Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!”
As they shrink from his bellows’ glow;
But the fire he fans is immortal youth,
And how should the bloodless know!
One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles,
A voice whose sagas shall live with God
When the lyres of earth are rust,—
is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem:
In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,
The song that is fit for men!