s.
I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen
men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on
a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the
making and the welding place of the bones of the world.

It is the object of this present writing to search out a world--a
world a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know
it and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be
written across the world once more--written across this year of the
world in the roar of its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannot
quite see the word YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we
hear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the
machines themselves.

IV

POETS

When, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modern
life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the
thing we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideas
practical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that "it will always
be practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal
to the imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the
real spirit we know exists in the real world.

Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth century.

Expectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are
now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the
earth.

The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of
John Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something of
the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer
of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this
same age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of
poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be
lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead,
this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more
kinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the
daring of their dreams.

Pessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being in
the real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of not
being in enough of the real world.

If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy
expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall
we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical a