Page:Carducci - Poems of Italy.djvu/24

 obey certain exigencies, as one may call them, of his time. Because, if the harp of his soul instead of vibrating beneath the wing of the fleeting Psyche, instead of answering to each echo of the past, to each breath of the future, to the solemn murmur of the centuries and of preceding generations, allows itself to be caressed by zephyrs from a lady's fan or soldier's plume, shrinks at the rustle of the professorial toga or the babblings of the gazette—then woe, woe to the poet, if poet indeed he be! To plant one's self at the window with every variation in temperature in order to ascertain what garb is assumed by the taste of the legal majority is to distract, to chill, to fossilize the soul. The poet should express himself and his moral and artistic convictions with all the sincerity, the clearness, the resolution in his power; the rest is no concern of his."

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