26 Outlook to Nature 



nature poem of wide reach must be the poem 

 of the man who is free. Such poetry must spring 

 from the open air ; perhaps it must be set to 

 words there, at least outside the city. The 

 city will have its great poems, but they will 

 rise out of the city as Venus rose out of the sea. 

 It seems to me that we have really very 

 little genuine nature poetry (a subject to which 

 I shall refer again in my fourth lecture). Our 

 poets, in spirit or in fact, now write largely 

 from the city and the study outward, and their 

 work is bookish. The product is too often the 

 "cultured" poetry of the literary cult, under 

 the influence of tradition. It continues to be 

 burdened with useless metaphor, and it follows 

 conventional forms of verse and line, as if verse 

 and line were more than essence. Literary 

 criticism still looks backward rather than for- 

 ward, and much of its criterion is not applica- 

 ble to present-day conditions. We must face 

 toward the future. Walt Whitman poet of 

 the commonplace has most completely freed 

 himself from the bondage of literary form ; and 

 he is only an earnest of what shall come. 



