Poetry of the highest quality—great enough to burst a language—is the outflow of the unconfinable passion of exceedingly rare individualities that can be neither encouraged nor discouraged by any external condition. They are vagrant leaps of life, wild with the creative power of projecting variety. They come off the common stock as new forms having many characteristics common to their ancestors but expressing their unlikeness in mental or physiological development. Real poets are genuine “sports” or mutations; near-poets are made by cultivation. As a nation grows old and the impact of its culture upon all classes of people increases, the greater its production of so-called classical art; but this has nothing to do with what I mean by poetry.
What is popularly termed poetry may represent sincere work; it may answer to all the technical requirements of versification; it may possess a sheen of word-music; it may contain deep, subtle thought, and yet, despite all these customary earmarks, it is not real poetry. To be sure, thousands of critics will acclaim it as authentic, and lecturers will quote it as beautiful wisdom, but it is soon lost to eye and memory. And in a large sense this must be true of the greatest poetry.
One reason why we haven’t more and better contemporary poetry and prose is that we are under the tyranny of so-called masters. It is foolishly assumed that masterpieces are finalities in their fields. By talking, writing, and teaching this absurdity we set up popular prejudices against vital work of our own time, so that even literary artists, with an alleged sharp eye for genius, cannot identify an outstanding genius when it appears before them. Only that poetry or prose which is a reminder of or is almost as good as a celebrity’s work is accepted as art. We thus evolve “forms of appraisal” or standards with which we try to hammer rebels and geniuses into line. The artist who, confident, fearless, ample, and resolute, can go through this acid test without compromise (fighting, even dying, for his vision) is the hope of men. He does not ask for anything; he is a god; the gods merely command—not always posthumously—and all the world is theirs.
It is quite possible to encourage the profession of writing verse and prose by making the road easier and the goal more attractive for the weaklings who whine for nationalized alms, to enable them to pursue a craft; but literature in the big sense is created by all sorts of men and women who cannot withhold it, let the world approve, condemn, or ignore. Hence literature is incapable of encouragement.
In his Gleams, which are the most intimately personal things that he has published, Mr. Björkman reiterates the conviction that artists ought to have a better chance than they now enjoy to express themselves. For instance, he says:
He who is to minister to men’s souls should have time and chance to acquire one for himself.
And this:
The children will build up the New Kingdom as soon as they are given a chance.
These extracts from his Gleams taken in connection with our concluding quotation from his Century article indicate if they do not prove that Mr. Björkman regards artists as meticulous persons who must be coaxed, humored, coddled, and rewarded in order to incite them to creative activity. Obviously he means craftsmen when he uses the word artists. An artist is impelled to do his work, which is his pain, joy, and passion. If life is made easy for him the chances are that he will lose his independence and power, and descend to a popular success. Stevenson could not endure prosperity; once a man, accustomed to a hard, uphill road—he did his noblest work then—a sentimental public made it so easy for him that he eventually grew fairly Tennysonian in his output of pretty trifles.
A literature worthy of the name might address itself, in Whitman’s words, to authors who would be themselves in life and art: