Byron, Keats, Shelley, Browning, all poets, as a rule fled from the commercial centers, went out from under the mists and mirk into the sunlight to sing. I warn the coming poet that as a poet his place is not in any city. Be advised, or have done with aspiration to do new work or true work. The Old World has been written, written fully and bravely and well. It is only the vast, far, New World that needs you. He who is aiming to sit down in New York, or any city, and eat dinners that are cooked and seasoned by servants who are not given even as much time to go to church as were the slaves of the South, may be good enough and write well enough to please the city in these headlong days, but the real poet would rather house with a half savage and live on a sixpence in some mountain village, as did Byron, than feast off the board of Madame Leo Hunter in a city. Nor is Washington a better place for work with soul or heart in it. Madame Leo Hunter is there also, persistent, numerous, superficial and soulless as in almost any great center. If I am cruel, O my coming poets, I am cruel to be kind. Go forth in the sun, away into the wilds or contentedly
lay aside your aspirations of song. Now, mark you distinctly, I am not writing for nor of the poets of the Old World or the Atlantic seaboard. They have their work and their ways of work. My notes are for the songless Alaskas, Canadas, Californias, the Aztec lands and the Argentines that patiently await their coming prophets. For come they will; but I warn them they will have to gird themselves mightily and pass through fire, and perish, many a man; for these new worlds will be whistling, out of time, the tunes of the old, and the rich and the proud will say in their insolence and ignorance, “Pipe thus, for thus piped the famous pipers of old; piping of perished kings, of wars, of castle walls, of battling knights, and of maids betrayed. Sing as of old or be silent, for we know not, we want not, and we will not, your seas of colors, your forests of perfumes, your mountains of melodies.”
