rgument?
the minor poet?

The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the
doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first
by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the
door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and
humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth
playing upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of the
mere outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of the
thing called life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. He
shall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over by
machines--shadowed by weariness--to the men about him half comrade,
half monk--going in and out among them silently, with some secret
glory in his heart.

If literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, who
are putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers and
brakemen--as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club,
there would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--_i. e._, a
great hope or great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that stands
in the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor aesthetic. It is
sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a
gentleman and a poet.

V

GENTLEMEN

The truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his
work. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves
his work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a
gentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own employer.
No matter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail
to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is master
of the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man who
loves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make a
man free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the
ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what
a gentleman's work is worth.

The poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it,
the men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that
these men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of
them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They
cannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the
autobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for