It is in getting
people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.

VI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of the
people, the tools of the nations.

The people are already coming to look upon the inventor under our
modern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we call
literature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing their
living with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as men
are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems the
world listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpret
machines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership until
it does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in an
age, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in a
machine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, is
not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of the
machines that we have made could make a better religion than this.

PART TWO

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES

I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must
have great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that the
language of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideas
that are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all language
looked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, is
irrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of
an archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people who
have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a form
of human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings.

II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of
everything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show
off. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not
feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it,
is not seeing it. The poetry is under water.

III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for
poetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for
old-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch
windmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern
man. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its
language is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in
proportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modern
language, it hides.