliness:
The Poetry of the coming age must come from the Working Classes. In the upper ranks, Poetry, so far at least as it represents their life, has long been worn out, sickly and sentimental. Its manhood is effete. Feudal aristocracy with its associations, the castle and the tournament, has passed away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott. Byron sang its funeral dirge. But tenderness, and heroism, and endurance still want their voice, and it must come from the classes whose observation is at first hand, and who speak fresh from nature's heart. What has poetry to do with our Working Classes? Men of work! We want our poetry from you—from men who will dare to live a brave and true life;——
It does not follow that individualism in poetry will die out and that ignorant laborers are to be the sole heroes and subjects of poetry. The intellectual reader will still find in poetry his intellectual heroes. There will never be equality of intellect, and hence there will also be something of an intellectual aristocracy in connection with the literature and poetry of democracy.