An observer cannot fail to see in modern poetry a tendency to beautify objects of nature, and facts of science. Past ages were taken up with the heroic, the legendary in poetry. Legends were creations of the mind and in turn subjects for all poetic effort. Some moral and spiritual lesson or truth, must be taught by the introduction of ideals drawn purely from imagination. Such an ideal was many times created for the special lesson at hand. The Homeric poems, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, are all poems of this character. They are founded on the unknown and the unknowable, yet they bring to us suggestions that inspire us and make us better for having read them. Milton never knew how Paradise was lost, nor even that it ever was lost. Dante did not know the history of the departed soul, nor did Homer and Virgil know what part the gods and heroes played in the fall of the city of Troy, nor has the riddle of the origin of the Latin and Greek races ever been written. Yet such themes give us pleasure when they come from the great poets, who actually believed what they were writing to be true, and the poems themselves will live forever.
We have reached a new order of things in the present era of the world's history, and we must look to something else for poetic inspiration, as well as to interpret the origin of things in the light of the last word on evolution. The minor poets have about worn these old themes threadbare, and the public mind is beginning to look to something else for entertainment. People are now seeking the poetic interpretation of facts of science and of nature, and the poet of the future will have the peculiar task of giving us new eyes with which to see truth, instead of leading us into fields of fancy.
John Burroughs is an interpreter of this latter kind. He has gone to nature with the poet's eye, and has needed no fiction to get us interested in what he is trying to tell us. The facts need only to be seen with the poet's eyes to make them beautiful, and he has translated them in terms of the human soul, without having to create beings of fancy to interest us while he tells the message. This is what differentiates his prose and poetry from the poetry of the past. It is true, he ranges from the commonplace to the sublime, but in it all with unfaltering devotion to truth, which should be the aim of every poet and is the aim of every true poet, despite the claims of some that literature is only to entertain, and should never be taken seriously. If it is not serious, it is not literature, and if it is serious, it will always have, as its entering wedge, some fundamental truth. The whole aim of Burroughs is to lead humanity into the proper method of interpreting the truths of nature, and if all his poetry is not the best, he has sacrificed poetry rather than truth and owns up to it like a man. He says: "My poetry is not the free channel of myself that my prose is. I, myself, do not think that my poetry takes rank with my prose." His best poetry takes rank with his or any body's prose. Replying to some questions with reference to Mid-summer in the Catskills, Mr. Burroughs says: "It was an attempt to paint faithfully, characteristic mid-summer scenes of that locality. I do not think it ranks high as poetry, but it is true. The genesis of such a poem, or of any poem, is hidden in the author's subconsciousness." Perched on a mountain top that overlooked the beautiful valleys amid the Catskill mountains, and seeing the many activities of farm life in August, Mr. Burroughs saw the beauty and simplicity of the situation, and could not forego his duty of telling it to the world.
"The strident hum of sickle-bar,
Like giant insect heard afar,
Is on the air again;
I see the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain."
From beginning to end the poem paints the rural life amid the Catskills in its busiest season, and associates with it all the best in Nature. It is literally a poet's vision of his own country, after many years absence from the fields he paints. How many times he himself has gone.
"Above the level grassy tides,
That flood the meadow plain,"
but perhaps without seeing the beauty that the scene now brings to him.
ON THE SUMMIT OF THE OLD CLUMP, LOOKING IN THE VALLEY BELOW "WHERE SWEATING FORMS AND BRONZED ARMS REAP IN THE LAND'S INCREASE"
Far different from this is his first poetry, which is the expression of a youth groping in the dark for some unknown god, with his only guide that of faith in the world, faith in himself and faith in his fellowman. He says of his early poem: "Waiting was written in 1862, during a rather gloomy and doubtful period of my life. I was poor, was in doubt as to my career, did not seem to be able to get hold of myself, nor to bring myself to bear upon the problems before me. Yet underneath all was this abiding faith that I should get what belonged to me; that sooner or later I should find my own. The poem was first printed in the old Knickerbocker Magazine of New York, in the fall of 1862. I received nothing for it. I builded better than I knew. It has proved a true prophesy of my life."