e Minor Poet--"there is
a difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its being
beautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautiful
the way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?"

This brings to a point the whole question as to where the definition
of beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing's
being considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question
"Is a thing beautiful?" resolves itself into "How large has a
beautiful thing a right to be?" A man's theory of beauty depends, in a
universe like this, upon how much of the universe he will let into it.
If he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and
passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if a
beautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggests
boundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It is
something--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever it
is or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life
is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they
see more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental
idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetry
were made--most of them--before infinity was discovered.

Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind of
huge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but the
idea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us or
with our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to do
with IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience of
infinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparatively
speaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more modern
discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modern
machinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention for
being infinite.

The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing
the same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time
and space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this
very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity
shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the
other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little
difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is
everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine i