Page:Americans (1922).djvu/130

 believer in the doctrine of continuous revelation, he demands a new revelation. "In a cotillon," he declares in "Poetry and Imagination," "some persons dance and others await their turn when the music and the figure come to them. In the dance of God there is not one of the chorus but can and will begin to spin, monumental as he now looks, whenever the music and figure reach his place and duty. O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad—this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money."

Emerson knew pretty well what he wanted in the way of a new poet. He was not in the least interested in the production of more "parlor or piano verse." He wanted such utterance as could come only from a great and noble soul immersed in the realities and filled with the spirit of the modern world. His poet must be radical, revolutionary, formative: "Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas out of our heads, and new ones in; men-making poets . . . poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of nature, and is the gift to men of new images and symbols, each the ensign and oracle of an age; that shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into religions and mythologies, and impart its quality to centuries." In his essay on "The Poet," he regrets that