esentment--- their curiosity and welcome of novelty--their
self-esteem and wonderful sympathy--their susceptibility to a
slight--the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand
in the presence of superiors--the fluency of their speech--their delight
in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of
soul ... their good temper and open handedness--the terrible
significance of their elections--the President's taking off his hat to
them, not they to him--these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the
gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a
corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen.
Not nature nor swarming states nor streets and steamships nor
prosperous business nor farms nor capital nor learning may suffice
for the ideal of man ... nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may
suffice either. A live nation can always cut a deep mark and can have
the best authority the cheapest ... namely from its own soul. This is
the sum of the profitable uses of individuals or states and of present
action and grandeur and of the subjects of poets.--As if it were
necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern
records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall
behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of
any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery and
what has transpired since in North and South America were less than
the small theatre of the antique or the aimless sleepwalking of the
middle ages! The pride of the United States leaves the wealth and
finesse of the cities and all returns of commerce and agriculture and
all the magnitude of geography or shows of exterior victory to enjoy
the breed of full sized men or one full sized man unconquerable and
simple.

The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race
of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To
him the other continents arrive as contributions ... he gives them
reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his
country's spirit ... he incarnates its geography and natural life
and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing
chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and St. Lawrence with the Falls
and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend
themselves more than they embouch