The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he
does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides--
and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang
on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age
transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives
similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and
inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its
inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day,
and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the
passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the
representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful
children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his
development.... Still, the final test of poems or any character or work
remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges
performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through
them? Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction
of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in
science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and
behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have
the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing
detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved
long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him?
and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old
think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a
man, and a man as much as a woman.
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