m out of its huge heaven,
packed in a seed and blown about on a wind? I have seen the leaves of
the trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listened
with my soul--thousands of years--I have heard The Night and The Day
creeping softly through mountains. People called it geology.

It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by going to the infinite, he
is going to be infinite where he is. He is carving it on the hills,
tunneling it through the rocks of the earth, piling it up on the crust
of it, with winds and waters and flame and steel he is writing it on
all things--that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The whole
planet is his signature.

If what the modern man is trying to say in his modern age is his own
infinity, it naturally follows that the only way a modern artist can
be a great artist in a modern age is to say in that age that man is
infinite, better than any one else is saying it.

The best way to express this infinity of man is to seek out the things
in the life of the man which are the symbols of his infinity--which
suggest his infinity the most--and then play on those symbols and let
those symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program is
something like this. The modern age means the infinity of man. Modern
art means symbolism of man's infinity. The best symbol of the man's
infinity the poet can find, in this world the man has made, is The
Machine.

At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down
the long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud
floating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long
wavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a
great Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it
almost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud
propelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen
a broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train
of cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its
whistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire
by night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither
is the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning
building pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the
car-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid
Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this
ghost of a train--soul or l