Pero cuando surgió la cuestión de si no era solo un lírico sino un poeta, nos vimos obligados a confesar que es claramente un hombre contemporáneo, no eterno. No sobresale de nuestras bajas limitaciones como un Chimborazo bajo la línea equinoccial, que se eleva desde la base tórrida a través de todos los climas del globo, con franjas de la vegetación de cada latitud en sus laderas altas y manchadas; sino que este genio es el jardín paisajístico de una casa moderna, adornado con fuentes y estatuas, con hombres y mujeres bien educados que están de pie y sentados en los paseos y terrazas. Oímos, a través de toda la música variada, el tono fundamental de la vida convencional. Nuestros poetas son hombres de talento que cantan, y no los hijos de la música. El argumento es secundario, el acabado de los versos es primario.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember when I was young how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told; he could tell nothing but that all was changed—man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome—what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakespeare were in the yellow