sophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main fact
about us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands of
years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding
themselves.

But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by
a new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud
of steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love,
the new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of
nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with
falling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws
down Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It
is a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new
widemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and
waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.

The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us--the mere
hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God--is the
neighborhood of human life.

Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses
the greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that
the soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.

Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of
infinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is
infinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is.
The infinity of man is no longer a thing that the poet takes--that he
makes an idea out of--Machinery makes it a matter of fact.

III

THE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE

The main thing the nineteenth century has done in literature has been
the gradual sorting out of poets into two classes--those who like the
infinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and those who have not. It
seems reasonable to say that the poets who have habits of infinity, of
space-conquering (like our vast machines), who seek the suggestive and
immeasurable in the things they see about them--poets who like
infinity, will be the poets to whom we will have to look to reveal to
us the characteristic and real poetry of this modern world. The other
poets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the modern world, to
say nothing of singing in it. They do not feel at home in it. The
classic-walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. It is too
savagely large, too various and unspeakable and unfinished. He looks
a