Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/22

 lish an intellectual aristocracy, are still, I believe, more powerful than Lincoln the artist democrat, and, although by the world in general Whitman is recognized as our one great American poet, I have heard of no general movement to introduce him into our public schools to take the place of the decidedly second rate and imitative New Englander, Longfellow.

I am sure that almost everyone nowadays knows that there is at this moment something happening in the spiritual life of the American people. In the first place, there has been for a long time now, and particularly among our younger men and women, a rather intense boredom with the more obvious impulses of our American life. There is a new restlessness that is more and more expressing itself in individual revolution against the social laws and customs of another age. Old gods are dead and we have all gone